“And on that note…” He held out his arm, crooked at the elbow, inviting me to take it. “May I escort you to our doom?”
He made such a joke of it, with his formal posture and indefatigable grin, that I could not help but return his smile. And take his arm.
The attendant with the severe blond bun led all ten remaining members of our cohort into a small stone building behind the Conservatory, which I’d always mistaken for a maintenance shed. Inside, we found nothing but a rough stone floor and another door.
Beyond that second door was a broad set of smooth marble steps, leading deeper into the earth than I’d ever been. As I descended, my pulse pounding, I reached back to grip Yoslyn’s hand and forward to squeeze Wilder’s shoulder, unburdened by my satchel, because we weren’t allowed to bring any notes into the White Trial.
The white arena was a thing to behold, and if I weren’t preparing to face my own purification and rebirth—or die trying—I probably would have been in awe of it. The round competition space itself was much larger than the amphitheater and was entirely paved in white marble stones, cut and polished to a slick mirror finish. The arena was sunken below the audience seating, so that spectators—far fewer than in the Black Trial—could observe the competition from above.
Desmond sat among them, on the row behind the Bluehelm and several senior professors and staff members.
My Mastery-year classmates and I were led into the arena and stationed just inside its perimeter, at ten workstations equidistant apart. An eleventh and twelfth stood empty: reminders of Kornell’s failure and Petyr’s death.
For this trial, there were no official observers. No one other than the competitors had entered the arena, and that fact made my very bones ache with nervous anticipation.
When the spectators had all taken seats, the Bluehelm stood, and all eyes turned her way. Bright white torchlight flickered across her taught alabaster skin, which made her cheekbones look sharp, the hollows beneath them deeper than usual.
“There are no specific instructions for the White Trial.” Her voice boomed across the huge space, no doubt aided by specially designed acoustics. “The trial has two stages, and at a certain point, anyone who has not found their own way into the second stage will be given access to it. You may use any materials at your workstation. Your only goal is to exit the arena. But to pass the trial, you must be one of the first eight to do so.” She glanced around the arena, briefly looking at each of us. “You may begin.”
With that, she took her seat.
Startled by the stark brevity of her speech, at first I could only stare at her, waiting for more. But no more came. No words of history or tradition. Of comfort or encouragement. The Bluehelm was all business today, and I took that as an indication that I should be as well.
I glanced at Wilder, who occupied the station two to my left, then at Yoslyn, who was directly to my right. The workstations were angled to face the center of the arena, so we could all see each other, but the spacing was so great that it would be difficult to understand what anyone else was actually doing.
My gaze strayed to the marble wall behind Wilder. The surface of the stones was too smooth to grip, and they were so cleanly cut and so tightly packed that the seams were hardly visible. My fingernail would not fit into a single crack. There was no hope of climbing out.
The door we’d entered through had closed neatly behind us, and I’d lost track of it when I turned to claim my station. Wherever the door was, the gap around it was now indistinguishable from the seams in the stones themselves, and I had no doubt that even if I could find it, it would not open.
It was unclear how we were intended to escape the arena, or how alchemy would aid in that endeavor. So I turned to the workstation in front of me to see what had been provided.
The supplies were basic, but plentiful: The usual array of ingredients and equipment. Three burners, an entire rack of vials in several shapes and sizes, and a generous allotment of beyn. I would have preferred to distill it myself—I’d tried out several basic recipes over the past month—but the time required for that would cost me. Not that I really understood the challenge yet, and…
A great grinding suddenly echoed, seemingly from everywhere at once, and several of my classmates gasped. I looked around for the source, even as the ground trembled beneath my feet, and I noticed that while my entire cohort looked startled, not one of the spectators did.
Yoslyn stood with both palms pressed to her work surface, as though it might shake apart without the extra stability, and Wilder stared, wide-eyed, at the ground.
Keryth and Lennox both backed away from their tables, directly across the arena from me, their arms outstretched as if for balance. Cressa had also stepped back, but she seemed to be looking not at the ground, or the spectators, or her work surface, but at her competitors. As if our actions were of more interest to her than the terrifying rumbling.
Then motion on the floor to my left caught my eye, and I understood why Wilder was staring at the ground.
Unlike the walls, the white tiles at our feet had been fitted together with thick mortar joints. The floor tiles were uneven, and some had clearly been chipped into angles in order to fit into odd shapes. And as I studied them, I noticed that the mortar was thicker in some places than in others, and that a line of it on my left had begun to…tremble.
A length of mortar suddenly bulged up from the floor, stretching oddly, as if something were pushing against it from beneath.
I dropped into a squat and pressed my finger into a line of mortar between my feet, and to my surprise, it was not hard and granular, like the grout between the stones of the ladies’ residential tower. Rather, it was gummy and soft. Something between a paste and a wax, like a sturdier version of the substance used to seal vials for long-term storage.
All around the arena, lines of mortar had suddenly popped up from the floors, stretching, leaving thin threads stuck to stone as something beneath them pushed upward in a pattern I could not yet comprehend.
The strange protrusions did not involve all of the mortar but just the thicker lines, which stretched for a bit, then seemed to turn at right angles and to join other lines, almost like…
A maze.
Walls were rising from the floor, creating barriers between each of the workstations and stretching into the center of the arena, forming winding paths on the way. The walls were glass, formed of the largest, clearest panels I’d ever seen—a mastery of craft that would have required the work of both a master alchemist and a master Toolkeeper to produce. There were great, huge squares of it, with seams of metal, and within a few seconds, they’d grown to the height of my waist. A second after, that of my shoulder. Then they were over my head, and I was staring at Yoslyn through a massive pane of glass.
I turned left, and when Wilder looked a bit distorted, I realize I was seeing him through at least two panes, and that it was no longer easy to trace the lines of the maze. To see the paths. They had become a jumble of glass and thin metal frames, difficult to distinguish beyond the ones immediately walling me in.
How was alchemy supposed to help us through amaze? Were we meant to concoct a formula that would dissolve the front wall and let us into the labyrinth?
