The Magician's Land (Magicians Series #3) by Lev Grossman, Hardcover***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***Copyright . It wasn’t much of a bookstore either. Quentin spent fifteen minutes watching it from a bus shelter at the edge of the empty parking lot, rain drumming on the plastic roof and making the asphalt shine in the streetlights. Not one of your charming, quirky bookstores, with a ginger cat on the windowsill and a shelf of rare signed first editions and an eccentric, bewhiskered proprietor behind the counter. The The Magician's House episode guide on SideReel features original episode air dates for each season, plus show reviews, summaries and more. Chapter One The Wrong Door. Polly had discovered long ago that if you opened a certain little door in the box-room attic of her house you would find the cistern and a dark place behind it which you could get into by a little. Silly Jilly also performs a children's comedy magic show full of audience participation, and Silly Jilly does face painting. The Magician's Assistant sustains author Ann Patchett's proven penchant for crafting colorful characters and marrying the ordinary with the fantastic. When Parsifal, Sabine's husband of more than 20 years and the magician of. A two alarm Surrey fire has left the former home of a famous 20th century magician in ashes. Leon “Mandrake” the Magician’s career began in New Westminster in the 1920s, taking him around the globe on stage and. Industry information at your fingertips. Over 200,000 Hollywood insiders. Enhance your IMDb Page. This was just another strip- mall outpost of a struggling chain, squeezed in between a nail salon and a party City, twenty minutes outside Hackensack off the New Jersey turnpike. Satisfied, Quentin crossed the parking lot. The enormous bearded cashier didn’t look up from his phone when the door jingled. Inside you could still hear the noise of cars on the wet road, like long strips of paper tearing, one after another. The only unexpected touch was a wire birdcage in one corner, but where you would have expected a parrot or a cockatoo inside there was a fat blue- black bird instead. That’s how un- charming this store was: it had a crow in a cage. Quentin didn’t care. Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. The bouncy disco house master rocks the Mixmag Lab London. FULL TRACK LIST hit show more More on The Magician here: http://bit.ly/1b2EWl3.It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn’t had that feeling much lately. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home. The store should have been empty, coming up on nine o’clock on a cold rainy Thursday night, but instead it was full of people. They browsed the shelves silently, each one on his or her own, slowly wandering the aisles like sleepwalkers. You would almost have thought they’d come there to buy books. But Quentin knew better. He wondered if it would be obvious, if he would know right away, or if there would be a trick to it. If they’d make him guess. At least it was warm inside. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a cloth. When he put them back on he noticed a sharp- featured young woman, girl- next- door pretty, if you happened to live next door to a grad student in astrophysics. She was standing in a corner paging through a big, expensive architectural- looking volume. Piranesi drawings: vast shadowy vaults and cellars and prisons, haunted by great wooden engines. Quentin knew her. She felt him watching her and looked up, raising her eyebrows in mild surprise, as if to say you’re kidding—you’re in on this thing too? He shook his head once, very slightly, and looked away, keeping his face carefully blank. Not to say no, I’m not in on this, I just come here for the novelty coffee mugs and their trenchant commentary on the little ironies of everyday life. What he meant was: let’s pretend we don’t know each other. It was looking like he had some time to kill so he joined the browsers, scanning the spines for something to read. The Fillory books were there, of course, shelved in the young adult section, repackaged and rebrandedwith slick new covers that made them look like supernatural romance novels. But Quentin couldn’t face them right now. Not tonight, not here. Bookbumblers will be closing in five minutes! The skinny kid who’d been camped out cross- legged in the graphic novels section, reading them to rags, left without buying anything. But he didn’t leave. At nine o’clock exactly the big cashier closed the door and locked it with a final, fateful jingle, and suddenly Quentin was all nerves. He was on a carnival ride, and the safety bar had dropped, and now it was too late to get off. The bird shuffled its feet in the seeds and drop- pings on the bottom of its cage and squawked once. It was a lonely kind of squawk, the kind you’d hear if you were out by yourself on a rainy moor, lost, with darkness closing in fast. The cashier walked to the back of the store—he had to excuse himself past the guy with the cheekbones—and opened a gray metal door marked staff only.“Through here.”He sounded bored, like he did this every night, which for all Quentin knew he did. Now that he was standing up Quentin could see that he really was huge—six foot four or five and deep- chested. Not pumped, but with broad shoulders and that aura of slow inexorability that naturally enormous men have. He looked like a gourd. Quentin took the last spot in line. He counted eight others, all of them looking around cautiously and taking exaggerated care not to jostle one another, as if they might explode on contact. He snapped his fingers at Quentin. No magic.”Heads turned. Nobody called him Your Majesty anymore, but he didn’t think he was ready to answer to guy yet. He finished his inspection. It was a door and nothing more.“Cut it out. No magic.”Pushing his luck, Quentin turned and studied the clerk. Through the lens he could see something small shining in his pocket, a talisman that might have been related to sexual performance. The rest of him shone too, as if he were covered in phosphorescent algae. Weird.“Sure.” he dropped his hands and the lens vanished. The cashier shook his head, but whoever it was rapped again, harder. He sighed.“What the shit.”He unlocked the front door and after a whispered argument let in a man in his twenties, dripping wet, red- faced but otherwise sportscaster- handsome, wearing a windbreaker that was way too light for the weather. Quentin wondered where he’d managed to get a sunburn in March. They all filed into the back room. It was darker than Quentin expected, and bigger too; real estate must come cheap out here on the turnpike. There were steel shelves crammed full of books flagged with fluorescent- colored stickies; a couple of desks in one corner, the walls in front of them shingled with shift schedules and taped- up New Yorker cartoons; stacks of cardboard shipping boxes; a busted couch; a busted armchair; a mini- fridge—it must have doubled as the break room. Half of it was just wasted space. The back wall was a steel shutter that opened onto a loading dock. A handful of other people were coming in through another door in the left- hand wall, looking just as wary. Quentin could see another bookstore behind them, a nicer one, with old lamps and oriental rugs. Probably a ginger cat too. He didn’t need magic to know that it wasn’t a door at all but a portal to somewhere else, some arbitrary distance away. There—he caught a telltale hairline seam of green light along one edge. The only thing behind that wall in reality was party City. Who were they all? Quentin had heard rumors about dog- and- pony shows like this before, gray- market cattle calls, work for hire, but he’d never seen one himself. He definitely never thought he’d go to one, not in a million years. He never thought it would come to that. Stuff like this was for people on the fringes of the magical world, people scrabbling to get in, or who’d lost their footing somehow and slipped out of the bright warm center of things, all the way out to the cold margins of the real world. All the way out to a strip mall in Hackensack in the rain. Things like this weren’t for people like him. Except now they were. He was one of them, these were his people. Six months ago he’d been a king in a magic land, an- other world, but that was all over. He’d been kicked out of Fillory, and he’d been kicked around a fair bit since then, and now he was just an- other striver, trying to scramble back in, up the slippery slope, back toward the light and the warmth. Plum and the man with the iridescent glasses sat on the couch. Red Face took the busted armchair. Pixie Cut and the teenage Stoppard reader sat on boxes. The rest of them stood—there were twelve, thirteen, fourteen in all. The cashier shut the gray door behind them, cutting off the last of the noise from the outside world, and snuffed out the portal. It looked around, shaking first one foot then the other the way birds do. Judging from the ripple of surprise that ran through the room, he wasn’t the only one. You didn’t see a lot of talking birds on Earth, that was more of a Fillorian thing.“I’m looking for an object,” the bird said. Its voice echoed in the half- empty stockroom. It was a soft, mild- mannered voice, not hoarse at all like you’d expect from a crow. It sounded incongruously human—however it was producing speech, it had nothing to do with its actual vocal apparatus. But that was magic for you.“So stealing,” an Indian guy said. Not like it bothered him, he just wanted clarification. He was older than Quentin, forty maybe, balding and wearing an unbelievably bad multicolored wool sweater.“Theft,” the bird said. Which of you has a rightful claim on the object?”The bird cocked its head thoughtfully.“Neither party has an entirely valid claim,” it said. The bird ignored that. Pixie Cut scooched forward, which wasn’t easy on the broken- backed couch, especially in a skirt that short. Her hair was black with purple highlights, and Quentin noticed a couple of blue star tattoos peeking out of her sleeves, the kind you got in a safe house. He wondered how many more she had underneath. He wondered what she’d done to end up here.“So we’re finding and we’re stealing and I’m guessing probably doing some fighting in between. What kind of resistance are you expecting?”“Can you be more specific?”“Security, how many people, who are they, how scary. Is that specific enough?”“Yes. We are expecting two.”“Two magicians?”“Two magicians, plus some civilian staff. Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I know.”“As far as you know!” The red- faced man guffawed loudly. The bond will have to be broken, obviously.”A stunned silence followed this statement, then somebody made an exasperated noise. The tall man who’d been shopping for greeting cards snorted as if to say can you believe this shit?“Those are supposed to be unbreakable,” plum said coolly. We have all the skills we need in this room.”“What about the resources?” pixie Cut asked.
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