I put my hands up to get her, and I cupped her in my hands and put her against my cheek, and my whole face crumpled like discarded classwork and I just sobbed a few times, getting her fur wet with leaking tears. She just poked at me with her nose and put up with it. When I managed to get myself under control, she climbed onto my shoulder, tucked behind my ear, and made soft small encouraging squeaks. I took a deep breath in through my nose and made myself go out into the hall before I could lock up again.

The hall wasn’t completely empty: a family of mature agglos, their tidy shells glittering with mana-infused jewels, bits of glowing artifice, and tiny jars and vials of potions and unguents, had been sleeping peacefully against the far wall, near the cleansing machinery we’d repaired last year. They all woke up at the sound of my footsteps and started humping away into dark corners at top speed, which in the case of adult agglos is about a quarter mile per hour.

The floor was crunchy with amphisbaena scales and the dried-up moltings of juvenile digesters, none bigger than a handkerchief. None of them were actually in sight. The ceiling had faint dark lines patterned across it, the ghosts of the century-old sirenspider webs that had been incinerated in the cleansing. The only things left of the sirenspiders themselves were a few hard melted lumps stuck to the ceiling among them, the stubs of legs poking out in a few places. There was nothing left of other mals at all except a few droppings and skeletons; a few construct mals had collapsed in mechanical heaps here and there, out of mana. A few more scuttling larval things ran away from me, so small I couldn’t even identify them, as I clenched both my hands tight and turned myself bodily to face the gates.

“But,” I said, after a moment, out loud. I stood there stupidly until Precious gave me a nudge, and then I walked across the whole graduation hall, directly up to the massive double doors, the gates to the school. There were two enormous scorch marks on the floor to either side, blackened outlines where the maw-mouths had been, like a police tape to show the position of a removed corpse. The marks had ripples: you could see the mortal flame had burnt off a good few layers, although there had certainly been plenty left of them afterwards.

I’d been half right. The cleansing had worked. Patience and Fortitude hadn’t been killed, but they’d been burnt and blinded, probably thrashing wildly, while the seniors ran out. They had missed their one annual meal. Afterwards, they’d recovered and tried to fill their hollow bellies by devouring all the rest of the surviving mals instead. But after they did that—when there was nothing at all left for them to eat, they’d—gone.

I had no idea where. Had they hidden away somewhere inside the school? They certainly hadn’t got into the main levels—we’d all have heard the screaming. There’re pockets of dead space, many of them, in the hollow area between the top of the graduation hall and the bottom of the workshop floor, and those aren’t really warded, so they could have crawled in there, but they still wouldn’t have had anything to eat. Maw-mouths don’t generally hide, anyway. Had they left entirely? They could have; the wards stop maleficaria from coming in, not going out, and if Patience and Fortitude had gone off to roam the world and trouble enclaves for their suppers, we wouldn’t hear about it until after we got out ourselves.

Which we’d apparently be able to do with no trouble at all. None of us needed a day’s practice, not a single run. We could stroll right out.

I stared up at the enormous doors, cast from solid bronze. There were diagrams and paintings of them scattered all round, like the blueprints, all a bit different from one another. But I can’t imagine anyone had actually spent as much as a millisecond looking at them since the day the school first opened to students. A massive seal in the middle was engraved with the school motto In Sapienta Umbraculum—In Wisdom, Shelter—and nested circles round the seal were engraved with a warding spell that had been layered through languages: so the same spell in English and Middle English and Old English, one after another, all going round in a ring. It wasn’t just English, either; there were rings of the same spell in dozens of languages, and all the ones I knew well enough to recognize had multiple versions, too—there was modern Arabic and medieval, modern French and Old French and Latin.

Translating a spell and actually getting a spell on the other end is almost impossible; it had probably taken a genius poet or a team of twelve for every version of every language, and only possible at all because they weren’t very complex spells: all the ones I could make out without a dictionary were just one or two lines and a variation on Don’t let anything evil through these doors. The English inscription was Malice, keep far, this gate wisdom’s shelter guards, tied to the motto, obviously not a coincidence; some version of the phrase was there in all the other languages I knew.

And they weren’t just an inscription. The letters had been engraved all the way through the top layer of bronze, and some kind of illuminated alchemical substance was being piped through behind them so the light shone out through. They weren’t just glowing steadily, either: the light moved through each inscription, at the speed and rhythm you’d have used to speak each spell. It was effectively casting the incantations over and over again, renewing them steadily. And the separate spells were even synchronized somehow—I couldn’t follow it exactly, but I could tell that several of them started or ended at the same time, new ones began as previous ones went out. Like a massive choral piece with a few dozen separate lines of music going at once.

It mesmerized me; I could almost hear the spells going, and then I realized I really was hearing them: there were bands of tiny perforations in the metal, what I’d thought were just decorative dots, and when I leaned close and peeked I could see there was a bit of artifice behind them that opened and closed each hole individually. And when one of them opened, a puff of air came through with a sound like a single letter or syllable, breathed out, and each sound matched one of the characters being lit up at the time. I could barely hear the whisper over the faint metronome ticking of the machinery that was controlling the vents, the shushing and gurgle of the liquid being pumped through, but they were there.

I’d never seen anything like it before, even inside the school. I know from much droning in our history lessons that Sir Alfred had talked the other major enclaves into building the school in stages—the expense of the thing was as ruinous as you might imagine. He initially proposed just building an ordinary enclave for kids to live in, just with these really powerful doors. After the doors were built, that’s when he showed everyone the rest of his even more elaborate plans, and supposedly they looked at the doors and signed on for the rest. Standing here, I wasn’t surprised. I’d spent nearly four years living inside the school, nearly dying over and over, and I still almost believed it, believed that these doors would keep out all evil, keep out the monsters and keep us all safe.

And obviously they had, more or less. I couldn’t even imagine how many maleficaria would have been coming at us without them. The Scholomance was a honeypot, the most alluring honeypot you could imagine: all the most tender, mana-plumpest wizard children in the world gathered in a single place. Any mal that so much as gets a whiff of this place would try to get in. And some of them would make it, even with the doors. Every once in a while, a letter didn’t light up, a puff of air didn’t make it through; there were surely a few places in the massive composition that were a little weaker, where the spells didn’t quite sound right at the same time, making cracks in the warding where a really determined mal could make an effort and wriggle through, like poking a loose brick out of the fortress wall. More than enough had made it through, even in the first few years, to make this hall into a slaughterhouse. The doors weren’t impenetrable.