help,” Johnny whispered.
“Won’t that attract… attention?”
“I know, but there’s nothing else I can do. Help me get the sand off part of the floor.”
I held the light in one hand and helped her sweep with my foot, then her scarf, till we had a clean spot on the floor. Dark stains were still visible in the cracks between the flagstones. What had happened here? “Who are we... asking?”
“Marutukku,” she said. “He helped keep the gates shut. Nuphel-Don may even have called to him for help directly.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“No, I can’t summon him the way she would have been able to. And it would draw too much attention to where we are in the maze. I just need wayfinding help. We can’t do this alone.” She was drawing on the floor with a marker, bracing herself over it with one hand as if she might keel over. Her cardboard cylinder came out too; she rotated it, muttered, wrote. Brown dust fell onto the circle. How many spells was she running right now? I opened my mouth and shut it again. The sacrifice. Everything will be taken from you. They’d said so.
“Okay, here goes,” she said, and leaned close to the stone, whispering into the centre of the circle.
Nothing happened; the space between my shoulderblades prickled as the things behind us watched the spell fail. “Oh shit,” I said.
“No,” she said, almost a sob, catching in her throat. She leaned forwards, pressing the palm of her hand to the design. “Marutukku...” She gasped, pulled her hand back just a fraction, and then pressed it to the stone again, hard. As she whispered again, a plea in his language, I assumed, the circle on the floor glowed. Something hummed above us, smug, discordant.
“Come on, Johnny,” I said. “We’re on our own.”
“Wait...”
Finally she simply collapsed onto her side, the marker circle fading as if we’d poured rubbing alcohol on it. I stared at the empty space on the floor, then down at her hand, which was turning blue on the palm, a powdery sky blue as if she’d run out of air. Then lines began to coalesce on it, dark, sweeping in from wrist and fingers, into a new magic circle very different from the one on the back of her hand. The centre was a painful, bruised purple.
After several agonizing seconds, she got up, cradling her hand to her chest, steadying herself on the wall with her other hand. “Come on,” she said hoarsely.
“What just happened?”
“We’ll have guidance for a little while,” she said, stumbling along the hallway again, away from the noises behind us. “So we’re going to have to hurry.”
“How long?”
“As long as I can keep it up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“THERE.” HER VOICE was barely audible. The wall we’d finally reached curved inwards like an eggshell, carved with something so complicated that my eyes couldn’t even follow the story. Bearded men with long curly hair, and more curls in the air, like smoke, or fog, or mustard gas, and everywhere people running, speaking, each carved figure in the clay matched with its little block of writing the size of my hand.
“Nuphel-Don said it would be locked,” Johnny said.
“This is it? For sure?”
Her small, dusty hands moved gently over the surface of the clay, tracing a particular inscription. She must have known it would be there, so tangled it was with all the other writing. I felt the old awe, the old envy, return. You are too young to know so much; you have always been too young; and yet here we are. The wise child, the holder of knowledge.
“She and her assistants left help. In case anyone made it this far—and, you know, knew what they were doing.”
“Do we?”
“I hope so. But you have to make sure, right? That only people who are… qualified. Can get in. And see it. Not just anyone.”
Her voice was muffled; I looked away from the carvings to see that she had slumped forward into the recess, forehead-first, breath ragged and slow. My relief turned into alarm. “Johnny? Are you all right?”
“Just tired,” she slurred, trying to push herself away from the wall; I hooked a finger into a beltloop and pulled, freeing her face. “Have to find the locks. Have to get the locks open. They would have made them hard to lock. Hard to open, too.”
I trained the flashlight on the wall, seeing how pale her face was, how it too glittered like the floor, how she seemed actually translucent now—seeing veins in places