The Magicians - Lev Grossman [84]
Once or twice a day, sometimes more, a lipless blue crevasse would open beneath his feet, and he would have to trot around it or cross it with a magic-assisted leap. Once he stumbled right into one and fell forty feet down into blue-tinted darkness. The ward-and-shield spells around his pale, nude body were so thick that he barely noticed. He just ground to a slow stop, jammed in between two rough ice walls, and then lifted himself back out again, like the Lorax, and kept on running.
Even as his physical strength faded he leaned on the iron magical vigor that his sojourn under Professor Mayakovsky had given him. It no longer felt like a fluke when he worked magic successfully. The worlds of magical and physical reality felt equally real and present to him. He summoned simple spells into being without conscious thought. He reached for the magical force within him as naturally as he would reach for the salt on the dinner table. He had even gained the ability to extemporize a little, to guess at magical Circumstances when he hadn’t been drilled on them. The implications of this were stunning: magic wasn’t simply random, it had an actual shape—a fractal, chaotic shape, but subconsciously his blindly groping mental fingertips had begun to parse it.
He remembered a lecture Mayakovsky had given a few weeks before, which at the time he hadn’t paid much attention to. Now, however, jogging forever south across the frozen, broken plains, it came back to him almost word for word.
“You dislike me,” Mayakovsky had begun. “You are sick of the sight of me, skraelings.” That was what he called them, skraelings. Apparently it was a Viking word that meant, roughly, “wretches.”
“But if you listen to me only one more time in your lives, listen to me now. Once you reach a certain level of fluency as a spellcaster, you will begin to manipulate reality freely. Not all of you—Dale, I think you in particular are unlikely to cross that Rubicon. But for some of you spells will one day come very easily, almost automatically, with very little in the way of conscious effort.
“When the change comes, I ask only that you know it for what it is, and be aware. For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and that strength.”
Mayakovsky stared out at their silent faces a moment longer, with undisguised disgust, then stepped down from the lectern. “Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”
When night finally fell the stars burned shrilly overhead with impossible force and beauty. Quentin jogged with his head up, knees high, no longer feeling anything below his waist, gloriously isolated, lost in the spectacle. He became nothing, a running wraith, a wisp of warm flesh in a silent universe of midnight frost.
Once, for a few minutes, the darkness was disturbed by a flickering on the horizon. He realized it must be another student, another skraeling like himself, moving on a parallel path but way off to the east, twenty or thirty miles at least, and ahead of him. He thought about changing course to make contact. But seriously, what was the point? Should he risk getting busted for collaborating, just to say hi? What did he, a wraith, a wisp of warm flesh, need with anybody else?
Whoever it was, he thought dispassionately, was using a different set of spells than he was. He couldn’t piece out the magic at this distance, but they were throwing off a whole lot of pale pink-white light.
Inefficient, he thought. Inelegant.
When the sun rose he lost