journey will be undertaken by members of the Order.”
Wait.
“What do you mean?”
“My colleagues and I will return with you to your ship and carry out the remainder of the quest. You may observe, of course.” Penny gave them a moment to take that in. “You didn’t think we would leave a mission of this importance to a group of amateurs, did you? We appreciate the good work you’ve done to get us this far, we truly do, but it’s out of your hands now. It’s time for the professionals take over.”
“Sorry, but no,” Quentin said. “It isn’t.”
He wasn’t giving this up. And he definitely wasn’t inviting Penny along.
“I suppose you’ll find your own way back to Fillory then,” Penny said. He crossed his handless arms. “I take back the spell.”
“You can’t take it back!” Poppy said. “What are you, nine? Penny!”
He’d finally gotten under even Poppy’s skin.
“You don’t understand,” Quentin said, though he wasn’t totally sure he understood himself. “This is our job. Nobody else can do it for us. That’s not how it works. You have to send us back.”
“I have to? Are you going to make me?”
“Jesus! Penny, you are unbelievable! Literally unbelievable! You know, I actually thought you’d changed, I really did. Do you even get that this isn’t about you?”
“Not about me?” Penny lost his grip on his interdimensional monk voice again and spoke in his old, higher- pitched voice, the one he used to use when he felt especially aggrieved and self-righteous. “Spare me that, Quentin. You haven’t spared me much during our long acquaintance, but spare me that. I found the Neitherlands. I found the button. I took us to Fillory. You didn’t do all that, Quentin, I did.
“And I got my hands bitten off by the Beast. And I came here. And now I’m going to finish this, because I started it.”
Quentin imagined it: Penny and his fellow Blue Oyster Cult members showing up on the
They glared at each other. It was a stalemate.
“Penny, can I ask you something?” Quentin said. “How do you do magic now? I mean, without your hands?”
The funny thing about Penny was that you knew questions like that weren’t going to make him uncomfortable, and it didn’t. In fact his mood brightened immediately.
“At first I thought I would never do magic again,” Penny explained. “But when the Order took me in they taught me another technique that does not depend on hand motions. Think about it: what’s special about hands? What if you were to use other muscles in your body to cast spells? The Order showed me how. Now I can see how limiting it was. To be honest I’m a little surprised you’re still doing it the old way.”
Penny wiped his chin with his sleeve. He always used to spit a little when he got excited. Quentin took a deep breath.
“Penny, I don’t think you or the Order can finish this quest. I’m sorry. Ember assigned this one to us, and He must have had His reasons. I think that may just be the way it works. It’s His will. I don’t think it would work for anybody else.”
Penny mulled this for a minute.
“All right,” he said finally. “All right. I can see there is a certain logic to it. And there is a great deal for the Order to do in the Neitherlands. In fact in many respects the crucial effort will take place here, while you retrieve the keys.”
Quentin had a feeling that was the best he was going to get.
“Great. I appreciate that. If you wanted to, you could take this opportunity to say that you’re sorry about sleeping with my girlfriend.”
“You were on a break.”
“Okay, look, just get us the hell out of here, we have to go save magic.” If they stayed here any longer Quentin was going to doom the universe all over again by killing Penny with his bare hands. Though it would almost be worth it. “What are you going to do while we do that?”
“We—the Order and I—are going to engage the gods directly. This will delay them while you recover the last key.”
“But what could you possibly do?” Poppy asked. “Aren’t they all-powerful? Or practically?”
“Oh, the Order can do things you wouldn’t believe. We’ve spent millennia studying in the library of the Neitherlands. We know secrets that you never dreamed of. We know secrets that would drive you mad if I whispered them to you.
“And we’re not alone. We’ll have help.”
A deep, muffled thump filled the square from over by the fountain that led back to Earth. It shook the air— they felt it in their knees. A stone fell somewhere. Another thump followed it, and another, as if something was knocking, trying to force its way into the world from somewhere underneath it. Was it the gods? Maybe they were too late.
There was a final thump, and all at once the ice in the fountain exploded upward. Quentin and Poppy ducked as chunks of it shot in all directions and went skittering across the paving stones. With a metallic groan the great bronze lotus flower tore open, the petals spreading out in all directions as if it were blooming, and a huge, sinuous form came surging and wriggling up out of it. The thing lunged violently up into the air, spreading its wings and shaking off water and beating its way into the night sky, whipping the falling snow into great whorls and circles around it.
Another one followed it, and then a third.
“It’s the dragons!” Poppy shouted. She clapped her hands like a little girl. “Quentin, it’s the dragons! Oh, look at them!”
“It’s the dragons,” Penny said. “The dragons are going to help us.”
Poppy kissed him on the cheek, and Penny smiled for the first time. You could tell he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help himself.
The dragons kept coming, one after the other. They must have emptied out every river in the world. The square lit up as one of them roared a gout of flame at the misty sky.
How did he know that was going to happen right then?
“You planned that, didn’t you,” Quentin said, or tried to say, but just then Penny’s spell took effect, and Quentin was no longer in the same world as the person he was talking to.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER 23
That morning in Murs, sitting around the table in the library, they gave Julia the full download.
In a way she was lucky she was only getting in now. She’d missed the early days, when they spent a lot of time just ruling things out. For example: they’d blown six months on a theory that spells picked up extra power the closer you got to the center of the Earth. A minor effect, barely measurable, but if it could be verified it would open up huge, ripe fields of new theory. It would change everything.
That had kicked off a barnstorming tour of abandoned mines and salt domes and other deep subterranean topography, not excluding an expensive sequence involving a rented tramp steamer and a secondhand bathysphere.
