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 into the pocket. Precious stuck her own pink nose out just long enough to chitter in vociferous agreement.
“What about you?” 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.