Chapter 18 The Seal Breaks

The great hall of the academy was a battlefield. Maya came up through the well with Seraphina, Talia, and Cassian behind her, and the first thing she saw was the light. The blue lamps that had burned in the academy for as long as anyone could remember were failing, one by one, and where they failed, the shadows grew, and where the shadows grew, the shadows moved. These were not working shadows, shaped and held by students. These moved the way a tide moves, and they were hungry. They were not the shadows of students and benches and pillars. They were something else, something that had been waiting underneath all of them, and it was rising. Voss stood at the center of the hall on the dais, and around him the Curators had formed a ring, and their combined shadow lay over the floor like a stain, and at the center of the stain the stone floor had split open, and from the crack came a sound that was not a sound, a vibration that Maya felt in her teeth and in her bones and in the very roots of her shadow. "The seal is broken," Seraphina said. "It broke from the inside. She let it go." Maya understood. Her mother had let it go. She had done what she said she would do. She had made it angry. "Voss," Maya shouted, and her voice carried across the hall, and the ring of Curators turned, and Voss turned, and his face was not kind anymore. It was hungry. "It's not a servant. It's not a power source. It's a thing that eats, and you've spent ten years feeding it, and now it's here, and it's not going to stop with the seal. It's going to stop with everything." "You know nothing," Voss said. "I have prepared for this. I have drawn on the Deep Shadow for years. I am more than ready for it." As if in answer, the crack in the floor widened, and the thing came through. The Hollow had no true shape. That was the first thing Maya understood, watching it rise into the great hall. It was a darkness that moved, a blackness deeper than shadow, and it wore the shape of the hall's own shadows, borrowing them, stretching them, until it stood in the center of the room like a tower made of night. It did not have a face. It did not need one. It had a mouth, or the suggestion of a mouth, and it was open, and it was singing, and the singing was the sound of everything it had eaten, all at once, a chorus of lost voices that made the students clap their hands over their ears and fall to their knees. Voss raised his hand. His shadow rose with it, and he flung it at the Hollow, a spear of darkness, a Working that would have shattered stone. The Hollow did not flinch. It opened its mouth wider, and the spear went in, and the Hollow swallowed it, and it grew, and it sang louder. "No," Voss whispered. "No. That's not. That's not how it works." "It is exactly how it works," Maya said. "It eats. That's all it does. That's all it has ever done. You taught it that. You made it that. You are the thing that made it, and now it is done being made." The Hollow turned toward Voss. It was not angry. It did not have the capacity for anger. It was hungry, and Voss was the largest thing in the room, and it had been waiting for ten years to be fed by his hand. The Curators broke. Some of them fled. Some of them tried to fight, and the Hollow ate their Working and their shadows and then, one by one, it ate them. Voss stood alone at the center of the ring, and his face was white, and his hands were shaking, and the hunger was coming for him, and it was not going to stop. "Students!" Maya shouted, and her voice cracked across the hall like the whip Voss's had once been. "Listen to me! I know how to stop it. I know how to seal it. Not alone. Together. All of us. I need your shadows. I need every one of you. Give me your shadow, and I will show you what to do with it." Some of them ran. Maya did not blame them. But some of them stopped. Some of them turned. Talia was already moving, her shadow stretching out toward Maya like a hand. Cassian was already moving, his shadow coming up beside her, steady as stone. And then a girl she had never spoken to, and a boy from the year below, and then more, and more, until there were twenty of them, and then fifty, and their shadows stretched across the floor of the great hall toward Maya like the roots of a single vast tree. "Good," Maya said. "Now hold on to me. Hold on to each other. And do not let go." The Hollow had reached Voss. It had him. It held him up like a doll, and he was screaming, and the screaming was the sound of a man who had spent ten years preparing for a thing he had never once understood. The Hollow did not eat him. That was the terrible part. It held him, and it looked at him, and it opened its mouth, and it began, very slowly, to take him apart. "Voss!" Maya shouted. "The seal! Where is the anchor? Where did she put it?" Voss's eyes found her. He was being unmade, and he knew it, and for the first time since she had met him, his face was honest. "The stones," he gasped. "The foundation stones. The first stones. She wove it through them. The deepest vein. It runs under the hall. It always did." And then the Hollow closed its mouth, and Voss was gone, and the hall was full of the sound of the thing swallowing the last of a man, and the singing grew, and the darkness grew, and the students held on to their shadows and to each other, and Maya stood at the center of them all, feeling the weight of fifty shadows in her hands, and she understood, at last, what her mother had meant. She was not alone. She had never been alone. The foundation of the academy was under her feet, and it was the oldest stone in the world, and it was hers, and it was theirs, and together, all of them, they were going to close the door. ---