The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(129)

“Penny,” Eliot said. It wasn’t so much a greeting as a statement of fact.

“The rest of your party should be arriving momentarily.”

Sure enough, up popped Quentin and Alice, her sputtering and blowing and apparently furious, big surprise. She favored Quentin with a disdainful look, then swam breaststroke over to the steps, at which point it became apparent that she was completely naked. What, did they roll over onto the button halfway through?

Best not to think about it. Alice didn’t seem at all self-conscious. Quentin followed and handed her clothes, which she put on clumsily.

“Hi, Penny,” Quentin said. “Good to see you. Did you just kidnap us?”

“That was my question,” Eliot said.

“I diverted you. All the ways of the Neitherlands are now mine to command. You are here as my special guests.”

Plum was getting the impression they all knew each other already.

“Isn’t the water bad for the books?” Plum said.

“We have taken precautions. Shelf space is a precious resource here. Nothing is wasted.”

“That’s great, Penny,” Quentin said, “but we’re actually in kind of a hurry. Important business. Really time-sensitive.”

“I require your presence. I will explain.”

“Well, thanks,” Quentin said. “But, you know, be quick. Nice hands.”

“Thank you. I made them myself.”

The dime dropped: the people who’d jumped them in Connecticut had had golden hands too, exactly the same. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe there had been a sale, but Plum doubted it. In which case she had a bone to pick with this Penny, maybe several bones.

“This is our friend Plum,” Quentin said. “Plum, this is Penny. And you remember Eliot. And Alice.”

“Hi,” Plum said. Alice said nothing.

“Pleased to meet you.” Plum was a little bit relieved that he didn’t try to shake her hand. “It’s good to have you back with us, Alice.”

While saying nothing about it Penny somehow managed to convey that he and Alice had once slept together.

“Penny,” Eliot said, “you should know that we really—”

“Walk with me.”

Penny turned and strode into the next room without waiting to see if they were going to follow him.

“Who is this guy?” Plum whispered to Quentin.

“We went to college together.”

They followed him. The next room was if anything even grander: a vaulted hall, also full of books but with soaring high windows that were dark and flecked with light rain. Through the lower panes Plum got her first look at the Neitherlands, a gray warren of broad squares and narrow alleys and Italianate palaces. It was night.

Penny walked with his magic hands clasped behind his back.

“The past year has been good to me,” he said—the gracious tour guide. “My work defending the Neitherlands and safeguarding the flow of magic brought me to the attention of my superiors in the order—we take care of the Neitherlands, Plum, in case they haven’t told you. At the same time we suffered significant losses of personnel, which created gaps in the leadership. I was advanced rapidly.

“The promotion was gratifying, of course, but the challenges have been non-trivial. The Neitherlands was changed irreversibly in the late catastrophe. Much of the old magic no longer works, or works differently. Things grow here now. There is time here.”

He said it irritably, like they had a case of bed bugs.

“You cannot imagine the inconvenience of it. But the upshot was that I was awarded the position of Librarian. It is one of the most prestigious titles a member of my order can hold.”

“Congratulations,” Quentin said. “I’ve always wondered though, what happened to the dragons? The last time I saw them they were getting ready to fight the gods.”

“The dragons succeeded. If they hadn’t, you would not have lived to play your part in the crisis. Fighting the old gods, even distracting them, is of course a chancy business. There’s an art to it: they don’t really counterattack so much as just delete you from reality. But some of the dragons survived. They will repopulate, if they can remember how. I believe it has been several millennia since any of them had sex. We in the order have been assisting them with the research.”

Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.

They left the great hall and entered a low labyrinth. Even there the walls were books, even the ceiling; they hung spine-down somehow, over their heads, like bats in a cave. Every once in a while large swaths of books shifted themselves over, grudgingly, like sleepers in a crowded bed, to make room for some new addition further down the line. This Penny guy was a bit of a pill, but she had to admit she was loving his library. Loving. If anything Quentin had undersold this place.

It made her wonder if they’d undersold Fillory too. She felt herself very close to Fillory now, just one fountain away, closer than she’d ever been. When she was kicked out of Brakebills Plum thought her life had gone straight off the rails, right into the muddy and unsanitary ditch by the side of the tracks, and maybe it had—like Quentin said, there’s no one to tell you what would have happened, after the fact. But it had also brought her here, to Fillory’s very threshold. She wanted to see it. It was time.