The Magicians - Lev Grossman [204]
Another month went by, and it was November, and Quentin was sitting in his corner office staring out the window. The building across the street was considerably shorter than the Grunnings Hunsucker Swann building, so he had a clear view of its rooftop, which consisted of a neat beige gravel walkway running around a gray grid of massive, complicated air-conditioning and heating units. With the coming of the bitter late fall weather the air-conditioning had gone silent and the heaters had sprung into life, and huge nebulae of steam curled off them in abstract whorls: hypnotic, silent, slowly turning shapes that never stopped and never repeated themselves. Smoke signals sent by no one, to no one, signifying nothing. Lately Quentin spent a lot of time watching them. His assistant had quietly given up attempting to schedule appointments for him.
All at once, and with no warning, the tinted floor-to-ceiling window that made up one entire wall of Quentin’s office shattered and burst inward. Quentin’s ultra-modern, narrow-wale Venetian blinds went crazily askew. Cold air and raw unfiltered sunlight came flooding in. Something small, round, and very heavy rolled across the carpet and bumped into his shoe.
He looked down at it. It was a bluish marble sphere: the stone globe they used to use to start a welters match.
Three people were floating in midair outside his window, thirty stories up.
Janet looked older somehow, which of course she was, but there was something else different about her. Her eyes, the irises, radiated a seething violet mystical energy like nothing Quentin had ever seen before. She wore a tight black leather bustier that she was in imminent danger of spilling out of. Silver stars were falling all around her.
Eliot had acquired a pair of immense white feathery wings somewhere that spread out behind him, with which he hovered on an intangible wind. On his head was the golden crown of Fillory that Quentin had last seen in Ember’s underground chamber. Between Janet and Eliot, her arms wrapped in black silk, floated a tall, painfully skinny woman with long wavy black hair that undulated in the air as if she were underwater.
“Hello, Quentin,” Eliot said.
“Hi,” Janet said.
The other woman didn’t say anything. Neither did Quentin.
“We’re going back to Fillory,” Janet said, “and we need another king. Two kings, two queens.”
“You can’t hide forever, Quentin. Come with us.”
With the tinted window gone and the afternoon sunlight pouring into his office, Quentin couldn’t read his monitor anymore. The climate control was howling trying to fight off the cold air. Somewhere in the building an alarm went off.
“It could work this time,” Eliot said. “With Martin gone. And besides, we never figured out what your Discipline was. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Quentin stared at them. It was a few seconds before he found his voice.
“What about Josh?” he croaked. “Go ask him.”
“He’s got another project.” Janet rolled her eyes. “He thinks he can use the Neitherlands to get to Middle-earth. He honestly believes he’s going to bone an elf.”
“I thought about being a queen,” Eliot added. “Turns out they’re very open-minded about that kind of thing in Fillory. But at the end of the day rules is rules.”
Quentin put down his coffee. It had been a long time since he’d experienced any emotion at all other than sadness and shame and numbness, so long that for a moment he didn’t understand what was happening inside him. In spite of himself he felt sensation coming back to some part of him that he’d thought was dead forever. It hurt. But at the same time he wanted more of it.
“Why are you doing this?” Quentin asked slowly, carefully. He needed to be clear. “After what happened to Alice? Why would you go back there? And why would you want me with you? You’re only going to make it worse.”
“What, worse than this?” Eliot asked. He tilted his chin to indicate Quentin’s office.
“We all knew