We scrambled and slid across the shattered stone floor over to the doors. I put my hands on the right-hand one, which was more or less still on its upper hinge and could be pushed. I didn’t try it right away. I shut my eyes and told myself the school was still there, still right over there. It had been there forever, it had been there for more than a hundred years, for the lives of tens of thousands of wizards; of course it was still there. It was still there, and so was Patience, and I didn’t want to go back, but I had to. So it had to be there.
Liesel put her hand on my shoulder. “The doors are here, so certainly we can get back inside,” she said, with iron certainty. “It will just take mana. You get us through. I will have a recoiler spell ready. That will give you enough time to put up the evocation.”
Aadhya hadn’t been with us in London, but she got the idea. She called back the glimmerball, closing her hand tight around it, so the light didn’t show us what was or wasn’t on the other side of the cracks. She put her other hand on my shoulder, too. “I’ll put the light up as soon as we’re through.”
I don’t know if they felt as confident about getting through as they sounded, but that didn’t really matter; they helped me be more sure about it. I took a deep breath and pushed on the door.
It should at least have creaked, but it didn’t budge at all. The entire horde of mals might as well have been on the other side trying to keep it shut. I put my head down and braced my heels, pushing harder, a burn starting across my shoulder blades. I didn’t consciously pull mana, but the power-sharer on my wrist began heating up, as if mana was being sucked through me so fast that I wasn’t even feeling it in my own body. “Come on, let us in,” I said under my breath, not really a spell; I was talking to the school, I suppose, which had occasionally answered me before, and maybe it heard me. The doors groaned and shifted, and a triangle of dark opened up between them that was just barely large enough to duck through.
I stepped through the opening with Aadhya and Liesel still clutching my shoulders, ducking right behind me. Liesel made a quick jerk with her free hand before she even straightened, and I felt the recoiler spell go flashing out from us. If it hit anything, I didn’t hear it. I was ready to be attacked instantly, but nothing came at us. I couldn’t feel anything moving or stirring in the air around me.
Aadhya heaved the glimmerball up and ahead of us. We were standing on the dais in the graduation hall—on the one unbroken part of the dais. I’d been standing right in this same place when I’d cast my earth-shattering supervolcano spell, which I could tell because the outline of my footprints was marked out on the surface with negative space: a crazed starburst of cracks radiated out from it in every direction, through the entire hall.
The floor around the dais was covered with a thick horrible crust of dried-up rotting ooze, still glistening in a few places. I gagged at the faint familiar smell: the detritus of a thousand corpses, those lives I’d slaughtered out of Patience or Fortitude, left in a gush on the floor. There was a thick scorched line around the bottom of the dais still visible through the dried ooze, marking the line of the shield I’d put up to hold off the horde.
Orion had been right next to me when Patience had rolled through their ranks and slammed into it, trying to get at us. Trying to get out, just like us. And behind the maw-mouth, the whole room had been packed from wall to wall with maleficaria. They’d been pouring back down into the graduation hall, cramming every available inch of air and space.
Now the hall was empty. There wasn’t so much as an agglo creeping around a dark corner.
“Where did—” Aadhya said, and just stopped there; the word echoed unnaturally loud off the marble walls, before it died away just as unnaturally into stillness. Anyway she didn’t need to finish the sentence. We all had the exact same question in our heads.
“They can’t have got out,” Liesel said, almost angrily. “All of Portugal would be swarming with mals.”
I made the mistake of looking back at the smashed doors, and discovered I couldn’t see out into the cavern we’d come from. The gaping holes around the doors were just featureless black, as if there were nothing outside but the void, after all. I didn’t think the mals had got out. I looked back to stop thinking about it. The room here still felt solid enough; it wasn’t anything as bad as Yancy’s half-real pavilion. But the mals were gone, and if they hadn’t got out—
“Maybe they just—fell away into the void,” Aadhya said. “The school is being kept up by external mana, but there wasn’t anything inside for the mals to eat, so…” She trailed off, dubiously, as she should have; that would have been much too nice and convenient. Liesel shook her head, rejecting the idea, but she didn’t volunteer one of her own, just frowned in deep irritation that meant she didn’t have any plausible enough to believe in.