The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(128)

“I know. But this is going to feel good.”

—

Afterward they lay next to each other on the bed. It had worked, for now, her body had gotten what it wanted. Not once but twice, which if she remembered correctly had been rather a rarity in the old days. But then again Quentin had had some practice since then. Poppy, why had she watched him with Poppy? It had seemed so funny at the time, but now it hurt her. She wished she could forget it.

She scooched away from him. She wanted to go away again. She let herself fall into herself, falling and falling, pulling away, into the inner darkness, dreaming of flying. She withdrew inside her body like a timorous crab inside an enormous whelk. She had felt so human before, so her old self, but she was losing it, and she let it go. She had thought for a moment that it was simple, but she was remembering that it wasn’t.

He sat up and started putting his clothes on.

“I have to go,” he said. “To the Neitherlands. To find Ember. Come with me.”

She shook her head. She wanted him gone. It was so much easier this way. He was gathering up her clothes too.

“Alice.” She didn’t react. She would sleep now. “Alice. I want you to know that I mean it in the kindest possible way when I say that you are being the most unbelievable *.”

He took her hand again and they vanished, both of them together.





CHAPTER 28


They were going to all go together, and from a tactical perspective Plum thought it would have been a better idea, but Eliot was getting impatient, and then there were the noises. From upstairs. Quentin and Alice. Plum and Eliot exchanged looks and nodded; no words were needed. It was probably a good development for all involved, on balance, but seriously: they were not going to hang around and listen to that.

Eliot made a big show about how interdimensional travel was really no big whoop to him anymore, but Plum was not going to let him ruin it for her. This was radical magic, world-expanding stuff, and even under the present grimmish circumstances she was a complete nerd for that shit. She could hardly wait. He held out his hand, in a foppish kind of a gesture, and she took it, and he put his other hand in his pocket and—oh.

Clear cold water. They were floating in it, floating upward. In spite of herself she laughed with pleasure and as a result almost choked on magic water. They rose up toward light, points of it, glittery and diffuse above them but getting more focused all the time, and then their heads broke the surface.

It wasn’t what she was expecting, not based on what she’d heard. They were inside somewhere, in a vast room lit by two chandeliers, treading water in what looked more like an indoor swimming pool than a fountain.

“What the hell?” Eliot said. He seemed if anything more surprised than she was.

The pool was sunk level with a marble floor. Water trickled into it from the open mouth of an angry stone face at one end; at the other end steps led up and out like a Roman bath, blue water graduating stair by stair up to clear. They stroked over to them in sync.

“This isn’t right,” Eliot said. “This isn’t the Neitherlands, I don’t think. We’ve been hijacked. Button-jacked.”

Magic water streamed out of their clothes as they climbed out, leaving them instantly dry. Awesome. The walls of the room were covered in bookshelves.

“Who puts a fountain in the middle of a library?” Plum said. “It can’t be good for the books.”

“No. It can’t.”

It was a library, maybe the grandest one Plum had ever seen. She would have known it was a library with her eyes shut: the hush of it was enough, like a velvet nest in which she’d been carefully nestled, and the smell, the heavy spicy aroma of slowly, imperceptibly decomposing leather and paper, of hundreds of tons of dry ink. Every square foot of the walls was bookshelves, and every foot of every shelf was full. Creamy spines, leather spines, knobby and ribbed spines, jacketed and bare, gilded and plain, blank spines and spines crammed with text and ornament. Some were as thin as magazines, some were wider than they were tall.

She ran her fingers along them, one after the other, as if they were the long back of some giant, friendly vertebrate that she was petting. In three or four places a book had been taken down and the one next to it was left slightly aslant, leaning its head against its fellow, as if in silent mourning for its absent neighbor.

Even the beams and buttresses had been fitted with shelves—rows and arches and fans of books. In the corners of the room, up near the ceiling, there were little book-sized doors like cat doors. As she watched one of them swung open with a squeak and a book came through, floating in midair, sailed the length of the room, and left through a cat door on the other side.

“I take it back,” Eliot said. “I think this must be one of the libraries of the Neitherlands. I’ve never been inside one.”

“I thought normal people weren’t supposed to be allowed in them.”

“You’re not.”

The voice came from a doorway behind them. It belonged to an odd-looking man: thirtyish, shaved head, his face round and doughy as an unbaked biscuit. He had a goatee that was maybe growing into something that was more than a goatee, which made him look like an angry barista at an indie coffee shop whose dreams of becoming a successful screenwriter were dwindling by the hour. He wore what looked like a monk’s robe, and sandals, but the oddest thing about him was his hands. They were magical constructs of some kind, golden and translucent, and they gave off their own warm honey-colored light. He held them clasped in front of him.