The Magicians - Lev Grossman [140]
Watching them work, Quentin was consumed with jealousy. Thank God it was Penny—anybody else and he would have been seriously suspicious. He and Josh spent the afternoon in the den with some beer and Smart Food watching cable on a flat-screen TV the size of a billboard. There had been no TV at Brakebills, or in their Manhattan apartment, and it felt exotic and forbidden.
Around five o’clock Eliot came and roused them.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re missing Penny’s big show.”
“How was Buffalo?”
“Like a vision of the apocalypse. We bought parkas and hunting knives.”
They trailed Eliot out to the backyard. Seeing him happy and excited and reasonably sober restored Quentin’s faith in the possibility that they were on the right track, that everything broken was fixable. He grabbed a scarf and a bizarre Russian hat with earflaps that he found in a closet.
The sun was setting behind the Adirondacks in the distance, cold and red and desolate through the haze. The others were grouped at the bottom of the lawn, which sloped down to a row of bare, decorative lindens. Penny was sighting down his arm at one of the trees while Alice paced off distance in long, even steps. She jogged over to Penny and they whispered, then she paced off the distance again. Janet stood to one side with Richard, looking adorable in a pink parka and a woolly watch cap.
“All right!” Penny called. “Stand back, everybody.”
“How much farther back can we stand?” Josh asked. Sitting on a broken white marble balustrade, a random architectural element dropped in by the landscaper, he took a nip from a bottle of schnapps and passed it to Eliot.
“Just so you’re standing back. Okay, fire in the hole.”
Like a sequined assistant, Alice stepped up to an end table on the green, placed an empty wine bottle on it, and stepped away.
Facing the bottle, Penny took a quick breath and spoke a rapid sequence of clipped syllables under his breath, ending with a one-handed flicking gesture. Something—a spray of three somethings, steely gray and tightly grouped—shot out of his fingertips, too fast to follow, and flickered across the lawn. Two of them missed, but one of them snapped the bottle’s neck off cleanly, leaving the base standing headlessly upright.
Penny grinned. There was scattered applause.
“We call it ‘Magic Missile,’ ” he said.
“Magic Missile, baby!” Josh’s breath steamed in the cold air. His face was radiant with excitement. “That’s straight up Dungeons & Dragons shit!”
Penny nodded.
“We actually based some of this on old D & D spells. There’s a lot of practical thinking in those books.”
Quentin wasn’t smiling. Wasn’t anybody going to say anything? This was dark magic. God knows he wasn’t a prude, but this was a spell meant to break up flesh, to physically wound. They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore. If they ever actually had to cast this stuff, it would already be too late.
“God, I hope we don’t have to use that,” was all he said out loud.
“Oh, come on, Quentina. We’re not looking for trouble. We just want to be ready if it comes.” Josh could hardly contain himself. “Dungeons & Dragons, motherfucker!”
Next Alice whisked the card table away so that Penny stood alone, facing the dark line of lindens. The others stood and sat scattered behind him, under the empty sunset sky. The sun was almost down now. Their noses were running and their ears were red, but the cold didn’t seem to bother Penny, who was still wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants. They were really in the middle of nowhere. Quentin was used to the background blare and hum of Manhattan, and even at Brakebills