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It was co on his toes, hands clu increasingly self-conscious about being naked, until Plum found hers Then he cla teeth, and they did the spells at the same time

This tih granted throwing up isn’t as big a deal to a bird as it is to a huienic job of it—business as usual After its brief reunion with hu to endure the insult of being squeezed into the tablespoon voluot oriented in time to watch Plum dwindle into the shape of a seabird twenty yards away, her pale body feathering over and collapsing in on itself into—he didn’t even knohat kind of bird she was Or for that matter what he was

He hatever kind of bird that feather had belonged to A moment of contact with Plum’s turht

Onward and upward

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 one or in hiding, the whole place sealed off If that happened they’d have to reassess pretty fast and ical research stations on the coast, where their arrival would be hard to explain at best

They spiraled in fro 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 ainst hohted on the flat roof of one of the towers and becaain

Quentin figured it was better to let Mayakovsky find them rather than the other way around—he didn’t want to startle the old ic—so theydown the stairs First stop was the laundry, where they secured so to feel urgent again

The place felt off-li aa wall, and the smooth stone was cool and sticky with condensed ave off a daht back memories of the last tihteen hours a day under Mayakovsky’s rule of silence There was so 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 theet the taste of bird beak out of their mouths Quentin was keenly aware that Mayakovsky had no real reason to help the he could He’d always known he wouldn’t have much to offer by way of co problem and some shameless flattery and, he supposed, the strictly—strictly—platonic presence of a s wo when they were first setting out

They never heard Mayakovsky cohost, looking grihtly 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 corowled “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 aive them the assistance they so desperately needed Mayakovsky chewed steadily and noisily, gazing into the distance atery, rapidly blinking eyes

When Quentin was done Mayakovsky sed, 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 hionna do? She made a monster face at him too

“Fine,” he said “You draw I’ll make the coffee”

While Pluinal flow chart, Quentin made coffee in a battered Soviet-era espressoand the coffee—he didn’t bother to pour, he just took the whole etting 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 dor by memory and lay down on a cot in one of the eht

He had no idea how long he’d slept, but when he caressed Mayakovsky was back, noearing glasses with heavy black fra 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 incoht 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 hied work, he knew they’d been right to coht 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 si to dig through aa toothpick”

Professor Mayakovsky shook his head again Hisfor 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 her lish letter h “Between khxere and kxere”

“I said that!” Plum said “Remember? That’s basically exactly what I said!”

“I reing It all seemed very inadequate now “How much more power?”

“Much Orders of nitude “You want to break the bond with these?” He grabbed Quentin’s fingers in one pawlike hand and shook thes? Waste of time Would take one hundred years! Or one hundred Quentins!”

“Or a hundred Plums,” Plum said

“Feefty Plurin “But you are nowhere near it Nowhere near Waste of time”

He cruram and threw it at the wall

Quentin watched it roll to a stop under a table He would have liked to take a few h the spell in a patient, civil, collegial fashion, looking for areas of flexibility, places where the multipliers could be tweaked, maybe, to -h the its 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 oork looked like, if he did any He was alone out here half the year every year What the hell did he do with hiht 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 follohat Mayakovsky was saying, just, but he couldn’t see an answer There had to be a way through He was dao 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”