The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(130)

Plum spotted a narrow, olive-green volume with silver type on its spine dangling above her. It was so tempting, like ripe fruit . . .

“Ah ah ah!”

Penny practically slapped her hand away. It was a measure of how out of her depth she felt that she actually blushed. But Penny was off and away again.

“I’ve already instituted some improvements that have been very well received. I don’t know if you’ve noticed . . . ?”

He pointed up at one of the cat doors, through which books were entering and exiting at irregular intervals.

“Yes, very nice,” Eliot said.

“Some of your best work,” Quentin chimed in.

Plum was picking up a significant frenemy vibe off the Quentin-Penny dynamic.

“They’ve been adopted by several other libraries.”

“Good for cats, too,” Plum said. “Though they’d have to be flying cats.”

“No animals, domestic or otherwise, are allowed in the building,” Penny said, without humor.

“We really have to go,” Eliot said. “Really.”

“I’ve set aside a special room here for problem formats.”

Curious in spite of herself, Plum poked her head in through the open door. It was the weirdest bibliographical menagerie she’d ever seen. Books so tall and yet so narrow that they looked like yardsticks; she supposed they must be illustrated guides to snakes, or arrows, or maybe yardsticks. One book was kept in a glass terrarium—a librarium?—the better to contain the words that kept crawling out of it like ants. One lay slightly open on a table, but only slightly, so you could see that its pages emitted an intolerably bright radiance; a welding mask lay next to it. One book appeared to be all spine along all of its edges. It was unopenable, its pages sealed inside it.

“Honestly, you wonder who publishes these things.” Penny shook his head, and they kept walking.

It was a little like touring a chocolate factory, except with books, and starring Penny as a wonky Willy Wonka. Other adepts wearing robes that were similar to Penny’s but not as nice bustled by them, nodding deferentially to him as they passed. Some of them had the golden hands too. Hm. She would wait for the right moment.

“There are catacombs underneath the library,” Penny said. “That’s another special collection: it’s all the novels people meant to write but didn’t.”

“Ooh!” Eliot brightened up. “Can I go see mine? I’ll be honest with you, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be amazing.”

“You’re welcome to try. I spent far too much time looking for mine. You can’t find anything down there!” He sounded exasperated. “But here’s something people always want to see.”

This room had only one bookcase in it, on the back wall, but that proved to be deceptive because apparently it was infinitely extendable: Penny took hold of one of the shelves and gave it a sideways shove, and it zipped along like a conveyor belt at amazing speed, frictionlessly, while the shelves above and below it stayed still. It reminded Plum a little of the motorized racks at a dry cleaners. Then Penny stopped it and pushed up on it, only lightly, just a touch, and the whole business began scrolling upward, shelf after shelf after shelf, as if it went on and on beyond the room in all directions, for unknown leagues.

“What is this?” Plum asked.

“These are everybody’s books. Or rather, the books of everybody.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hang on, I’m looking for ours.” They spun by, thousands and thousands of them, until Penny stopped the bookcase with one hand. “These are the books of our lives. Everybody has one. See, here we are. All together, as it happens, one book for each of us.”

“You must be joking,” Quentin said quietly.

Not that Penny ever joked, as far as Plum could tell.

“Not at all. Here is Plum’s.”

He put a finger on one spine. The book had, appropriately enough, a plum-colored dust jacket.

“Mine.”

Penny’s was tall and thin and bound in smooth pale leather, with his name clearly etched in black up the spine in a no-nonsense sans-serif font. It looked like a vintage technical manual.

“They’re next to each other?” Plum said. “Please tell me that doesn’t mean we get married.”

“I don’t know what it means. Nobody knows much about these things.”

“Your middle name is seriously Schroeder?” Eliot said, like that was the surprising thing here.

“You’re not going to tell me there’s one of these for every person who ever lived,” Quentin said.

“Only people who are alive have them. They come and go as people are born and die; this shelf goes on for miles in all directions, it must jut into some separate subdimension. I don’t know where they go when you die. Remaindered, I suppose.”

He tittered at his own joke.

“What’s in them?”

“About what you’d expect. The story of your life, start to finish. Who you are and what you did and what you’re going to do. Eliot’s is in two volumes. Here’s yours.”

Penny put his hand on a squat navy blue book, as chunky as an unabridged thesaurus, with Quentin’s name stamped on it in gold.

Quentin hesitated.