Page 19 of The Last Graduate
“Do you have enough for us to run for it?” I asked her, but she shook her head, holding it up for me to see: the reservoir was the size of an underfed caterpillar, and there was barely any of the blue stuff left in the bottom.
“I just couldn’t think of anything else to do that would be quick enough,” she said. “I’ve got a blinding spray on me, but if I use it on those two incanters, Hu Zixuan in the back is going to hit us, and I’m almost sure that thing he has is a reviser. We’ve heard rumors about him working on one since he got here, and he’ll have it powered up by the time they go down—”
She was pointing at a kid all the way in the back of the group on the other side. I hadn’t paid much attention to him, because he was so shrimpy he looked like a sophomore at best; I’d assumed he was just helping to provide mana. But as soon as Chloe pointed him out, I realized it was the other way round: the five people fanned out in front of him were screening him and feeding manabackto him. Zixuan had a small pale-green rod almost completely hidden in his hand, which was connected by a thin gold wire to what had to be the rest of the artifact in his pocket: I could see slowed-down light gleaming along the line.
“Right,” I said grimly. “Go ahead and blind the incanters. Is it permanent?”
“You really want me to explain how it worksnow?” Chloe said. “It’s a migraine inducer, and maybe they’ll keep having them for the rest of their lives, and they’re about tofry us!”
“Yes, all right!” I said hastily. Iwasin fact perfectly all right with giving someone migraines in exchange for attempted murder. “Go after the boy with the mustache: Yuyan’s just doing an amplification; if you get him, her casting won’t do anything.”
“But what about the reviser?” Chloe said.
“That I can handle,” I said, and I really hoped I wasn’t lying, but anyway we were out of time. Chloe threw me one last desperate look that also hoped I wasn’t lying as she got out the blinding spray, and then the blue haze was settling down and my throat was hurting as if I’d been shrieking at the top of my lungs. The people on either side of us in the line were cringing away, so probably that’s about what our conversation had sounded like. Chloe was already lunging with a last bit of unnatural quickness across the empty space towards mustache boy, whose eyes went wide in alarm but stayed resolute. He’d known he was going to pull the first attack, brave bastard, although he screamed and crumpled when the spray hit him in the face just the same.
I turned towards the other group just as they parted and Zixuan, owlish with his eyes magnified behind enormous farsighted lenses, brought the jade rod up to mouth level and sang a single clear line at it. I couldn’t understand his request, as he was casting in Shanghainese, but I could take a reasonable guess: it was probably something on the order ofplease alter the floor so it no longer encloses this girl.
I’d only seen a reviser in illustrations before. They’re used all the time, but only in major enclave projects. It’s a generic device that allows artificers to create vastly more complicated and difficult pieces of artifice—something that no one person could keep in their heads—by starting with a completed piece and then making it more complex, little by little. The first ones were used to help build the Scholomance, in fact.
It was quite a clever approach to take against me. Dropping me out into the void beneath the gym would certainly remove me as a problem, and I couldn’t stop it with any kind of shield or even throwing the spell back, because he wasn’t actually aiming a spell atme; he was aiming it at the school itself. It was a small enough edit that he could get away with it, too. And I couldn’t exactly destroy the piece of artifice he was using it on, at least not without dumping usallinto the void.
Fortunately, I knew what to do in this situation, because I’d had to spend two months in my freshman year translating a charming cautionary tale in French all about a truly horrible maleficer who maintained herself in gory evil for about a decade at the expense of many wizard children in her vicinity. Her shielding was so good that she was effectively invincible in a fight, so she killed all the wizards who attempted to end her reign and mounted their heads on the parapet of her elaborate and well-warded tower. She finally got taken out by a young artificer she’d snatched: a boy with an affinity for stoneworking. He didn’t try to attack her; instead he cast a working on the stone of her tower, and walled her up with all her six layers of shielding, so closely that she couldn’t move, and left her entombed to suffocate.
The school then assigned me a long essay—in French—explaining what I would do in the same situation. It even flat-out failed my first half-arsed attempt in which I suggested running away andnotkilling any more children, so I had to spend a week in the library doing research for the makeup.
The answer I found was, when facing an artificer who’s about to turn the environment against you, kill them first. But if that’s not an option you like, your second best chance is to try and intercept the spell power, and then override their alteration with your own.
Chloe wasn’t wrong to be worried about my doing that, however, because if two wizards start wrestling over the same piece of artifice—which in this case was the school itself—almost always the better artificer is the one who ends up in charge.
If Zixuan couldmakea reviser of his own—you can’t bring one in with you through induction, because they’ve got to be fed with a tiny thread of mana constantly or they burn out—he had to be an absolutely brilliant artificer. And I’mnotgood at artifice myself. Artifice is fundamentally about giving the universe a long and complicated story complete with attractive props in order to coax it to accommodate your wishes. I’m really more about shouting the universe into compliance with mine.
But there was some tidy coaxing right at hand that had already been done for me, more than a hundred years ago, by a whole pack of artificers far more skilled than any senior kid could be. So when the green wave of power came towards me, ready to revise the floor beneath my feet out of existence, I stepped into it and spread my arms to greet it and said, “Set this right instead, why don’t you?” then just heaved it up at the gym ceiling, with a push of extra mana to help it along.
The power went boiling up from my arms into the mottled-grey ceiling. It ran cascading down over the domed surface with the wild frothing of a power washer, trickles of green dripping down and kids screaming and running everywhere around me trying to dodge the rain. I was only vaguely aware of them, deep in the breathless shock like standing under a waterfall, having to look straight up into the flow with my whole face desperately scrunched up, barely able to see or breathe or hear for the rushing fury of it. Zixuan and the other kids had put alotof power behind his working: if I had stopped redirecting for a second, his original instructions would have been carried out, too.
I didn’t notice when the screaming and running stopped around me; I was still in the middle of the torrent, and I had to stay there until the last reluctant trickling flowed through and I sank out of it gasping, to find Chloe standing there in front of me with her hands over her mouth, crying in just a shocking way—outright blubbing with her mouth turned down like a clown. I couldn’t see Zixuan or any of the other Shanghai kids anymore, or anyone else I knew. Everyone had been scattered around the gym like giant hands had gathered them up in a sack and then shaken them out into the room again at random, except for the small area right around me.
Almost all of the kids were crying, the older kids especially, or huddled up on the floor like they wanted to be curled into a fetal position but they couldn’t bear to put their heads down. All of us under the crisp blue of an autumn sky, dry leaves on the air and crunchy under us, sunlight dappling in a slant through the leaves of dark maple trees in a mix of brilliant crimson and yellow and green around the edges of the room that was suddenly a forest clearing, the faint gurgle of water running over stones somewhere not far away like a promise, large grey stones emerging like islands from a carpet of moss and leaves, while in the far misty distance a hill climbed a little way above the tree line, with the wooden balcony and roof of a pavilion just peeking out from more cascading colors.
I stood there stupid for a minute or two and then a bird called from somewhere and I started blubbing myself, too. It was horrible. It was almost the most horrible thing that had happened to me in here; it wasn’t exactly as bad as the maw-mouth, but it was hard to compare because it was horrible in such a completely different way. I have no idea what they were thinking when they’d made it, except of course I do. They wanted to make a room that would look charming on tours and impress other wizards, and make them all say how lovely it would be for the kids to have such a nice place to come to for exercise, how lovely to have this to make up for being trapped inside the school for four years without ever seeing the sun or feeling the wind or seeing a single green leaf, all the water you drink tasting faintly of sour metal, all the food the regurgitated slop of massive kettles filled with different vitamins and barely there enchantments to fool you into believing it’s something else, knowing the whole time you’re probably never coming out again, and it didn’t make up for any of that at all.
People started running out of the gym in droves. The only ones who didn’t were the stupid freshmen, who were all wandering around burbling out nonsense like, “Wow,” and “Look, there’s a nest!” and “It’s so pretty!” and making everyone who’d been in here for more than five minutes during the safest year on record want to stab them with knives. I would have gone running out myself, only my legs were as mushy as if I’d just been born, and so I just sat down on one of the picturesque rocks sobbing until Orion was there grabbing me by the shoulders saying, “El! El, whathappened,what’swrong?” I waved my hand frantically and he looked around with his face only confused, and then he said, “I don’t get it, you fixed the gym? But why are youcryingover that? I gave up hunting a quattria to come back here!” in a faintly accusatory voice.
It did help. I got a breath and told him flatly through my snot and tears, “Lake, I’ve just saved your life again.”
“Oh for—I can take a quattria!” he snapped.
“You can’t takeme,” I spat at him, and I heaved myself up onto my feet and stormed out on the energy of pure fury, which at least carried me out the doors and away from the grotesque lie of the grove.
I lurched away down the corridor, wiping my streaming nose on the hem of my t-shirt—hist-shirt actually, the New York one he’d given me, which I’d stupidly worn today, like a declaration; maybe that had been part of why the Shanghai kids had come at me. Because they were afraid of what I would help New York do to their enclave, their families, and why wouldn’t they be afraid? I could do anything.
There were kids crying in huddles scattered around the corridors. I went into the labyrinth and all the way to my seminar classroom, where at least I could be alone except for any maleficaria that wanted to try to jump me, which I’d have really appreciated at that moment. I went down the narrow corridor into the room and shut the door and put my head down on the ugly massive desk, and through the vent a faint breath of autumn leaves came into the room, and I cried for another two hours without anything at all trying to kill me.
Nobody bothered methe last few weeks of the semester, except by sort of sidling around me warily like I was a bomb that might go off unexpectedly. Faint wafts of fresh air scented with crisp leaves and early frost were now coming through the vents at occasional moments that emphasized how awful the air was all the rest of the time. My delightful classroom up in the library got them quite often. My freshmen all took deep breaths of it while I did my best not to vomit. I saw kids occasionally burst into tears in the cafeteria when one blew into their face. Every time, people would glance at me sideways, and then pretend really hard that they hadn’t.
The Shanghai kids had all backed a mile off, and for that matter so had the New York kids. During the previous month, people had briefly started doing things like asking me to trade books or passing me a jar in lab or loaning me a hammer in the shop. I’d been irritated at the time, since I’d understood very well it was because they’d decided I was an important person worth courting. But now they didn’t ask me for anything, and if I did say, “Can I have the psyllium husks,” four kids would jump at the same time to shove whatever thing I needed at me, more often than not knocking it over and spilling it all over the floor, at which point they would collectively go into a frantic routine of apologies and babbling while cleaning it up.
I did try saying things like, “I won’tbite,” only I said it while seething, so the message that actually got conveyed was that biting would be mild by comparison with whatever I would do instead. And of course they believed me. I’d already done something horrible beyond imagining: I’d made the Scholomanceworse.Top marks for inflicting mass trauma. It was even getting the freshmen, too: three of them haddiedin the gym during the last couple of weeks. I made clear to mine that none of them were to go near the place, but other, less-well-advised ones, kept making excuses to go down there to play fun games of keep-away-from-the-surprise-mal or get-eaten-in-the-doorway. The death toll would’ve been higher except Orion had begun patrolling the place on a routine basis to hunt for the mals that were using it as a hunting ground. I wasn’t clear on whether it counted as him using the freshmen as bait if they were the ones staking themselves out.
