It was warm there. He could feel the ocean pressing in on him from the other side of the damp, sweating wood. The hold was so full of supplies there was hardly room to move. It wasn’t very scenic. He was making his way back to the ladder, back up to reality, or what passed for it in Fillory, when a weird, furry, upside-down face loomed out of the darkness at him.

He gave a high and not very kingly bark of alarm and hit his head on something. The face hung in midair—as his eyes adjusted he saw that the creature was hanging upside down from a crossbeam, so comfortably that it looked like it had been there its whole life. It had an alien, half-melted look.

“Hello,” it said.

That was one mystery solved. Their talking animal was a sloth. It was just about the ugliest mammal Quentin had ever seen.

“Hi,” Quentin said. “I didn’t realize you were down here.”

“Nobody seems to,” the sloth said, with equanimity. “I hope you’ll come visit. Often.”

It took them three days to sail to the Outer Island, and every day it got hotter. They left the autumn beaches and steel waters of Whitespire for a more tropical zone. They did this while traveling east, instead of north or south, which was weird to the people from Earth, but none of the Fillorians seemed surprised. It made him wonder whether this world was even spherical—Benedict had never even heard of an equator. The crew changed into tropical whites.

Benedict stood by Admiral Lacker’s side at the helm with a book of charts that laid out the approach to the Outer Island, page after page crowded with technical-looking dots and blobby concentric isobars. Working together they threaded their way through a maze of shoals and reefs that no one but they could see until the island was actually in sight: a little bump of white sand and green jungle on the horizon, with a modest peak in the middle, not so different from what he’d imagined. They rounded a point and entered a shallow bay.

The moment they did the wind dropped to nothing. The Muntjac coasted into the center of the harbor on the last of its momentum, rippling the placid green surface as it went. The sails flapped limply in the silence. It could have been a sleepy hamlet on the Côte d’Azur. The shore was a narrow sandy strand littered with dry seaweed and the fibrous bits that palm trees constantly shed, baking in the afternoon heat. A wharf and a few low structures stood toward one end, and one rather magnificent-looking building that might have been a hotel or a country club. Not a single person was visible.

Probably they were taking a siesta. In spite of himself Quentin felt a rising sense of anticipation. Don’t be an idiot. This was an errand. They were here to collect the taxes.

They lowered the launch in silence. Quentin climbed in, followed by Bingle and Benedict, who lost his sullen self-consciousness for a moment in his excitement at starting his survey. At the last minute Julia appeared from below and slipped aboard. The sloth, slung comfortably from its beam in the hold, declined to go, though it enjoined them, before closing its drooping, shadowed eyes, to remember that if they came across any particularly succulent shoots, or even a small lizard, it was an omnivore.