The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(132)

But the light didn’t reach his face. With one weird magic hand Penny stopped the beam—his hand seemed to eat the light. With the other he grasped the beam like it was a solid thing and bent it 90 degrees downward so that it shone harmlessly at the floor. It stayed there. Too late Eliot weighed in with some kind of electric bolts, but those golden hands plucked them out of the air, one-two-three-four-five, in sequence and with inhuman quickness and accuracy. It was like a stage magician’s bullet catch.

Plum was frantically weaving a shield in front of Quentin. She was still weak on this kind of magic, nobody at Brakebills taught it, but Quentin had showed her a thing or two, and she was nothing if not a quick study. But she already knew it wasn’t going to be ready in time.

“I’ve waited a long time for this,” Penny said.

“Then this is going to be kind of an anticlimax,” Alice said, and she punched him in the face.

Boom! Oh my God. It was beautiful, just like in a movie: straight from the shoulder, feet planted, hips rolled, follow-through, the works. Penny never saw it coming. Do people really do things like that?

People like Alice did, apparently. Penny didn’t fall down, but he bent over double, clutching his face with both hands.

“Ahhhhhh!”

He said it quietly but with real feeling.

“We’re done,” Alice said. “Let’s go.”

Quentin looked at Alice with an expression Plum had never seen on him before. Love, she guessed it was. It was as bright as that beam he’d shot out of his hand.

“Penny,” Quentin said, “I don’t know what you would have done with that page, but I’ll tell you what I did with it: I made Alice human again. In case you were wondering how that happened. You’re a great magician, you always have been, and I’m sure you’re a pretty great librarian too. Magic and books: there aren’t many things more important than that. But there are one or two. We saved Alice, and now we’re going to save Fillory. Please don’t get in our way, that’s all I ask.”

Penny was bent over, working his jaw, both hands pressed to his cheek. He raised his face at them blearily as they filed out, Alice in the lead. She was studying the knuckles of her right hand.

“For a second there,” she said, “I saw the point of being alive.”

“I’m glad you are,” Quentin said. “You’re pretty good at it.”

“Can we get out of here now?” Eliot said.

But Plum had a thought.

“Hang on,” she said. “Somewhere in this building there must be everything there is to know about Fillory, don’t you think? Maybe before we go we should do a little research.”

Penny came running up behind them, with a reddening scuff-mark on his cheekbone but otherwise steady on his feet. Plum would say this for him: he was impervious to embarrassment.

“Don’t say anything,” Eliot said, before Penny could speak. “Just listen. We need information. You have it. Where are the books about Fillory?”

“There’s a whole room of them!” Plum deplored physical violence on principle, but it did seem to have a remarkably positive effect on Penny. “Large one. Come on, it’s in the other wing!”

They never would have found it on their own; even with Penny leading the way it took ten minutes to walk there, up and down stairs and through a maze of passages. On the way Penny explained about his hands: they were a form of spectral prosthetic, quite groundbreaking in their own way, the theory was very elegant but the concepts were likely beyond what most of them, except for Alice, were capable of understanding. His fingertips could move at several times human speed, and they had a number of extra senses, including the ability to feel magnetic fields and refract light and gauge temperature to within a hundredth of a degree.

He had something of a cult of personality going among the sublibrarians, Penny went on, and a number of them had arranged for their own hands to be—painlessly, hygienically—removed and replaced with magical prostheses to match his. Plum was finally on the point of asking him about Connecticut when they arrived at a room that could have been a ballroom at Versailles, an immense expansive space with windows along one wall and the wall opposite paneled in books, two stories high, traversed by one spindly rolling ladder.

Penny was back to playing the host. It was a role he obviously enjoyed.

“Stand back against the windows. That way you’ll get the full effect.”

They did, and they did. Taken as a whole the spines of the Fillory books formed a faint, ghostly outline which even Plum recognized as a map of Fillory itself, the size of the entire wall. Each book did its part; the blues were the ocean, and the pale greens and browns were the land. Up close Plum never would have seen it, but now looking at them all together she couldn’t see anything else.

“Beautiful,” Quentin said.

“So can we look at the books?” Plum asked.

It was a measure of how much the power had shifted since Alice punched him that Penny pursed his lips with distaste but then nodded, reluctantly.

“Just . . . don’t reshelve them. Please. Leave it to the professionals.”

It was hard to know where to begin. Eliot didn’t even move.

“Penny,” he said, “you’re the expert on the Neitherlands. What happens when a world ends?”

“Pretty much what you’d expect. The land dies. Over time the world disintegrates and ceases to exist.”