The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [75]
“That’s when it all went to shit. All the fun was gone. I went to this kind of Greek world, all white cliffs and hot sun and dark seas. I slept with a harpy there.”
“You had rebound sex with a harpy?”
“I don’t know if that’s what she was. Wings for arms, basically. Her feet were kind of talon-y too.”
“Right.”
“She practically took off in the middle of it. Feathers going everywhere. Way more trouble than it was worth. I still have a scar from where she clawed me. I can—”
“I don’t want to see it.”
Josh sighed. All the humor had drained out of his face, leaving it gray under the stubble. Now Quentin saw those years that he’d missed before.
“I mean, all I was looking for basically was some kind of Y: The Last Man setup, right? Where I was the only dude in a world of chicks. I know it’s out there. They could even all have been lesbians, and I would just watch. I’d be good with whatever.
“Anyway after that I started just sliding through worlds. Worlds worlds worlds. I stopped caring. It was like when you’ve surfed too much porn on the Web and none of it seems real but you keep going anyway. I’d get to a world and immediately start looking for any excuse to quit and go on to the next one. As soon as I’d see one wrong thing—oh, this one has flies, or the sky is a weird color, or no beer, anything that wasn’t perfect—I’d bail.
“Then one of those times I came back and the whole Neitherlands was busted.”
“What? How do you mean, busted?”
“Broken. Fucked up. Do you know about this? If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
He drained his wineglass. A man came to refill it, and Josh waved him off. “Whiskey,” he said.
He went on.
“At first I thought it was me, I must have broken it. I used it too much, something like that. When my head broke the water that last time it was like the cold punched me in the face. The air was freezing, and the wind was just whipping this dry powdery snow through the squares.”
“How is that even possible?” Quentin said. “I didn’t think the Neitherlands even had weather.”
It made him think of that silent storm, the one that had thrashed the clock-tree back in Fillory. Maybe it was the same wind?
“Something’s deeply messed up there, Quentin. Something’s wrong, something basic. Like systemic. Half the buildings were in ruins. It looked like the place had been bombed. All those beautiful stone buildings just laid open to the sky. Do you remember how Penny said once that they were all full of books? I think he was right, because the air was full of pages, blowing along through the city.”
Josh shook his head.
“I guess I should have grabbed a few, to see what was on them. You would have. I never even thought of it till after.
“You know what I was thinking about? Not dying. I was pretty far from the Earth fountain at that point, a mile maybe. I’d brought warm clothes, but I ditched them when I met the harpy. It was hot as hell there. And she kinda tore at my clothes a lot of the time anyway.
“So I was practically naked, and a lot of my landmarks were gone. A lot of the fountains were gone too. Some of them were leveled, some of them were frozen. You know how you can’t really do magic there? A couple of times I just squatted down in a corner. I thought maybe I’d wait out the storm, but really I just wanted to go to sleep. I didn’t think I could go on. I could have died, easily. I was out there for about half an hour. It’s a miracle I found the Earth fountain at all. I really thought I wouldn’t make it.”
“It’s incredible that you did.” Good old Josh. Just when you were ready to write him off he kicked into gear, and when he did he really was indomitable. Like that time in Fillory, when he’d beaten the red-hot giant with his black hole spell. He’d probably outlive them all.
“I keep trying to figure it out,” Josh said. “It was like somebody’d attacked the Neitherlands, or cursed it, except who could do that? I didn’t see anybody there. It was just as empty as it always was. I thought maybe—I know it’s silly—I thought maybe I’d see Penny.