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.
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.