Footsteps on stone. Quentin thought he would have welcomed any interruption, anything, especially if it was carnivorous and would eat him alive.
“Kind of a reunion, isn’t it?”
Penny came stepping briskly across the flagstones toward them. The gray facade of a stone piazza loomed above them, with heraldic inlays: an anchor and three flames. Penny looked as happy and relaxed as Quentin had ever seen him. He was in his element and glowing with pride. His clothes were dry.
“Sorry. I’ve spent so much time here, but I’ve never had anybody to show it to. You wouldn’t think that would matter, but it does. When I first came through there was a corpse lying right there on the ground. Right over there.”
He pointed like a campus tour guide.
“Human, or close to it, anyway. Maybe Maori, he had a tattoo on his face. He could only have been dead a few days. He must have gotten trapped here—came in, but the pools wouldn’t let him out somehow. I think he died of starvation. The next time I came the body was gone.”
Penny studied their two faces and took in the situation for the first time: Alice’s tears, Quentin’s rapidly darkening black eye, their toxic body language.
“Oh.” His face softened slightly. He made a gesture, and suddenly their clothes were warm and dry and pressed, too. “Look, you have to forget about all that stuff here. This place can be dangerous if you’re not paying attention. I’ll give you an example: which way would you go to get back to our home square?”
Alice and Quentin looked around obediently, Penny’s reluctant students. In their running fight they had cut an angle through the second square into a third. Or a fourth? Their footprints had already faded. There was an alley on each side of the square, and through each alley you could catch a glimpse of other irregular alleys and fountains and squares, more and more, diminishing to infinity. It was like a trick with mirrors. The sun was hidden, if there even was a sun. Penny was right: they had no idea which one led back to Earth, or even which general direction they’d come from.
“Don’t worry, I marked it. You only came about a quarter mile. One up and one over.” Penny pointed in exactly the opposite direction Quentin would have guessed. “In the book they just wander at random, and it always comes out all right, but we have to be more careful. I use orange spray paint to mark a path. I have to do it fresh every time I come here. The paint disappears.”
Penny headed back in the direction he’d pointed. Tentatively, without looking at each other, Quentin and Alice fell in behind him. Their clothes were getting damp all over again from the rain.
“I have strict operating procedures when I’m here. There are no directions, so I’ve had to invent new ones. I named them after the buildings in the Earth square, one for each side: palace, villa, tower, church. Can’t be a real church, but that’s what it looks like. This is churchward, the way we’re going now.”
They were back at the fountain, which Penny had circled with big sloppy X’s of gifted ones and shoved and the desperateg fluorescent orange paint. A little way off there was a crude shelter, a tarp with a cot and a table underneath. Quentin wondered how he’d missed it before.
“I set up a base camp here for a while, with food and water and books.” He was so excited, like a rich, unpopular kid the first time he brings home friends to see his fancy toys. He didn’t even notice that Quentin and Alice weren’t saying anything. “I always thought it would be Melanie who came here the first time, but she could never quite work the spells. I tried to teach her, but she’s not quite strong enough. Almost, though. In a way I’m happy it’s you guys. You know you were the only friends I ever had at Brakebills?”
Penny shook his head as if there was something amazing about the fact that more people didn’t like him. Only twelve hours ago, Quentin thought, he and Alice would have barely been able to keep from cracking up with conspiratorial laughter at the suggestion that they had ever been friends with Penny.
“Oh, I almost forgot: no light spells here. They go crazy. When I first came here, I tried to do a basic illumination. I couldn’t see for two hours afterward. It’s like the air here is hyperoxygenated, only with magic. One spark and everything goes up.”
There were two stone steps leading up to the fountain. Quentin sat down on the top one and leaned his back against the rim. There was no point in fighting anymore. He would just sit here and listen to Penny talk.
“You wouldn’t believe how far I’ve walked in this place. Hundreds of miles! Way farther than the Chatwins ever went. Once I saw a fountain that had overflowed like a plugged-up toilet and flooded its square a foot deep, and half the squares around it. Twice I’ve seen ones that were capped. Sealed over with a bronze cover like a well, like they were keeping people out. Or in. Once I found fragments of white marble on the pavement. I think it was a broken sculpture. I tried to piece it back together, to see what it was a statue of, but I never could.
“You can’t get into the buildings. I’ve tried every way you can think of. Lock picks. Sledgehammers. Once I brought an acetylene cutting torch. And the windows are too dark to see in, but once I brought a flashlight—you know, one of those high-intensity rescue flashlights that the Coast Guard uses? When I turned it all the way up I could see inside, just a little bit.
“I’ll tell you something: they’re full of books. Whatever they look like on the outside, on the inside every one of these buildings is really a library.”
Quentin had no idea how long they’d been there, but it was a while. Hours maybe. They’d walked through square after square, like lost tourists, the three of them. Everything they saw shared a common style, and the same weathered, ancient look, but nothing ever quite repeated. Quentin and Alice couldn’t look at each other, but they couldn’t resist the seductions of this grand, melancholy place either. At least the rain had let up.
They passed through a tiny square, a quarter the size of the others and paved in cobblestones, where if they stood in the center it seemed like they could hear the ocean, the breaking and withdrawing of waves. In another square Penny pointed out a window with ghostly scorch marks above it, as if it had been the scene of a fire. Quentin wondered who had built this place, and where they’d gone. What had happened here?
Penny described in great technical detail his elaborate but ultimately think about itNGty-gunsuccessful campaign to rappel up the side of one of the buildings to get a view above the rooftops. The one time he’d managed to secure a line, on a piece of decorative masonry, he’d been overcome by dizziness halfway up, and when he recovered he found himself turned around, rappeling down the same wall he’d been trying to ascend.
At different times all three of them saw, in the farthest possible distance, a verdant square that seemed to contain a garden, with rows of what might have been lime trees in it. But they could never reach it—as they approached it always lost itself in the shifting perspectives of the alleyways, which were slightly out of alignment with one another.
“We should get back,” Alice said finally. Her voice sounded dead. It was the first time she’d spoken since she screamed at him.
“Why?” Penny asked. He was having the time of his life. He must have been terribly lonely here, Quentin thought. “It doesn’t matter how much time we spend here, you know. No time passes on Earth. To the