CHAPTER 10
Quentin had never heard of anybody going to Brakebills South in the gap between fall and spring semesters, which this was, and he wasn’t even a hundred percent positive they could get in. They might find the building shut down, Mayakovsky gone or in hiding, the whole place sealed off. If that happened they’d have to reassess pretty fast and make a break for one of the non-magical research stations on the coast, where their arrival would be hard to explain at best.
They spiraled in from above, balancing on their aching wings, steeling themselves for the moment when their webbed seabird feet would skip off the surface of some hard invisible dome—but the moment never came. Apparently Mayakovsky considered five hundred miles of Antarctic no-man’s-land enough of a defense against home invasion. They alighted on the flat roof of one of the towers and became human again.
Quentin figured it was better to let Mayakovsky find them rather than the other way around—he didn’t want to startle the old magician into some lethal display of defensive magic—so they made as much noise as possible coming down the stairs. First stop was the laundry, where they secured some Brakebills South robes: the nakedness issue was starting to feel urgent again.
The place felt off-limits, out of bounds. It was like they were hunting a minotaur in its maze. Quentin trailed one hand idly along a wall, and the smooth stone was cool and sticky with condensed moisture, something about the heating spells—it gave off a damp basement smell that brought back memories of the last time he’d been here, when they were all studying eighteen hours a day under Mayakovsky’s rule of silence. There was something he didn’t have to worry about at Brakebills South: nostalgia.
He was too hungry to feel anything anyway. They wound up in the kitchen, where they stuffed themselves on anything they could find that might possibly get the taste of bird beak out of their mouths. Quentin was keenly aware that Mayakovsky had no real reason to help them, even assuming he could. He’d always known he wouldn’t have much to offer by way of compensation, aside from an intellectually interesting problem and some shameless flattery and, he supposed, the strictly—strictly—platonic presence of a smart and pretty young woman. But somehow it had all been more convincing when they were first setting out.
They never heard Mayakovsky coming, he just appeared in the doorway, silent as a ghost, looking grim and hungover and unbathed. His stubble was slightly frostier, his gut more prominent, his nails yellower, but otherwise he was perfectly preserved. It was like Antarctica had freeze-dried him.
He didn’t kill them.
“Saw you coming,” he growled. “Miles away.”
He had on a dressing gown, unbelted, a white button-down shirt badly in need of bleach and a pair of very short, very un-professorial shorts.
“Professor Mayakovsky.” Quentin stood up brightly. “I apologize for intruding on your privacy like this, but we’re working on an interesting problem, and we could use your help with it.”
Mayakovsky sawed the end off a stale loaf of bread with an unwashed knife, spread about an inch of soft, unrefrigerated butter on it and began to eat standing up. It was pretty clear he wasn’t going to throw the ball back, so Quentin kept going: he explained about incorporate bonds, and what they were trying to do, and why he, Mayakovsky, alone among all practitioners of the arts invisible, could give them the assistance they so desperately needed. Mayakovsky chewed steadily and noisily, gazing into the distance with watery, rapidly blinking eyes.
When Quentin was done Mayakovsky swallowed, sighed, his round shoulders rising and then falling under his robe, and left the room. He came back with a piece of paper and a blunt pencil. He swept some crumbs onto the floor and put them down in front of Quentin.
“Write eet down,” he said. He pointed at Plum. “You. Make coffee.”
Plum made a monster face at him behind his back. Quentin turned up his palms: what are you gonna do? She made a monster face at him too.
“Fine,” he said. “You draw. I’ll make the coffee.”
While Plum produced a crude approximation of their original flow chart, Quentin made coffee in a battered Soviet-era espresso maker. Mayakovsky came back for both the drawing and the coffee—he didn’t bother to pour, he just took the whole machine—and left again. It was just as well, Quentin was getting tired. He hadn’t slept for four days; there had been no breaks during the flight from the coast, and whales didn’t really sleep at all. He found his way to the dormitory wing by memory and lay down on a cot in one of the empty cells and fell asleep in the milky white Antarctic light.
He had no idea how long he’d slept, but when he came back down to the dining hall matters had progressed. Mayakovsky was back, now wearing glasses with heavy black frames, sitting at a table talking heatedly at Plum and waving his arms. The flow chart was on the table in front of them; it looked like it had been repeatedly folded into two-inch squares and then unfolded again. Most of the white space was now full of annotations and calculations in Mayakovsky’s tiny blocky handwriting, a jumble of numbers and letters, Roman and Cyrillic, and more obscure symbols.
Quentin pulled up a chair. Mayakovsky’s body odor was sharp as cheese.
“It is crazy, what you are doing.” Mayakovsky shook his head with Slavic melancholy, as if their sheer incompetence saddened him. “A valid exploit, yes. All right. Crude—this, here, totally unnecessary. Totally.” He tapped the paper heavily. “And this, you transpose—it is working against your secondary effects, here and here. Spell is fighting itself. You understand? But the rest is not so terrible.”
It was better than Quentin expected. Listening to him crisply parse their tangled, fudged work, he knew they’d been right to come to him, however much it had cost them and might still cost them.
“Thees, though, no.” It was a round, resonant, definitive Russian no. He indicated one of the later stages of the spell with the back of his hand, like he didn’t even want to touch it, it was that far beneath his contempt. “It is impossible. Waste of time. You need more power, much more. Is a simple matter of scale. You are—I don’t know. You are trying to dig through a mountain using a toothpick.”
Professor Mayakovsky shook his head again. His mood was darkening visibly, heading for black.
“You are needing more power, much more. See? Khxere. And khxere.” He indicated two points on their flow chart; like a lot of Russians Mayakovsky had mastered many arcane points of higher mathematics but not the English letter h. “Between khxere and kxere.”
“I said that!” Plum said. “Remember? That’s basically exactly what I said!”
“I remember.” Quentin stared at the chart. His confidence was flagging. It all seemed very inadequate now. “How much more power?”
“Much. Orders of magnitude.” Megnitude. “You want to break the bond with these?” He grabbed Quentin’s fingers in one pawlike hand and shook them in front of Quentin’s face. “These little things? Waste of time. Would take one hundred years! Or one hundred Quentins!”
“Or a hundred Plums,” Plum said.
“Feefty Plums,” Mayakovsky said gallantly, with a quick yellow grin. “But you are nowhere near it. Nowhere near. Waste of time.”
He crumpled up the diagram and threw it at the wall.
Quentin watched it roll to a stop under a table. He would have liked to take a few minutes to go back through the spell in a patient, civil, collegial fashion, looking for areas of flexibility, places where the multipliers could be tweaked, maybe, to make up the difference. But Mayakovsky rolled over him, frog-marching him briskly through the math of it, brutally multiplying three and four digits in his head as he went. It was all Quentin could do to keep up. There was nothing that Mayakovsky didn’t know about incorporate bonds, apparently; it was like he’d studied up on them specifically in anticipation of their arrival. He understood their spell far better than they did.
Quentin wondered what Mayakovsky’s own work looked like, if he did any. He was alone out here half the year every year. What the hell did he do with himself? With a mind like his there was no limit to what he might have accomplished, if he wanted to. But Quentin had no idea what Mayakovsky wanted.
Quentin closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He could picture the whole spell in his head, and he could follow what Mayakovsky was saying, just, but he couldn’t see an answer. There had to be a way through. He was damned if he was going to go back empty-handed.
“Maybe I could store it up,” he said. “Build up the power over time. Construct a kind of containment device—I could cast the spell a hundred times, store it up, release it all at once.”
“And you stabilize how? ‘Store’ how? What is storage matrix?”
“I don’t know. A gem, a coin, something like that.”
Mayakovsky made a rude noise.
“Bad magic. Dangerous magic.”
“Or,” Quentin said, “I could get a hundred magicians together. We’ll cast it all at once.”
“I think you will not be telling one hundred magicians about this little project.”
Fair point. “Probably not.”
“It would be very risky.”
“True.”