The well deposited us in a misshapen tunnel with many branches that didn’t go anywhere, made of weirdly soft limestone, as if they’d been chewed open by something living. The weight of the earth was palpable overhead, and the cheap LED lightstrip they had set up to keep people from tripping didn’t make it less terrible, partly because it so clearly didn’t belong: it was only a feeble struggling effort to hold off the dark. There were no faces even in the crowd. People talked and muttered and someone screamed with laughter somewhere up ahead. Tears were glazing my eyes, blurring the orange light, and my breath was loud in my own ears. All I wanted was to keep going towards the gleams of light that I could just glimpse every once in a while up ahead, along the streaming river of tourists. I wanted to keep going and get out, escape along with them. That was the other reason they’d built this elaborate passageway: to make unsuspecting mundanes walk through the same journey that they hoped for their own children to make, the journey down to the smothering awful dark and back out again on the other side.
But there was a tiny thread of cold air coming at me along the side of the wall, with a faint familiar smell of ozone and iron and machine oil, and a hint of rotting compost: the smell of the Scholomance. I breathed it in, and felt in my gut how close I was, how close we were, and I stopped going along with the river of people. None of them really knew that I was here. None of them could see me. I was just one of a thousand shadows moving with them in the dark, I didn’t matter, and they wouldn’t even notice, they didn’t notice, when I stepped into the next dark tunnel branching and stopped being there.
My foot came down hard on a jagged broken stone. I almost went sprawling on my face before I caught my balance, clenching my abdominal muscles tight instead of using my hands, and straightened up with the evocation of refusal in my mouth and my hands held up in front of me, ready to push it out, but I didn’t need to. Nothing attacked me.
I couldn’t see a thing, but I had a strong impression of space round me, and a moment later Liesel and Aadhya were there on either side of me. We all nearly went over again as they both instantly jerked into casting positions themselves. The floor under our feet was so uneven we were more or less falling down against one another. A faint light appeared a moment later: Aadhya had taken out a round glimmerball, a lacework of gilt brass over a crystal innard, with a satellite ring of brass around it and tiny little propellers like a drone. She gave it an underhand toss upwards, and it whirred to life and brightened slowly, shining over an enormous cavern, so huge it must have been almost as large as the entire gardens overhead, a hollow excavation that made everything up above belatedly feel precarious.
You could tell there had been a massive plaza down here once, with columns and fountains carved into the walls all around: possibly some sort of protective artifice. Now they were only vague suggestions of caryatids and lion’s-heads beneath thick layers of dirt and sludge. There was a green wet dripping everywhere, a stink of mold and stagnant water, and of rust; old scattered relics of dead maleficaria, scorched shells and cracked bits of constructs.
Across the center slab of the stone floor, they’d carved the familiar words at the heart of the Scholomance: To offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world, and around them in curving patterns were monumental versions of the same spells that had been engraved into the Scholomance doors, a litany of protection. I spotted Malice, keep far, this gate wisdom’s shelter guards: deep letters filled with gold that was still bright despite a glaze of algae.
But the spell was cracked right through gate, a wide dark fissure crossing the curved shape of the words. Massive slabs of stone heaved up in every direction at sharp angles, piles of crumbled shards. The whole plaza was shattered in a sunburst of jagged cracks—radiating out from the immense bronze doors of the Scholomance, which were hanging askew out of their frame in the cavern wall. It looked—well, it looked like a supervolcano spell had gone off here in the recent past.
There was nothing else moving in the whole chamber, except the dripping water coming down from some leaky place overhead, plinking every few moments. There were gaping cracks between the doors and the frame, big enough we should have been able to see through them, but even in the glimmerball’s light, there was nothing but pitch dark on the other side. It could have been a shallow niche in the cavern wall; it could have been the unlit graduation hall; it could have been the empty void. It could have been the side of an enormous maw-mouth, pressed up tightly against the doors on the other side, trying to get out.
“I’m going in,” I said. My voice echoed weirdly off the walls round me, unbalanced. “Stay here.”
“And wait for Patience to come fleeing out ahead of you?” Liesel said caustically. “No. We are safer with you than alone.”
Aadhya just said, “Let’s go.”
I didn’t argue. Maybe I’d known all along that they would come with me, and I’d only told myself that I’d stop them because it was horribly selfish to drag them along, and so I’d had to pretend I wasn’t going to do it. I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.
We went into the Scholomance.
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 Scholomance was 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 over to 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 helped me be 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 dark opened up between them that was just barely large enough to duck through.