Page 48 of The Golden Enclaves
She came back perched on Liu’s shoulder, leading her and Aadhya in. I let go of the pry bar and ran to hug Liu as tight as I dared, which was roughly half as tight as she hugged me back. “Are you all right?” I whispered, and she gave me an even tighter squeeze and whispered back, “No,” and was wiping tears when she let go, even though she smiled at me. Shelookedall right: I would have liked to find something I could point at and say,No, you’ve got to sit this one out,but I couldn’t; she didn’t have so much as a bruise or a scar. If anything, she lookedtoogood. She’d brought the sirenspider lute, slung over her shoulder, and she was wearing loose graceful clothes. Her short hair was brushing perfectly at chin height, and I had the vague sense that one of her shoulders and one of her cheekboneshadbeen a little higher than the other, and now they were all perfectly symmetrical: like someone on a magazine cover who’d been polished up on a computer. And it did help to feel good in your body, to be free from pain, but this seemed more like she’d been papered over by someone who’d wanted to hide the pain fromtheireyes, something they didn’t like looking at that was still there underneath for her.
“Is this going to help?” I asked bluntly, instead.
“Staying away would hurt,” she said, simply, and fair enough; I’d come for the same reason, after all.
“Okay, so can we all recognize that this is a totally pointless idea that I’m guessing you all liked because it was fast?” Aadhya was saying meanwhile, examining our jury-rigged pry bar. “They didn’tliterallycover the well with dirt. You could rip up the entire garden and you still wouldn’t find it. We have to go through the artifice to get in.”
“What artifice?” I demanded.
“Have you forgotten the brochure?” Aadhya said. “The whole concept of the garden is you’ll keep being lost in the wilderness if you don’t follow the right path. And the whole thing’s been reinforced by years and years of mundanes going through it. All New York needed to do was just layer a little reinforcement on top, and now you literally can’t get into the well unless you’ve gone through the steps in the right order. You’re not going to be able to just bust through. We’re going to have to follow the actual initiation ritual.”
The problem was we didn’t have any idea what that was. The placards all round the gardens were distinctly vague. We found one of the brochures lying half singed under a bush, but it wasn’t much more use: it told us what order we had to go to the various places, and that we had to perform vigils and so forth, but provided no details about any of the oaths or incantations. So we got ourselves out of the gardens and broke into the gift shop at the front of the museum and all sat round skimming urgently through the various tomes about Freemasonry. It was almost like being back in a study group at school, which wasn’t a recommendation for the experience: it’s not very pleasant knowing your life depends on ferreting out an obscure reference in the footnotes of a history book so boring your eyes and brain glaze over in the first ten minutes of reading.
We really could have done with Liesel just then, so of course she didn’t turn up. I even went so far as to text her, with no response. Of course the London enclave team wouldn’t have been left to wrangle in the gardens with the little people; they’d have been invited directly inside to hobnob with New York and the other American enclaves, Paris, and Munich. Probably Lisbon, too; I expect it would be rude to leave the host enclave out, even if they weren’t quite the power they’d once been.
Liu started cobbling together something out of a few different books, and I worked on translating her work into Latin. Most rituals become a bit more resilient if you do them in a dead language: something about not having the meaning really solid in your own head means that there’s room for interpretation. But partway through, Liu paused and said slowly, looking her own work over, “El, this ritual requires a commitment, up front.You will steadily persevere through theceremony—we have to promise to keep going, once we start. The well could become a trap. If they blocked the way out—we won’t be able to get out.”
“If we couldn’t get out, why not everyone else?” Khamis demanded.
“Itwouldbe everyone,” Liu said. “Nobody could get out, even the person who blocked the path. But someone in there mightwantto do that—if they had a weapon that would make people run away.”
Liu had more than enough reason to be especially wary of any ritual where you were asked to sign on the dotted line before you knew what was on the other side, but it would be dangerous for anyone. “I’ll go alone,” I said.
“I don’t think you can,” Liu said.
“And youaren’t,” Aadhya said, giving my arm a shove. “I’m coming.”
“Me too,” Miranda said, a murmur of agreement going round, and then abruptly, almost fiercely, Antonio said, “You got us all out last time. You and Orion,” and my throat got tight as he spoke. “You got us out for good, and now they’re starting a war over the bones. There’s a better way. Weknowthere’s a better way. And you’re trying to find it. We’ll all come.”
We set off to the chapel and took up positions. We were all playing a part: the grandmaster, members of the order, and the new initiate, who had to be me, as there was a solid chance that the new initiate was the only one who would get through, if our makeshift ritual only halfway worked. And if it went completely pear-shaped, the grandmaster would take the brunt of it, so I couldn’t argue when Khamis volunteered for the part, although I’m sure he only did it for the pleasure of getting to have me kneel in front of him, which apparentlyoutweighed a substantial risk of bodily harm. I didn’t quitewantthe ritual to go all wrong, but I did feel passionately that it would serve him right if it did.
Everyone made a circle and Khamis smugly intoned his bit, and I knelt down at the altar and promised to be a very good knight, trying not to feel silly—you can cast spells that leave a bad taste in your mouth easily enough, but it’s difficult when you feel like an absolute twonk. It helped that it was dark, and afterwards we marched in single file from the chapel to the grotto nearby, everyone carrying small spell-lights cupped in their hands, and Liu playing the lute up at the head of the line to lead us onwards. And from the grotto we climbed up a narrow stair through one of the fairy-tale turrets scattered round, stone walls and dark close around us until the stairwell opened up again to let us back into the path, and it began to feel like something beyond the real, towork,as we filed silently out.
We were deep into the gardens by then, but there were no sounds of fighting anymore. But it wasn’t that everyone else had packed up and gone. We were on the way: I felt it with sharp certainty. The gardens mightlookthe same, but we’d moved onto a completely different part of the space, as though we’d gone onto a higher floor of a building. We kept going along the widest path, gradually rising and folding back on itself several times, passing turreted overlooks and alcoves with statues that I didn’t remember seeing while I’d been going round in circles. On the next pathway up, we heard a waterfall going somewhere out in the dark; I remembered the sound from being underground in the tunnels. We kept climbing, a steady burn starting in the back of my calves as though we were climbing a much steeper incline. After the next curve of the path, all of us were panting for breath in ragged gulps, the air going thick and moist and clammy onour skin; every step became a struggle, fighting our way upward,inward—until we finally came to a rocky wall, turning away, and we were at the top of the well, with only darkness down below.
I knelt down again. Khamis tied the blindfold over my eyes and took my hand. At least Aadhya was the one holding the ritual sword, which she’d formed out of our original pry bar. I wouldn’t have liked trusting him with the temptation of a sharp blade held at my chest. I got up groping in the dark, and the others reached out and put anonymous hands on my shoulders and back, Liu still playing the lute softly as we went down the narrow coiling passageway, footsteps echoing strange and muffled in the dark.
It was easier going down, in a very bad way: when passages were unusually quick, inside the Scholomance, you always knew they were taking you somewhere you didn’t want to go. And that’s where we were going now, with every step: somewhere we didn’t want to go. We weren’t actually just playacting at a ritual anymore. We were going down, deep into the dark, and we didn’t have any assurance that there would be light on the other end.
I could hear some of the footsteps fall away as we went, as if some of the others had taken a turning off the path, gone the wrong way. I wouldn’t have been surprised to be the only one to make it to the bottom. But when the ground leveled out beneath my feet, Khamis took the blindfold off, his face hard and grim, and Liu and Aadhya were there, too. Miranda and Antonio and a boy named Eman from Lapu-Lapu enclave had made it down with us as well, and a moment later Caterina from Barcelona enclave stumbled out of the passageway, shivering, to join us.
The mouth of the labyrinth was solidly black—no fairy lights down here now—and we didn’t need anyone to tell usthat it wasn’t going to be a perfunctory symbolic jaunt to the other side. We made a chain, holding hands, and I took the lead before we plunged into the passageway.
Our lights went out at once. As soon as we were all in the dark, I could hear other people, other voices, somewhere up ahead. I had one hand on the craggly wall, and when a tunnel mouth opened up, the voices came more clearly, on cold creeping gusts of wind. I stopped and listened, but I couldn’t make out words or even language over the sound of our breathing. I wasn’t sure whether to turn or not, and I had to decide. Finally I kept going: it felt too soon. We needed to go further in.
We passed another tunnel branching on the right, and one more on the left, whispers of sharp wind biting along my arms. I wanted to turn off even more badly each time, but I felt even more certain that it was too soon. The tunnel roof began to lower, and the walls narrowed in, more oppressive with every step, as if the whole terrible weight of the Scholomance was coming down on us somewhere overhead.
And finally we came to another branch, a narrow crack on the left barely big enough to go into, and it didn’t feel as though it would be a relief to go that way. The breath of cold refreshing air blew down towards us from the tunnel up ahead, instead, and I had a faint sense of opening up. I put my hand out overhead, and the tunnel roof sloped a tiny bit away, rising. I turned away from it, and squeezed myself through the tight opening, into the branching passage.
The voices began to get louder almost at once, and the tunnel twisted one way and then another and dumped us abruptly into another well, the same size around as the other one but made of rough-hewn slabs and columns that looked as though they were falling into each other, propping each other up.
There was a spiraling ramp in front of us, and it ran upwards to a wide open circle above that was full of stars and fresh air, but that wasn’t the way we were going. I remembered the place from our infuriating tourist visit, when we’d been slogging around futilely trying to find the way in. At the time, this well hadn’t been any deeper than the other one. It had stopped here. But now it kept going down. The voices were coming from below, echoing up through the hollow middle from a dark place down below, further in. We went down the spiral, down and down and down three more sloping circles, and then abruptly the ramp bottomed out in the massive cavern before the Scholomance doors, the one Aadhya and Liesel and I had found before.
Only this time, the whole place was full of wizards.
The doors had been fixed up, set back into their frame, and there were dozens of people in front of them, manning fortifications that were growing more elaborate by the moment. I recognized one of them: Ruth, the woman I’d seen in the train station in New York. She was sitting in a folding chair directly in front of the doors, in the middle of the shattered starburst of the floor. She looked just as beleaguered and weary as before, but every few moments she lifted her hand, with the vague impression it was a massive effort, and then she moved it just a bit, the same smoothing motion you’d use to pet the back of a ruffled cat, and another square meter of the ground pressed itself flat away from her. The engraved words of the spells settled back into place as she did it. One of them had just been made whole, and it went flaring gold with renewed power, which was just nonsense: you couldn’tmendartifice that complex, only obviously she could. She must have been controlling the entire floor on an atomic level.
But opposite the New York crew, at the far side of thecavern where the ground hadn’t been quite so badly smashed up, a second array of wizards were putting together the mirror image of their work: siege machines. The magical sort, long narrow lances mounted on a lightweight metal frame, piercing spells like Khamis’s spear, meant to get through a shield. They were being lined up on either side of a pair of long red banners blazoned with the characters forShanghaiin gold, and a pair of golden ones withJaipurwritten out in red.
