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Chapter 2
🕑 Added 2025-03-07 05:00:12 +0000 UTCSong 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 visible 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 them from 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 them. 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 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 one 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 the brigade as it entered the plaza spread 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 wasn’t 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 twice as fine a 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 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 the intervention 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 were 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.
“Oh, Captain Wen is here,” Izel noted. “I did not know we’d 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. “Still, 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 the regular uniform. The corpulent man was tearing into a bag of fried dough balls with some sort of paste stuffed inside 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 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’s 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 the Sacromontan. Still, in the interests of peace she would allow that to pass without comment.
“You don’t need anything 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, right now. 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 damnable 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 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 the matter 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 the 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 get started on that, 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 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 fair-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 wrist, 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. The worst of the displeasure had been bled out by Wen already.
“It is getting worse by the moment,” Song 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 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 desires.”
“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.”
That little detail hadn’t escaped Song, as it happened. 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 near-impossible, if you wandered off the beaten paths, and there were only two reliable ways to do 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 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 lines 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 supporting pillars and facing each other.
That emptiness was a trick of the eye, for behind the pillars were 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 at all. 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 were in. 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, depicting 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 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. And 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 across the colossal temple ground some hulking shape waited. Not a sculpture, she thought but-
“Sleeping God,” Angharad whispered. “It’s his throne, isn’t it? The Morningstar’s.”
Song breathed in sharply. Something about the shape of it had been catching her eye, some detail itching at her, and suddenly she understood: it was a skull. Something’s skull. Facing them, upside down, with the back of the great chair an unhinged jaw while the jawbones were straight enough to seem the edge of a dais. The nose hole and the hollow eye sockets were strangely shaped, enough to obscure what they were at first glance, and the top of the skull had been cut off at a slight angle with unnatural smoothness.
“It is genuine bone,” Lieutenant Mitra quietly said. “Though not even our teratologists can tell us of what.”
For the throne to seem so large even from across the grounds, the sheer size of it must be absurd. No smaller than a ship.
“Welcome,” Wen Duan said, “to the graduation hall.”
He raised his voice slightly for the last word and as if some invisible threshold had been passed an echo seized on it – reverberating it through the yawning emptiness of the throne room, first as the same word then breaking it down into whispers that turned increasingly sibilant.
“I don’t suppose,” Tristan said, “that the ceremony could be held anywhere else?”
“No,” Captain Wen said with a grunt. “And believe me, no one’s happy to be here.”
Lieutenant Mitra cleared his throat.
“No one sensible,” Wen amended.
The man looked at him with mild reproach, but much like a badger’s skin grew in thick to resist the sting of bees Wen Duan had grown a protective layer of disregard that made him immune to such things. A cleared throat, and Song turned.
“Can we touch it?” Tupoc seriously asked.
To her mild distress, Angharad also leaned in with open interest. Any moment now she’d ask if she could hack off a chunk of bone to put on a necklace. Malani.
“Sure,” Wen lazily said. “But your cabal’s got to mop up the chunks afterwards. I won’t be doing it.”
“No,” Lieutenant Mitra more sensibly replied. “It is trapped. And despite our best efforts to disarm this, the trap returns.”
Song cleared her throat.
“If I might ask where the ceremony is to take place, sir?”
“In front of the trapped throne,” Wen told her.
Of course it was, Song darkly thought as she rubbed the bridge of her nose. Their brigades set about crossing the temple grounds, instinctively pulling close as if the yawning emptiness around them were an enemy hemming them in. Izel pulled ahead of the pack, eyes trying to catch hers, so with a nod at Alejandra she slowed her steps enough they could speak mostly in private.
“I think this room is an axle,” he whispered.
Her brow rose.
“As in the axle of a wheel?”
The tinker nodded.
“The way the pillars are positioned, it smacks of conceptual symmetry – especially the way we can’t see the end of them. That and the few cryptoglyphs I recognize from the floor are all concerned with movement.”
Song hummed.
“So we stand at the center of a wheel,” she said. “What happens when it turns?”
“Either this place is how the god moves around the parts Scholomance,” Izel said, “or there is something else at work.”
He hesitated.
“Go on,” Song evenly said.
“Some of those movement glyphs I did not learn studying under the Watch,” Izel said.
It took her a moment to catch on and she leaned in close.
“An Izcalli candle?” she whispered.
He nodded.
“It is not physical movement they are concerned with,” he quietly said, “but aetheric. Given what Maryam saw earlier…”
They might well be standing where all the aether Scholomance sucked in was headed.
“Well,” Song grimly said, “I suppose we will soon learn what it is all for.”
She nodded at the tinker.
“Thank you for telling me,” Song said.
He responded only with a nod, falling back to walk with Angharad and leaving Song to chew on yet another uncomfortable thought. It was not the Antediluvians who had laid the plans for Scholomance, or even hollow princes come from kingdoms of Gloam. Lucifer himself had this place built as his summer palace, and the Lightbringer was the father of a great many evils. It was said to be at his urging that the last kings of Cathay had undertaken the ruinous wars that broke Song’s homeland so thoroughly it shattered into quarreling fiefdoms.
From that chaos had eventually emerged the Ten Republics, proof that even the Lightbringer’s foul works could be turned to good, so Song would not begrudge the Watch turning his works to higher purpose. But neither would she trust it.
Song had not seen so much as a single sliver of the god of Scholomance since entering these grounds, which should have been a comfort but somehow was anything but.
How long it took for them to reach the other side of the grounds she was not sure, save that it felt like hours. By the time they reached the last pillars the hall behind them was strewn with waves of brigades following behind, all marching as if they were wary ambush. Several had weapons out. The students of Scholomance had come in formal uniform, but that had also come armed. Anything else would have been sheer foolishness.
Only five brigades had arrived before the Thirteenth and the Fourth, all of them standing in an orderly row past the last pillars but well shy of the great throne which Song saw with dread stood tall as a tower. Like a monument of bone that everyone avoided standing in the shadow of. Even as Song began putting numbers to the brigades already there – the First, the Third, the Ninth – they were taken aside by a pair of watchmen led by one of the teachers, Professor Iyangar.
Their Mandate teacher acknowledged them with a curt nod, visibly tense.
“Brigades are to stand in numerical order,” she said. “Don’t step past the chalk line.”
Song had not noticed it, but there was a faint chalk outline on the ground that the other brigades were standing behind. The Thirteenth and the Fourth were separated in the shuffle, though Song was more interested in the presence of what appeared to be a full fifty watchmen from the garrison armed to the teeth and every Scholomance teacher she had ever seen. The brigade patrons went to join them.
As much as the students had been told on to stay on one side of the chalk, older watchmen seemed quite intent on staying on the other side as much as possible. They did not linger even when moving cabals around.
It took the better part of thirty minutes for the rest of the students to trickle in, batches of cabals adding themselves to the rows, and Song was pleased that while the Thirteenth was at the edge of the first row they were still on it. The entire student body could have fit in a line across the breadth of the grounds, but the instructors were putting room between them and were keeping the brigades in the space delineated by pillars on either side.
As the last cabal trickled in – the Forty-Fourth, she noted with disdain – Song’s gaze lingered not on the rows of finely uniformed students but on what wasn’t there. Or who, rather. When the year had begun, there had been four hundred and three students, split into seventy-two cabals.
This morning, only three hundred and twenty-one students stood in the throne room.
Scholomance, the world and even other blackcloaks had buried or exiled eighty-two of the students that had flocked to the shores of Tolomontera to become the Watch’s rising stars. Not all those missing were dead, some had even simply failed out instead of anything sinister, but many had been swallowed by the very grounds they now stood on. Bones and all. Almost a quarter of those come to this shore were gone. And this is the first year since it woke, Song thought. How much more dangerous would the god become now that it’d had its first meal in ages?
The last blackcloaks to arrive, once the brigades were all arrayed in rows and quietly whispering, were not students at all. A company of eight marched past the student body, on the left side of the pillars, escorting a tall man limping along on a cane. The stranger made his way to the front of the garrison blackcloaks, passing by the lined-up teachers as he did – all of which saluted. From the deference Song would have guessed he was the colonel leading the Tolomontera garrison, but he was not wearing a uniform and had no visible marks of rank.
Though his clothes were Watch-black, the stranger was fashionably dressed: under a long open coat in the Someshwari fashion he kept a gold-buttoned waistcoat of black silk, finely embroidered. His breeches and hose were subtly tailored, seamless to the eye, and his ebony cane perfectly polished. Indeed every single part of the man was agreeably neat, from the trimmed nails to the salt-and-pepper beard that contrasted pleasantly with his tanned skin. His spectacles were finely made and gleaming, his hands were beringed but not heavily or ostentatiously.
It was the eyes that gave it away. The way they were too empty behind the glass, like a dead fish.
Toc, toc, toc. The cane rang out against the stone, every noise dissolving into distant whispers as the finely dressed devil came to stand before the throne. He alone, of everyone in the grand room, dared to slip into that long shadow. The cane came to a half and the devil gestured at one of the Akelarre teachers, who stepped forward and traced a Sign in the air before him. Gloam shimmered, and when the devil spoke the sound of it filled the entire throne room.
“Students of Scholomance,” he said, “I greet you.”
The whispers had died as he made his way to the front, but now it was dead silence that answered.
“I am Lord Asher, sitting member of the Lesser Committee for the Trebian Northwest. I stand today addressing you on its behalf.”
It was a testament to the devil’s presence that no whispers of ‘Obscure Committee’ spread among the students, for that name was much more commonly used.
“Let me begin by congratulating you on reaching this day,” Lord Asher said. “When the order returned to these shores, it was with trepidation – the bloody close of our last venture into Scholomance had not yet faded from memory, and it could not be known if the move to reclaim these grounds would end in grief or victory.”
His bespectacled gaze swept them.
“But a victory this has been, and one you should take pride in.”
Backs straightened, and Song was not ashamed to admit hers was one of them.
“History likes to praise the great upsets,” Lord Asher said. “The impossible odds overcome. Yet such grand triumphs are fireworks – bright and quickly gone. The stonework of the world is not made of famous deeds but of the quiet victory of survival, standing as a foundation of order in a world that craves its own end.”
He raised his hand high, gesturing at unseen ceiling and the red lights beyond the fog,
“You were sent to stand in the deeps, and the current did not sweep you. Every breath you take under this roof is taken in defiance of the night, and there is no worthier work in all the world.”
Song’s fingers clenched, and she felt an odd pang of shame. At having come here for reasons personal, instead of choosing the duty. The calling. It was not regret, she would never feel that for the path she was walking down, but she was not above wishing she were a better woman. That Vesper would see it fit to let her be one.
“But we did not send you here out of whim,” Lord Asher said, and hers was not the only gaze to snap up to him. “You gave trust in undertaking this duty on the behalf of the Watch, and now this trust must be lived up to. You will, at last, be told why we sent you to chance the belly of the beast.”
Answers, finally she would have answers.
“Most of you know this, but l will state it nonetheless: Lucifer raised this house.”
Lucifer raised this house. The words echoed in the temple, despite the Sign. Despite the way all other words had dissolved into whispers as they reverberated. But this sentence the grounds spoke back almost lovingly, as if Scholomance itself rejoiced of them. Song’s jaw clenched.
“Men and devils stacked the stones, filled the foundations with their bones and oiled the gears with their blood, but it was Lucifer’s will that moved them,” Lord Asher said. “Know this: nothing under this roof is an accident. The cold madness that set this horror in motion yet lingers, waiting for you to feed its machinations.”
Asher’s ebony cane struck the floor, a harsh clap.
“But you survived. Scholomance is a wager, and this once you have won.”
The world screamed.
Wind hurled itself at them from behind, Song almost blown off her feet – Angharad had to steady her – and she could have sworn that the pillars were writhing like a tide of seething vermin. But oh, that was not the worst of it. Song’s silver eyes followed the streaks of smoke, the gargantuan web suddenly crisscrossing the temple and all converging towards a single spot ahead as beneath her feet the stone shivered. Scholomance itself was ticking forward like some gargantuan gearwork, spinning around an unseen axle.
It all came together on the throne. There a roiling, struggling silhouette was forced into being – too tall and angled to be human, but close enough for its shrieking terror and fury to have Song tasting bile.
Half the signifiers suddenly flinched, and in the moment that followed the flow of the smoke reversed. Song would have thought it to drain the silhouette, but the shape remained there. Solid, as if bound – and as it kept struggling, seething, she watched the limbs warp and stretch under the force of the withdrawing threads. It was like looking at a man get quartered, and with a final scream that had the very air shuddering the silhouette was torn apart.
It broke, a cloud of smoke hanging in the air for a fragment of a moment, and then one of the students breathed in.
Song watched in horror as the smallest bit of smoke, a mere finger’s worth, was breathed in by the boy’s nose. As if drawn by an invisible current the smoke was inhaled by one student after another, and Song had to force herself not to hold her breath. She felt nothing as it slithered through her nostrils, but as it disappeared she thought there might be the faintest sliver of warmth in her chest. She was not the only one looking visibly disturbed, either, but a voice claimed her attention.
“Thus is the wager of this school: eat or be eaten,” Lord Asher said. “And though Scholomance has partaken of you, you now partake of it.”
He cocked his head to the side.
“You are ants gnawing at a god, bite by bite. And though it may be but an ant’s meal, you still ate a mouthful of a god.”
Song shivered, for some rewards sounded as if they should be punishments.
“You will find over the coming days that a vigor was kindled within you, that the span of your life has lengthened and every part of you sharpens to a keen edge.”
She swallowed. Their lifespan had grown longer? That was no small thing, and to think it was just…
“This is but the first step on a long road,” Lord Asher said, riding ahead of her thought. “Five years you were granted in these halls, five times the right to wager against the hungry maw. Five times you may make a meal of the divine, before we send you out into the world.”
He struck down his cane again and the sound felt like a curtain falling.
“Thus, on this fourth year of the Century of Smoke, I declare your year at an end,” Lord Asher said. “Go forth proudly, though as you find rest on kinder shores I caution you against letting distance from peril turn that pride into conceit. Never forget, children, that you must win every time.”
The devil smiled, for the first time. All lips and no teeth, but Song could tell. They all could tell.
“It only needs to win once.”
In the moment that followed, as Lord Asher walked away, not a single one of them dared to clap. Be they student, teachers or garrison. And in thus in that utter, suffocating silence the Thirteenth Brigade finally graduated from its first year of Scholomance.
Comments
Scott's Folly
Diminishing returns on ability vs number? Not much point having ever-improving elites if they spend all their time wagering against Scholomance rather than being used for the Watch's purposes in the wider world, especially since attrition is likely to be a continuing factor.
Victor Cavalcanti
Is there a conceptual/aetheric reason why they can only do this 5 times? If they could it forever I don't see why they wouldn't .
Nathan Fish
Scholomance_was too sluggish to stop them from creating a handful of safe paths through s/it/its belly too bloody a business even s//for/ the Watch By the time they reached the last pillars the hall behind them was strewn with waves of brigades following behind, all marching as if they were wary s//of/ ambush. Several had weapons out. The students of Scholomance had come in formal uniform, but s/that/they had also come armed. Anything else would have been sheer foolishness.
Jordan Braxton
No wonder the competition to get your heirs and scions was so brutal. They make it and they’ve got a huge edge over the rest of the population just from how long they’ll live. Nevermind the skills and connections.
Aguido Horatio Davis
So that was the graduation ceremony for the first year. Does that mean there's a summer (winter?) break? Vacation classes? The 13th heading out to pursue individual or collective agendas in the world, with or without a Watch contract? Everyone finally having time to take the skimmer out for a cruise? Enquiring minds want to know. How fortunate it's the next week, and we get one more chapter today before a well-earned hiatus.
WaveySky
I think the implication is that Mitra is just a mage who is fascinated by the process of a god being torn into smoke by a machine.
Poop McScoop
Do Wen and Mitra get the bonus too? It's implied the answer is yes, given Mitra's reaction to the ceremony.
Gwennafran
EE just really want this particular character to look like Elsa from Frozen. Even if she's not supposed to. Last time it was her eyes. XD
Tristan A
So, I imagine that obviously the more powerful scholomance gets the stronger the graduates become. So, even though you'd think they'd shut the school down after even one entire class dies, the truth is if they can get even one person to graduate that person would be a monster in terms of power. Not too mention how good they would have to be already to survive.
Runaway_Cactuar
Chekov's burnt chicken strikes again!
York
I thought it was so they could have immediate access to brigade funds. If they had new plaques made, then they would have had to wait.
Adam Woods
The callback to the burned chicken had me howling XD
Pteromys Momonga
Cressida is such a skilled Mask that her abilities break the fourth wall and affect the author.
dhighway61
Iron sharpens iron.
Taelel
I think it's a typo and it should be up to the elbow thinking back to the description from when it happened
Markos El-Far
The throne of Lucifer- the Toppler of Thrones. It is trapped to the touch- and sitting on it allows the throne-room’s mechanisms to rip you to pieces.
Markos El-Far
I think it may have had to do with him falling into a layer. If he said “I dont have one” for the Judas test he may have just gotten shot.
WaveySky
Song mentions the 13th is in the first row. And so presumably is the 4th. I wonder if proximity matters for how much god they breath in. Is this why in the second book Nerie told Tristan to take one of the plaques that was already forged? Because she knew the only premade plaques left would be low numbers? It always felt weird to me that she would give that advice if all it did was help Tristan prove he wasn't possessed that one time.
Gwennafran
Hahaha, not just me, then. Reading this I was all "wait, did I just go for a default brown for her hair on Cressida's portrait? Was that never specified)" (but it was)
Revenant
The map is indeed not the territory.
Jacob Shpiece
Damn, it feels obvious now that it's been spelled out. We've already seen several cases of wagers against gods for boons - it's pretty much the main reason to keep interacting with a dangerous god. And it makes the importance of the Scholomance graduates more apparent - they aren't just well trained officers and members of covenants, they're five times empowered by winning a death wager against a mad god. Christ these kids are going to be terrors.
Mark W
And by 'too strong to manage' they lost three entire batches of students in a row. It wasn't a 'we judged this is getting too risky' but a 'we are literally getting nothing after feeding over 1000 kids into it, maybe we should stop'. "Professor Sasan mused. “We are a stubborn folk, our order – but even we balked at continuing to send children in after the third year in a row that the entire roster died.”
Pteromys Momonga
Probably. Also, Cressida was described as having "long, dark hair" in Book Two.
Anton Caménisch-Coget
I have to say, captain mitra appears as a more and more enjoyable character with each appearance
DRg
@EE "the fair-haired hatchet of a Mask that had survived the disgrace of the Eleventh" shouldn't this be the Nineteenth Brigade?
sarvashaktimaan
I always assumed Nerei was a devil given the apparent longevity and shapeshifting.
Joe Rachman
Good point and nice catch on the theme. The latter makes me think of the monastery door in the Name of the Rose...
Pteromys Momonga
I would guess it is, and maybe consuming the Golden Ram's blood for boons was along that continuum too. There's been a recurring theme (or at least pattern) in Pale Lights about how the categorizations people use are somewhat arbitrary, similar to a lot of real-world taxonomy, and how lots of creatures, supernatural phenomena, and so forth are on more of a spectrum than neat little boxes. Just like in real life, the categories are frequently useful models for understanding and communicating concepts, but they're not completely accurate.
Noble Solana-Walkinshaw
Been loving the last few chapters. Closing plot holes about the Masks, the Ivory Library, Imani and now Scholomance.
Joe Rachman
If they all just ate a bit of god is that on a continuum with Nerei's consuming of her old patron god? It might explain why she is apparently extremely long-lived.
HoodedHero
I believe their break starts on the 21st and lasts until the 11th of April
joie01
thanks for the chapter EE. now we know for what reason people keep sending children into the belly of the beast. i shouldve guessed it was more than just "challenging learning environment".
StrollingEye
That's a slamming solid chapter ...
Avery Cortell
My bet is that's why it was shut down in the first place. It got to eat too many students and was growing to strong to manage. So they pulled to plug to starve it out long enough they could try again.
Gibborim
I must object to describing a missing hand as losing an arm up to the wrist.
Pteromys Momonga
Wow, so that's why the Watch uses Scholomance despite the danger - or at least part of the reason (I don't think Asher was lying, but it's quite likely that he left some details out). I can see why this would be a big deal to Song, in particular; it might mitigate her curse and buy her more time in her attempt to break it. Speaking of which, I just realized that Song's plan to get rid of the nascent curse-god is pretty much conceptual bane. If it feeds on hatred and scorn toward the Ren family, admiration and gratitude toward them seems like the natural opposite. I wonder if the bit of god-snorting will affect anyone's contracts, signifying, and so forth in the next few days.
Jacob Burton-Edwards
Huh. So that's why they throw their greatest at this place. Making experts who last more than a human lifetime. Still don't know why they had to turn everyone against each other though.
Joe Rachman
Well damn. Between this and the Red Maw slowly consuming eldritch abominations bite by bite seems a favourite trick of the Watch... Also EE I thought you were taking a well-deserved break?
Aguido Horatio Davis
I wonder what Fortuna will make of this. Also, does Scholomance grow faster than it is consumed?
