The mouth of the labyrinth was solidly black—no fairy lights down here now—and we didn’t need anyone to tell us that it wasn’t going to be a perfunctory symbolic jaunt to the other side. We made a chain, holding hands, and I took the lead before we plunged into the passageway.
Our lights went out at once. As soon as we were all in the dark, I could hear other people, other voices, somewhere up ahead. I had one hand on the craggly wall, and when a tunnel mouth opened up, the voices came more clearly, on cold creeping gusts of wind. I stopped and listened, but I couldn’t make out words or even language over the sound of our breathing. I wasn’t sure whether to turn or not, and I had to decide. Finally I kept going: it felt too soon. We needed to go further in.
We passed another tunnel branching on the right, and one more on the left, whispers of sharp wind biting along my arms. I wanted to turn off even more badly each time, but I felt even more certain that it was too soon. The tunnel roof began to lower, and the walls narrowed in, more oppressive with every step, as if the whole terrible weight of the Scholomance was coming down on us somewhere overhead.
And finally we came to another branch, a narrow crack on the left barely big enough to go into, and it didn’t feel as though it would be a relief to go that way. The breath of cold refreshing air blew down towards us from the tunnel up ahead, instead, and I had a faint sense of opening up. I put my hand out overhead, and the tunnel roof sloped a tiny bit away, rising. I turned away from it, and squeezed myself through the tight opening, into the branching passage.
The voices began to get louder almost at once, and the tunnel twisted one way and then another and dumped us abruptly into another well, the same size around as the other one but made of rough-hewn slabs and columns that looked as though they were falling into each other, propping each other up.
There was a spiraling ramp in front of us, and it ran upwards to a wide open circle above that was full of stars and fresh air, but that wasn’t the way we were going. I remembered the place from our infuriating tourist visit, when we’d been slogging around futilely trying to find the way in. At the time, this well hadn’t been any deeper than the other one. It had stopped here. But now it kept going down. The voices were coming from below, echoing up through the hollow middle from a dark place down below, further in. We went down the spiral, down and down and down three more sloping circles, and then abruptly the ramp bottomed out in the massive cavern before the Scholomance doors, the one Aadhya and Liesel and I had found before.
Only this time, the whole place was full of wizards.
The doors had been fixed up, set back into their frame, and there were dozens of people in front of them, manning fortifications that were growing more elaborate by the moment. I recognized one of them: Ruth, the woman I’d seen in the train station in New York. She was sitting in a folding chair directly in front of the doors, in the middle of the shattered starburst of the floor. She looked just as beleaguered and weary as before, but every few moments she lifted her hand, with the vague impression it was a massive effort, and then she moved it just a bit, the same smoothing motion you’d use to pet the back of a ruffled cat, and another square meter of the ground pressed itself flat away from her. The engraved words of the spells settled back into place as she did it. One of them had just been made whole, and it went flaring gold with renewed power, which was just nonsense: you couldn’t mend artifice that complex, only obviously she could. She must have been controlling the entire floor on an atomic level.
But opposite the New York crew, at the far side of the cavern where the ground hadn’t been quite so badly smashed up, a second array of wizards were putting together the mirror image of their work: siege machines. The magical sort, long narrow lances mounted on a lightweight metal frame, piercing spells like Khamis’s spear, meant to get through a shield. They were being lined up on either side of a pair of long red banners blazoned with the characters for Shanghai in gold, and a pair of golden ones with Jaipur written out in red.
No one paid any attention to us at first. There were only eight of us, after all, and eight wizards weren’t especially important on the scale of this fight. Another dozen appeared on both sides just while I was watching, wizards who hadn’t had to take the long way in; near the golden Jaipur banners there was a horizontal pulley set up, ropes going into a big curtained box like a magic trick. “That’s a ghandara,” Aadhya said, low. “Long-distance transport artifice. You can pull things in from more than ten miles away.” Four wizards were cranking the gears round as fast as they could go, and every four or five turns, the ropes came out with a wizard on the other end clinging to them, blindfolded, to be quickly helped off and sent into the frantic preparations.
I couldn’t see what the New York side was using, but wizards were coming from somewhere over there as well, more of them every few minutes, like clowns piling improbably out of a car. There was a command center to one side of the doors, a raised metal floor with sections unfolded out from its sides, ready to shut itself back up again into an armored box when the enemy fire began to fly, loaded with senior wizards in there directing things; I spotted Christopher Martel among them talking to a Japanese woman, presumably Chisato Sasaki from Tokyo, and a tall dark-haired man that Caterina said was Bastien Voclain, the Dominus of Paris. Maybe Liesel’s target was over there: Herta Fuchs of Munich was surely in that crowd, and her daughter and son-in-law might have come along. There were a few other American wizards looking sufficiently impressive that they must also have been Domini or whatever the plural ought to be. And seated amidst the rest of them, an old woman with a tidy cap of silver hair in a black dress with a collar of sapphires and diamonds, who might have modeled herself after a Hepburn photo shoot: Aurelina Vance, the Domina of New York.
On the Shanghai side, the command center was less obvious; there were a dozen cloth pavilions up at the back in ornate drapery, red and blue and green embroidered with silver and gold, concealing anything going on inside. But surely they had their own ranks of the powerful and important gathering.
My plan was already well off the rails, because the one person I didn’t see was Ophelia, anywhere. I would have liked to believe that something had gone wrong for her, that she’d lost her grip on power, but I didn’t. If I couldn’t see her, that only meant she was doing something even more horrible than anything I could have imagined, and I had no idea what it was or how to stop it. I didn’t know which side to go to. Presumably Shanghai’s side would have had a stronger interest in helping me stop her, but I’d be more likely to get information about what she was doing on the American one.
I stood there like a lump dithering over which side to go to. It didn’t seem like a choice I’d get to make twice. There was a feeling of a critical mass being reached, as if the space couldn’t hold much more of us, of mana. If I wasn’t imagining it, the ceiling was receding up into an increasing dark that didn’t belong in the world. This many wizards using this much magic all together was making the place become less real.