The Magicians - Lev Grossman [50]
Holding both arms above her head and curved slightly upward, like she was balancing a large invisible basket on her head, Alice had created the magical equivalent of a magnifying glass a dozen yards across—her bent arms defined a small section of the total circumference of a soaring circular lens, the upper edge of which was even with the top of the beech tree, taller than the chimney of the little Victorian bungalow. Quentin could just make out the edge of the lens as a curved distortion in the air. The focal point was too bright to look at.
Alice stood about fifty feet back from the door. Quentin stood closer, to one side, holding out a hand to shield his eyes and shouting out directions:
“Up! Okay, slow! A little more! Keep moving! Okay, now right!”
Quentin could feel the heat from the focused sunlight against his face and smell the savory-sweet smell of wood smoke, along with an acrid tang of seared house paint. The door was definitely vulnerable to heat. They’d been worried that there wouldn’t be enough sunlight left, but Alice’s spell was cutting a nice deep charred trench in the wood. They’d decided to cut the door in half laterally, and if the trench wasn’t penetrating all the way through, it must be pretty close. A bigger problem was Alice’s aim, which wasn’t good, and in one place she had wandered off the door and burned a groove in the wall.
“I feel stupid!” Alice shouted. “How are we doing?”
“Looking good!”
“My back hurts! Are we almost done?”
“Almost!” he lied.
With a foot to go Alice expanded the spell’s radius to compensate for the fading sun. She was whispering, but he wasn’t sure if it was an incantation or just obscenities. Quentin realized they were being observed: one of the older professors, a very erect, white-haired man named Brzezinski, who specialized in potions and whose pants were always covered with appalling stains, had interrupted his evening stroll to watch them. In another lifetime he had given Quentin the test involving knots during his Examination. He wore sweater-vests and smoked a pipe and looked like an IBM engineer, circa 1950.
Shit, Quentin thought. They were about to get busted.
But Professor Brzezinski just took his pipe out of his mouth. “Carry on,” he said gruffly. He turned and walked back in the direction of the House.
It took only about ten minutes for Alice to make a full lateral cut, then go back across it a second time. The trench glowed red.
When she was finished, Quentin walked back to where she was standing.
“You have ash on your face,” she said. She brushed at his forehead with her fingers.
“Maybe we should go across again. You know, just to be sure.” If this didn’t work, he was out of ideas, and he didn’t think he could spend the night out here. He also didn’t think he could face going back to the House in defeat.
“There’s not enough light.” She looked drained. “By the end the lens was probably out to a quarter mile. After that it just loses coherence. Falls apart at the edges.”
A quarter mile? Quentin thought. How powerful is she?
His stomach rumbled. It was fully dusk now, and the sky was a luminous blue. They stared at the scarred, blackened door. It looked worse than he thought—Alice’s aim had strayed on the second pass, so in places there were two separate trenches. If this was wrong, Eliot was going to kill him.
“Should I try to kick it in?”
Alice pulled her mouth to one side. “What if there’s somebody behind it?”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I don’t know.” She picked at one of the burnt parts that had cooled. “I think we’re almost through . . .”
There was an old iron knocker on the door in the shape of a disembodied hand holding an iron ball. It was bolted on.
“Okay,” Quentin said. “Stand back.”
God, please let