Page 26 of The Golden Enclaves
I don’t know how to describe what that was like, going back in through the doors, knowing what was on the other side. I don’t mean Patience, not just Patience.The Scholomancewas on the other side, and that was so much worse than any one mal could have been. We’d considered a few plans, last year, in our frantic hunting for ideas, that had involved the younger kids leaving the Scholomance for a while and going back, and we’d abandoned all of them. You could only go into the Scholomance once, when you didn’t understand where you were going: to the endless awful hope of getting out, a hope you could only buy with other people, who were all trying to buy the same hope with you, and the open maw of Patience and Fortitude waiting at the end so you couldn’t even be sure of getting out by dying. Once you understood, once you’d been in it and got out, you couldn’t go back in. But we had to.
We scrambled and slid across the shattered stone floor overto the doors. I put my hands on the right-hand one, which was more or less still on its upper hinge and could be pushed. I didn’t try it right away. I shut my eyes and told myself the school was still there, still right over there. It had been there forever, it had been there for more than a hundred years, for the lives of tens of thousands of wizards; of course it was still there. It was still there, and so was Patience, and I didn’t want to go back, but I had to. So it had to be there.
Liesel put her hand on my shoulder. “The doors are here, so certainly we can get back inside,” she said, with iron certainty. “It will just take mana. You get us through. I will have a recoiler spell ready. That will give you enough time to put up the evocation.”
Aadhya hadn’t been with us in London, but she got the idea. She called back the glimmerball, closing her hand tight around it, so the light didn’t show us what was or wasn’t on the other side of the cracks. She put her other hand on my shoulder, too. “I’ll put the light up as soon as we’re through.”
I don’t know if they felt as confident about getting through as they sounded, but that didn’t really matter; they helpedmebe more sure about it. I took a deep breath and pushed on the door.
It should at least have creaked, but it didn’t budge at all. The entire horde of mals might as well have been on the other side trying to keep it shut. I put my head down and braced my heels, pushing harder, a burn starting across my shoulder blades. I didn’t consciously pull mana, but the power-sharer on my wrist began heating up, as if mana was being sucked through me so fast that I wasn’t even feeling it in my own body. “Come on, let us in,” I said under my breath, not really a spell; I was talking to the school, I suppose, which had occasionally answered me before, and maybe it heard me. The doors groaned and shifted, and a triangle of darkopened up between them that was just barely large enough to duck through.
I stepped through the opening with Aadhya and Liesel still clutching my shoulders, ducking right behind me. Liesel made a quick jerk with her free hand before she even straightened, and I felt the recoiler spell go flashing out from us. If it hit anything, I didn’t hear it. I was ready to be attacked instantly, but nothing came at us. I couldn’t feel anything moving or stirring in the air around me.
Aadhya heaved the glimmerball up and ahead of us. We were standing on the dais in the graduation hall—on the one unbroken part of the dais. I’d been standing right in this same place when I’d cast my earth-shattering supervolcano spell, which I could tell because the outline of my footprints was marked out on the surface with negative space: a crazed starburst of cracks radiated out from it in every direction, through the entire hall.
The floor around the dais was covered with a thick horrible crust of dried-up rotting ooze, still glistening in a few places. I gagged at the faint familiar smell: the detritus of a thousand corpses, those lives I’d slaughtered out of Patience or Fortitude, left in a gush on the floor. There was a thick scorched line around the bottom of the dais still visible through the dried ooze, marking the line of the shield I’d put up to hold off the horde.
Orion had been right next to me when Patience had rolled through their ranks and slammed into it, trying to get at us. Trying to get out, just like us. And behind the maw-mouth, the whole room had been packed from wall to wall with maleficaria. They’d been pouring back down into the graduation hall, cramming every available inch of air and space.
Now the hall was empty. There wasn’t so much as an agglo creeping around a dark corner.
“Where did—” Aadhya said, and just stopped there; the word echoed unnaturally loud off the marble walls, before it died away just as unnaturally into stillness. Anyway she didn’t need to finish the sentence. We all had the exact same question in our heads.
“They can’t have got out,” Liesel said, almost angrily. “All of Portugal would be swarming with mals.”
I made the mistake of looking back at the smashed doors, and discovered I couldn’t see out into the cavern we’d come from. The gaping holes around the doors were just featureless black, as if there were nothing outside but the void, after all. I didn’t think the mals had got out. I looked back to stop thinking about it. The room here still felt solid enough; it wasn’t anything as bad as Yancy’s half-real pavilion. But the mals were gone, and if they hadn’t got out—
“Maybe they just—fell away into the void,” Aadhya said. “The school is being kept up by external mana, but there wasn’t anything inside for the mals to eat, so…” She trailed off, dubiously, as she should have; that would have been much too nice and convenient. Liesel shook her head, rejecting the idea, but she didn’t volunteer one of her own, just frowned in deep irritation that meant she didn’t have any plausible enough to believe in.
I didn’t either, and I didn’t want them anyway. I didn’t care where the other mals had gone. I couldn’t care about anything except what I was here for, and I couldn’t think about that because I would have started screaming. I just walked out across the hall, and Aadhya and Liesel came after me. The huge maintenance shafts were still standing wide open on either side of the hall, the ones we’d used to funnel the mals through the school. A skinny ladder ran up the inside wall, looking tiny and precarious in the vast gaping space. I got onto it and started the climb.
The glimmerball whirred and flitted around up above our heads as we went, illuminating a globe around us that faded out into solid dark above and below. I’d just have gone on climbing mindlessly, but after the floor disappeared into the dark, Aadhya said from below, “The shafts are sixty feet tall, and every twelve rungs is ten feet. It shouldn’t be too long,” and Liesel started counting them off loudly, one after another, fixing us in space. And when she finished counting off the last one, I reached up my fingers without looking and they found the edge of the floor. I pulled myself up the last few rungs and onto the floor of the workshop, the glimmerball bobbing out into the big space just ahead of us.
We did find signs of the horde’s passage. The edge of the shaft that I’d climbed out of was gouged with claw marks, all the worktables smashed and overturned with scorch marks and dried slime trails left across the floors, scattered limbs and shells where they’d been dropped, most of them gnawed and cracked: mals would eat each other when they couldn’t get delicious wizard children instead. But there still weren’t any actual mals anywhere. Liesel even picked up one of the furnace pokers and jabbed at the ceiling panels overhead, which ought to have stirred up at least a few baby flingers or larval digesters, but nothing.
Aadhya took Pinky out of her pocket. “What do you think? Chance you could sniff out a maw-mouth?” she said to him.
That wasn’t an act of cruelty or anything; under ordinary circumstances, mice—even magical familiar mice—were well beneath the notice of a maw-mouth. Most maw-mouths won’t even stop to eat a single wizard. Their idea of a midday snack is ten of us at a minimum. But Pinky just gave a loud squeak of protest and made a leap out of her hand and onto the side of her dress and squirmed himself back down intothe pocket. Precious stuck her own pink nose out just long enough to chitter in vociferous agreement.
“What aboutyou?” I said aloud to the air, asking the school itself. “I’d think you’d want me to do for Patience. It would certainly protect the wise-gifted children of the world.”
I was sorry that I’d done it as soon as the words finished leaving my mouth: the only thing that came back was the opposite of an answer. The sound of my raised voice died away too quickly in the air that I now couldn’t help but notice felt strange and thin. Our breath was misting. It was cold, and not just cold the way the tunnels had been after the heat of the gardens outside. The workshop should have been full of noises: the grinding of gears, endless fans rotating, the gurgle of the pipes and the roaring furnaces. Instead it was silent, muffled.
The Scholomance was dying.
And yes, it was still being fed with mana, with belief. But you could tell it wasn’t all there anymore, either. I had the strong sense of living in the hushed moment just before an old rotten tree falls in the forest, inside the held breath, waiting.
Waiting, in our case, directly under the creaking tree. “I think we should just start looking,” Aadhya said, with sensible urgency.
“Let us follow the path the maleficaria would have taken,” Liesel said, and pointed up at the speaker wires rigged to the ceiling, where the honeypot song had been piped out to all the mals, luring them along. Long pieces of wire were dangling down like caterpillar threads: it was lucky we’d had half a dozen backups for every connection.
We went along the line all through the warren of the seminar rooms and then finally up the stairs to the next floor. For a long stretch we had only the yawning void on our left,where the junior dormitories should have been; apparently they’d crumbled away and taken the outer wall of the main school with them. We crept past it clinging to the inside wall, half plastering ourselves against it, and when we didn’t find a single mal anywhere in the alchemy labs, and the wires would have led us up the main staircase to the third floor, we detoured and found the interior staircase instead. It wasn’t much better. The stairs and corridors had always been the thinnest and most flexible parts of the school. We were a long time getting up to the language labs, my legs burning with the acid pain of climbing. We only had Aadhya’s glimmer to keep us from pitch dark: all the lights were out. It made every muscle from the top of my head to the bottom of my spine tight with well-trained anxiety: this was how you got taken out, stupidly going up a bad way. Something would always be waiting, something would leap out at you. Somethingshouldhave leapt out at us.
Nothing did. The strange unnatural quiet was broken by occasional nerve-racking groans and creaks that sounded less like machinery working and more like something large about to break off and fall on our heads. Eventually we made it up to the language labs and all just sat down on the floor of the corridor together to catch our breath and let our legs stop whinging. We hadn’t stoppedonthe stairs: possibly it would have been all right if we had, but no one who had made it through six months in the Scholomance would ever stay to find out.
“This makes no sense,” Aadhya said, between panting. “Patience can’t have eatenallthe other mals. There were amillionof them,” which might have been an exaggeration, but it had certainly felt close at the time. “Some of them would have got away or hidden.”
“It was not only Patience,” Liesel said. “The maleficaria were lured here to hunt. When we were all gone, they wouldhave fed on each other, and the school has been devouring as many of them as it could catch with the wards.” It sounded plausible, but I could tell she didn’t believe her own words. She was only selling it the way you would an essay question on an exam when you hadn’t a clue of the real answer.
