I didn’t either, and I didn’t want them anyway. I didn’t care where the other mals had gone. I couldn’t care about anything except what I was here for, and I couldn’t think about that because I would have started screaming. I just walked out across the hall, and Aadhya and Liesel came after me. The huge maintenance shafts were still standing wide open on either side of the hall, the ones we’d used to funnel the mals through the school. A skinny ladder ran up the inside wall, looking tiny and precarious in the vast gaping space. I got onto it and started the climb.
The glimmerball whirred and flitted around up above our heads as we went, illuminating a globe around us that faded out into solid dark above and below. I’d just have gone on climbing mindlessly, but after the floor disappeared into the dark, Aadhya said from below, “The shafts are sixty feet tall, and every twelve rungs is ten feet. It shouldn’t be too long,” and Liesel started counting them off loudly, one after another, fixing us in space. And when she finished counting off the last one, I reached up my fingers without looking and they found the edge of the floor. I pulled myself up the last few rungs and onto the floor of the workshop, the glimmerball bobbing out into the big space just ahead of us.
We did find signs of the horde’s passage. The edge of the shaft that I’d climbed out of was gouged with claw marks, all the worktables smashed and overturned with scorch marks and dried slime trails left across the floors, scattered limbs and shells where they’d been dropped, most of them gnawed and cracked: mals would eat each other when they couldn’t get delicious wizard children instead. But there still weren’t any actual mals anywhere. Liesel even picked up one of the furnace pokers and jabbed at the ceiling panels overhead, which ought to have stirred up at least a few baby flingers or larval digesters, but nothing.
Aadhya took Pinky out of her pocket. “What do you think? Chance you could sniff out a maw-mouth?” she said to him.
That wasn’t an act of cruelty or anything; under ordinary circumstances, mice—even magical familiar mice—were well beneath the notice of a maw-mouth. Most maw-mouths won’t even stop to eat a single wizard. Their idea of a midday snack is ten of us at a minimum. But Pinky just gave a loud squeak of protest and made a leap out of her hand and onto the side of her dress and squirmed himself back down into the pocket. Precious stuck her own pink nose out just long enough to chitter in vociferous agreement.
“What about you?” I said aloud to the air, asking the school itself. “I’d think you’d want me to do for Patience. It would certainly protect the wise-gifted children of the world.”
I was sorry that I’d done it as soon as the words finished leaving my mouth: the only thing that came back was the opposite of an answer. The sound of my raised voice died away too quickly in the air that I now couldn’t help but notice felt strange and thin. Our breath was misting. It was cold, and not just cold the way the tunnels had been after the heat of the gardens outside. The workshop should have been full of noises: the grinding of gears, endless fans rotating, the gurgle of the pipes and the roaring furnaces. Instead it was silent, muffled.
The Scholomance was dying.
And yes, it was still being fed with mana, with belief. But you could tell it wasn’t all there anymore, either. I had the strong sense of living in the hushed moment just before an old rotten tree falls in the forest, inside the held breath, waiting.
Waiting, in our case, directly under the creaking tree. “I think we should just start looking,” Aadhya said, with sensible urgency.
“Let us follow the path the maleficaria would have taken,” Liesel said, and pointed up at the speaker wires rigged to the ceiling, where the honeypot song had been piped out to all the mals, luring them along. Long pieces of wire were dangling down like caterpillar threads: it was lucky we’d had half a dozen backups for every connection.
We went along the line all through the warren of the seminar rooms and then finally up the stairs to the next floor. For a long stretch we had only the yawning void on our left, where the junior dormitories should have been; apparently they’d crumbled away and taken the outer wall of the main school with them. We crept past it clinging to the inside wall, half plastering ourselves against it, and when we didn’t find a single mal anywhere in the alchemy labs, and the wires would have led us up the main staircase to the third floor, we detoured and found the interior staircase instead. It wasn’t much better. The stairs and corridors had always been the thinnest and most flexible parts of the school. We were a long time getting up to the language labs, my legs burning with the acid pain of climbing. We only had Aadhya’s glimmer to keep us from pitch dark: all the lights were out. It made every muscle from the top of my head to the bottom of my spine tight with well-trained anxiety: this was how you got taken out, stupidly going up a bad way. Something would always be waiting, something would leap out at you. Something should have leapt out at us.