Alice just nodded gravely.
The silver mouthpiece tasted metallic against his lips, like a nickel or a battery. The breath he took was so deep that pain lanced hotly into his arrow-stuck shoulder as his ribs expanded. He wasn’t sure exactly what to do—purse his lips like a trumpeter, or just blow into it like a kazoo?—but the ivory horn produced a clear, even, high note as gentle and round as a French horn winded by a seasoned symphony player in a concert hall. Everybody stopped talking and turned to look at him. It wasn’t loud, exactly, but it made everything else quiet around it, so that it was instantly the only sound in the room, and everything resonated with its pure, simple strength. It was natural and perfect, a single note that sounded like a grand chord. It went on and on. He blew until his lungs were empty.
The sound echoed and faded away, gone as if it had never been. The cavern was still. For a moment Quentin felt ridiculous, like he’d just blown a noisemaker. What was he expecting, anyway? He really didn’t know.
There was a snuffling sound from Ember’s pedestal.
“O child,” came the ram’s deep voice. “Don’t you know what you have done?”
“I just got us out of this mess. That’s what I’ve done.”
The ram drew Himself up.
“I am sorry you came here,” Ember said. “Children of Earth. No one asked you to come. I am sorry that our world is not the paradise you were looking for. But it was not created for your entertainment. Fillory”—the old ram’s jowls shook—”is not a theme park, for you and your friends to play dress-up in, with swords and crowns.”
He was visibly mastering some powerful emotion. It took Quentin a moment to recognize it. It was fear. The old ram was choking on it.
“That’s not why we came here, Ember,” Quentin said quietly.
“Is it not?” Ember said, basso profundo. “No, of course it is not.” His alien eyes were hard to meet, with their molten yellow whites and black pupils like figure eights on their sides, symbols of infinity. “You came here to save us. You came here to be our King.
“But tell me something, Quentin. How could you hope to save us when you cannot even save yourself ?”
Quentin was spared the necessity of answering, because that was when the catastrophe began.
A small man in a neat gray suit appeared in the cave. His face was obscured by a leafy branch that hung in front of it in midair. He looked exactly the way Quentin remembered. The same suit, the same club tie. His face was no less illegible. He held his pink, manicured hands clasped urbanely in front of him. It was as if Quentin had never left the classroom where he first appeared. In a way he supposed he never had. The terror was so absolute, so all-encompassing, that it was almost like calm: not a suspicion but the absolute certainty that they were all about to die.
The Beast spoke.
“I believe that was my cue.” His tone was mild, his accent patrician English.
Ember roared. The sound was colossal. It shook the room, and a stalactite fell and shattered. The inside of Ember’s mouth was mottled pink and black. At that moment the ram no longer looked quite so ridiculous. There were great humps of muscle under all that fluffy wool, like boulders under moss, and His ribbed horns were thick and stony—they curled all the way around so that the two sharp tips pointed forward. Head down, He surged down off the stone plinth at the man in the gray suit.
The Beast slapped Him aside with a smooth, unhurried backhand motion. The gesture was almost casual. Ember shot sideways like a rocket and hit the rock wall with a sickening, boneless smack. The physics of it looked wrong, as if the ram were as light as a leaf and the Beast as dense as dwarf star matter. Ember dropped motionless to the sandy floor.
He lay where He fell. The Beast flicked woolly fluff off one immaculate gray sleeve with the backs of his fingers.
“It’s a funny thing about the old gods,” he said. “You think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill. But when the fighting starts, they go down just like anybody else. They aren’t stronger, they’re just older.”
There was a sandy shuffling from behind Quentin. He risked a glance: Dint had turned on his heel and walked out of the room. The Beast did nothing to stop him. Quentin suspected the rest of them wouldn’t get off that easily.
“Yes, he was one of mine,” the Beast said. “Farvel was, too, if you want to know the whole truth. The birch tree, you remember him? They mostly are. The rams’ time is over. Fillory is my world now.”
It wasn’t a boast, just a statement of fact. Fucking Dint, Quentin thought. And I pretended to like his stupid vest.
“I knew you’d come for me. It’s hardly a surprise. I’ve been waiting for you for ages. But is this really all of you? It’s a bad joke, you know.” He gave an incredulous snort. “You’ve no chance at all.”
He sighed.
“I suppose I won’t be needing this anymore. I’d almost gotten used to it.”
Almost absentmindedly the Beast plucked the branch that hung in front of his face with a thumb and forefinger, as if he were taking off a pair of sunglasses, and tossed it lightly aside.
Quentin cringed—he didn’t want to see its real face—but it was too late. And it turned out he had nothing to worry about, because it was an utterly ordinary face. It could have been the face of an insurance adjuster: round, mild, soft-chinned, boyish.
“Nothing? You don’t recognize me?”
The Beast strode over to the stone plinth, picked up the crown that still lay there, and placed it on his graying temples.
“My God,” Quentin said. “You’re Martin Chatwin.”
“In the flesh,” the Beast announced cheerfully. “And my, how I’ve grown!”
“I don’t understand,” Alice said shakily. “How can you be Martin Chatwin?”
“But surely you knew? Isn’t that why you’re here?” He searched their faces but got no answer. They were frozen in place—not magically this time, just paralyzed the regular way, with fear. He frowned. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters. But I would have thought that was the whole point. It’s a little insulting, really.”
He pouted for show, a sad clown. It was disturbing to see a middle-aged man with the mannerisms of a little English schoolboy. It really was him. He hadn’t grown up at all. He even had a curiously miniature, asexual quality, as if he’d stopped growing the moment he’d run away into that forest.
“What happened to you?” Quentin asked.
“What happened?” The Beast spread his arms triumphantly. “Why, I got what I wanted. I went to Fillory, and I never came back!”
It was all becoming clear. Martin Chatwin hadn’t been stolen by monsters, he had become one. He had found what Quentin thought he wanted, a way to stay in Fillory, to leave the real world behind forever. But the price had been high.
“I wasn’t going to go back to Earth after I’d seen Fillory. I mean, you can’t show a man paradise and then snatch it back again. That’s what gods do. But I say: down with gods.”
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you put your mind to it. I made some very interesting friends in the Darkling Woods. Very helpful chaps.” He spoke genially, expansively, like a toastmaster at a dinner party. “Mind you, the kinds of things you have to do to work that kind of magic—well, your humanity is the first thing to go. You don’t stay a man once you’ve done the things I’ve done. Once you know the things I know. I hardly miss it now.”
“Friends,” Quentin said dully. “You mean the Watcherwoman.”
“The Watcherwoman!” Martin seemed to find this hilarious. “Oh, my! That is amusing. Sometimes I forget what’s in those books. I’ve been here a very long time, you know. I haven’t read them in centuries.
“No, not the Watcherwoman. Goodness, the crowd I run with make her look like—well, they make her look like you. Amateurs.
“But enough chit-chat. Who’s got the button?”
The button was, of course, in Penny’s bag, which lay right at Quentin’s feet. I did this, he thought, with a pang that ran all the way through him. This is twice. Twice I’ve summoned the Beast. I’m a curse on everyone around me.
“Button, button, who’s got the button? Who’s got it?”
Penny began backing away from the thing in the gray suit, at the same time starting up a spell—another secret weapon, maybe, Quen tin didn’t recognize it. But Martin moved invisibly fast, like a poisonous fish striking. In a blur he had both of Penny’s wrists in the grip of one hand. Penny struggled wildly; he bent at the waist and kicked Martin in the stomach, then braced his legs against his chest and pushed to try to get free, grunting with the effort. The Beast barely seemed to notice.
“I’m afraid not, dear boy,” he said.
He opened his mouth wide, too wide, as if his jaw were unhinging like a snake’s, and placed both of Penny’s hands in his mouth. He bit them off at the wrists.
It wasn’t a clean bite. Martin Chatwin had blunt human teeth, not fangs, and it took an extra shake of his calm, middle-aged head to fully crush the wrist bones and detach Penny’s hands. Then the Beast dropped him, chewing busily, and Penny fell back on the sand. Arterial blood sprayed crazily from the stumps, then he rolled over and they were underneath him. His legs thrashed like he was being electrocuted. He didn’t scream, but frantic snuffling noises came from where his face was pushed into the sandy floor. His sneakers scrabbled in the dirt.
The Beast swallowed once, twice, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He grinned, almost embarrassed, holding up one finger while he chewed: give me a moment. His eyes narrowed with pleasure.
“Shit shit shit shit shit . . .” somebody wailed, high and desperate. Anaïs.
“Now,” Martin Chatwin said, when he could speak again. “I’d like the button, please.”
They stared at him.
“Why,” Eliot said numbly. “What are you?”
Martin took out his handkerchief and dabbed Penny’s blood from the corner of his mouth.
“Why, I’m what you thought that was.” He indicated Ember’s motionless body. “I’m a god.”
Quentin’s chest was so tight that he kept taking tense irregular little breaths, in and out.
“But why do you want it?” he asked.
Talking was good. Talking was better than killing.
“Just tying up loose ends,” Martin said. “I would have thought it was obvious. The buttons are the only things I know of that could force me to return to Earth. I’ve got almost all of them rounded up. Just one more after this. Goodness knows where the bunnies got them. I still haven’t figured that out.
“Do you know, when I first ran away, they hunted me like an animal? My own siblings? They wanted to bring me home. Like an animal!” His urbane manner cracked for an instant. “Later Ember and Umber came looking for me, too, to try to deport me, but by then it was much too late for that. Much too late. I was too strong even for them.
“That bloody cunt of a Watcherwoman is still at it, with her damned clock-trees. Mucking about with time. Even now their roots go halfway through this bloody world. She’s next after you, she’s still got a button. The last one. Once I’ve got hers I really don’t think there’ll be any way to get rid of me at all.”
Penny rolled over onto his side. He looked up at Quentin, his face strangely ecstatic, though paler than ever and covered in sand. His eyes were closed. He had the stumps of his wrists pressed tight against his chest. His shirt was wringing wet with blood.
“Is it bad, Q?” Penny asked. “I’m not going to look. You tell me. How bad is it?”
“You’re all right, man,” Quentin muttered.
Martin could not suppress a joyless clubman’s chuckle at that. He went on.
“I’ve been back once or twice, of course, by myself. Once to kill the old bugger, Plover.” His smooth brow crinkled, and he looked thoughtful. “He earned that. That and more. I wish I had him to kill again.
“And I nipped through once when your Professor March bungled a spell. Just to keep an eye on things. I thought somebody at Brakebills might be planning something—I get a sort of sense of the future sometimes. It appears that I was right. Though I must have eaten the wrong student.”
Martin clapped his hands together and rubbed them in anticipation.
“Well, that’s all bygones,” he said, perking up. “Let’s have it.”
“We hid it again,” Alice said. “Like your sister Helen. We buried the button. Kill us and you’ll never find it.”
My brave Alice. Quentin gripped her hand. I brought this on us. His knees were trembling uncontrollably.
“Oh, well played, my girl. Shall I start ripping people’s heads off, one by one? I think you’ll tell me before it comes to that.”
“Wait, why would you kill us at all?” Quentin asked. “Fuck it, we’ll just give you the button. Just leave us alone!”
“Oh, I wish I could do that, Quentin. I truly do. But you see, this place changes you.” Martin sighed and waggled his extra fingers, his hands like pale spiders. “It’s why the rams didn’t like humans staying here too long. As it is, I’ve almost gone too far. I’ve got quite a taste for human flesh now. Don’t you go anywhere, William,” he added, nudging Penny’s twitching body with the toe of his shoe. “Fauns just don’t have the same savor.”
William, Quentin thought. That must be Penny’s real name. He never knew it before.