He set the tray down on the desk. It supported a cup of hot tea, a tumbler of water, a plate with a pat of yeasty European butter and a thick slab of sourdough bread on it, and a glass containing what would turn out to be two fingers of peppery vodka, one finger of which Mayakovsky drank off himself before placing it on the table.
When he was done he slapped Quentin hard across the face.
“That is for doubting yourself,” he said.
Quentin stared at him. He lifted a hand to his cheek, thinking: This man is batshit insane. He could do anything to us out here.
Mayakovsky turned the book back to the first page again. He turned the piece of paper with the spell on it over and patted it. On the back was written another spell: Bujold’s Sorcerous Nail Extraction.
“Begin again, please.”
Wax on, wax off.
When Mayakovsky was gone, Quentin stood up and stretched. Both his knees cracked. Instead of beginning again he went over to the tiny window looking out on the lunar snowfields. The sheer monochromaticity of the landscape was beginning to make him hallucinate colors. The sun had not moved at all.
That was how Quentin’s first month at Brakebills South went. The spells changed, and the Circumstances were different, but the room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition. Mayakovsky’s ominous warnings had been entirely justified, and arguably a little understated. Even during his worst moments at Brakebills, Quentin had always had a niggling suspicion that he was getting away with something by being there, that the sacrifices asked of him by his instructors, however great, were cheap by comparison with the rewards of the life he could look forward to as a magician. At Brakebills South, for the first time, he felt like he was giving value for money.
And he understood why they’d been sent here. What Mayakovsky was asking of them was impossible. The human brain was not meant to ingest these quantities of information. If Fogg had tried to enforce this regimen back at Brakebills, there would have been an insurrection.
It was difficult to gauge how the others were holding up. They met at mealtimes and passed in the hall, but because of the prohibition against speech there was no commiserating, just glances and shrugs and not much of that. Their gazes met bleakly over the breakfast table and turned away. Eliot’s eyes were empty, and Quentin supposed his own probably looked the same way. Even Janet’s animated features were set and frozen. No notes were exchanged. Whatever enchantment kept them from talking was global: their pens wouldn’t write.
Quentin was losing interest in communicating anyway. He should have been ravenous for human contact, but instead he felt himself falling away from the others, deeper inside himself. He shuffled like a prisoner from bedroom to dining room to solitary classroom, down the stone corridors, under the tediously unblinking gaze of the white sun. Once he wandered up to the roof of the West Tower and found one of the others, a gangly extrovert named Dale, putting on a mime show for a listless audience, but it really wasn’t worth the effort of turning his head to follow what was going on. His sense of humor had died in the vastness.
Professor Mayakovsky seemed to expect this, as if he’d known it was going to happen. After the first three weeks he announced that he had lifted the spell that kept them from talking. The news was received in silence. Nobody had noticed.
Mayakovsky began to vary the routine. Most days were still devoted to grinding through the Circumstances and their never-ending Exceptions, but once in a while he introduced other exercises. In an empty hall he erected a three-dimensional maze composed of wire rings through which the students would levitate objects at speed, to sharpen their powers of concentration and control. At first they used marbles, then later steel balls only slightly narrower than the rings. When a ball brushed a ring a spark cracked between them, and the spellcaster felt a shock.
Later still they would guide fireflies through the same maze, influencing their tiny insect minds by force of will. They watched one another do this in silence, feeling envy at one another’s successes and contempt for one another’s failures. The regime had divided them against each other. Janet in particular was bad at it—she tended to overpower her fireflies, to the point where they would crisp up in midair and become puffs of ash. Mayakovsky, stony-faced, just made her start over, while tears of wordless frustration ran down her face. This could and did go on for hours. No one could leave the hall before everyone had completed the exercise. They slept there more than once.
