The Magicians - Lev Grossman [176]
Quentin couldn’t think of anything to say. He waited while Eliot took a piss against the stone wall. It felt like they’d come to the end, but they had no choice but to keep walking. Maybe this is still part of the story, he thought numbly. The bad part right before everything comes out all right. He wondered what time it was on the surface. He felt like he’d been up all night.
The masonry of the walls was older now, crumblier. For short stretches it was just dusty unworked cave rock. They were at the very outer fringes of this subterranean universe, wandering among badly eroded planets and dim, decaying stars. The hallway had ceased to branch now. It contented itself with curving gently to the left, and Quentin thought he could feel the curve getting gradually tighter, like it was spiraling inward, like the interior corridors of a nautilus shell. He figured it stood to reason, what little reason was left in the world, that there was a geometrical limit to how far it could keep curving in on itself before they came to something. Pretty soon it turned out he was right.
THE RAM
Just like that, there they all were.
Quentin and Eliot stood at the edge of a large round underground chamber, blinking at bright torchlight. It was different from the rooms they’d already seen in that it appeared to be naturally occurring. The floor was sandy, the ceiling craggy and irregular and unworked, with stalactites and other rocky excrescences poking down that you wouldn’t want to hit your head on. The air was chilly and damp and still. Quentin could hear an underground stream gurgling somewhere, he couldn’t see where. The sound had no origin or direction.
The others were here, too, all of them except for poor Fen. Josh and Alice were in an entrance a little ways over. Janet stood in another archway looking lost and bedraggled, Dint and Anaïs were in the next one over, and Penny was alone in the one after that. They stood in the doorways like contestants framed in the spangled, lightbulbed archways of a game show.
It was a miracle. It even looked like they’d all just arrived at the exact same moment. Quentin took a deep breath. Relief flooded through him like a warm liquid transfusion. He was just so fucking glad to see every last one of them. Even Dint—good old Dint, you hound dog! Even Penny, and only partly because he still had his pack, presumably with the button still inside. The story’s outcome was still in play after all. Even after everything that had gone wrong it could still all turn out basically okay—it was a disaster, but a mitigated disaster. It was still possible that five years from now, when they were more or less over their post-traumatic stress disorder, they’d all get a big kick out of getting together and talking about it. Maybe the real Fillory wasn’t that different from the Fillory he’d always wanted after all.
Kings and queens, Quentin thought. Kings and queens. Glory has its price. Did you not know that?
A block of stone stood in the center of room. On it was a large shaggy sheep—or no, it had horns, so that made it a ram. It lay with its eyes closed, its legs folded under it, its chin resting on a crown, a simple golden circlet snuggled between its two shaggy front knees. Quentin wasn’t sure if it was asleep or dead or just a very lifelike statue.
He took a tentative, exploratory step into the room, feeling like a man setting foot on shore after a long and grievous afternoon on a storm-tossed yacht. The sandy floor felt reassuringly solid.
“I didn’t know—” he called hoarsely to Alice. “I wasn’t sure if you were still alive or not!”
Josh thought Quentin was talking to him. His comical face was ashen. He looked like a ghost seeing a ghost.
“I know.” He coughed wetly into his fist.
“What the hell happened? Did you fight that thing?”
Josh nodded shakily. “Sort of. I felt a big spell coming on, so I just went with it. I think I finally felt what you guys feel. I called up one of those swirly black holes. He looked at it, then he looked at me with those freaky gold eyes, then it just sucked