“The Order did that?”

“So they say. A back door was built into the system, metaphorically speaking, that would let magic back out into the universe, if the gods ever returned to claim it. It just has to be opened.”

“Oh my God.” Quentin didn’t know whether he should dare to hope or not. It would almost be too painful if it turned out not to be true. “So you can fix this? You’re going to fix this?”

“The ‘back door’ exists.” Penny mimed doing quotey-fingers, which he couldn’t actually do. “But the keys to it were hidden a long time ago. So long ago now that not even we know where they are.”

Quentin and Poppy looked at each other. It couldn’t be that simple, it just couldn’t. No way were they that lucky.

“Penny, there wouldn’t by any chance be seven of these keys?” Quentin said.

“Seven, yes. Seven golden keys.”

“Penny. Jesus Christ, Penny, I think we have them. Or six of them. We have them back in Fillory. It has to be them!”

Quentin had to sit down on a block of stone, even though it was a little outside Penny’s circle of warmth. He put his head in his hands. That was the quest. It wasn’t fake, and it wasn’t a game, it was real. It mattered after all. They’d been fighting for magic all along. They just hadn’t known it.

Of course Penny took this in stride. He would never be so uncool as to give Quentin credit for saving the universe or anything.

“That’s very good. That’s excellent. But you must recover the seventh key.”

“Right. I got that far. We’ll find the seventh key. And then what?”

“Then take them all to the End of the World. The door is there.”

This was it. He knew what to do now. He’d received his cue. It was like how he felt back on the island, in the castle, but calmer this time. This must be what the gods felt like, he thought. Absolute certainty. They had arrived at Penny’s building, back where they’d started.

“Penny, we have to get back to Fillory, back to our ship, to finish the quest. Can you send us back? I mean, even with the fountains frozen over?”

“Of course. The Order has made me privy to all the secrets of inter-dimensional travel. If you think of the Neitherlands as a computer, then the fountains are merely—”

“Awesome. Thanks, man.” He turned to Poppy. “Are you in on this? Or do you still want to go back to the real world?”

“Are you kidding?” She grinned and pressed herself against him. “Fuck reality, baby. Let’s go save the universe.”

“I will prepare the spell to send you back,” Penny said.

It was snowing harder, the flakes blowing slantwise through their little dome of warmth, but Quentin felt invulnerable now. They were going to fight this, and they were going to win. Penny began chanting in that same incomprehensible language he’d used before. It had some vowel sounds that Quentin barely recognized as human.

“It needs a minute to take effect,” he said when he was done. “Of course, from this point forward the 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 Muntjac and ordering everybody—ordering Eliot!—around. Probably they were better magicians than he was, technically. But still, no, he couldn’t do it. It was impossible.

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. But all they’d learned from half a year’s hard spelunking and deep-ocean diving was that Asmodeus’s spellwork performed slightly better once you got half a mile underground, and that the most probable explanation for that was that spelunking got Asmodeus really excited.

They pushed on into astrology and ocean magic and even oneiromancy—dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it.

They worked with the Earth’s magnetic field, using apparatus cribbed from some Nikola Tesla drawings, right up until the night when Failstaff almost flipped the planet’s magnetic poles, whereupon they dropped that whole line of investigation and backed away slowly. Gummidgy spent a sleepless week developing a witheringly abstract hypothesis related to cosmic rays and quantum effects and the Higgs boson, which in the end even she only half-understood. She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.

That’s when they turned to religion.

At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.

“I know,” Pouncy said. “But it’s not what you think. Hear us out.”

Failstaff began unrolling a huge, closely annotated diagram that was almost as big as the table.

Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds. As far as she knew, or thought she knew, her views on this matter were shared by the other Free Traders.

“There was a piece missing,” Pouncy went on. “We thought we’d gone back to first principles. But what if we hadn’t? What if there were principles before the first principles we’d gone back to?

“We were assuming, until it could be proved otherwise, that there were bigger energies out there, far bigger, and that there was a technique by which those energies could be manipulated. Humans have not, so far as we know, in the modern era, gained access to those energies. But suppose there were another class of beings who did have access to them. Maybe not humans.”

“Another class of beings,” Julia said flatly. “You’re talking about God.”

“Gods. I wanted to find out more about them.”

“That’s insane. There’s no such thing as gods. Or God. You know, Pouncy, one of the things I love about the fact that I didn’t go to college is that I didn’t have to sit around a freshman dorm getting high and arguing about shit like this.”

But Pouncy was not withered by her scorn.

“‘Once you’ve eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth.’ Sherlock Holmes.”

“That’s not actually the quote. And it doesn’t mean that gods are real, Pouncy. It means you need to go back and check your work, because you screwed it up somewhere.”