The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(131)

“I know,” Penny said, more quietly. “Not as tempting as you’d think, is it? I’ve never opened mine. There are those in the order who have looked, and I’ve seen their faces.”

Plum slid her volume off the shelf and held it cradled in her hand like a baby. The urge to read it was almost overpowering. Almost, but not quite.

“You spend your whole life trying to understand yourself, what your story is about,” Penny said, “and then suddenly it’s all there. All the answers, spelled out in black and white. Some of them are indexed even. Look at Quentin’s, it’s alphabetized.” It was true: there were little half-moons cut into the pages, labeled A–B, C–D and so on, in a diagonal ladder down the side.

Slowly, reluctantly, Quentin handed his book back to Penny.

“I guess I’m supposed to be writing it,” he said. “Not reading it.”

Penny reshelved it—a little cavalierly, Plum thought. Plum replaced hers with appropriate care. You can’t unread a book. She was dying to look, but she supposed that if she lived her life properly then by the time it was over she’d know what was in it. That was sort of the whole point, wasn’t it? To understand your own story? Reading the book now would just be cheating. And what kind of jackass cheats at life?

“Hang on,” Eliot said, “this raises a lot of questions. Does this mean we don’t have free will? And if you burn somebody’s book do they die?”

“Keep moving!” Penny shooed them out into the hall. “There’s a lot to see! I thought you were in a hurry.”

He hustled them along as far as a plain unmarked door, which he opened. It was the first room they’d seen that was completely empty of books. There was nothing on the walls, not even a picture. It had no windows either, only a desk with a leather chair behind it. In fact it was rather gloomy.

“Let me guess,” Plum said. “Invisible books. Or no, microscopic. Like they’re in the air, and we’re breathing them.”

“This is my office.”

Penny sat down at the desk, facing them, and steepled his eerily luminescent fingers.

“The system notified me as soon as you entered the Neitherlands. There’s a reason I brought you here.”

“You have literally three minutes,” Eliot said. He was practiccally fidgeting with impatience.

“You have something of mine,” Penny said. “Quentin.”

“I do?”

“A page. From one of my books.”

“Oh.”

Everybody looked at Quentin. Plum hadn’t thought of that, but she guessed it made sense. Probably technically Quentin had stolen that page from the Neitherlands. But even so Penny was being kind of scoldy about it.

“Fair enough.” Quentin extracted it from his coat pocket. “I took good care of it for you, I promise.”

The page, with what seemed to Plum like a certain lack of sentimentality, slipped out of Quentin’s hand of its own volition and through the air and onto Penny’s desk like a toddler rushing to embrace its parent.

“Thank you.”

Instantly a door opened and a robed woman entered, eyes on the floor as if to avoid gazing directly at Penny’s magnificence. She took the page, bearing it in both hands as gingerly as if it were a limb in urgent need of reattaching. Which Plum supposed in some sense it was.

Penny leaned over and pulled up one of the floor tiles next to his chair, which turned out not to be a tile at all but the cover of a large book. It was embedded in the floor. Plum looked around: they were standing on books, big, dusty, thickly bound tomes fitted together like flagstones. Penny leafed through the tissue-thin pages, which contained columns of minute numbers, nodded, and then let the cover fall closed with a thump.

“Now,” he said, “there is the matter of the fine.”

“A fine?” Quentin said. “You mean like a late fee?”

“I do. You will be detained here for one year to work in the stacks until your debt is repaid.”

Oh my God, what an ass!

“Don’t be an ass,” Plum said.

“You’re not going to detain me,” Quentin said. “Penny, Fillory is dying. We might be able to save it, but it can’t wait. We have to go.”

“There are thousands of worlds. They live and they die. But knowledge is power, Quentin, and wisdom is eternal.” He actually talked like that. “You took some of ours.”

“I gave it back.”

“But you had the use of it for a year. A page from the Arcana arcanorum, in the hand of the Zwei V?gel scribe herself. Think what we could have done with it in that time.”

“Almost certainly nothing. You have like a dillion books here, probably nobody would have even looked at it.”

Penny stood up and walked around from behind the desk, raising his hands. His fingers—hey, those were spellcasting positions!

“The books must be balanced, Quentin. You always did have trouble accepting that. We will also have to remove from your mind the memory of what you read—”

He was going into Quentin’s head now? No. Plum took a step back and raised her hands too. Everybody did; in one second they went from a loose clump of people with complicated feelings about one another to a single defensive phalanx. Quentin moved the fastest: he held up a hand and a tight, blinding shaft of light shone out of his palm, straight into Penny’s face.