They followed him. The next room was if anything even grander: a vaulted hall, also full of books but with soaring high windows that were dark and flecked with light rain. Through the lower panes Plum got her first look at the Neitherlands, a gray warren of broad squares and narrow alleys and Italianate palaces. It was night.

Penny walked with his magic hands clasped behind his back.

“The past year has been good to me,” he said—the gracious tour guide. “My work defending the Neitherlands and safeguarding the flow of magic brought me to the attention of my superiors in the order—we take care of the Neitherlands, Plum, in case they haven’t told you. At the same time we suffered significant losses of personnel, which created gaps in the leadership. I was advanced rapidly.

“The promotion was gratifying, of course, but the challenges have been non-trivial. The Neitherlands was changed irreversibly in the late catastrophe. Much of the old magic no longer works, or works differently. Things grow here now. There is time here.”

He said it irritably, like they had a case of bed bugs.

“You cannot imagine the inconvenience of it. But the upshot was that I was awarded the position of Librarian. It is one of the most prestigious titles a member of my order can hold.”

“Congratulations,” Quentin said. “I’ve always wondered though, what happened to the dragons? The last time I saw them they were getting ready to fight the gods.”

“The dragons succeeded. If they hadn’t, you would not have lived to play your part in the crisis. Fighting the old gods, even distracting them, is of course a chancy business. There’s an art to it: they don’t really counterattack so much as just delete you from reality. But some of the dragons survived. They will repopulate, if they can remember how. I believe it has been several millennia since any of them had sex. We in the order have been assisting them with the research.”

Plum guessed it stood to reason that out of all these billions of books at least one of them had to be dragon porn.

They left the great hall and entered a low labyrinth. Even there the walls were books, even the ceiling; they hung spine-down somehow, over their heads, like bats in a cave. Every once in a while large swaths of books shifted themselves over, grudgingly, like sleepers in a crowded bed, to make room for some new addition further down the line. This Penny guy was a bit of a pill, but she had to admit she was loving his library. Loving. If anything Quentin had undersold this place.