And I missed them, with a sharp jab of pain; I missed Mum, missed home, wanted to be there with every atom of my body again, as if coming back into the Scholomance had erased away all the confusion and misery of her revelation, and replaced them with the much larger misery of being in here, hunting for what was left of Orion, so I could kill him.
We followed our thread through the labyrinth of the library stacks and back down again through the other half of the school. We passed the wreckage of the Maleficaria Studies auditorium: we’d torn the loathed place apart for building supplies at the end of last year, and the damage there had only worsened, the outer walls left gaping. The new freshman dormitory level ought to have been visible on the other side and wasn’t, only pitch-black void there past the handful of skeletal girders still standing. A few partial mals still peered out at us from the walls, but they stayed in the almost-destroyed instructive mural and didn’t come alive the way they’d used to sometimes, in class; they were just flat paintings now.
That was the closest we got to seeing a mal or for that matter anything even moving. “The maw-mouth in London ran from you. It knew you could kill it, even before you knew,” Liesel said as we slogged back down the stairs to the workshop floor. “Patience must be hiding.”
“How can a maw-mouth the size of a barn hide?” Aadhya said.
“Maw-mouths are oozes,” Liesel said. “It could simply spread itself out between two floors.”
We all looked down at our feet with an involuntary flinch, even Liesel. “Except we already hacked up the school all over the place,” Aadhya said after a moment, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself. “Half the rooms have some floor and ceiling panels missing. We’d have seen it.”
I wasn’t convinced; none of us had spotted Patience before graduation, had we? For lack of any better ideas, we went into a classroom and Aadhya took the legs off one of the old metal chairs and reshaped them into pry bars. We started lifting up floor panels as we went and sending the glimmerball inside. It slowed our progress to even more of a crawl. If we were going to do an exhaustive search, we ought to have gone back up and started at the library, but we didn’t, in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going. We couldn’t possibly have done an exhaustive search of the Scholomance anyway. This place had been built to house five thousand wizards. An entire army of maleficaria could have avoided the three of us for years, much less a single mal.
But it shouldn’t have made a difference. We were looking for something that none of us wanted to find. In the Scholomance, that ought to have made it bog-easy. We should have turned a corner and there Patience would be, waiting for us, with Orion’s eyes and mouth staring out at me right at eye level. Half of what made the search agonizing was the certain knowledge that I was going to find exactly what I was looking for. Even if Patience was putting an enormous effort into hiding from us, even a modest effort on our side ought to have won out. Only we kept looking, and we kept not finding it.
“I’ll have to summon it,” I said finally, as we went down the last stairway, back to the workshop level.
“Well, that sounds amazing,” Aadhya said. “How can we have to summon a maw-mouth? That literally sounds like what you’d offer if you were trying to summon something good. Universe, bring me a basket of soma, and in return I’ll face the world’s biggest maw-mouth! Maybe you should try it that way.”
“It will not work either way,” Liesel said, savagely, and threw her pry bar down with a clang. We both paused and looked at her. “It isn’t here! We would have found it if it were here. It is not in the school.”
“Oh, okay, so now you think it’s worth considering the possibility that it did get out,” Aadhya said, dropping hers too, and putting her hands on her hips with a glare of outrage.
“No!” Liesel said. “If Patience could get out, the others could get out, too. None of them got out. The school lingers, but the maleficaria are gone. They spent their malia to survive as long as they could, but they dwindled and faded into the void. They are gone, and Patience is gone.”
She said it with the aggressive confidence of someone trying to impose their own truth on the universe, only in this case, I understood at once that she was trying to impose it on me. She didn’t really believe that all the horde and Patience had just quietly gone into the void. She’d only decided that, to her fury, something she didn’t understand in the least had happened to the mals and to Patience, and so we weren’t going to find Patience no matter what we did. And she didn’t want me trying to do a summoning, because she was concerned about what I would offer, to set Orion free. She was right to be concerned. I’d have to offer enough to break through whatever hideous thing had happened to all the mals, which was presumably even worse than all of them lumped together.