The Magicians полностью

“You are not going on a mystical adventure here, Quentin. This process will be long and painful and humiliating and very, very”—he practically shouted the word—“boring. It is a task best performed in silence and isolation. That is the reason for your presence here. You will not enjoy the time you spend at Brakebills South. I do not encourage you to try.”

Quentin listened to this in silence. He didn’t especially like this man, who had just referred to his penis and whose name he still didn’t know. He put it out of his mind and focused on cramming starch into his depleted body.

“So how do I do that?” Quentin mumbled. “Learn things in my bones? Or whatever?”

“It is very hard. Not everybody does. Not everybody can.”

“Uh-huh. What happens if I can’t?”

“Nothing. You go back to Brakebills. You graduate. You spend your life as a second-rate magician. Many do. Probably you never realize it. Even the fact that you failed is beyond your ability to comprehend.”

Quentin had no intention of letting that happen to him, though it occurred to him that probably nobody actually set out to have that happen to them, and, statistically speaking, it had to happen to somebody. The hash browns no longer tasted quite so scrumptious. He put his fork down.

“Fogg tells me you are good with your hands,” the sandy-haired man said, relenting a little. “Show me.”

Quentin’s fingers were still stiff and sore from having served as wings, but he picked up a sharp knife that looked decently balanced, carefully cleaned it off with a napkin, and held it between the last two fingers in his left hand. He spun it, finger by finger, as far as his thumb, then he tossed it up almost to the ceiling—still spinning, careful to let it pass between two rafters—with the idea that it would fall and bury itself in the table between the third and fourth fingers of his outstretched left hand. This was best done without looking, maintaining eye contact with his audience for maximum effect.

Quentin’s breakfast companion picked up a loaf of bread and stuck it out so that the falling knife speared it. He tossed loaf and knife contemptuously on the table.

“You take stupid risks,” the man said stonily. “Go on and join your friends. I think”—theenk—“you will find them on the roof of the West Tower.” He pointed to a doorway. “We begin in the afternoon.”

Okay, Mr. Funnylaffs, Quentin thought. You’re the boss.

He stood up. The stranger stood up, too, and shuffled off in another direction. He had the air of a disappointed man.

Stone for stone, board for board, Brakebills South was the same house as the House at Brakebills. Which was reassuring, in a way, but it was incongruous to find what looked like an eighteenth-century English country house planted in the middle of a soaring Antarctic wasteland. The roof of the West Tower was be broad and round and paved with smooth flagstones, with a stone wall running around the edge. It was open to the elements, but some kind of magical arrangement kept the air warm and humid and protected it from the wind, or mostly. Quentin imagined he could feel a deep chill lurking underneath the warmth somewhere. The air was tepid, but the floor, the furniture, everything he touched was cool and clammy. It was like being in a warm greenhouse in the dead of winter.

As promised, the rest of the Brakebills group was up there, standing around dazed in threes and fours, staring out at the snowpack and talking in low tones, bathed in the eerie, even Antarctic light. They looked different. Their waists were trimmer, and their shoulders and chests were sturdier, huskier. They’d lost fat and packed on muscle during their flight south. Their jaws and cheekbones were sharply defined. Alice looked lovely and gaunt and lost.

“Honk honk honkonk honk honk!” Janet said when she saw Quentin. People laughed, though Quentin had the impression she’d already made that joke a few times.

“Hey, man,” Josh said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Is this place fucked up or what?”

“Doesn’t seem so bad,” Quentin said. “What time is skinny-dipping?”

“I might have been a little off base with that,” Eliot said gloomily, also probably not for the first time. “We did all get naked, anyway.”

They were all wearing identical white pajamas. Quentin felt like an inmate in an insane asylum. He wondered if Eliot was missing his secret boyfriend of the moment, whoever it was.

“I ran into Nurse Ratched downstairs,” he said. The pajamas had no pockets, and Quentin kept looking for somewhere to put his hands. “He gave me a speech about how stupid I am and how miserable he’s going to make me.”

“You slept through our little meet’n’greet. That’s Professor Mayakovsky.”

“Mayakovsky. Like Dean Mayakovsky?”

“He’s the son,” Eliot said. “I always wondered what happened to him. Now we know.”