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.”

“What happens here? I mean, what happens to the fountain?”