“The maw-mouth is at the council room,” Alfie said.
Alfie led us down the narrow staircase between the boulders. It ended in a strange small stony hollow, encircled by boulders taller than our heads, and one wall built of stone and marble, with an old Roman-temple-looking doorway. The pediment was held up by two statues of hooded figures, their heads bowed to hide their faces: a man holding an open book and a woman with a goblet in her hands. It was another piece of watchful artifice, just like the enchanted door we’d come through. As I went past them, I felt the strong sense that the man looked up from his book at me. But with Alfie in the lead, they let us through, into a dim hollow atrium.
I expect ordinarily it was a grand, dramatic space. There was a tiled mosaic floor beneath our feet, and statues lining up alongside a pool running the length of the room with a fountain at one end and a skylight overhead. There should have been an illusion of sky up there, made more believable by looking at it in the rippling water, but instead it was only the blank empty void, and the pool was still and pitch-dark, with nothing to reflect. The fountain spout was still letting a few drops fall occasionally like a leaking faucet, every unpredictable drop too-loud and echoing. This had to be the oldest part of the enclave, the one that had been built when London itself was just lurching its way towards becoming a city, and it was clearly meant to make you think of the glory that was Rome. Instead it felt like Pompeii just before the flames, a thin blanket of ash already laid down and more coming.
There was a single raised platform at the far end, with a table and chairs behind it that had the feeling of a bench in a courtroom: it was so clearly meant for a panel of grand superior enclavers to look down on someone come for an audience. This was surely where they welcomed the little people, the desperate supplicants come to be interviewed for the chance of an enclave space. I glared at the empty dais; I was ready to be angry at them even if I was here to help them. If the garden above was a fairy tale, there was another story being told in this place, one where the children never came home, and smiling wizards drank a soup of bones.
All the doorways off the room were leading to dark, just barely managing to suggest the slightest hint that there was something on the other side. Alfie stood for a moment uncertainly before he swallowed and set off through one to the left, with what I could only hope was confidence and not just blind hope. I followed after him, still seething, into an endless columned corridor, with more dark passages branching off to either side, and occasionally a tiny cell-like room: the height of enclave luxury in the days of yore, surely, but smaller than our Scholomance dorm rooms now. Standards had changed since the year 200.
I could barely see where we were going. There were sconces on the wall, but they were almost all dark, with only a handful still flickering with the tail ends of candlelight: just enough for us to barely see where we were putting our feet, and to make our shadows go dancing crazily over the walls around us, looming and wavering. The corridor went on for much longer than it possibly could have, even if the building was the size of a rugby pitch, stretching itself out with our unease. The sound of distant voices drifted out towards us from the side passageways, too muffled to make out words, clear enough to carry anxiety and fear. The nauseating heave of the mana ocean was still moving beneath my feet, and the anger leaked out of me little by little until it was all gone, and the only thing left was heavy cold dread.
All my Scholomance-honed instincts told me maleficaria were lurking on the other side of every dark doorway. The feeling only got stronger the further we went without being pounced on, because that always means one thing: there’s something worse up ahead, the kind of mal that eats the other mals, and it’s time to skive off from class and go to work in the library. Which was quite correct in this case, and we knew exactly what was up ahead. The very worst of the worse, and we were heading straight on towards it, and getting closer with every minute. The others knew it too; I could hear them all breathing raspily, loud in the narrow corridor. And then I realized it wasn’t only our breathing I was hearing.
They all realized it a moment later. Alfie stopped short. The murmuring through the network of passageways was resolving into clearer sounds: gasps, whimpers, sobbing breaths. A woman screamed, “Help, oh god, help me,” very briefly—a shrill exhausted cry that lasted only a moment, but echoed horribly down to us through half a dozen doorways. Someone who’d been eaten recently, if they still had the energy to be screaming. Probably someone Sarah had known: she’d drawn in a stuttering breath behind me, and when I glanced back, in the dim light I could see she had the back of her hand pressed over her mouth, tears gathered like a glaze over her dark eyes.