“Is this going to help?” I asked bluntly, instead.
“Staying away would hurt,” she said, simply, and fair enough; I’d come for the same reason, after all.
“Okay, so can we all recognize that this is a totally pointless idea that I’m guessing you all liked because it was fast?” Aadhya was saying meanwhile, examining our jury-rigged pry bar. “They didn’t literally cover the well with dirt. You could rip up the entire garden and you still wouldn’t find it. We have to go through the artifice to get in.”
“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.