Quentin was staring down at the exposed circuitry of creation, and at the master of it. It looked a little like the Silver Surfer.

“I suppose,” Quentin said slowly, “you’re going to say that that is a being of sublime beauty and power, and he only looks like that because my fallen mortal eyes are incapable of perceiving his true magnificence.”

“No. We think that’s actually pretty much it.”

“Come on,” Poppy said. She tilted her head. “He is pretty impressive. He’s big. And silvery.”

“A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.”

“In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.”

So that was him. The biggest bastard of them all, top of the food chain. That’s where magic came from. Did he even understand what he’d made, how beautiful it was, how much people loved it? He didn’t look like he loved anything. He just was. Though how could you make anything as beautiful as magic and not love it?

“I wonder how he found out,” Poppy said. “About us using magic. I wonder who tipped him off.”

“Maybe we should talk to him,” Quentin said. “Maybe we can change his mind. We could, I don’t know, prove ourselves worthy of magic or something. Maybe they have a test.”

Penny shook his head.

“I don’t think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there’s only one of them. Finally there aren’t any choices left to make at all.”

“You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.”

“The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”

They watched the god work for a while without talking. It never paused or hesitated. Its hands moved and moved, bending lines, breaking one connection, making another. Quentin couldn’t see why one pattern was better than another, but he supposed that was his mortal fallibility. He felt a little sorry for it. He supposed it was happy, never doubting, never hesitating, eternally certain of its absolute righteousness. But it was like a giant divine robot.

“Let’s cover it up,” he said. “I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

The bronze cover grated against the stone, then dropped with a clang back into place. Quentin latched it. Though who the latch was going to keep in or out, he couldn’t imagine. They stood around it as if it were a grave they’d just finished filling.

“Why is this happening now?” he said.

Penny shook his head.