EMBER’S TOMB
THE HILL WAS smooth and green. Set into its base was a simple post-and-lintel doorway: two enormous rough stone slabs standing upright with a third slab laid across them. In the space between them was darkness. It reminded Quentin of a subway entrance.
It was just dawn, and the door was on the western face of the hill, so the hill’s shadow fell over them. The grass was frosted with pale dew. There was no sound at all. The shape of the hill was a pure emerald-green sine wave against the lightening sky. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen here.
They stopped and huddled a hundred yards away, miserable and unshowered, to pull themselves together. The morning was chilly. Quentin rubbed his hands together and tried a warmth spell that only left him feeling feverish and slightly queasy. He couldn’t seem to get oriented to Fillory’s Circumstances. He had slept heavily the night before, with vivid dreams, the weight of his fatigue sinking him down into dark, primal realms haunted by roaring winds and tiny furry beasts, early mammals hiding fearfully in the long grass. He wished he could just stand here a little longer and look at the pink light on the dew. Everybody had a heavy hunting knife, which back on Earth had seemed beyond overkill but now felt pathetically inadequate.
The shape of the hill tuggedLev Grossmanbv">niffin the faculty at something in his deep memory. He thought of the hill they’d seen in that enchanted mirror, in that musty little storeroom back at Brakebills, where he and Alice and Penny had studied together, so long ago. It looked like the same hill. But so did a thousand hills. It was just a hill.
“So just to be clear,” Eliot was saying to Dint and Fen. “It’s called Ember’s Tomb, but Ember isn’t buried here. And he’s not dead.”
He sounded exactly as relaxed and unworried as he ever had back at Brakebills. Just dotting the i’s, clearing up the details, the way he would have insouciantly picked apart one of Bigby’s problem sets, or decoded a closely written wine label. He was in control. The deeper they rolled into Fillory, the shakier Quentin felt, but Eliot was the opposite: he just got calmer and more sure of himself, exactly the way Quentin had thought that he, Quentin, would, and exactly the way that he wasn’t.
“Every age finds a use for this place,” Fen was saying. “A mine, a fortress, a treasure house, a prison, a tomb. Some dug it deeper. Others walled up the parts they didn’t need or wished to forget. It is one of the Deep Ruins.”
“So you’ve been here before?” Ana?s asked. “I mean, in there?”
Fen shook her head. “Not this one. A hundred places like it.”
“Except that the crown is in this one. And how did it get there exactly?”
Quentin had wondered that same thing. If the crown really had belonged to Martin, maybe that was where he went when he disappeared. Maybe he died down there.
“The crown is there,” Dint snapped. “We will go in and get it. Enough questions.”
He swirled his cape impatiently.
Alice was standing very near Quentin. She looked small and still and cold.
“Quentin, I don’t want to go in there,” she said softly, without looking at him.
Over the past week Quentin had devoted literally hours to fantasizing about what he would say to Alice if she ever spoke to him again. But all his carefully planned speeches fell away at the sound of her voice. She wasn’t going to get a speech. It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though—and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger—he was only angry because his position was so weak.
“So go home,” was all he said.
That wasn’t right either. But it was too late, because somebody was running toward them.
The weird thing was that the entrance to the tomb was still a hundred yards off, and Quentin could see the creatures coming the whole way, two of them, running flat out across the wet grass for at least a minute, like they were out doing early-morning wind sprints. It was almost funny. They weren’t human, and they didn’t seem to belong to the same species as each other either, but they were both cute. One was something like a giant hare, squat and covered in gray-brown fur, maybe four feet tall and about that wide. It hopped toward them determinedly, its long ears flattened back. The other one was more like a ferret—or maybe a meerkat? A weasel? Quentin tried to think what the closest equivalent furry animal would be. Whatever it was it ran upright and it was tall, seven feet at least, most of it long silky torso. Its face was chinless, with prominent front teeth. nostrils.
This odd couple came charging at them across the green grass silently, no battle cry, no sound track, in the still early-morning air. At first it looked like they might be running to greet them, but Bunny had short, stubby swords in both of its front paws, held out steady in front of him as he ran, and Ferret was hefting a quarterstaff.
They closed to within fifty yards. The Brakebills crowd shrank back involuntarily, as if the newcomers exerted an invisible force field. This was it: they had come to the end of what was conceivable. Something was about to give. It had to. Dint and Fen didn’t move. Quentin realized there wasn’t going to be any parley or rock-paper-scissors. This was going to be about stabbing. He had thought he was ready, but he wasn’t. Somebody had to stop it. The girls were hanging on to each other as if in a howling wind, even Alice and Janet.
Oh my God, Quentin thought, this is really happening. This is really happening.
Ferret arrived first. It stutter-stepped to a jittery stop, breathing hard. Its huge eyes blinked as it smoothly spun its staff two-handed in a figure-eight pattern. It whickered in the still air.
“Hup!” yelled Fen.
“Ha!” Dint answered.
They set themselves side by side, as if they were getting ready to lift something heavy. Then Dint stepped back, ceding first blood.
“Jesus,” Quentin heard himself say. “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” He wasn’t ready for this. This wasn’t magic. This was the opposite of magic. The world was ripping open.
Ferret feinted once and snapped a nasty jab at Fen’s face. The two ends of the quarterstaff were now glowing an ominous enchanted orange, like the tip of a cigarette. Somebody shrieked in the silence.
Even as one end of the staff whipped forward Fen turned away from it, bowing forward at the waist, ducking the jab and turning seamlessly, almost lazily, into a graceful spinning roundhouse kick. She seemed to be moving slowly, but her foot clocked Ferret’s weak chin hard enough to spin its head round a quarter turn.
Ferret grinned, with blood in its big teeth, but it had more bad news coming. Fen was still spinning, and her next kick connected low and hard with the side of its knee. The knee bent in, sideways, wrongly. Ferret staggered and aimed the same jab at Fen’s face, whereupon Fen caught the flashing quarterstaff barehanded—the smack of it hitting her open palm was like a rifle shot. She dropped her slick martial arts elegance and tussled savagely, messily for control.
For a second they froze, vibrating with isometric strain while Ferret, with agonizing, comical slowness, stretched its neck forward to try to bite Fen’s bare throat with its big rodent incisors. But she had it outmuscled. Fen slowly forced the staff up under its chin, right into where its Adam’s apple would be, while her right foot stamped pneumatically on the outside of its hurt knee, over and over again. It gagged and twisted away.
Just as Quentin thought he couldn’t watch anymore, Ferret made its last mistake. It took its paw off the quarterstaff for an instant—it looked like it was going for a knife strapped to its thigh. With the extra leverage Fen flung it down hard on the turf, and the wind huffed out of it.
“Ha!” she barked, and stamped twice on its thickly furred throat, hard. A long, gargling rattle followed, the first sound Quentin had heard it make. glance passed between and theem; margin-right:g
Fen popped up, visibly amped, her face red under her blond buzz cut. She picked up the quarterstaff, braced herself, and broke it over her knee in one try. Throwing the broken pieces aside, she leaned down and screamed in Ferret’s face.
“Haaaaaaaaaa!”