My foot came down hard on a jagged broken stone. I almost went sprawling on my face before I caught my balance, clenching my abdominal muscles tight instead of using my hands, and straightened up with the evocation of refusal in my mouth and my hands held up in front of me, ready to push it out, but I didn’t need to. Nothing attacked me.
I couldn’t see a thing, but I had a strong impression of space round me, and a moment later Liesel and Aadhya were there on either side of me. We all nearly went over again as they both instantly jerked into casting positions themselves. The floor under our feet was so uneven we were more or less falling down against one another. A faint light appeared a moment later: Aadhya had taken out a round glimmerball, a lacework of gilt brass over a crystal innard, with a satellite ring of brass around it and tiny little propellers like a drone. She gave it an underhand toss upwards, and it whirred to life and brightened slowly, shining over an enormous cavern, so huge it must have been almost as large as the entire gardens overhead, a hollow excavation that made everything up above belatedly feel precarious.
You could tell there had been a massive plaza down here once, with columns and fountains carved into the walls all around: possibly some sort of protective artifice. Now they were only vague suggestions of caryatids and lion’s-heads beneath thick layers of dirt and sludge. There was a green wet dripping everywhere, a stink of mold and stagnant water, and of rust; old scattered relics of dead maleficaria, scorched shells and cracked bits of constructs.
Across the center slab of the stone floor, they’d carved the familiar words at the heart of the Scholomance: To offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world, and around them in curving patterns were monumental versions of the same spells that had been engraved into the Scholomance doors, a litany of protection. I spotted Malice, keep far, this gate wisdom’s shelter guards: deep letters filled with gold that was still bright despite a glaze of algae.
But the spell was cracked right through gate, a wide dark fissure crossing the curved shape of the words. Massive slabs of stone heaved up in every direction at sharp angles, piles of crumbled shards. The whole plaza was shattered in a sunburst of jagged cracks—radiating out from the immense bronze doors of the Scholomance, which were hanging askew out of their frame in the cavern wall. It looked—well, it looked like a supervolcano spell had gone off here in the recent past.
There was nothing else moving in the whole chamber, except the dripping water coming down from some leaky place overhead, plinking every few moments. There were gaping cracks between the doors and the frame, big enough we should have been able to see through them, but even in the glimmerball’s light, there was nothing but pitch dark on the other side. It could have been a shallow niche in the cavern wall; it could have been the unlit graduation hall; it could have been the empty void. It could have been the side of an enormous maw-mouth, pressed up tightly against the doors on the other side, trying to get out.
“I’m going in,” I said. My voice echoed weirdly off the walls round me, unbalanced. “Stay here.”
“And wait for Patience to come fleeing out ahead of you?” Liesel said caustically. “No. We are safer with you than alone.”
Aadhya just said, “Let’s go.”
I didn’t argue. Maybe I’d known all along that they would come with me, and I’d only told myself that I’d stop them because it was horribly selfish to drag them along, and so I’d had to pretend I wasn’t going to do it. I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.
We went into the Scholomance.
I don’t know how to describe what that was like, going back in through the doors, knowing what was on the other side. I don’t mean Patience, not just Patience. The Scholomance was on the other side, and that was so much worse than any one mal could have been. We’d considered a few plans, last year, in our frantic hunting for ideas, that had involved the younger kids leaving the Scholomance for a while and going back, and we’d abandoned all of them. You could only go into the Scholomance once, when you didn’t understand where you were going: to the endless awful hope of getting out, a hope you could only buy with other people, who were all trying to buy the same hope with you, and the open maw of Patience and Fortitude waiting at the end so you couldn’t even be sure of getting out by dying. Once you understood, once you’d been in it and got out, you couldn’t go back in. But we had to.