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. Something should have 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 stopped on the 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 eaten all the other mals. There were a million of 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 would have 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.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said flatly. “I’m here for Patience.” I pushed myself up. “Let’s go.” Aadhya and Liesel weren’t very enthusiastic about getting up, but they did it. I got ahead of them a little, banging open doors to the language labs, looking inside, banging back out. I was aggressive about it, letting doors slam and crash. The noise didn’t travel properly, but as long as I kept on making it, I could almost fill the heavy muffling air.
Then they caught up to me, and Liesel stopped me opening the next door. “Listen!” she hissed.
We all stood holding our breath, and faintly from down the hall I heard a low murmuring sound, like voices talking on the other side of a wall. I didn’t move for a moment. I’d half been hoping to be attacked, for Patience to come at me roaring and horrible and fast, so fast I could just kill it right away, kill it without hearing anything any of its mouths might have to say to me.
Finally I forced myself back into motion, and we went down the corridor. The murmuring grew louder, still unintelligible but more clearly a single voice speaking, speaking without a pause. I couldn’t understand the words. I stood outside the door another thousand years before I shoved it open and went inside.
It was one of the honors language labs, the small ones with the nice private carrels and the padded headphones. I’d been languages track my entire career, but I’d never been assigned to one of them. I ought to have been sure of at least one course in here during my senior year, but instead I’d been loaded up with four interdisciplinary seminar classes and not a single straightforward language class, and yes I could still feel bitter about it, or at least I tried to still feel bitter, tried to hold on to that nice small feeling of resentment and spite as hard as I could.
The room wasn’t especially large by Scholomance standards. The Patience in my memory would have filled it completely. But the back half was sunk in darkness, and the murmuring was coming from in there. I was tight all through my body as Aadhya sent the glimmerball shooting forward—but the room was still empty. There had been fighting in here at some point: a handful of carrels had been smashed apart, and a set of massive clawed gouges ran in parallel along the ceiling, through the overhead lamps, and down the far wall, like a dragon had been thrashing around wildly. But whatever had done the fighting was gone. The murmuring was coming from the headphones dangling from one of the carrels, repeating a lesson in a language I didn’t know.
Aadhya let out an explosive breath that helped me let go of the one I hadn’t noticed I was holding on to, and we all just stood there a little bit shakily, until Liesel reached out and took the headphones and unplugged them, to stop the endless murmuring noise.
We slogged onwards up to the cafeteria, the wreckage of our last breakfast still left on the tables: no one had bothered to bus their trays. We followed the speakers through the library stacks, a weirdly short walk: sections seemed to have entirely disappeared, and the ones that were left were mostly full of introductory textbooks in rubbishy condition. The books were all slipping off the shelves by the dozens, I suppose, going wherever books of magic hide when they don’t want to be on a shelf. I had an instinctive burst of alarm about the Golden Stone sutras, back home with Mum. I wasn’t paying enough attention to them, I should have cleaned the cover, I should have told them how wonderful they were—all the habits I’d built over senior year.
And I missed them, with a sharp jab of pain; I missed Mum, missed home, wanted to be there with every atom of my body again, as if coming back into the Scholomance had erased away all the confusion and misery of her revelation, and replaced them with the much larger misery of being in here, hunting for what was left of Orion, so I could kill him.
We followed our thread through the labyrinth of the library stacks and back down again through the other half of the school. We passed the wreckage of the Maleficaria Studies auditorium: we’d torn the loathed place apart for building supplies at the end of last year, and the damage there had only worsened, the outer walls left gaping. The new freshman dormitory level ought to have been visible on the other side and wasn’t, only pitch-black void there past the handful of skeletal girders still standing. A few partial mals still peered out at us from the walls, but they stayed in the almost-destroyed instructive mural and didn’t come alive the way they’d used to sometimes, in class; they were just flat paintings now.
That was the closest we got to seeing a mal or for that matter anything even moving. “The maw-mouth in London ran from you. It knew you could kill it, even before you knew,” Liesel said as we slogged back down the stairs to the workshop floor. “Patience must be hiding.”
“How can a maw-mouth the size of a barn hide?” Aadhya said.
“Maw-mouths are oozes,” Liesel said. “It could simply spread itself out between two floors.”
We all looked down at our feet with an involuntary flinch, even Liesel. “Except we already hacked up the school all over the place,” Aadhya said after a moment, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself. “Half the rooms have some floor and ceiling panels missing. We’d have seen it.”
I wasn’t convinced; none of us had spotted Patience before graduation, had we? For lack of any better ideas, we went into a classroom and Aadhya took the legs off one of the old metal chairs and reshaped them into pry bars. We started lifting up floor panels as we went and sending the glimmerball inside. It slowed our progress to even more of a crawl. If we were going to do an exhaustive search, we ought to have gone back up and started at the library, but we didn’t, in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going. We couldn’t possibly have done an exhaustive search of the Scholomance anyway. This place had been built to house five thousand wizards. An entire army of maleficaria could have avoided the three of us for years, much less a single mal.