Our coordinates had been rounded off to three places, so we had to hunt through the whole sprawling estate: it could have been anywhere inside the grounds. And we couldn’t even skip the queue for tickets and slip in through a wall when no one was looking; there were just too many people ambling through the picturesque nearby streets, taking selfies against the outer walls. Even if we’d found ourselves all alone for a moment, we couldn’t have counted on it lasting: every few minutes another one of the carts came careering around the turn.
So instead we waited on the queue and bought tickets just like everyone else, and then went through a long droning tour of the preserved house, hearing about the self-important owner and his architect and their fascination with Tarot rituals and initiation rites and primitivism—by which they’d clearly meant nature unspoilt by anyone who didn’t look like them; Aadhya rolled her eyes at me and silently mouthed what a dickhead—and all the lavish parties he’d hosted in the gardens. We kept trying to look for a place where someone might conceivably slip away, a door that might lead you out of the world, but the annoying nine-year-old boy in the group got to literally every single one before we could do, yanking on old brass doorknobs and opening antique cupboards while his beleaguered mother kept asking him wearily not to touch things.
When the tour finally spilled us out into the gardens, I was ready to believe that Ophelia had actually sent us out here as some sort of diversion, but when I suggested as much, Liesel said, “She would have sent us somewhere further away and more remote!” which was true, so we grimly set off to wander through the gardens, trying to find the entrance to the world’s most secret and hidden enclave of mystical power, hard on the heels of an entire tour bus of people with their guide carrying a waving flag of Hello Kitty at the head.
The grounds were dazzlingly beautiful, enormously lush, et cetera. Also it was hot as Satan’s tit, to put it in the most colorful terms possible, and what primitivism seemed to mean was that the paths went in loops, meandered aggressively, and the whole thing was full of stairs that pretended they’d been worn naturally into the rock and were therefore uneven. We kept trying to avoid the worst crowds, and as a result managed to go in circles three times in a row, which we only realized when we kept coming past the same distinctive moss-eaten staircase. I was overheated, sleep-deprived, wretched, and when we hit the same bloody staircase a fourth time, I started giggling and couldn’t make myself stop, and had to be taken to the café and revived with cold water and strong coffee.
Liesel was enraged by then herself—I reckon she didn’t much care for primitivism—and she stormed back to the ticket booth, got a map of the grounds, and after I got hold of myself, she led us on a systematic exhaustive tour of the place, and even insisted on our waiting in the painfully long queue to go down into the initiation well. The pamphlet told us it was part of some trumped-up mystical initiation rite of Freemasonry that the owner and his mates had liked to perform. It sounded to me that they hadn’t had enough hazing in university, and in order to justify more of it to themselves as grown men, he’d had to build himself a palace and dress it up as some ponderous mystic rite that none of them really believed in, as if they could cart themselves back in time to a pagan era they’d mostly made up.
I wasn’t in a mood to be fair to them, and also on some level I’d stopped thinking of finding the gates. In my head I was just on a horrible grade school trip that was happening to me as if I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t imagine the Scholomance being in this adult Disneyland sort of place, so I wasn’t wondering why it was here, what any of it was for. I dragged myself through the queue in sullen sweaty annoyance, and into the actual well, which wasn’t literally a well: it was a tower that someone had hollowed out of the ground instead of building into the air, with a long spiral stairway going down around the empty space in the middle, people leaning over the sides to take photos up and down and across.
By the third level down, I wasn’t sweating anymore, and I also didn’t have the slightest doubt: the Scholomance was here, somewhere, close by, and whoever had built this place had known exactly what they were doing.
The voices of all the tourists, dozens of conversations in dozens of languages, were bouncing back and forth off the walls and blurring together into a wordless clamoring, deep and insistent: a Greek chorus speaking urgently to you from the other side of a wall, trying to tell you something important. It didn’t seem to matter what they were saying, whether they were laughing or leaning over the edge to take photos; the echoes took everything and mashed it into the single low reverberating message.
The world above had been swallowed up by the dark inside the walls: it had receded into a round white circle of sky, too bright to look at from down here. I didn’t want to keep going, but the walkway was too narrow to pause for long, people crowding behind us and in front of us, pushing us onward. Anyway, I had to keep going. We had to keep going down. We had to go in.
In a city, you wanted your enclave entrance to be as hidden as you could manage, so you could slip in and out of it easily, without drawing attention. If a mundane ever caught sight of a wizard going into an enclave, disappearing impossibly through a wall—that would have cost the enclave an enormous amount of mana, if it didn’t literally make the entrance collapse.
But no one went in and out of the physical doors of the Scholomance on a daily basis. As students, we were brought in through the induction spell that whisked us in an incorporeal form through the gates and wards all the way up to our freshman dormitories, at hideous expense, during the tiny window of opportunity right after the mals were gorged from graduation or had been cleansed. And at graduation, we walked back out through the doors, but we didn’t pop out into Portugal; the portal spell just sent us back whence we’d come.
The only things that used the doors were the mals, and this packed-solid river of mundanes would only make it harder for them to get through. The builders had started with parties and elaborate ceremonies—the owner had surely been a wizard himself, or maybe just the architect; in any case they’d made the place a destination for mundanes from the start. And then they’d traded off the solemnity of the fake rituals for the sheer masses of tour groups.
When once in four decades the enclaves did need to send something through the doors into the graduation hall—like New York’s golems installing the new cafeteria equipment after the war—they presumably just hired the whole place out, claimed to be a film crew, and perhaps put out a documentary while they were at it. A documentary that would bring even more tourists here, to go through the ritual over and over and over, each one putting in just a little bit of mana in between the selfies—a moment of delight and wonder, a hint of unease, the half a second when they shut their eyes and imagined they were here alone, put themselves willingly into the story that the guidebooks and the pamphlets told them of initiation, and willingly went in, going down into the pitch dark below.