At noon they witnessed one of Fillory’s famous daily eclipses, and they observed something that was described in none of the books: instead of being a sphere, the moon of Fillory was formed in the shape of an actual, literal crescent, an elegant silvery arc that sailed through the sky, rotating slowly around its empty center of gravity.
They made camp at sunset in a ragged square scrap of meadow. Ember’s Tomb, Dint told them, was in the next valley over, and they wouldn’t want to spend the night any closer to it. He and Fen divided the watches between them; Penny volunteered to take one, but they declined. They ate some roast-beef sandwiches they’d been saving since the house upstate and unrolled sleeping bags and slept in the open, their bodies pressing flat the tough, coarse green grass underneath.
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 unshow ered, 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 tugged 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?” Anaïs 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 angry only 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.
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 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 around 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.
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!”
The broken ends of the staff spat out a few feeble burnt-orange sparks on the grass. Sixty seconds had passed, maybe not even that.
“Jesus jesus jesus,” Quentin said, hugging himself. Someone was throwing up on the grass. It had never once even occurred to him to try to help. He wasn’t ready for this. This wasn’t what he’d come here for.
Meanwhile the other assassin, the squat muscular Bunny, had never arrived on the scene. Dint had done something to the ground beneath its long rabbit feet, or maybe to its sense of balance, so that it couldn’t seem to stand up. It was scrabbling around helplessly on the grass like it was wet ice. Fen, on a roll, stepped over Ferret’s body toward him, but Dint stopped her.
He turned back to the Brakebills crowd.
“Can any of you take him from here? Bow and arrow maybe?” Quentin couldn’t tell if he was pissed that they weren’t helping or if he was just being polite, offering them a taste of the action. “Anybody?”
Nobody answered. They stared at him like he was speaking gibberish. Every time the muscle-bound hare tried to get up its paws kept flying out from under it. Chittering and weeping, the hare shouted a guttural cry and threw one of its swords at them, but it slipped again and the sword landed safely short and off to one side.
Dint waited for an answer from the group, then turned away disgustedly. He made a quiet tapping gesture with his wand, like he was ashing a cigar, and a bone in the hare’s upper thigh snapped audibly. It screamed in falsetto.
“Wait!” It was Anaïs, pushing her way forward, past a waxwork Janet. “Wait. Let me try.”
The fact that Anaïs could even walk and talk right now was incomprehensible to Quentin. She began a spell but stuttered a few times, rattled, and had to start over. Dint waited, obviously impatient. On her third try she completed a sleep spell that Penny had taught them. Bunny’s grunting struggles ceased. It sagged onto its side on the grass, looking alarmingly sweet. Ferret was still gagging weakly, eyes open and staring at the sky, red foam pouring from its mouth, but nobody paid any attention to it. No part of it below its neck was moving.
Anaïs went over and picked up the short sword the hare had thrown.
“There,” she said to Dint proudly. “Now we kill it, no problem!”
She hefted the sword happily in one hand.
As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaging in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold and immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. He wasn’t even ashamed. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn’t matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.
They trailed after Dint and Fen—and what kind of retarded names were those anyway, Dint and Fen? he thought numbly—through the doorway and into the hill. He barely noticed his surroundings. A square stone corridor opened out into a huge open chamber that looked almost as big as the hill that contained it, which must have been mostly hollow. Green-tinted light filtered down through a circular oculus at the room’s apex. The air was full of stone dust. The ruins of an enormous brass orrery stood in the center of the room, its skinny arms stripped of its planets. It looked like a broken, defoliated Christmas tree, the smashed spheres lying at its base like fallen ornaments.
Nobody noticed a large—ten-feet-long large—green lizard standing frozen amid the remains of shattered tables and benches until it abruptly unfroze and skittered off into the shadows, claws skritching on the stone floor. The horror was almost pleasant: it wiped away Alice and Janet and everything else except itself, like a harsh, abrasive cleanser.
They wandered from room to empty room, down echoing stone hallways. The floor plan was beyond chaotic. The stonework changed styles and patterns every twenty minutes as a new generation of masons took over. They took turns putting light spells on their knives, their hands, various inappropriate body parts in an effort to break the tension.
Having tasted blood, Anaïs now tagged after Dint and Fen like an eager puppy, lapping up whatever observations she could get out of them about personal combat.
“They never had a chance,” Fen said, with professional disinterest. “Even if Dint hadn’t taken the second one, even if I had been alone, the quarterstaff is not a collaborative weapon. It simply takes up too much room. Once the tall one is into a form, those tips are flying left and right, up and down. He can’t afford to worry about his friend. You face them one-on-one, and you move on.
“They should have fallen back, waited for us together in that big chamber. Taken us by surprise.”
Anaïs nodded, obviously fascinated.
“Why didn’t they?” she asked. “Why did they come running straight at us?”
“I don’t know.” Fen frowned. “Could’ve been an honor thing. Could’ve been a bluff, they thought we’d run. Could be they were under a spell, they couldn’t help it.”