Page 38 of The Last Graduate
The message was extremely clear. My head wasn’t, which is why I didn’t think as hard as I probably ought to have before I went and got on the ladder and started climbing down, in the dark. But I didn’t even hear any sounds of maleficaria, no scuttling or rasping or hisses or breath; only the gurgles and bangs of the school itself, the vast conglomeration of artifice running on, steadily pumping air and water and cafeteria slop and wastes all round, the low burring hum of mana being channeled into the wards. The climb didn’t take very long: the school wanted me to get there quickly, and my brain was so empty that it didn’t insist on the climb taking a rational amount of time. It felt like only a few minutes, and then I was climbing down off the ladder into the skinny maintenance chamber at the bottom, the place from which we’d sallied forth on our grand mission to repair the cleansing machinery.
I made a light. It shone onto the blank, curved metal wall—dented a bit from the outside, as if the mals had beaten on it trying to get through after we’d made our yanked escape. The graduation hall was on the other side, along with whatever the school had been preparing us all—preparingme—to deal with. This whole term, all the endless outrageously horrible unsurvivable runs, pushing and pushing and pushing all of us to find completely new strategies, to learn to work as a single enormous alliance, to defeat—whatever was on the other side. That’s what we had to overcome.
And apparently, it was time for me to face it. I didn’t have a maintenance hatch with me, but one of the metal wall panels just popped itself open, rivets pinging out of the seam and onto the floor one after another. I just stood there and watched. The two panels of the wall fell open with an enormous clanging, one towards me and one away.
Nothing came through the opening.
It wasn’t especially shocking; I’d understood by then. I knew what was on the other side waiting, and they weren’t going to bother coming after one measly student. I’d known all along what it was going to be, really, no matter how hard I’d pretended I didn’t. It wasn’t going to be evil glaciers, or an anima-locust swarm, or a castigator demon. The school had been treating me gently, with kid gloves, bringing me along little by little, but time was running out now, and I had to face it, so I could be ready on graduation day. I’d promised, after all. I’d promised Khamis, and Aadhya, and Liu, and Chloe, and everyone in the entire school.
I couldn’t make myself step through. Even if it was safe right now, in some ridiculous sense of the word, I didn’t want to go look. I didn’t want to have to go back upstairs and tell everyone what we were up against. I didn’t want to spend the next three months thinking about them every single day, making plans, discussingstrategiesfor me to relive the most horrible thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to huddle into a ball against the back of the chamber. I wanted to sob for Mum, for Orion, for anyone at all to save me, and there wasn’t anyone. There was only me. And them. Patience and Fortitude, waiting by the gates, so hungry that they’d licked the entire graduation hall clean.
I knew I had to go look at them, so I couldn’t go back up the ladder—if the school would even have let me run away—but I couldn’t move forward, either. I stayed down there for a very long time. I think it had been close to an hour when there was a small anxious chirp from the shaft, and Precious poked her tiny nose out, clinging to the last rung of the ladder.
I put my hands up to get her, and I cupped her in my hands and put her against my cheek, and my whole face crumpled like discarded classwork and I just sobbed a few times, getting her fur wet with leaking tears. She just poked at me with her nose and put up with it. When I managed to get myself under control, she climbed onto my shoulder, tucked behind my ear, and made soft small encouraging squeaks. I took a deep breath in through my nose and made myself go out into the hall before I could lock up again.
The hall wasn’t completely empty: a family of mature agglos, their tidy shells glittering with mana-infused jewels, bits of glowing artifice, and tiny jars and vials of potions and unguents, had been sleeping peacefully against the far wall, near the cleansing machinery we’d repaired last year. They all woke up at the sound of my footsteps and started humping away into dark corners at top speed, which in the case of adult agglos is about a quarter mile per hour.
The floor was crunchy with amphisbaena scales and the dried-up moltings of juvenile digesters, none bigger than a handkerchief. None of them were actually in sight. The ceiling had faint dark lines patterned across it, the ghosts of the century-old sirenspider webs that had been incinerated in the cleansing. The only things left of the sirenspiders themselves were a few hard melted lumps stuck to the ceiling among them, the stubs of legs poking out in a few places. There was nothing left of other mals at all except a few droppings and skeletons; a few construct mals had collapsed in mechanical heaps here and there, out of mana. A few more scuttling larval things ran away from me, so small I couldn’t even identify them, as I clenched both my hands tight and turned myself bodily to face the gates.
“But,” I said, after a moment, out loud. I stood there stupidly until Precious gave me a nudge, and then I walked across the whole graduation hall, directly up to the massive double doors, the gates to the school. There were two enormous scorch marks on the floor to either side, blackened outlines where the maw-mouths had been, like a police tape to show the position of a removed corpse. The marks had ripples: you could see the mortal flame had burnt off a good few layers, although there had certainly been plenty left of them afterwards.
I’d been half right. The cleansing had worked. Patience and Fortitude hadn’t been killed, but they’d been burnt and blinded, probably thrashing wildly, while the seniors ran out. They had missed their one annual meal. Afterwards, they’d recovered and tried to fill their hollow bellies by devouring all the rest of the surviving mals instead. But after they did that—when there was nothing at all left for them to eat, they’d—gone.
I had no idea where. Had they hidden away somewhere inside the school? They certainly hadn’t got into the main levels—we’d all have heard the screaming. There’re pockets of dead space, many of them, in the hollow area between the top of the graduation hall and the bottom of the workshop floor, and those aren’t really warded, so they could have crawled in there, but they still wouldn’t have had anything to eat. Maw-mouths don’t generally hide, anyway. Had they left entirely? They could have; the wards stop maleficaria from coming in, not going out, and if Patience and Fortitude had gone off to roam the world and trouble enclaves for their suppers, we wouldn’t hear about it until after we got out ourselves.
Which we’d apparently be able to do with no trouble at all. None of us needed a day’s practice, not a single run. We could stroll right out.
I stared up at the enormous doors, cast from solid bronze. There were diagrams and paintings of them scattered all round, like the blueprints, all a bit different from one another. But I can’t imagine anyone had actually spent as much as a millisecond looking at them since the day the school first opened to students. A massive seal in the middle was engraved with the school mottoIn Sapienta Umbraculum—In Wisdom, Shelter—and nested circles round the seal were engraved with a warding spell that had been layered through languages: so the same spell in English and Middle English and Old English, one after another, all going round in a ring. It wasn’t just English, either; there were rings of the same spell in dozens of languages, and all the ones I knew well enough to recognize had multiple versions, too—there was modern Arabic and medieval, modern French and Old French and Latin.
Translating a spell and actuallygettinga spell on the other end is almost impossible; it had probably taken a genius poet or a team of twelve for every version of every language, and only possible at all because they weren’t very complex spells: all the ones I could make out without a dictionary were just one or two lines and a variation onDon’t let anything evil through these doors.The English inscription wasMalice, keep far, this gate wisdom’s shelter guards,tied to the motto, obviously not a coincidence; some version of the phrase was there in all the other languages I knew.
And they weren’tjustan inscription. The letters had been engraved all the way through the top layer of bronze, and some kind of illuminated alchemical substance was being piped through behind them so the light shone out through. They weren’t just glowing steadily, either: the light moved through each inscription, at the speed and rhythm you’d have used to speak each spell. It was effectively casting the incantations over and over again, renewing them steadily. And the separate spells were even synchronized somehow—I couldn’t follow it exactly, but I could tell that several of them started or ended at the same time, new ones began as previous ones went out. Like a massive choral piece with a few dozen separate lines of music going at once.
It mesmerized me; I could almost hear the spells going, and then I realized I really was hearing them: there were bands of tiny perforations in the metal, what I’d thought were just decorative dots, and when I leaned close and peeked I could see there was a bit of artifice behind them that opened and closed each hole individually. And when one of them opened, a puff of air came through with a sound like a single letter or syllable, breathed out, and each sound matched one of the characters being lit up at the time. I could barely hear the whisper over the faint metronome ticking of the machinery that was controlling the vents, the shushing and gurgle of the liquid being pumped through, but they were there.
I’d never seen anything like it before, even inside the school. I know from much droning in our history lessons that Sir Alfred had talked the other major enclaves into building the school in stages—the expense of the thing was as ruinous as you might imagine. He initially proposed just building an ordinary enclave for kids to live in, just with these really powerful doors. After the doors were built, that’s when he showed everyone the rest of his even more elaborate plans, and supposedly they looked at the doors and signed on for the rest. Standing here, I wasn’t surprised. I’d spent nearly four years living inside the school, nearly dying over and over, and I still almost believed it, believed that these doors would keep out all evil, keep out the monsters and keep us all safe.
And obviously they had, more or less. I couldn’t even imagine how many maleficaria would have been coming at us without them. The Scholomance was a honeypot, the most alluring honeypot you could imagine: all the most tender, mana-plumpest wizard children in the world gathered in a single place. Any mal that so much as gets a whiff of this place would try to get in. And some of them would make it, even with the doors. Every once in a while, a letter didn’t light up, a puff of air didn’t make it through; there were surely a few places in the massive composition that were a little weaker, where the spells didn’t quite sound right at the same time, making cracks in the warding where a really determined mal could make an effort and wriggle through, like poking a loose brick out of the fortress wall. More than enough had made it through, even in the first few years, to make this hall into a slaughterhouse. The doors weren’timpenetrable.
But they were close. So after the mortal flame had actually worked last year—and after Patience and Fortitude had eaten their way through everything else—and after Orion had done for every mal that had dared to poke its nose into the classroom levels—the whole room had been cleared. For one shining moment, our one unbelievably lucky year, we’d be able to come down here and walk straight to safety, the first class in the history of the Scholomance to make it through graduation without a single death.
And then—the mals would all come back. Every single portal that opened up to send one of us home would make an opening in the wards; two or three mals would squirm through for every one of us that left. More of them would tag along later that day with the newly inducted freshmen. Psychic mals would follow a parent’s worried dream of their child; the eldritch and gaseous mals would float up through the ventilation shafts, and the amorphous ones would pour themselves through the plumbing.
And sooner or later, if Patience or Fortitude didn’t come back, a new maw-mouth would ooze in through one of those openings and settle into pride of place by the gates. The cleansing would break again. The death rate would likely be back to normal by the time the current freshmen were graduating, or at best a year or two later. Sudarat and Zheng and my other freshmen wouldn’t get a free ride. That boy from Manchester, Aaron, who’d brought me my tiny scrap of a note from Mum, for nothing. All the kids I barely knew or didn’t know or had never met or who hadn’t been born yet.
That’s what the school had been working me up towards, all this time. Luring me onwards with one crumb of power after another to teach me that it wasn’t useless for me to care, that I could let myself care about my friends, and about their allies, and then even about everyone in my year, and once it had got me over that hump, now it was showing me that I didn’t need to worry about any of them after all, so surely now I had the spare capacity to care about—everyoneelse.
“But what do you want me todo?” I said, staring up at the doors. Surely the Scholomance didn’t want to save one year’s worth of kids, or even four years’. The school had already chewed up a hundred thousand children during its relentless triage operation. No human who cared enough to try could have stood it. But the school wasn’t human, wasn’t soft. It didn’t love us. It just wanted to do its job properly, and here we were, dying all the time on its watch, inexorably, three-quarters of every class lost. It wanted us to take this wide-open shining window of opportunity and—“Fixyou?” It was the only thing I could think of, but it didn’t actually provide any direction. I looked round the empty killing field: even the bones had been cleared away. “How?”
No answer came. I didn’t get any more helpful guidance, except from Precious, who gave a chirp and prodded me with her nose, wanting to go back. “I don’t understand!” I yelled at the doors. They went on placidly ticking away: the work of an army of geniuses with all the time and mana in the world at their fingertips, trying to build the safest and most clever school in the world for their children, and that hadn’t been good enough, so what did the Scholomance expectmeto do?
Precious gave another squeak, vaguely exasperated, and poked me again. I thumped the left door resentfully with my fist, and then wished I hadn’t: it moved a little. Not really, not actually enough to go ajar or anything, it just trembled, barely, under my fist, enough that I could tell that if I braced myself on something and put my back and legs into it, I could haveopenedit. It wasn’t held shut from this side. The outer edges of the gates were stained with green and black mold, and the puffs of air coming in were coming in from outside. This was the one place where the school wasn’t just floating in the void. The real world was there, right there on the other side. If I pushed the doors open, I couldwalk out,into whatever secret hidden place the enclaves had chosen as the anchor point, and that would be a real place, somewhere on the Earth, with a GPS location and everything, and surely I could find someone in a day’s walk with a mobile who’d let me ring the main line of the commune and talk to Mum.
It would be an absolutely stupid thing to do, because I wouldn’t havegraduated—we don’t march through the doors to get in, since if you turned the physical doors into a single point of entry, all the mals in the world would eventually be massed round it, and not a single freshman would survive the gauntlet long enough to get inside. My vague understanding of the induction spell is that we’re borrowed into here with the same kind of spells that enclaves use to borrow space from the real world, and when we go through the gates, what actually happens is we’re being paid back with interest, through a portal that sends us right back where we were taken from in the first place. If I hopped out the doors into the real world instead of going back out through the proper portal, I’d more or less be making off without paying the debt. I have no idea what the consequences would be, but they were bound to be unpleasant.
But Icould do it.It was the opposite of everything that was unbearably horrible about the gym. The other side of the doors was undoubtedly deep underground in some unpleasant and probably dangerously spiky place to discourage both mals and mundanes from coming near; the smell coming through had the thick mucky stink of a stagnant sewer—an entirely likely location—and absolutely none of that mattered because it would bereal,it would beoutside,and I wanted to go so badly that I turned round and ran back to the maintenance shaft without letting myself look round even one more time.
The climb up wasnotabbreviated. It felt more as if I were paying back the speed from the earlier climb. But Precious was along with me, a warm lump on my shoulder, or scampering up a few rungs ahead of me, her white fur bright even in the dim light I’d cast on my hands. I finally crawled out of the shaft and lay flat on the floor in the seminar room with my arms and legs starfished out round me, too tired to groan more than faintly. She sat on my chest washing her whiskers fastidiously and keeping an eye out, if that was even necessary. Theschoolwas obviously looking out for me really hard. It had only sent just the right level of mals to make me swallow the indigestible lump of my pride and take mana from Chloe. If ithadn’tgone after me, Aadhya and Liu and I would’ve spent this year working so hard to build a decent pot of mana that I certainly wouldn’t have had the time and energy—much less the mana—to imagine saving anyoneelse.And no one else would’ve listened to me even if I had.
