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“I’m here! Dammit, Sarah, you took your sweet time. But looks like you thought to bring a lot more than I did!” Linda cackled wildly. “Bring any good socks in there?”
The creaking was a garden cart festooned with a string of LEDs. A halo of light illuminated it as Linda pushed it before her. The cart held two jerry cans, a loop of transparent tubing, and the tool roll from the truck. Three more battered carts, similarly lit, followed her in a solemn procession. As Sarah’s mind scrambled to put it all in context, she heard the rattle of toenails on pavement and a much skinnier Sarge raced up to her, wriggling and wagging in excitement. They weren’t dead. She wasn’t alone. Sarah stooped and hugged the excited dog, letting him lap the tears off her cheeks.
Linda gave her time to recover as she barked her orders at the tribe. “Benny, you come here and take this. Crank this fifty times and then it will light up. Hector, you know how to siphon gas. Check that old truck. We need every drop we can get to keep the Generac running. Carol, you pop the hood and salvage the battery.”
The scavengers came to her, accepting the jerry cans and the siphon tube. Backpack Man bobbed a bow to her before accepting the crank light. As he turned away, Linda smiled at her. “They’re good kids. A bit rough around the edges, but they’re learning fast. You should have seen their faces the first time I fired up the generator. I know where to look for stuff like that. It was in the basement of that clinic on Thirtieth.”
Sarah was speechless. Her eyes roved over Linda. Like the dog, she had lost weight and gained vitality. She hobbled toward Linda on the ragged remnants of her bedroom slippers. She gave a caw of laughter when she saw Sarah staring at her feet.
“Yes, I know. Dotty old woman. Thought of so many things—solar lights and a crank flashlight, aspirin, and sugar cubes and so on … and then walked out the door in my slippers. Robbie was right, my trolley was definitely off the tracks. But it doesn’t matter so much over here. Not when the tracks are torn up for everyone.”
“Russ’s hiking boots are in one of those bags,” Sarah heard herself say.
“Damn, you thought of everything. Cold-weather gear, books … and a pistol! I’d never have thought it of you. You pack any food?”
Sarah shook her head wordlessly. Linda looked at the gun she still held, muzzle down at her side, and nodded knowingly. “Didn’t plan to stay long, did you?”
“I could go back and get some,” Sarah said, but as she looked back at her house, the last lights of the past faded. Her home was a wreck, broken windows and tumbledown chimney. Her grapevines cloaked the ruins of the collapsed porch.
“Can’t go back,” Linda confirmed for her. She shook her head and then clarified: “For one, I don’t want to.” She looked around at her tribe. “Petey, pick up that bat. Remind everyone, we carry everything back and divvy up at the clinic. Not here in the street in the dark. Don’t tear the bags and boxes; put the stuff back in them and let’s hump it on home.”
“Yes, Linda.” Backpack Man bobbed another bow to her. Around her in the darkness, the others were moving to obey her. The girl stood, staring at both of them, her mittened hands clasped together. Linda shook a bony finger at her. “You get busy, missy.” Then she motioned to Sarah to come closer. “What do you think?” she asked her. “Do you think Maureen will be ready soon?”
Lev Grossman
A novelist and journalist, Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time and coauthor of the TIME.com blog TechLand. His quirky 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians was a phenomenal international sensation, and landed on the New York Times Best Seller list as well as being named a New Yorker Best Book of 2009, and its sequel, The Magician King, published in 2011, has enjoyed similar acclaim. Grossman’s other books include the novels Warp and Codex. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a website at levgrossman.com.
Here he takes us to an ancient, venerable school for wizards, one haunted by a thousand age-old traditions as well as spirits of a different kind, to show us that even the most innocent of pranks can end up having dangerous and even deadly consequences.
You could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. It wasn’t that innocent. It was just that Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he had to be punished for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at the very least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer, and that counted for something. A lot really.
You couldn’t call it innocent. But you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway, is there really any such thing as an innocent prank?
Plum was president of the League—unelected but undisputed—and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, probably, though since the college had been around for something like four hundred years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been, at some point in the past, another League or at any rate something along the same lines, which you could count as a historical precedent. You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in fact she’d gotten the idea from a P. G. Wodehouse story.
They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as they could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. Plum was lying full length on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered limply around the room on couches and chairs, like confetti from a successful but rather exhausting party that was thankfully now all but over.
Plum made the room go silent—it was a little spell that ate sound in about a ten-yard radius—and all the attention immediately focused on her. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.
“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said solemnly. “All those in favor of pranking Wharton, say aye.”
The ayes came back in a range of tones from righteous zeal to ironic detachment to sleepy acquiescence. This business of clandestine after-hours scheming could certainly take a whack at your sleep schedule, Plum had to admit. It was a little unfair on the others, because Plum was a quick study who went through homework like a hot knife through butter, and she knew it wasn’t that easy for all of them. From her vantage point on the floor, with her eyes closed, her long brown hair splayed out in a fan on the carpet, which had once been soft and woolly but which had been trodden down into a shiny, hard-packed grey, the vote sounded more or less unanimous.
Anyway, there was fairly evidently a plurality in the room. She dispensed with a show of nays.
“It’s maddening,” Emma said in the silence that followed, by way of spiking the football. “Absolutely maddening.”
That was an exaggeration, but the room let it go. It’s not like Wharton’s crime was a matter of life and death. But a stop would be put to it. This the League swore.
Darcy sat on the couch opposite the long mirror with the scarred white frame that leaned against one wall. СКАЧАТЬ