Page 17 of A Deadly Education
It wasn’t going for the reading room. It was going the other way, straight for the stairway at the end of the aisle, the one that went down from the library to the freshman dorms. Where all the youngest kids would be holed up in their rooms right now, all the ones who didn’t have an enclave to get them in at one of the safe tables in the reading room, doing their homework in pairs and crowded trios. The maw-mouth would stretch itself out along the hall, blocking as many doors as it could reach, and then it would start poking tendrils inside to pull the tender oysters out of their shells.
And there was absolutely nothing I could do to save them. The quickest other way to get to the freshman dorms was to run through the reading room and down the other half of the incantations corridor to the staircase there, and I’d come out on the opposite side of the dorms. By the time I got back round, no warning would be necessary. The kids on the other side would already be screaming loudly enough.
But that was the only thing I could do, the only thing anyone could do; the only thing at all, because you can’t kill maw-mouths. When a maw-mouth comes at an enclave, even their goal is defense: hunkering down, closing up entrances, driving away other mals, so the maw-mouth moves on to hunt somewhere else. The greatest wizards alive can’t kill maw-mouths, and they won’t even try, because if you try and you don’t kill it, it eats you and it keeps eating you forever. It’s worse than being killed by a soul-eater and it’s worse than being grabbed by a harpy and taken to her nest to be eaten alive by her chicks and it’s worse than being torn apart by kvenliks, and no one in their right mind would ever try it, no one, unless the girl you’d started dating a few months ago was going to die, her and someone you didn’t even know, not even a person but just a blob of cells that had barely started dividing yet, and you stupidly cared about that enough to trade a million years of agony for theirs.
That maw-mouth wasn’t going after anyone I loved. I didn’t evenknowany freshmen. After it made a good meal of some dozens of them, it would settle down to digest and recover from the effort of its long climb up. It would probably stay there in their hall, riding down with it one year after another all the way to graduation. When it got hungry again, it would just creep a little way further along the corridor and eat some more freshmen who didn’t have anywhere to go. At least they’d have some warning. The kids it ate today would keep begging and crying and whispering for a long time, or at least their mouths would.
And then it occurred to me, unwillingly—if Icouldsomehow stop the maw-mouth, no one would even know. There wasn’t a single person left in the library stacks right now, not with all the blasting and screaming in the reading room. And the freshmen wouldn’t come out of their dorm rooms if they heard anything in the hallway. It was the end of freshman year, they’d learned by now to just barricade their doors, like sane people. No one but me even knew there was a maw-mouth up here, and absolutely no one would believe me if I tried to tell them I’d done for one. And I’d have to burn up who even knew how much of my hard-won mana stash. I wouldn’t beableto show off afterwards. My reputation would be the least of my worries. I’d spend all of my senior year scrabbling desperately after every last drop of mana I could collect just to try and survive graduation.
I didn’t want to realize any of that. I didn’t want to realize because it mattered too much to me. You never get anything for free in here. But I’d just been handed an incredibly valuable book, and right behind me in the reading room was everything I’d been hoping for, my best chance for survival and a future. I already knew that the school wasn’t holding that out to me for nothing—and here in front of me was the exact opposite. I was being offered a bribe twice over. But why would you bribe someone if you didn’t have to? The school wouldn’t bother trying to keep me off the maw-mouth unless the school thought—that I had achance. That a sorceress designed from the ground up for slaughter and destruction might just be able to take out the one monster no one else could kill.
I looked around just in time to see Orion go flying across the corridor opening, the white flare of that top-notch shield holder of his going off as he slammed into whatever on the other side. A cloud of rilkes went boiling after him, their wings making the shrieking bird-noise, dripping blood beneath them like rain. I could run right in and vaporize all of them with a single crystal’s worth of mana, just like the scratcher, and end up standing there heroically over gasping Orion, in front of a crowd of enclavers. And no one would even think twice when they heard about the maw-mouth. I wouldn’t even have to pretend I hadn’t seen it. I could go in there and tell everyone I’d seen it, and I’d still be a hero. Not even heroes try to stop maw-mouths.
I turned and went after the maw-mouth. I wanted to be angry, but I just felt sick. Mum would never even know what had happened to me. Nobody would see me die. Maybe some of them would hear me screaming, muffled on the other side of a door, but they wouldn’t know it was me. And the kids who heard me screaming would all be screaming themselves, soon enough. Mum wouldn’t know, except actually I was sure she would; she’d know the way she’d know if I ever used malia. She was probably leading a meditation circle right now, a nice summer evening in the woods, and she’d close her eyes and think about me, the way she was always thinking about me, and she’d know what had happened to me, what was happening to me. She’d have to live with it in her, along with Dad’s death, for the rest of her life.
I was crying in the only way I ever let myself cry in here: with my eyes wide open, blinking hard and letting the tears just go down my face and drip off my chin so they don’t blur my vision. There was a brighter light over the entrance to the staircase. I could see the glossy surface of the maw-mouth shining with iridescent reflections as it poured itself through. It didn’t leave anything behind, no trail of slime or slick. It didn’t even leave dust behind: I followed a smooth, clean-swept track instead, down the stairs and out the landing into the freshman hall. The light was better in there. I could see the maw-mouth clearly, already uncurling limbs out in front of the doors, like a parody of open arms. Stretched wide, it looked at me with dozens of eyes, some mouths making soft whimpering noises, others just breathing noisily. One of them said something like, “Nyeg,” as if it were a word.
I gripped my crystal in my hand and linked up to all the other ones waiting back in the chest in my room, and then I walked towards the maw-mouth. I wasn’t sure if I could really make myself touch it, but I didn’t have to. When I got close enough, it finally did put out a tentacle just for me and wrapped it around my waist and pulled me in, a horrible feeling even through the shield: a really big sweaty man with sticky hands who had grabbed me too tight and was pulling me close against his body. The mouths near me started whispering unintelligible slurred moist words like him breathing drunk into my ear, only on both sides at once. I couldn’t get away from it, this thing thatwantedme, wanted to get inside me and open me up. I tried. I couldn’t help trying. It wasn’t a choice. I couldn’t stop myself trying to thrash myself away from it, to twist and fight, but it didn’t work. I was just helplessly in its grip.
And the only good my shield did for me was that the maw-mouth couldn’t quite manage to get in, yet. Like a tongue trying to push between my lips, and I was able to keep them shut, and it couldn’t get my legs open. But I’d get tired eventually, I’d have to give up. I couldn’t outlast it. And the terror and rage of knowing that I couldn’t hold out forever was the only thing that made me able to do anything else. I pushed a little way into it, and then a wave of it rolled down over my head and it stopped being anything like being held by a person, no matter how awful. It wasn’t mouths and eyes and hands, it wasintestines,organs, and it was still trying to get in me, without limits. It wanted to open me up and make me a part of it, mash me up into itself, and it was the disgusting horrible wet inside of dying things, never quite getting to dead, rotting and still bubbling with blood. I started to scream, just from feeling it around me.
And I knew no one was coming ever, no matter how much I screamed, so I kept going at first. I pulled myself deeper into it, grabbing fistfuls of it one after another like some kind of rope that squished out of my hands almost as fast as I got it, trying to swim through meat. But I could feel my mana just going, a torrent pouring through me to hold my shielding spell up, to keep the hungry thing out of me, and I had no idea how much I was using, how much I had left, whether I’d even have enough left to destroy the thing when I got to wherever I was trying to go, and I was screaming and sobbing and blindly shoving onward without really getting anywhere, and I couldn’t actually bear it lasting any longer. The textbook had been right all along,take anything instead,any other death, because I would rather have been dead than keep going, even with my shield.
So I didn’t keep going. I stopped, and I used the best of the nineteen spells I know for killing an entire roomful of people, the shortest one; it’s just three words in French,à la mort,but it must be cast carelessly, with a flick of the hand that most people get wrong, and if you get it even a little wrong, it kills you instead. That makes it hard to be careless. But I didn’t care. Could I flick my hand properly inside here? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I was just doing something that came naturally, a spell that slipped off my tongue as easily as a breath, and I flicked my hand or maybe just thought of flicking my hand. All around me the horrible stuff wentworse,sludging into putrescence, but that one moment of casting the spell had felt easy and good and right, so I did it again, and then again, and again, and again, just for the relief. I threw other killing spells, every one of the dozens I knew, in case any one of them would do it, would make it all stop. But it didn’t stop. The rot and corruption just kept spreading wider around me, organs floating in a sloshing mass, eyes bobbing out of it to press against my shield staring at me, but at least they clouded over and shriveled up when I cursed them, so I kept going, just killing and killing until suddenly between one moment and the next the maw-mouth broke apart over my head and slithered down all around me to puddle like an emptied sack at my feet, disintegrating, the last few eyes already dead and empty before they sank in on themselves as the last of it came apart.
I thought I’d been clawing my way through it for miles, but I’d hardly gone two steps past where the maw-mouth had first grabbed me. There was a thing left on the floor a few feet away from me, a grotesque lump that looked like a deboned chicken, except a person instead, a body that had been crushed into a fetal position. Then that broke apart too into gobbets and sludge, leaving the whole hallway drenched in blood and bile and the last bits of rotting flesh.
All of it was already running away down the drains set in the floor, the carefully, thoughtfully placed drains in the slightly sloped floor that were designed for just this sort of occasion, to efficiently drain away all the evidence of any unfortunate event that might mess up the floors. They started to choke on the sheer quantity, and I thought the pipes might back up, but then the sprayers in the ceiling kicked in automatically with loud grinding thumps, and look at that, they were even up to the task of draining away the wreckage of a maw-mouth’s worth of murder. I didn’t know how many people I’d killed in there. I’d lost count how many times I’d cast killing spells. Of course, I’m sure they were all grateful. All of them would have taken me instead.
I had to take down my shield spell, which was still covering me up. I didn’t need it anymore, and I was going to desperately need every last drop of mana it was using right now. But I couldn’t make myself do it. The outer surface was drenched in rot. The sprayers had stopped, and blood and fluids were draining down, puddling red and putrid yellow around the outline of my shoes, leaving only the three-inch margin of my shield. I didn’t want to put my hands out through it.
I just stood there instead, trembling, still leaking the tears that hadn’t stopped, and when a line of snot dripped down my face, warm and sticky, I wanted to vomit; my whole stomach clenched up into a knot. Then I heard a voice yell, “El! Galadriel! Are you down there?” from the stairs, and it set me loose. I put my hands up through the very top of my shield and shoved it open out and down to the ground, wasting another couple seconds of mana to do it that way, so the filth just went into the last draining mess on the floor.
Orion came off the steps and into the hallway, panting and singed, half his hair burnt short on one side, and when he saw me, he stopped and heaved a deep breath like someone who’s been a bit worried because you stayed out too late, and now, seeing you’re fine, is annoyed. “Glad you made it out safe,” he told me pointedly. “It’s all over, by the way.”
I burst into sobs and buried my face in my hands.
ORION HAD TOmore or less carry me back to my room. Possibly less given that he couldn’t actually manage my weight the whole way and had to stop and put me down a few times, and I walked for a bit before I stopped and cried some more and he picked me up again in a panic. He worked out somewhere along the way that something had happened other than me running away from a bunch of mals in the reading room, and when he got me to my room, he tried to get me to tell him about it. I suppose he would have believed me, and if he’d believed me, and told other people, wouldn’t that have done it? Probably not. Everyone thought he was stupidly gone on me, after all, and they’d have asked if he saw it, and he hadn’t.
I didn’t find out. I didn’t want to talk about it at all. I didn’t answer any of his questions, except the last one; I said, “No,” when he finally asked me if I wanted to be alone. He tentatively sat down on the bed next to me, and even more tentatively, after a few minutes, put his arm around my shoulders. It made me feel better, which was awful in its own way.
I fell asleep at some point. He stayed with me for the whole afternoon, even through lunch, and woke me just in time for dinner with my eyes gummy and my throat sore. I slogged through it dull and blank, taking absolutely no precautions. It was just as well that Orion never left my side. An eyestalk came up from the drains under the table I’d sat down at, which was one of the bad ones and I’d just taken it anyway; the big watery green blob of an eye swiveled around, peered at Orion’s ankles, and slid quietly back under without making a full appearance. I didn’t mention it.
Aadhya said, “Did she have a casting rebound or something?”
“I don’t know!” Orion said, sounding frayed at the edges. “I don’t think so.”
“I heard you killed a manifestation in the library,” Liu said. “Sometimes they can split themselves. Maybe she got partly drained.”
Orion hooked a finger into the chain round my neck and fished my crystal out from under my shirt: it was dark and cracked and empty. That was because I hadn’t protected it properly when I had finally yanked down the shielding spell, but it would’ve looked the same if I’d been shielding against a manifestation and it had broken through. But I didn’t tell him Liu’s guess was wrong, or say anything one way or another. The whole conversation felt like something happening on a TV screen in a program I didn’t even watch, with actors I didn’t recognize. “Right,” Orion said, grimly. “Stay with her, would you?” and then he took off the power-sharer on his wrist and got up.
He went and grabbed one of the mops standing at the edge of the cafeteria waiting for the next maintenance shift, and went round the whole room whacking the ceiling tiles hard. People squawked complaints as mals started literally raining down all over the place, but they were mostly the larval ones who hang around waiting for leftovers; Orion ignored them until he finally hit a nest of flingers in the corner. After he’d killed all nine of them, he came back to the table, put his hand on my chest, and shoved what felt like a year’s worth of mana right into my not-at-all-drained body.
I’ve got a substantial capacity for holding mana, but it was too much for even me. I didn’t have a functional storing crystal on me, so I couldn’t bleed off any of it. If I’d been properly functional at the moment, I’d have used it for the dramatic display I’d been planning. If I’d been a little less functional, I’d have instinctively cast my most natural spell, which at this particular moment was the killing spell I’d lately been casting over and over. I was just functional enough to recognize that I really didn’t want to do that, and yet I was about to be mana-poisoned if I didn’t do something with the power. So instead I poured it into the one completely unthinking spell I know that doesn’t involve killing people, which is the little meditation Mum had me do every morning and night, directly after toothbrushing. She taught it to me when I was little by having me sing the Simple Gifts hymn, which is as close to the idea as any incantation gets, but it’s not really an incantation, you don’t actually need words for it at all. It’s just making the choice to put yourself right, whatever that means for you. On the handful of occasions when I asked her whether I really was a monster, what was wrong with me, she told me there was nothing wrong with me that wasn’t wrong with me, and made me do the meditation until I felt right again. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you’re completely welcome to go and visit the commune and discuss it with her.
Normally the spell requiresnomana; sitting down with the intention to cast it is enough. I was so far from right that I couldn’t actually form that intention, but throwing so much power into the spell was enough to force me through, rather like picking myself up by the scruff of my neck and shaking myself really hard, with a few slaps across the face from each side. I jerked up onto my feet, standing with a yowl, batting my hands at the air wildly for a moment. That only used up about one month’s worth of mana; I had eleven more ready to pop my seams, and—still operating on instinct—I shoved the spell out from me, which made everyone else at the table except Orion jump and gasp just the same as I had. That took care of nine months’ worth; two other random kids passing by tripped and dropped their trays as it hit them, and then it finally petered out.
I sank back down on the bench with a hardthump.I certainly did feel like myself again, namely violently irritated. Everyone else around the table was looking uneasily happy, their faces brighter, except Liu on the other side of the table, who was shaking violently, staring at her own hands: her fingernails had gone back to normal. She stared at Orion. “What did youdo?” she cracked out, wobbly.
