Nothing did. The strange unnatural quiet was broken by occasional nerve-racking groans and creaks that sounded less like machinery working and more like something large about to break off and fall on our heads. Eventually we made it up to the language labs and all just sat down on the floor of the corridor together to catch our breath and let our legs stop whinging. We hadn’t stopped on the stairs: possibly it would have been all right if we had, but no one who had made it through six months in the Scholomance would ever stay to find out.
“This makes no sense,” Aadhya said, between panting. “Patience can’t have eaten all the other mals. There were a million of them,” which might have been an exaggeration, but it had certainly felt close at the time. “Some of them would have got away or hidden.”
“It was not only Patience,” Liesel said. “The maleficaria were lured here to hunt. When we were all gone, they would have fed on each other, and the school has been devouring as many of them as it could catch with the wards.” It sounded plausible, but I could tell she didn’t believe her own words. She was only selling it the way you would an essay question on an exam when you hadn’t a clue of the real answer.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said flatly. “I’m here for Patience.” I pushed myself up. “Let’s go.” Aadhya and Liesel weren’t very enthusiastic about getting up, but they did it. I got ahead of them a little, banging open doors to the language labs, looking inside, banging back out. I was aggressive about it, letting doors slam and crash. The noise didn’t travel properly, but as long as I kept on making it, I could almost fill the heavy muffling air.
Then they caught up to me, and Liesel stopped me opening the next door. “Listen!” she hissed.
We all stood holding our breath, and faintly from down the hall I heard a low murmuring sound, like voices talking on the other side of a wall. I didn’t move for a moment. I’d half been hoping to be attacked, for Patience to come at me roaring and horrible and fast, so fast I could just kill it right away, kill it without hearing anything any of its mouths might have to say to me.
Finally I forced myself back into motion, and we went down the corridor. The murmuring grew louder, still unintelligible but more clearly a single voice speaking, speaking without a pause. I couldn’t understand the words. I stood outside the door another thousand years before I shoved it open and went inside.
It was one of the honors language labs, the small ones with the nice private carrels and the padded headphones. I’d been languages track my entire career, but I’d never been assigned to one of them. I ought to have been sure of at least one course in here during my senior year, but instead I’d been loaded up with four interdisciplinary seminar classes and not a single straightforward language class, and yes I could still feel bitter about it, or at least I tried to still feel bitter, tried to hold on to that nice small feeling of resentment and spite as hard as I could.
The room wasn’t especially large by Scholomance standards. The Patience in my memory would have filled it completely. But the back half was sunk in darkness, and the murmuring was coming from in there. I was tight all through my body as Aadhya sent the glimmerball shooting forward—but the room was still empty. There had been fighting in here at some point: a handful of carrels had been smashed apart, and a set of massive clawed gouges ran in parallel along the ceiling, through the overhead lamps, and down the far wall, like a dragon had been thrashing around wildly. But whatever had done the fighting was gone. The murmuring was coming from the headphones dangling from one of the carrels, repeating a lesson in a language I didn’t know.
Aadhya let out an explosive breath that helped me let go of the one I hadn’t noticed I was holding on to, and we all just stood there a little bit shakily, until Liesel reached out and took the headphones and unplugged them, to stop the endless murmuring noise.
We slogged onwards up to the cafeteria, the wreckage of our last breakfast still left on the tables: no one had bothered to bus their trays. We followed the speakers through the library stacks, a weirdly short walk: sections seemed to have entirely disappeared, and the ones that were left were mostly full of introductory textbooks in rubbishy condition. The books were all slipping off the shelves by the dozens, I suppose, going wherever books of magic hide when they don’t want to be on a shelf. I had an instinctive burst of alarm about the Golden Stone sutras, back home with Mum. I wasn’t paying enough attention to them, I should have cleaned the cover, I should have told them how wonderful they were—all the habits I’d built over senior year.