head he was doing them on blackboards and whiteboards and napkins and in the air in front of his face with his fingers.
The students could never quite decide whether he was romantic and mysterious or just unintentionally hilarious. His actual students, the ones in his Physical Magic seminar, had a kind of cultish reverence for him, but the other faculty seemed to look down on him. He was young for a professor, thirty maybe—it was hard to tell with the hair—and technically he was the most junior faculty at the school, so he was constantly getting handed the jobs nobody else wanted, such as eating with the First Years. He didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t notice.
Right now, Professor Coldwater was standing at the far end of the room with his back to her. He was tall and skinny and stood bolt upright, staring at the bookcase in front of him but not actually taking down a book. Plum breathed a silent prayer to whatever saint it was who watched over absentminded professors and made sure their minds stayed absent. She glided noiselessly across the thick overlapping oriental carpets, cutting swiftly through the right angle of the L into its shorter arm where Professor Coldwater couldn’t see her. Even if he did see her, she doubted he would bother to report her; worst case, he would just kick her out of the Senior Common Room. Either way, it was totally worth it.
Because it was time for the grand reveal. Wharton would open the wine closet, which was actually a whole room the size of a studio apartment, to find Plum already in position, having entered it on the sly through a secret back passage. Then she would present the League’s demands, and she would the learn the truth of the matter.
It was the chanciest bit of the plan, because the existence of this secret back passage was a matter of speculation, but whatever, if it didn’t work, she’d just make her entrance the normal, less dramatic way. And it was reasonably confident speculation. Plum was almost positive that the passage was there. It ran, or it once had run, between the Senior Common Room and the wine closet, so the faculty could cherry-pick the best bottles for their private use. Its location had been divulged to her by the elderly Professor Desante, her erstwhile undergraduate advisor, when she was in her cups, which was usually—Professor Desante was a woman who liked a drink, and she preferred harder stuff than wine. Plum had filed the information away for just such an eventuality.
Professor Desante had also said that nobody used the passage much anymore, though why nobody would use such an obviously useful passage was not obvious to Plum. But Plum figured that even if it had been sealed up, she could and would unseal it. She was on League business, and the League stopped at nothing.
Plum looked quickly over her shoulder—Coldwater still out of view and/or otherwise engaged—then knelt down by the wainscoting. Third panel from the left. Hm—the one on the end was half a panel, not sure whether she should count it. Well, she’d try it both ways. She traced a word with her finger, spelling it out in a runic alphabet—the Elder Futhark—and meanwhile clearing her mind of everything but the taste of a really oaky chardonnay paired with a hot buttered toast point.
Lemon squeezy. She felt the locking spell release even before the panel swung outward on a set of previously invisible hinges. It was a door, albeit a humble, hobbitlike door, about two-thirds height. Any professors who used it would have to stoop and duck their august heads. But presumably such an indignity was worth it for some good free wine.
Annoyingly, though, the passage had been sealed. It had been bricked up, only about three feet in, and the bricks had been bricked in such a way as to form a design that Plum recognized as an absolutely brutal hardening charm—just a charm, yes, but a massively powerful one. Not undergraduate stuff. Some professor had bothered to put this here, and they’d spent some time on it too. Plum pursed her lips and snorted out through her nose.
She stared at the pattern for five minutes, in the dimness of the little passageway, lost to the world. In her mind, the pattern in the bricks floated free of the wall and hung before her all on its own, pure and abstract and shining. Her world shrank and focused. Mentally, she entered the pattern, inhabited it, pushed at it from the inside, feeling for any sloppy joins or subtle imbalances.
There must be something. Come on, Plum: it’s easier to screw magic up than it is to make it. You know this. Chaos is easier than order. Whoever drew this seal was smart. But was she smarter than Plum?
There was something odd about the angles. The essence of a glyph like this wasn’t the angles, it was the topology—you could deform it a good deal and not lose the power as long as its essential geometric properties were intact. The angles of the joins were, up to a point, arbitrary. But the funny thing about the angles of these joins was that they were funny. They were sharper than they needed to be. They were nonarbitrary. There was a pattern to them, a pattern within the pattern.
17 degrees. 3 degrees. 17 and 3. Two of them here, two of them there, the only angles that appeared twice. She snorted again when she saw it. A simple alphabetical code. A moronically simple alphabetical code. 17 and 3. Q and C. Quentin Coldwater.
It was a signature of sorts. A watermark. A Coldwatermark. Professor Coldwater had set this seal. And when she saw that, she saw it all. Maybe it was on purpose—maybe he’d wanted a weak spot, a key, in case he needed to undo it later. Either way, his little vanity signature was the flaw in the pattern. She extracted the little knife from Wharton’s pencil case and worked it into the crumbly mortar around one specific brick. She ran it all the way around the edge, then she stressed the pattern—she couldn’t unpick it, but she could push at it, pluck its taught strings, so that it resonated. It resonated so hard that that one brick vibrated itself clean out of the wall, on the other side. Clunk.
Deprived of that one brick, and hence the integrity of its pattern, the rest of the wall gave up the ghost and fell apart. Funny that it should have been him—everybody knew Coldwater was a wine lush. Plum ducked her head, stepped over the threshold, and drew the panel closed behind her. It was dark in the passageway, and chilly, much chillier than in the cozy Senior Common Room. The walls were old, unfinished boards over stone.
Dead reckoning, it was about one hundred yards from the Senior Common Room to the back of the wine closet, but she’d only gone twenty before she got to a door, this one unlocked and unsealed. She closed it behind her. More passage, then another door. Odd. You could never tell what you were going to find in this place, even after living here for four and a half years. Brakebills was old, really old. It had been built and rebuilt a lot of times by a lot of different people.
More doors, until the fourth or fifth one opened onto open air—a little square courtyard she’d never seen before. Mostly grass, with one tree, a fruit tree of some kind, espaliered against a high stone wall. She’d always found espaliers a little creepy. It was like somebody had crucified the poor thing.
Also, not that it mattered, but there shouldn’t have been a moon out, not tonight. She hurried across the courtyard to the next door, but it was locked.
She fingered the doorknob gently, inquiringly. She checked it for magical seals, and wow. Somebody smarter than her and Professor Coldwater put together had shut it up tight.
“Well, blow me down,” she said.
Her internal GPS told her that she ought to be going straight ahead, but there was another door off the courtyard, a heavy wooden one on a different wall. She went for door number two, which was heavy but which opened easily.
She had suspected before, but now she was sure, that she was traversing some magically noncontiguous spaces here, because this door opened directly onto one of the upper floors of the library. It wasn’t impossible—or it was, obviously, but it was one of the possible impossibles, as Donald Rumsfeld would have said if he’d secretly been a magician. (Which fat chance. Now there was an impossible impossible.) It was preposterous, and a bit creepy, but it wasn’t magically impossible.
The Brakebills library was arranged around the interior walls of a tower that narrowed toward the top, and this must have been one of the teensy tiny uppermost floors, which Plum had only ever glimpsed from far below, and which, to be honest, she’d always assumed were just there for show. She never thought there were any actual books in them. What the hell would they shelve up here?
It looked tiny from below, and it was tiny—in fact, now she realized