“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 the ceremony—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.
“It would be everyone,” Liu said. “Nobody could get out, even the person who blocked the path. But someone in there might want to 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 you aren’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. We know there’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 apparently outweighed a substantial risk of bodily harm. I didn’t quite want the 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, to work, 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 might look the 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 on our 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.