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

While Plum produced a crude approximation of their original flow chart, Quentin made coffee in a battered Soviet-era espresso maker. Mayakovsky came back for both the drawing and the coffee—he didn’t bother to pour, he just took the whole machine—and left again. It was just as well, Quentin was getting 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 dormitory wing by memory and lay down on a cot in one of the empty cells and fell asleep in the milky white Antarctic light.

He had no idea how long he’d slept, but when he came back down to the dining hall matters had progressed. Mayakovsky was back, now wearing glasses with heavy black frames, sitting at a table talking heatedly at Plum and waving 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 incompetence saddened him. “A valid exploit, yes. All right. 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 him crisply parse their tangled, fudged work, he knew they’d been right to come to him, however much it had cost them and might 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 simple matter of scale. You are—I don’t know. You are trying to dig through a mountain using a toothpick.”

Professor Mayakovsky shook his head again. His mood was darkening visibly, heading for 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 mastered many arcane points of higher mathematics but not the English letter h. “Between khxere and kxere.”

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