Page 4 of A Deadly Education
As soon as I stepped through the door, I grabbed a fistful of his shirt to stop him going on further. We halted just inside, the shining light in his hand reflecting off all the gleaming saw-blade teeth and the dull iron of the vises and the glossy obsidian black of the hammers, and the dull stainless steel of the shop tables and chairs lined up in neat rows filling the massive space. The gas lamps had all been turned down to tiny blue pilot dots. The squat furnaces at the end of each row had tiny flickers of orange and green glowing through the vent slits, the only sickly light. It felt weirdly crowded despite having not a single person in it. The furniture took up too much room, as if the chairs had multiplied. We all hated the workshop more than anything. Even the alchemy labs are better.
We stood still for a long moment in which nothing whatsoever happened, and then finally I deliberately stepped on the back of Orion’s heel just to pay him back. “Ow!” he said.
“Oh, sorry,” I said insincerely.
He glared at me, not entirely a doormat. “Will you just get the stuff and let’s go,” he said, like it was that easy, just go wild and start rummaging through the bins and so forth, what could go wrong. He turned to the wall and flipped the light switch. Nothing came on, of course.
“Follow me,” I said, and crossed to the scrap metal bins. I picked up the long tongs hanging by the side and cautiously used them to flip open the lid. Then I reached in and took out four big flat pieces, shaking them thoroughly and banging them violently against the side of the nearest table. I wouldn’t have tried to carry that many myself, but I’d make Orion carry them, and then I’d have extra to trade someone another time.
After getting the scrap, I didn’t go for the wire, because that would’ve been an obvious choice; instead I had him reach into one of the other bins for a double handful of screws and nuts and bolts, which wouldn’t be much use for repairing my door, but were worth more, so I could trade them to Aadhya for some of the wire I knew she had and even have some left over. I put them into the zip pockets of my combats. Then there wasn’t any help for it: I had to have a pair of pliers.
The tool chests are large squat containers the size of a body, which they have in fact contained on at least two occasions since I’ve been here. You can’t keep the tools you take out during class time—if you try, it’ll come after you—so the only time you can get a tool for private use is after hours, and it’s one of the best ways to die, since the kind of mals that climb into the tool chests are the smart ones. If you open one incautiously—
Orion reached out and lifted the lid while I was still debating strategy. Inside, there was absolutely nothing but several neat rows of hammers, screwdrivers of all sizes, spanners, hacksaws, pliers, even adrill.Not a one of them leapt up to smash him in the head or rip off one of his fingers or poke out his eyes. “Get a pair of pliers and the drill,” I said, swallowing my seething envy in favor of maximizing the value of the situation. A drill. No one in our entire hall had a drill. I hadn’t heard of anyone other than a senior artificer even seeing them more than once or twice.
Instead he grabbed a hammer and in one smooth motion whirled and smashed it down right over my shoulder, directly into the forehead of the thing that the dull metal chair behind me had turned into: a molten grey-colored blob with a maw full of jagged silver teeth opening along the seam where the seat met the back. I ducked under his arm and behind him and slammed the lid down on the tool chest and got it locked before anything else could come out of it, and then I turned round and saw four more chairs had pulled up their legs and were coming at us. Therehadbeen too many of them.
Orion was chanting a metal-forging spell. The nearest mimic started glowing red-hot, and he hit it with the hammer again, beating a huge hole into its side. It made a grating shrieking noise out of its sawtooth mouth and fell over. But meanwhile the others had all sprouted knife-blade limbs and charged—atme.
“Look out!” Orion shouted, uselessly: seeing them was not the problem. I knew a terrific spell for liquefying the bones of my enemies, which would have done nicely in the given circumstances if I’d wanted to blow a tankful of mana and if there hadn’t been any Orion around to be liquefied right alongside the more immediate enemies. There was only one spell I could afford to cast. I shouted out the Old English floor-washing charm, and jumped aside as all four of the chair-mimics skidded on the wet soapy slick and shot past me straight at Orion. I grabbed two of the pieces of scrap and ran for the door while he fought them. I’d use my bare hands to wrap on the wire if I had to.
I didn’t have to. Orion caught up to me on the stairs, panting, carrying two more pieces of scrap, and the pliers,andthe drill. “Thanks a lot!” he said, indignantly. He had a thin bloody slice across one forearm and no other damage.
“I knew you had them,” I said, bitterly.
The climb up the stairs to our res hall took fifteen solid minutes of trudging. We didn’t talk, and nothing pestered us. I knocked on Aadhya’s door on the way back to my room, swapped for wire and also let her know I had a drill now—a lot of people who wouldn’t trade with me would trade with her, and if I had something she didn’t, she would usually broker for a cut—and then had Orion keep watch while I fixed my door. It wasn’t fun. I laboriously drilled holes in one piece of scrap and wired it in place over the hole he had left in the door, securing it thoroughly. I then sat there and wove some of the thinner wire around four thick strands to make a wider band, and I used it to wire the dented remains of my doorknob and lock roughly back in place. Then I pulled the door shut and did the same on the inside with a second piece of scrap.
“Why don’t you just use the mending charm?” Orion ventured tentatively, about halfway through the agonizingly boring process, after he looked round to see what was taking me so long.
“Iamusing the mending charm,” I said through my teeth. Even with the pliers and the drilled holes, my hands were throbbing. Orion kept watching with increasing confusion until I finally twisted down the last ragged end of wire. Then I put my hands flat on either side of the double-layered hole and shut my eyes. A basic version of mend-and-make is one of the spells we all learn, in shop class. The classes are the only way to get the most critical general spells. Mending is pretty obviously on that list, as you can’t get anything into the school but what little you’re allowed to bring in at induction. And mending is one of the most difficult spells, too, with dozens of variations depending on the materials you’re working with and the complexity of what you’re trying to fix. Only artificers really master it completely, and even then only within a specialized range of materials.
But at least you can usually do it in your own bloody vernacular. “Make and mend, to my will bend, iron thrust and steel extend,” I said—we all knew a lot of rhymes formendandmake—and mapped in seventeen knocks around the words, somewhere between the twenty-three you use for sheet metal and the nine for wire. Then I tapped into the mana I’d built up by doing all that excessively nitpicky hand work. The charm grudgingly went churning through the materials. The pieces of scrap slagged into something like a thick metallic putty, which I pushed into place to fill the gaping hole in the door, and as the surface went smooth and hardened under my hands, the doorknobs on either side made a rude noise like a belch and finally hooked themselves back together, the dead bolt shooting back into place with a solidthunk.I dropped my hands, panting, and turned round.
Orion was standing in the middle of my bedroom staring like I was an exotic zoological specimen. “You’restrict mana?”
He made it sound like I was a member of a cult or something. I glared at him. “Not all of us can pull from maleficaria.”
“But—why don’t you pull from—the air, or the furniture—everyone’s got holes in their bedposts—”
He wasn’t wrong. Cheating is a lot harder in here because there’re no small living things to pull from, no ants or cockroaches or mice unless you bring them in with you, which is awkward since the only stuff you can bring is what’s physically on you at the moment of induction. But most people can pull small amounts of mana from the inanimate stuff around instead: leach heat from the air or disintegrate a bit of wood. It’s a lot easier to do that than to pull mana from a living human being, much less another sorcerer. For most people.
“If I pull, it won’t come from there,” I said.
Orion was eyeing me with a growing frown. “Er, Galadriel,” he said, a bit gently, as if he was starting to think I was a lunatic, one of the ones who’d just gone crazy inside. I’d had a wildly horrible day anyway, thanks to him, and that was the final straw. I reached out and grabbed at him. Not with my hands—I grabbed at his mana, at his life force, and gave it a hard deliberate yank.
Most wizards have to work at it to steal power from a living thing. There are rituals, exercises of will, voodoo dolls, blood sacrifices. Lots of blood sacrifices. I barely have to try. Orion’s life force came away from his spirit as easily as a fish on a line, being tugged out of the water. All I needed to do was keep pulling and it would end up in my hands, all that juicy power he’d built up. In fact, I could probably have followed his power-sharing lines to pull mana from all his enclave friends. I could have drained them all.
Even as Orion’s face went wide with appalled shock, I let go again, so the mana went snapping back into him like a rubber band. He staggered back a full pace, his hands coming up defensively like he was ready for a fight. But I ignored him and sat down with a hardthumpon my bed, trying not to cry. Whenever I let my temper get away from me like that, I always feel rotten afterwards. It’s rubbing my own face in how easy everything would be if I just gave in.
He went on standing there, hands raised, looking a bit silly when I didn’t do anything. “You’re a maleficer!” he said after a moment, like he thought he was prodding me into doing something.
“I know this is going to be a challenge for you,” I said through my teeth, still fighting back the sniffles, “but try not being an idiot for five minutes. If I was a maleficer, I’d have sucked you dry downstairs and told everyone you died in the workshop. It’s not like anyone would’ve been suspicious.” He didn’t look like he’d found that particularly comforting. I rubbed the back of my sooty hand across my face. “Anyway,” I added desolately, “if I was a maleficer, I’d just suck all of you dry and have the whole school to myself.”
“Who’d want it?” Orion said after a moment.
I snorted a laugh up into my nose; all right, he had a point. “A maleficer!”
“Not even a maleficer,” he said positively. He did lower his hands then, still warily, only to take another step back again when I stood up. I rolled my eyes and made a little jump at him with my hands raised like claws and squeaked, “Boo!”
