Page 12 of The Last Graduate
Sudarat nodded, a small jerk of her head. “Some people from Bangkok heard,” she said. “About the attacks we’ve had. Some other people. When I told…” She trailed off, but I’d got the picture. When she’d told Prasong about the library attacks, other older Bangkok kids had been at the table, too. And now her former enclave mates were using her as the source of useful gossip to pass along, just to score a few points. Just like all of us loser kids do, because you can’t know which of those points is going to be the one that gets you through the graduation hall gates.
“What did you tell them?” I said.
Her head was bent down towards her desk, the short blunt edge of her hair hiding her eyes, but I could see her lips and throat work when she swallowed. “I said, I didn’t remember. Then I said no.”
She was learning, the way every loser freshman learns. She’d understood that they weren’t asking out of consideration for her: they were hunting for information that was valuable to them. She understood that they were sniffing around after me. But she hadn’t learned the full lesson yet, because she’d done the wrong thing. What she should have done, obviously, was find out how much the information was worth, and sell it to them. Instead, she’d lied to protect me, to someone who had hope to offer her: hope of help, hope of a new home.
Thoughtful of her, although I’d have been happier if someone from Shanghai hadn’t been suspicious enough to be asking her questions in the first place. That meant a raft of bad things. For one, the seniors in Shanghai enclave were actively trying to figure out what was going on with the mals—and they had nine students in our year alone, not to mention all their allies. For another, they already knew that our library sessionhadbeen attacked by a mal at least once, which made us unusual this year. They were surely trying to put that information together with any other known mal attacks, which would be the handful that had spilled over into the workshop from my seminar room. As soon as someone found out that there was a single-person language seminar held next to the workshop that was getting attacked, and the single person happened to also be the only senior in the library room that was getting attacked, that wouldn’t be a difficult blank to fill in.
I had no idea what would happen when the information all came out. The other New York kids might decide to cut Chloe and us off from the pipe. If Orion wasn’t supplying them with fresh mana anyway, they didn’t have a lot to lose from ditching his “girlfriend.” And that could—would—be the least of it. If people worked out that the school was gunning for me in particular, they’d want to knowwhy,and if they couldn’t turn up a reason, someone would probably decide to poke me with a sharp stick to find out. If they didn’t just decide that it was a good idea to give the school what it wanted.
So, my midterm study sessions were exceptionally cheery.
Except actually theywere.The shine of studying with other people still hadn’t dulled for me. We’d cleaned up Chloe’s double-width room, and found new stuffing for the cushions—if you think we’d turn up our noses at reusing some perfectly good and comfortable cushions just because they’d previously been home to a pair of monsters and a half-digested fellow student, you haven’t been paying attention—and we gathered there almost every evening, with a little basket in the middle where our mice could snooze between getting petted and even occasionally fed a treat by anyone invited to join us.
It was almost never just the four of us. Whatever subject we wanted to cover, it was a sure bet we could get in more people for the asking. I had plenty of help for Arabic: Ibrahim and a couple of his friends were happy to come by and give me advice as the price of admission. Nkoyo came almost every night, too, and she was doing that general Sanskrit seminar I’d expected to get. Thanks to their help, I was making some real headway on the Golden Stone sutras: just that week I’d actually got to the first of the major workings.
Except, ugh, that was a lie. It wasn’t their help, not really. It was the time I had because I didn’t have to desperately watch my own back every second of the day. It was the energy I had because I wasn’t constantly scrabbling to build mana. And itwastheir help, too, only their help and the time and the energy all came from the same thing, and that wasChloe’shelp, Chloe’s bountiful generosity, and I didn’t like it. Except of course I did like it loads, I was just bitter and sullen about it, too.
But I couldn’t manage being bitter and sullen on the day I turned the page and found myself looking at a gorgeously calligraphed heading that I didn’t need to translate into Being the First Stone upon the Golden Road to understand what it was saying:This one’s really special,with the Sanskrit incantation set in a finely bordered window on the page, every character flavored with gold leaf and paint in the main curves. Even at a first glance I could pick out bits of all the other spells I’d gone through so far: the phase-control spell, the water-summoning spell, another one I’d just finished working through that was for dividing earth from stone; they were woven together and invoked as part of the overall working.
I didn’t just stop being sullen. I stopped worrying about mana, about what was going to happen when and if my cover was blown; I stopped working on my midterm assignments and ignored the rest of my classes entirely. For that whole week, in every waking minute that I wasn’t actually stuck in session or killing mals, I was working on the sutra. Even during meals I had my head in a dictionary.
I knew it was stupid. My midterm assignment for the Myrddin seminar was a long involved piece of Old French poetry that was sure to contain at least three or four useful combat spells I could probably use during graduation. Meanwhile Purochana’s great working was on the scale of architecture and probably needed an entire circle of wizards to cast anyway. The Golden Stone sutras were meant for building enclaves, not killing off mals: it would only do me any good if I lived long enough to getoutof here.
But if I did—then I could offer it to groups like Liu’s family, like the kibbutz that Ibrahim’s friend Yaakov was from: established communities of wizards who wanted to set up their own safe, sheltered places. The Golden Stone sutras probably weren’t the best way to build enclaves anymore, otherwise more of the spells would have survived into the modern day, the way the phase-control spell had, but it would be a sight better than having to mortgage your entire family to another enclave for three generations just to get access to the spells, much less for the resources you’d need to use. And Purochana’s enclave spells probably weren’t going to be as expensive as the modern spells, either. No one was building skyscraper enclaves back in ancient India: even if you’d imagined one, you couldn’t exactly call your local builders and order some steel girders and concrete.
So my golden enclaves wouldn’t be as grand as a top modern-day enclave, but who cared? It would still keep the mals from getting to your kids, and if you had that, if you hadsafe,at least you’d have a choice. A choice that someone could make without being Mum. You wouldn’t have to suck up to enclave kids and bribe them. They’d still have advantages, they’d still have more hand-me-downs and more mana, some people would still court them, but it wouldn’t be everyone, desperate to survive. They wouldn’t get piles of free help just for dangling the slim hope of getting into their alliances and the even slimmer hope of getting into their enclaves.
I liked the idea; I loved the idea, actually. Ifthiswas how I’d bring destruction to the enclaves of the world, I was on board with my great-grandmother’s prophecy after all. I’d take Purochana’s spells and spread them all over the world, and I’d teach people how to cast them, and maybe they wouldn’tlikeme, but they’d listen to me anyway, for this. They’d let me stay in the enclaves I helped them build, and I’d make it part of the price that they had to help others build them, too. Either they’d donate resources, or they’d make copies of the spells, or train teachers—
While I was busy putting the world to rights in my spare time, what I wasn’t doing was any of my other schoolwork. I completely forgot the midterm assignment for my Proto-Indo-European seminar, and I would have been well on the way to outright failing if it hadn’t been for Ibrahim; when I remembered it on the Monday night before the due date, with less than one hour to curfew, he brokered me an emergency trade with an enclaver from Dubai that he’d got friendly with. He and I had sat near the Dubai kids in the library for one evening last term. They all still gave me dirty looks if we passed in the corridors, and he’d made one good friend and four nodding acquaintances. Story of my life. But now I got to benefit, because when I yawped in alarm, that night in Chloe’s room, Ibrahim said, “Hey, Jamaal’s probably got a paper for that.” It turned out that Jamaal was the youngest of five, and had inherited a priceless collection of hand-me-down papers and schoolwork for nearly every class he might possibly have taken, and more besides. I handed over a copy of the paper I’d written about the water-summoning spell and got back a nice, solid essay handed in for the PIE seminar of ten years ago.
I still had to rewrite the essay in my own handwriting, and while I was doing that, I got annoyed at some of the dumb things it said and ended up changing about half of it, staying up until all hours. I fell asleep on my desk and had to work on it the next day during my independent study. Afterwards I shuffled into the PIE seminar, full of unjustifiable resentment, and as I stuffed it into the submission slot still yawning, an eldritch vapor wisped out and went straight into my wide-open mouth.
Forget any preconceived notions you might have of gigantic Cthulhian monstrosities. Eldritch-category mals are actually relatively fragile. They hunt by driving people insane with enchanted gases that fill your senses with the impression of untold horrors, and while you thrash around screaming and begging everything to stop, the mal creeps out of its hiding place and tries to hook your brains out through your nose with its partially embodied limbs.
The problem with using this clever tactic on me was that there really isn’t an untold horror that the human brain is capable of experiencing that’s worse than being enveloped by a maw-mouth. So the vapor made me flash back to that particular experience, and I reacted just as I had at the time, which can be summed up as me yellingdie immediately you horrible monstrositywith enormous and violent conviction. Only this wasn’t a maw-mouth, it was just a drippy ectoplasmic cloud, and I slammed it with the full force of a major arcana murder spell like someone trying to light a match with a flamethrower.
My handiest killing spell doesn’t kill things by destroying their bodies, it just goes straight to extinguishing life on a metaphysical level, so that’s what spilled over. More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression that I shoved it entirely out of reality, and I then went on from there to try and insist that a whole lot of the stuff around it should also stop this absurd pretense of continuing to exist.
This was especially awkward because a lot of the Scholomancedoesn’texactly exist. It’s made of real material, but the laws of physics get quite flexible in the void, so most of that material has been stretched thinner than it should be, the engineering doesn’t meet the regs, and the number one thing keeping it up is that we’re all believing in it as hard as we can stare. And that’s what I took out: in one horrible moment, I made the four other kids in my seminar extremely aware that the only thing between them and howling nothingness was a tin can held together by happy thoughts and pixie dust. They all screamed and tried to get to safety, only they couldn’t, since they were carrying the lack of belief along with them, and the seminar room and then the entire corridor started to come apart around them.
The only thing that stopped us taking out a massive swath of the school was that I hadn’t stopped believing myself. Still half groggy with eldritch vision, I stumbled after them out of the room into a corridor which was starting to bend and warp like aluminium foil under the weight of the entire massive school above it, and in my confusion I thought it was just me being drugged, so I shut my eyes and told myself firmly that the corridor was not by any means wobbling and put out my hand to the wall with the expectation that the wall would be there and solid, and so it was again. I yelled after the other kids, “It’s fine! It’s just eldritch gas! Stop running!” and when they looked back and saw that the corridor was fine around me, they were able to persuade themselves I was right, and then they started believing in the school again.
A moment later, I realized that actually I’d been wrong, because as soon as the corridor stabilized, the Scholomance slammed the door of the room shut and sealed it away behind a permanent hazard wall, which are normally reserved for lab rooms on the second floor where there’s been an alchemical accident so horrible the deadly effects won’t resolve for a decade or more. As the hazard wall shot down from the ceiling beside me, almost taking off my thumb in the process, I startled and glanced over long enough to catch just half a glimpse of the excessively real wall of the seminar room beyond it, crumpled into accordion folds. That’s how I worked out what I’d done.
I didn’t really know any of the other kids in the seminar. They were all languages-track seniors like me, of course, and one of them, Ravi, was an enclaver from Jaipur, so the other three had sat round him, the better to offer him help on his papers and exams. None of them had ever spoken to me. I only knew Ravi’s name because one of the others was a blond German girl named Liesel who had a violently annoying habit of cooing “Ravi, this is extremely excellent,” every time he let her edit his papers. It made me want to hurl a dictionary at both their heads, and all the more so because I’d seen her submitting a paper once—that’s how I knewhername—and that one peek had been enough to tell me she was probably going for valedictorian and at least ten times smarter than him, since he wasn’t even smart enough to have figured out that she was the best in the class; he usually gave his papers to one of the other boys and wasted class time flirting with her and staring at her breasts.
Of course, brains aren’t everything in all circumstances. Ravi was able to convince himself everything was fine a lot quicker than anyone else; by the time I got over to them, he was recovered and saying with easy assurance, “We’ll go to the library. We can’t be marked down if the classroom’s been shut. You’re welcome to come,” he added to me, in a tone of lordly generosity, and had the gall to gesture to the corridor, indicating that I was to take point position in exchange for the condescension. What made it even worse was that just a few weeks ago, without Chloe’s power-sharer on my wrist, I’d have had to do it and be grateful for the lucky chance of company.
“If I’m taking point for a walk mid-period, I’ll go by myself,” I said, rude. “Especially since none of you thought of mentioning the eldritch shine.” They’d all been in class before me. Since none of them had been attacked handing in their own assignments, they’d clearly spotted the signs—there’s a sort of faint iridescent glitter to the air near an eldritch horror that I wouldn’t have missed ordinarily—and pushed their own papers in from a distance. None of them had said a word as I’d stepped up to the slot myself.
“You’ve got to have your own lookout,” one of the boys said to me, a little defiantly.
“That’s right,” I said. “And now you can have yours.”
“What was that?” Liesel said suddenly. She’d been looking at the stabilized walls and the hazard door with a lot more suspicion than the rest of them, which she’d now translated into staring at me. “That spell which you used. Was that—La Main de la Mort?”
