The Way of the Wizard

Endgame Lev Grossman

It was morning rush hour and the subway station was packed. The platform was choked with people: they bunched up at the stairs and wherever construction made the space too narrow and they had to walk in single file. Some of them had thought it necessary to bring an umbrella and some of them hadn’t.

They were all trying to hurry while at the same time not touch each other or look directly at each other or acknowledge in any way that there was anybody else on the platform with them. They made themselves human black holes: no information about their interior lives, if they had any, escaped through their faces. A train pulled in, and everybody raised their hands to their ears in unison at the scream of metal on metal.

A pretty young woman with short dark hair stood by a metal pylon at the edge of the platform, just short of the nubby yellow warning strip. She kept her back to the tracks, watching the crowd shuffle by her. Trains came and went, but she didn’t get on any of them. She just stood there. The only other person doing the same thing was an old man in a dashiki sitting on a milk crate under the stairs, who was playing “Margaritaville” over and over again on a steelpan.

The young woman had been excited when she first arrived, but she’d been standing there for two hours now, starting at six in the morning, and her excitement was starting to pall. It was separating out into boredom and jitteriness, the way the frosting on a birthday cake that’s been left out too long separates into butter and sugar. She wasn’t especially enjoying “Margaritaville,” which the old man in the dashiki rendered slowly and lovingly, with a lot of swelling tremolos and rallentandos. She leaned back against the iron pillar, bumpy with hundreds of coats of burnt-orange house paint, thinking bored and jittery thoughts, and let the waves of people wash past her. Here they were, the winners of humanity’s great historical lottery, living in the richest city in the world, in the richest period of human civilization ever, and they were trudging to work in a rat-infested cement cavern on their way to stare at computer screens for eight hours. What happened here? Whose fault was it? Who had betrayed whom? And yes, real live rats. She’d seen six so far.

She just wanted it to start already. She looked at her watch. The fug in the air was rich and capricious — steam, sweat, machine oil, cheese, shit — Jesus, you took your life in your hands every time you breathed in. It was only about the third time she’d ever even been in a subway station.

She glanced down the platform to where Rob was standing, his gawky curly head bobbing and swiveling above the crowd like an ostrich’s, his mouth never quite completely closed. They were supposed to make eye contact every five minutes. That was part of the system. Sean would be somewhere down the other end. The three of them were the stoppers. She looked at her watch, then back at the crowd.

The thing was, it was taking too long. It had already taken too long. Way too long. She looked at her watch again: 8:07.

Possibly they hadn’t come, or they hadn’t come this way, but she didn’t believe it. They had to come this way; tactically it was over-determined ten times over, and plus they had good intel. But the thing was, they didn’t have all that far to come, and they wouldn’t have waited this long. They must have slipped through the net. Maybe their guises were better than anticipated. Something new. They’d be at the goal soon if somebody didn’t chase them down. Probably they were already there, except that then the turn would have ended.

If she could just find them she could take them. She knew she could. It might already be too late. Anyway she had to pee.

She bit her lip and looked at Rob again, gave him the OK sign. Then, when he looked away, she stepped back from the pylon, ditched her prop purse in the trash—if you see something, say something—and joined the crowd that was slowly trying to feed itself up the stairs. She was going off piste, Sean would say. Off the reservation. They would murder her if she was wrong, destroy her, but wasn’t that why she was a stopper? She took the big chances nobody else would. So.

Anyway if she was wrong she’d be back in position in a couple of minutes. No harm no foul. As she passed the man in the dashiki, he stopped covering Jimmy Buffett and stood up abruptly. She made a curious, contorted sign with her fingers and whispered a word in Farsi. He sat down again and face-planted gently into his steelpan, his sticks clattering on the cement. Some people claim that there’s a woooooooman to blame …

Now she was moving around and in play it was all different. The scene had unfrozen, it was no longer a photograph but a movie — starring her. She could breathe again; it was like she’d taken a hit off an inhaler. The early morning fog was burning off. This was the good part. And when the going was good, nobody was better at it than she was. She tried to keep her eyes glazed and empty like everybody else, but she was full of crazy energy. She wanted to grin like a loon. Everybody else looked so normal. Even the freaks were freaky in a normal way. She slowed her pace with an effort. Walk like a regular person, asshole.

The flow of the crowd bore her up the iron-shod cement stairs to the concourse level. At the turnstiles she did a mirror-image buck-and-wing dance with a guy wearing Prada and a novelty beard who wanted to come in the same turnstile she was going out. That took an amazingly long time to sort out, by which time the clock in the token booth already read 8:11.

The hallways of the concourse radiated out around her in all directions. She counted five exits and they all looked wrong. No time. Pick one. She stopped. The crowd was thinning out around her. No one was giving up any obvious tells. The turnstiles clattered and chirped incessantly in the background, at slightly different pitches, like a chorus of peeping frogs.

She felt a stab of panic. She could double back to the platform, it wasn’t too late. But the turn would be over soon. There were rules.

“Shee-it,” she said out loud.

She lifted the brass and mother-of-pearl opera glasses that hung on a chain around her neck, so tiny they looked like a toy, and scanned the crowd.

And you know what? She’d been one hundred percent right. Young man, mid-twenties, sandy hair, olive houndstooth jacket with leather elbow patches, could pass for a pussy-chasing editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster except for the crowd of glowing icons over his head, bobbing along in time with his steps: numbers and Greek letters and sundry more obscure symbols in fluorescent green. He was trudging up the concourse with the rest of the straights, not a care in the world.

And on the same bearing, about ten feet in back of him: an upper east side matron, complete with pearls and fur jacket. Full civilian drag. A dense configuration of ochre italic writing hovered above her quaffed, steel-grey head, with two satellite stars spinning in place over her shoulders. They’d sent a captain.

They couldn’t be working together. It was practically impossible. There were rules, rules, rules. Well, either way they only had two options from where they were: stairs up to the street or revolving doors to the left, which led into the basement lobby of an office building. Houndstooth stepped into the revolving doors, and bless his pussy-chasing heart because she loved revolving doors. Her heart was racing now, but she could step back from it — it was like she pressed some mental clutch, disengaging it from the drive train, while her fingers calmly did the walking. Throw in some archaic Dutch expletives and just like that the door jammed with Houndstooth inside. He did a hilarious involuntary mime-trapped-in-a-box routine, made all the more hilarious by the fact that he actually was trapped in a box.

The crowd began backing up against the jammed door, murmuring discontentedly. It would take him a minute to figure out what she’d done, because she hadn’t done it the way you’d think, which why would she have? But it always took them a minute to figure it out. And a minute was all she needed. The Matron knew something was up, she had turned around, still walking but backwards, trying to spot her in the crowd, but she didn’t have the benefit of those fancy glasses. There was a moment’s grace. She began to put the Matron to sleep the same way she had the busker: a Persian fainting charm, it only stings for a second. But this was apparently a much more senior magician than Jimmy Buffett back there because before she could finish, something invisible hit her hard in the chest and she went right down on her ass.

Maybe she actually should have read that writing over the Matron’s head. That woman was a captain at least. Probably more. Shocked commuters went to help her up, but she shrugged them off, taking deep breaths and massaging her breastbone. The Matron was already off and running, sprinting up the stairs like a champion, surprisingly spry in those heels. She should give chase. But first, what to do with Houndstooth? She could feel him unpicking her charm, loop by loop. A little of the rough stuff, she decided. With a gust of force she blew the whole revolving door off its axle and back into the office building basement. The crash it made was incredible.

That would hold him for a minute or two more. No broken bones, but it would shake him up and tie him up. Maybe even knock him out. Crude but effective, and most important, legal. The crowd went shrieking crazy. The noise faded as she pounded up the steps into the sunlight. The Matron was heading for the same office building that Houndstooth was now in the basement of, a monolith with a double-height green glass lobby. The game was well and truly afoot.

Fast-walking in parallel, on opposite sides of the street, she and the Matron tried to trip each other, then make each other forget where they were going, then give each other heart palpitations. They messed with each others’ vision and steered pedestrians into each others’ way, which was somewhat off the reservation ruleswise but they were both doing it so call it a wash. Then, on a lark, she reached out to the lights on an idling town car and made them flash, much too brightly, so brightly that the older woman had to stop for a minute and press the heels of her hands against her eyes and lean on the hood.

Set and match. She darted across the street, between the cars and right past the wilting Matron and straight at the green glass and through it and there — the most beautiful sight she had ever seen — was Houndstooth coming up the escalator, right on time, still rubbing his head and arguing with a security guard over whether or not he was okay.

She could capture him and go for the tie, or try to follow him to the goal and go for the win. The next best thing to knowing where something was was knowing who knew where it was, and she knew that Houndstooth knew. Though what beyond-asshole had decided to hide the Blue Cube in a midtown office building? Just a lot of extra hassle and cleanup for everybody.

Precognition was sort of like body English in pool: there was no good reason why it should work but sometimes it did anyway. With her eyes closed, groping around with some nameless mental extremity in some nameless direction, she dredged one simple fact out of where it lay mired ninety seconds in the future: an elevator number. So she was ready, right behind him, when Houndstooth stepped into it. Just as the doors were closing she karate-chopped her hand in between them, they shuddered back open, and she marched into the little box with him with a shit-eating grin all over her face.

Let’s be honest: the ride up was awkward. She really did feel sorry for him. He was a rookie, and it was just dawning on him who she was. He made the Pax sign with thumb and forefinger, indicating that they could dispense with hostilities. Like downing a football at the twenty. He wasn’t going to fight. Disappointed Houndstooth! With his narrow face and his wavy chestnut hair that was just getting thin at the temples.

God, it was taking forever. For whatever reason Houndstooth had not thought it necessary to choose the express elevator. The artificial respite was giving her time to think. Too much time — her mind had been spinning at maximum speed, and now that it wasn’t getting traction on anything the thoughts were piling up on each other. She tried to count up points but kept getting lost. The formulae were complex, and some of the variables were still in play. But she would keep her seeding, anyway. Youngest number one since they’d been keeping records. Five months straight. She was a prodigy, a talent so out of scale that it would have smacked of witchcraft if it wasn’t witchcraft they were all doing in the first place.

She sighed, and Houndstooth gave her a searching look, possibly flirtatious, but she blanked him. It’s not that she was worried about it. It’s not like she was going to lose. She was just — it hurt to admit it — a little bit tired of the whole wargaming scene. Being a magician, it turned out, wasn’t so much like it was in books. You thought there’d be a Sauron or a White Witch or a Voldemort waiting for you when you graduated, but you know what? Those fuckers could never be bothered to show up. Didn’t get the memo.

Their final betrayal, their ultimate evil, was their refusal to exist. So there she was, a newly minted sorceress, spoiling for a fight, but there was nobody to fight and precious little to fight for. Wargaming wasn’t the adventure she’d been waiting for, and training for, and living for. But it was pretty much the only game in town.

And she was good at it. But they’d been at it for three weeks, with another four to go, and suddenly that seemed like a fuck of a long time, a hell of a slog. Crashing at a new squat every night, in a new time zone, living on junk food, five raids a week, awake twenty hours a day on speed. People got so obsessed with it. She hadn’t had breakfast this morning, and she was getting weak at the knees from too much adrenaline on an empty stomach. Where next? Vilnius, probably. Maybe Perth. There were a lot of Envelopes still left to open. This would keep her numbers up though. There would be an Artifact in the cube. But you know what it was? It’s that she was way too young to be this bored.

Ping, the doors opened. She gestured grandly — after you — because why not be as much of a bitch about it as absolutely possible? Houndstooth looked at her emptily, like a man cursed from birth, then walked over and buzzed himself in through the glass doors into the office. Give him some credit, he’d cased the security ahead of time. She followed.

It was an office floor. Fluorescent lights, gray carpets, incurious employees in cubicles. They looked up as she passed, then back down at their screens, unaware that they were in the presence of two living gods, two angelic emissaries from the secret world that lay all around them, if they only had eyes to see it. The silence was like chloroform. It was freezing, the air was conditioned to death.

She trailed after her quarry, ten paces back. He wouldn’t be taking her right to it, he wasn’t that scared. He probably didn’t know where he was taking her. Not a big deal. She could wait while he decided. There was still some time left to play with. This was endgame stuff. Queen takes pawn.

The civilians stared at their flickering, incandescent spreadsheets. A woman listened on the phone, a shoe dangling from her stockinged toe, a lock of chocolate-colored hair tucked in her mouth. The cubicles were like a maze. Funny how the walls were carpeted with the same stuff as the floor. Like just in case the room suddenly changes its orientation, Escher-wise, we can all walk comfortably on the walls. A soft labyrinth. Maybe there would be a plushy carpeted minotaur in the middle.

God, it really was cold in here. Houndstooth turned right, then right again, then left. What’s your hurry? A gaggle of office cuties excused themselves past her. She took a jogging sidestep.

Hang on, where was he? She’d lost track. She stopped and hopped up and down to see over the cubicles. Nothing. If only she were as tall as Rob. She listened. Silence.

She breathed out, and her breath showed white in the air.

No no no no no! She raised the opera glasses to her eyes. The entire floor was a forest of invisible writing, green and ochre, so dense as to be illegible. This wasn’t an office. And there were no civilians here.

She dropped to a squat and slapped the rough carpet, hard, with both hands, and shouted a phrase in Russian. A wave of force blew out in all directions. The cubicle dividers went down in a ring around her, as if they were fir trees and she were the epicenter of a Siberian meteor strike. Somebody shrieked, and a window cracked.

Well, she could only do that once. Wards, wards, wards — she threw them up one after the other, even as a tide of magical energy threatened to swamp her from all sides, neon scribbles in the air, trying to pick her shields apart and tear them down again. But nobody worked as fast as she did. It was a gift. In college she’d had to slow her hands down for her professors, they couldn’t follow. (And what was her hurry? What was she trying so hard to stay ahead of, exactly?) Everybody was probably expecting her to Pax out now, but she’d never done that in her life. This was survivable. It had to be. At least until it wasn’t. The cubicle walls began re-erecting themselves behind her, cutting off her retreat. But she didn’t want to retreat.

She blew on her knuckles and gave herself the Hard Hand — her right hand became big and heavy and tough and numb. She loved the Hard Hand. You couldn’t cast spells with it, but there were plenty of enchantments she could work with her left hand only. She advanced behind her huge, glittering right fist. Boom, she punched down the wall in front of her. A lanky kid with a shaved head yelped and went down under it. They were always surprised, right out of Brakebills, how much rough stuff people got up to. Whatever. We can all have a tea ceremony together later.

A wild wind was raging through the office now, and the air was full of reams of copier paper. Ward and shield, ward and shield, she moved ahead under a hail of fire — you could actually see the invisible curve of her shield in the air, outlined by the glow of the spellwork shattering against it. Mostly boring kinetic stuff, whatever. Some of them were doing computer magic, automated spells: weak stuff, but you could churn it out in bulk. Most of the casters were smart enough not to try to get too near to her physically, but a distractingly handsome blond guy stepped out of an office and squared off with her, tricked out with all kinds of martial-arts type enhancements. She slipped past him, leaving behind an image of herself frozen with fear, then belted him in the back of the head with the last fading moments of the Hand.

From their point of view she was speeding up and slowing down now at random intervals, and fading in and out of view. It made her hard to catch and hard to target and sort of queasy-making to look at. But other things were coming at her that weren’t covered by her general defenses and dismissals. Crazy atmospheric effects, fog and smoke and cold and plasma, radiation too, stuff even she wouldn’t have tried in a populated area. The carpet was slithering fast under her feet, flowing like lava, trying to upend her. And somebody had been choking off her air, gradually, for the past twenty seconds or so, and she couldn’t quite make out who or how. They must have been laying this trap since yesterday.

She had spotted the Matron now, watching from the corner office. The minotaur in the maze. Stupid — should have known she wouldn’t go down that easy. The cold was coming from there, and it was numbing her fingers, locking her jaw. That along with the choking. She’d almost forgotten about it. Her vision was going all gray and psychedelic at the edges.

There was no possible way this was happening. It just wasn’t possible. Most of the people in this hex weren’t within four levels of her! She gambled and spent some of her dwindling energy on a Maximal Dismissal, snuffing everything within ten yards. At least it brought her trachea back online. She sucked wind.

Paper was thick in the air around her. Some of it was on fire, and somebody kept trying to form it into a kind of golem-shape, which wanted to wrap its papery arms around her. She ripped up the carpet, wrapped people up in it, blocked them off. Between them they were tearing the place apart, right down to the reinforced concrete. The Matron was blitzing her with the whole spellbook, major and minor, smart and stupid, presumably with the idea that something would get through and it didn’t really matter what. She was strong, really strong. Not a captain. Higher than that.

Sweat was freezing on her face. This was not sustainable. She had to stop it, all the bullshit. Make it go away. The hair was rising on the back of her neck, static fuzz bristled on the carpeting. Something shorted out in the cubicle next to her. Computer monitors ruptured with a sound like busting piñatas. Frost crystals bloomed wildly on glass surfaces all around her, and snow condensed out of the air. The Matron was building up to her big finale.

But at the same time she was having a ridiculous idea. Really wonderfuckingly ridiculous. And impossible. But listen: there was a clock on the wall. There was a clock in every computer and every phone and printer and fax on this floor. Clocks were wild magic — not much by themselves, but put them together and gather all the threads and cut them … desperate times call for batshit insane measures.

Adding a couple of magical feet to her vertical leap, she vaulted into the air and snatched a fluorescent tube out of the ceiling and made it into a Griggs’ Scepter, hard and magnesium-bright. She whipped it in a series of intricate patterns, tracing letters and sigils and wards in the air around her, then stabbed it down into the floor in front of her, with both hands. Something rippled out from around it.

Time snagged on something, got stuck. Groaning and complaining, it jerked to a halt.

Silence. She breathed hard, raggedly, resting her forehead against the rough carpet. Time hadn’t really stopped, of course. They were all breathing and their hearts were beating. But they couldn’t perceive it. Or time couldn’t perceive them. Or something — in the heat of the moment her spellcraft had leapt ahead of whatever theory was supposed to be underpinning it. But it worked. They would spend years adjudicating the legality of it, but meantime it would just add to her legend. And she would have the Blue Cube. Possession. Nine tenths of something. Now to find it.

And, looking up, she found it. It was in the right hand of a tall, skinny stranger who was strolling down the aisle toward her, between the shattered cubicles. Stray papers were hanging in the air, suspended; he batted one aside with his free arm. His clothes were odd. Fancy embroidery. If she had to describe his expression she’d say it was melancholy and humorous.

Well, she’d give him something to be melancholy and humorous about. She would lay him out flat. She still had the Scepter for a few more minutes.

But then she didn’t. He’d made it go away somehow — put it away somewhere she couldn’t get at. Really, it was the most eyebendingly strange casting she could ever remember seeing. Totally alien gramarye. She could have followed up with the fainting charm — her standard second serve — but she didn’t. Something told her it was pointless. And anyway if he was unconscious she couldn’t ask him how the hell he’d just done that.

In that same foreign style of magic, he immobilized her. Not in a mean way, but thoroughly. Like he meant it. She could try and cast something vocally, but she didn’t feel like having her mouth bound too. And she still had to pee.

“Annie,” he said. “Poppy Muller.”

She shrugged, as best she could under the circumstances. Yeah, and?

He spun the cube cleverly on one finger. Not a magic trick, just old-fashioned fingersmithing. His clothes really were odd. Old-timey and yet not. He might have been twenty-five, twenty-seven at most. Whose side was he on?

“You’re ranked number one in the world. Overall.”

“And in three individual categories.”

“I’m Quentin.” He sniffed at the air, wrinkled his nose. Yeah, lot of toxic smoke in here. Burning plastic. “I haven’t seen a Griggs’ Scepter for years.”

She wasn’t afraid of him exactly, but he was talking very slowly, and her time spell wouldn’t hold much longer. She needed to move. She had to make him let her. Mentally she ran through angles, looked for points of leverage. She didn’t find much.

“You don’t really want to spend the rest of your life playing games, do you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. Keep it flip. “Maybe. It’s not like I had anything else planned.”

“I understand. Would you like to see a real magic trick, Poppy?”

She frowned. Her eyes stayed glued to the cube.

“What do you mean, real?” she said.

She’d gone really off piste now. He let the spell dissipate. Just like that she was free. Watching her carefully, as if she were a small wild rodent of some kind, prone to unpredictable behavior, Quentin put his hand on her shoulder, and with the other hand he reached inside his jacket.

Then he must have touched something, something quite small and extremely magic, because the ruined office vanished from around them. And just before a new world arrived to replace it (she really hoped they had bathrooms there) and everything changed forever, she had time to think: this is really going to fuck up my average.

But the funny thing was, she really didn’t care.