Chapter 2

Song understood better than most what Scholomance was: the shell-labyrinth of a god, a maze that was a maw. But such understanding was nothing to boast of when one had eyes like hers.

How could she ignore the malevolence lurking in the walls when it was naked to her gaze, ghostly vines creeping along walls, floor and ceiling whenever the beast paid the Thirteenth attention? Yet usually that attention was… fragmented, divided. An eye out of a hundred, Scholomance keeping a sliver of itself watching every potential meal and picking out the weakest of the herd. Years of being starved after Port Allazei’s abandonment had diminished the god.

When the Watch returned, Scholomance was too sluggish to stop it creating a handful of safe paths through it belly – spikes of a material it could not touch hammered into the ground, nailing down the Material securely enough not even the god inside the walls could move it. Scholomance might be some great beast, Song had thought, but it was one grown so emaciated you could see its ribs through the skin. Or it used to be emaciated, at least.

As the Thirteenth walked across the bridge, Song beheld the thing inhabiting Scholomance and wondered if this was what the god had looked like at the height of its power. Back when the school first closed, too bloody a business even for the Watch. A sea of smoky tendrils snaked through stone and brass, curling lovingly around statues and creeping over glass like eldritch frost. The god was everywhere, its vine-like presence pulsing as if it were breathing.

Maybe it was, Song thought. Only it was not air that was being sucked in.

Between the dark turn her expression had taken and the equally grim warnings she and Maryam had given out, a pall fell over her brigade as it entered the plaza spread out before the gates of Scholomance. From the corner of her eye Song watched as Tristan tripped forward, brushing Angharad’s side. Fake, she assessed.

“Sorry,” Izel called out.

The tinker, who had been just behind Tristan, was apologizing not because his feet had been anywhere near Tristan’s but because that was who Izel Coyac was. Song had never in her life met an Izcalli who apologized so much, much less one of such high birth.

“It’s fine,” Tristan dismissed, “I was not paying attention.”

He moved away from Angharad, waited three beats then let out a cackle that would have made Sakkas proud.

“And neither was Tredegar,” he crowed in triumph, holding out a small purse.

Angharad, instead of promptly stabbing him for having picked her pocket, looked even more pleased than he did.

“I hadn’t noticed at all!” she happily exclaimed. “You have gotten much better.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Tristan replied, bowing in a display of humility about as humble as a day-long parade. “I finally got the trick with the brush-on, I think.”

“You did,” Angharad assured him. “It used to be I could tell when you slipped your fingers out of the pocket, but now-”

Song hid a smile as she tuned out the enthusiastic prattling, having noticed two things the others had not. First was that while Tristan’s technique had improved, he had actually tricked Angharad by using Izel’s propensity to apologize without thinking as a way to sell his tripping. Angharad tended to trust the word of others by default, so she had unconsciously assumed Izel truly had tripped him. However fine a thief Tristan Abrascal was, he was a better trickster.

The second thing Song noticed was that Tristan was making such a production of his petty victory to distract the brigade from what lay ahead, so that anxiety would not eat away at them all the way there. A glance at Maryam told her the latter at least had been noticed by someone else, though of course her friend was looking at him with a little more fondness than warranted. Almost like she was sweet on him. Which she was.

Song had yet to decide if that whole affair was a disaster in the making or not. So far the pair was keeping that unspoken thing between them buried so she had not intervened, but nothing stayed buried forever. Not even burnt chickens, which a woman might have to dig out and dispose of before a cucumber plot would come to overlap with the burial site.

“Captain Wen is here,” Izel noted. “I did not know we would be meeting with him this morning.”

Her gaze snapped up to follow the tinker’s, finding what he had. There were at least twenty older blackcloaks of all stripes idling around the plaza, but Wen had a… presence that stood out, making him hard to miss.

“I had not planned to,” Song muttered. “Let us find out what he wants.”

Captain Wen Duan stood near the wide-open gates of Scholomance, chatting with another blackcloak in that Akelarre tunic the signifiers sometimes wore instead of their regular uniform. The corpulent man was tearing into a bag of fried paste-stuffed dough balls with all the mercilessness of an Izcalli warlord. The Thirteenth’s patron was like a bloodhound for small but savory food shops, somehow being on first name terms with half the shopkeepers in Allazei even though eating out so much should have bankrupted an officer of his rank and pay.

Song was not the only one to notice the food, Tristan lengthening his stride to come and walk by her.

“Where did he even find bunuelos on this island?” he said as they crossed the plaza, disbelief thick in his tone. “That churros shop doesn’t make them, I checked.”

“The dough balls?” Maryam asked from behind them.

“The same,” the thief said. “Though I can see there are sweet potatoes inside, so they’re using the Sarayan recipe.”

A true ocean of disdain was crammed into the word ‘Sarayan’, Song noted with amusement. The Heavenly Republics had old rivalries kept ever fresh by modern competing trade interests, but they were nothing compared to the centuries of accumulated scorn that Liergan’s successor-states wielded at each other. Tristan might think little of the Six and the city of his birth as a rule, but he could be quite defensive about Sacromontan food.

“Which, one assumes, is much inferior to the venerable Sacromontan recipe,” Angharad teased.

Considering Angharad Tredegar herself had strong opinions on salt – essentially that it was all mediocre except the stuff that came from a single small stretch of Pereduri coastline – Song did not believe she had much room to make fun of Tristan. Still, in the interests of peace she would allow that to pass without comment.

“You don’t need anything on but cinnamon,” Tristan muttered. “It’s festival fare, not a meal.”

It was not a long walk but Captain Wen still put away another two bunuelos by the time they arrived, loudly chewing while his companion animatedly talked. Song tore her gaze away from the massacre on display long enough to notice quite a few of the brigade patrons hanging around the plaza were also speaking with their brigade, said students looking as surprised as she felt. There must be something more to this than Wen wanting to get a few taunts in before graduation.

It was only when Wen’s interlocutor turned that Song put a name to him – Lieutenant Mitra, the Akelarre patron to the Fourth Brigade. With his usually messy hair pulled together in an orderly ponytail, Song hadn’t recognized him from behind. The man almost looked put together, at the moment. Almost.

“Good morning, Unluckies,” Captain Wen said.

As always, he slipped her a sly look when using the fucking nickname. She would not rise to his bait, it only incited him to keep doing this. While it might be too late to bury the sobriquet, Song refused to give him the pleasure of getting her to twitch every time he used it.

“Captain Wen,” she formally replied.

Staggered echoes from the others, which Wen Duan acknowledged by scarfing down another dough ball. Song kept her disgust at the messy chewing off her face, barely.

“We’ll be going in together,” Wen finally said once he had extracted his toll of visual violence. “In a bit.”

It was not a question and neither of them treated it as such. As the Thirteenth’s patron Wen Duan did have some authority over them, but this was strongly worded enough that Song would guess the order came from higher up.

“I was not told to expect you,” Song said, fishing.

Wen would have made her work for it, but he was not the only patron here.

“It was a last minute decision, Captain Ren,” Lieutenant Mitra told her. “Scholomance is being… capricious, this morning.”

Tristan openly grimaced at those words, which Song approved of – it lent her most of the satisfaction of doing it herself without the accompanying breach of decorum. Lieutenant Mitra glanced back at the open gates.

“It tried to undo a spiked path in the early hours,” the signifier elaborated. “The garrison prevented it, but if not for some quick shooting we might well have lost the corridors that lead to the Saga lecture halls.”

A pause.

“Loss is the natural destination of all things, joy being inherently perishable, but it would have been regrettable to lose the only path there that does not currently involve pendulum blade traps.”

Those again? They’d never killed a student, as far as Song knew, but Scholomance fixated on them for some reason. She’d asked Fortuna about it and been informed that the god was a ‘pretentious boor who needs to get on with the times’, a useless complaint the goddess had then refused to elaborate on.

The degree of fear Song had once held for the Lady of Long Odds had grown increasingly embarrassing as months passed.

“They are tacky,” Wen agreed. “Anyhow, a decision was made that these irregularities warrant students being assigned guides and that, inexplicably, this is a valid reason to cut into my beauty sleep.”

He paused, purely for emphasis.

“Detestable.”

Best bet not let him wind up, if he was allowed to get started on the ‘things he would let Tristan die in exchange’ for they’d be there all morning. That spiel was so well-trod that any day now it would qualify as a literary genre. Angharad cleared her throat.

“Might I ask what it is we are waiting for, captain? I would not want us to be late.”

“My cabal,” Lieutenant Mitra replied in Wen’s place.

He then glanced past the Thirteenth, raising an eyebrow.

“Who are nearly there, as it happens.”

Song turned and found the man was not exaggerating. The Fourth Brigade was crossing the plaza as they watched, the pack of them tightly clustered. Tupoc Xical had not changed a whit in all the time Song knew him, still the same pale-eyed and perfectly symmetrical Izcalli prick, but there had been changes around him. Cressida Barboza was at his side, for one, the dark-haired hatchet of a Mask that had survived the disgrace of the Eleventh by putting a bullet in one of her fellow cabalists

Attempts to saddle her with the name of ‘Turncoat’ had not stuck beyond Tupoc’s own use, mostly because Barboza was not above poisoning in retaliation and only Tupoc could shrug off snake venom.

Bait, also known as Adarsh Hebbar, had not been so lucky. The bespectacled Someshwari seemed to have made his peace with his own sobriquet, however, not that it made him any less nervous around the others. Even in formal uniform he looked like he was somehow curling in on himself. He stuck close to the last of the four, the only one of them Song actually liked.

Alejandra Torrero had not, to her genuine surprise, held a grudge over the wound she took while under Song’s contract and command. Her right arm was gone up to the elbow, replaced by a cast-iron prosthetic that she still struggled with and the already habitual scowl on her face was now a near-permanent fixture. As always, Alejandra wore the black wide-brimmed hat that had once belonged to Velaphi. They’d been friends, of a sort, and though his death had been the sort a Skiritai aspired to the grief of it had followed her back to Tolomontera.

As her wound had healed well and she could still signify without trouble, Alejandra’s position as second-in-command of the Fourth was unchanged. This despite Barboza’s attempts to dislodge her from that role several times, as Alejandra had ranted to her copiously.

“Good morning, Unluckies!” Tupoc called out with a grin.

Too late, Song thought with dark satisfaction. The worst of the displeasure had been bled out by Wen already, like a preventive leeching.

“It is getting worse by the moment,” she replied without batting an eye.

Sadly, in the aftermath of Asphodel it had been impossible to avoid some degree of association with the Fourth Brigade. Not only did Song Ren as an individual and the Thirteenth as a brigade owe them money, as the two brigades who had been in the thick of the now infamous ‘Three Risings’ their reputations had become heavily intertwined in the eyes of other students.

Some degree of accord had been necessary, if only so the Fourth could not pull them into its petty feuds. Song had told the brigade she would deal with Alejandra directly, since she was likely to shoot Tupoc in the head if forced to deal with him regularly. Disgustingly, he had reacted as if this were a love confession. Still, with the man’s tacit agreement was born the custom of meeting Alejandra Torrero every three weeks to keep their common affairs in order.

This once formal occasion had so progressively slumped into five minutes of official talk followed by drinks and venting about their brigades that Song genuinely could not tell when the change had begun.

“Alejandra,” she added with a polite nod. “Adarsh, Turncoat.”

“Song,” Alejandra replied, a twitch of the lips temporarily cracking her scowl.

The usual ensued. Tristan and Barboza eyed each other from the corner of their eyes like cats unwilling to share an alley, Maryam and Alejandra traded brusque respect and Tupoc tried to get a rise out of Angharad while pretending Izel did not exist. There was an almost familiar rhythm to it by now. If someone had told Song a year ago that the brigade closest to hers would be the Fourth, she would have gone looking for a way to exorcise the curse. Yet here they all were.

“Let us head inside,” Lieutenant Mitra said, clapping his hands. “The irreversible forward march of time is indifferent to even our most desperate longings.”

“He only uses that one when he thinks we’re going to be late,” Alejandra whispered, falling in besides Song as they took the head of the impromptu column, right behind the teachers.

“You ought to start writing these pearls of wisdom down,” Song said. “Make a proper gospel.”

“He’s a very fine signifier,” the other woman sighed. “There’s a reason your Captain Wen waited for him before going in.”

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

That little detail hadn’t escaped Song. The god of Scholomance shifted its labyrinth-shell largely as it wished when the part of the school in question was not either nailed down with a spike or a room with people inside. That meant navigating it could become nigh impossible, if you wandered off the beaten paths, and there were only two reliable ways to survive doing so: tools called ‘roseless compasses’ and the powers of a signifier.

By glimpsing ahead with their Signs, the signifier ‘fixed’ the path in the same way it would be were someone standing in the middle of it. It was not surefire thing, but then within the walls of Scholomance sureties were in short supply.

Just past the great doors stood one of the few fixed points of the school, an antechamber whose many doors led into half a dozen directions on the sides. The paths were marked by the spikes the Watch had hammered into the floor, each bearing the ribbon of the color designating one of the four student divisions, but today it was not to the sides they headed. It was straight forward, past a second set of ornate gates into the great hall.

The quiet feeling of it was deceptive. The hall seemed a peaceful place, with the tall and arched ceiling filtering in the light of the Orrery through rows of round windows. The tile floor had long been cleared of debris and now the only decoration of the room seemed to be the two rows of worn statues set before the supporting pillars and facing each other from across the room.

That emptiness was a trick of the eye, as behind the pillars were hidden niches where the god could place doors or worse. Scholomance could slip lemures into the hall this way, and had, but that’d not been the talk of the students half as much as when the god had once thrown a fit over a new path being forged to the Teratology classrooms. It made several doors lead into a body of water, flooding half the hall and almost drowning a girl. Once it’d allegedly connected a door to some kind of furnace, too, which had spewed out smoke and flame before some enterprising captain managed to get it shut.

Another two brigades were at the other end of the hall, walking through doors that’d not existed last time Song had a look at the hall. Beautiful cast-iron work, each made to look like a single bat wing. More interesting were the spikes hammered into the threshold and into the hallway beyond, which bore no ribbon and was thus not one of the classroom paths. That and the way Scholomance was furiously trying to get rid of these spikes, anyway, tendril of smoke boiling around them.

The school kept shifting the grounds below them, but whatever these tools were made of was preventing direct manipulation of the ground they touched. Alejandra, still at her side, suddenly winced.

“The god’s in a foul mood,” she replied to Song’s questioning look. “Like a child throwing a tantrum.”

“Banging toys and fists on the ground,” Maryam grimly agreed from behind them. “The noise in the aether is…”

They both grimaced, which was description enough. Lieutenant Mitra looked entirely serene, though, as if the unpleasantness rolled right off him. A reminder that however skilled Maryam and Alejandra were at signifying, they were still students.

It took minutes to cross the hall, which led them into a hallway just as intricately decorated as the new gates. Ironwork on all the walls and ceiling depicted strange and incomplete creatures. Some were snakelike, others horned like rams and others halfway bats. There were even some doglike things without faces. None looked like any lemure Song had heard of in Teratology.

The hallway stretched and narrowed, curving and rising seemingly without care for where it should be within Scholomance, and there was only one way forward. On some stretches it seemed like the god was covering every inch of iron and stone with itself, the tendrils of smoke so numerous they looked like a solid wall – though they fled the touch of the blackcloaks, always curling out just of the way as boots hit the floor.

“We are close now,” Lieutenant Mitra told them. “I’ve locked the exit into place.”

The gates they reached were a mirror of the ones they had entered the hallway through, and looking at the vast expanse before them for a heartbeat Song thought they’d somehow looped back around. The thought did not survive even a single step into the chamber beyond, for though the great hall they had come through was large this was…

Temple, Song thought, was too small a word for this. Eight pillars held up a roof so high there was fog beneath it, each as large as a house and sculpted with such detail at first glance they looked a living thing. The stone was of a dim red so dark it straddled the line of black, and what they depicted disturbed the eye. Roots and branches and bones, all intertwined with tentacles that looked disgustingly fleshy. There was a sense of ugly blindness to it, as if the flesh belonged to something that had dwelled in the abyss so long it knew not the taste of Glare.

Thousands could have stood here, on this floor built of great square stones crawling with cryptoglyphs and scratchy symbols that ached behind your eyes to behold. The walls on either side were of the same stone as the pillars, but polished so perfectly that even in full awareness of what she was looking at Song still caught herself thinking of them as not there.

And that ceiling, gods, fog or not her eyes should have seen it. She could make out dull orbs of worn iron through the fog, hanging in the air and emanating the dim red light that filled the room like a haze, but when she tried to see the ceiling itself? It always seemed to be just a little too far, a little out of focus. She wrenched her gaze away, swallowing, and found thst across the colossal temple ground some hulking shape was waiting. Not a sculpture, she thought but-

“Sleeping God,” Angharad whispered. “It’s his throne, isn’t it? The Morningstar’s.”