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Because it was tirand reveal Toward the end of dinner, when Wharton was ready to bring out the dessert wines, he would retreat to the wine closet, which wasn’t so much a closet as a room the size of a studio apartment To his shock he would find Plu entered it on the sly through a secret back passage from the Senior Coue’s dele one of them

It was the chanciest bit of the plan, because the existence of this secret back passage was a matter of speculation, but whatever, if it didn’t work she’d find some normal, less dramatic way to corner him

She looked quickly over her shoulder—Coldwater still out of view and/or otherwise engaged—then knelt by the wainscoting She took a deep breath Third panel from the left Hmm—the one on the end was half a panel, not sure whether she should count it or not Well, she’d try it both ways She traced a word in Old English with her finger, spelling it out in a runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark, andbut the taste of a really oaky chardonnay paired with a hot-buttered toast point

Le spell release even before it happened: the panel swung outward on a set of previously invisible hinges

Annoyingly though, the passage had been sealed Ten feet in it ended in a brick wall, and the bricks had been bricked in such a way as to fornized as an absolutely brutal hardening charraduate stuff Some professor had bothered to put this here, and they’d spent soh her nose

Crouching down, she stepped into the passage and pulled the little door shut behind her She snapped on a siloill-o’-the-wisp Then she stared at the brick wall for five eway, lost to the world in an analytical trance In herbefore her all on its own, pure and abstract and shining Mentally she entered the pattern, inhabited it, pushed at it fro for any sloppy joins or subtle imbalances

There ic than to make it You know this Whoever drew this seal was smart But was she smarter than Plum?

There was solyph like this wasn’t the angles, it was the underlying topology—you could defor as its essential geoles of the joins were, up to a point, arbitrary

But the funny thing about the angles of these joins was that they were funny They were sharper than they needed to be They were nonarbitrary There was a pattern to therees Seventeen and three Two of theles that appeared twice

When she saw it she snorted again It was a code A moronically simple alphabetical code Seventeen and three Q and C Quentin Coldwater

It was a signature of sorts, a watermark A Coldwatermark Professor Coldwater had set this seal, and when she saw that, she saw it all He’d wanted a weak spot, a back door in case he needed to undo it later His vanity signature was the flaw in the pattern She extracted the little knife from Wharton’s pencil case and worked it into the crumbly mortar around one particular brick She ran it all the way around the edge, then she knocked on the brick with her knuckles: shave and a haircut Free and loose, it pushed out cleanly: clunk Deprived of that one brick, and hence the integrity of its pattern, the rest of the wall gave up the ghost and fell apart

Why would he have sealed it up? And why him in particular—everybody knew Coldwater was a wine lush She could always ask hiet on hat she was here for It was chilly in the passageway, much chillier than in the cozy Senior Common Room The walls were unfinished boards over very old stone

Dead reckoning, it was about one hundred yards from the Senior Coone half that distance before she cae, then another door Like she was going through a series of airlocks Weird You could never tell what you were going to find in this place, even after living here for four and a half years

The fifth door opened onto open air That was very odd It was a pretty little square courtyard that she’d never seen before, rass, with one tree, a pear tree, espaliered against a high stone wall She’d always found espaliers a little creepy It was like so

Also she was alht

“Nutso,” Plum said quietly She frowned at it Thenot to care She hurried across the courtyard to the next door

It opened directly onto one of the upper floors of the library That definitely wasn’t right; she was traversing souous spaces here The Brakebills library was arranged around the interior walls of a tower that narrowed toward the top, and this must have been one of the teensy tiny upperlimpsed from far below, and which to be honest she’d always assuht there were any actual books up there

In fact now she realized that these upper floors must be built to false perspective, to make the tower look taller than it was, because it was very tiny indeed, barely a balcony, like one of those tiny houses that ate it on her hands and knees; she felt like Alice in Wonderland, grown too big The books looked real enough though, their brown leather spines flaking like pastry, with letters staold Sohosts

The other weird thing was that they weren’t quite inanimate: they poked themselves out at her from the shelves, butted her as she crawled past, as if they were inviting her to open the her A couple of theet a lot of visitors, she thought Probably this is like when you visit the puppies at the shelter and they all jump up and want to be petted

No, thank you If she wished to consult them she would be in touch via the usual channels It was a relief to crawl through the miniature door at the far end of the balcony—it was practically a cat-door—and back into a norht

But it wasn’t too late The main course would be half over, but there was still dessert, and she thought there was cheese tonight too She could still make it if she hurried

This corridor was tight, almost a crawl space In fact it was one—as near as she could tell she was inside one of the walls of Brakebills On the other side was the dining hall: she could hear the warm hum of talk and the clank of heavy silverware, and she could look out through a couple of the paintings—there were peepholes in the eyes, like in oldthe main, a nice rare laht of it ry She felt like she was ashe knew She was a ghost herself, the skeleton at the feast, the world in the walls She already felt nostalgic, like one of those teary alu at the table with her bland crab cakes, half an hour ago, back when she knew exactly where she was

And there was Wharton, showily pouring his ht eet through this For the League

Though God, how long was it going to take? The next door opened out onto the roof The night air was bone cold She hadn’t been up here since the tieese and they’d flon to Antarctica to study at Brakebills South It was lonely and quiet after the dining hall—she was very high up, higher than the leafless tops of all but the tallest trees The roof was so sharply raked she had to crawl again, and the shingles were gritty under her pal sinuous leaden squiggle She shivered just looking at it