Page 48 of The Last Graduate
I wouldn’t have expected it of them, of enclave kids; they’d been raised to do the opposite, to get themselves the hell out. But they’d also been raised on the party line, hadn’t they: they’d been told, just like the school itself, that Manchester and London and their heroic allies had built the Scholomance out of generosity and care, trying to save the wizard children of the world; and maybe just like the school, it had sunk in more than their parents might have wanted. Or maybe if you only gave someone a reasonable chance of doing some good, even an enclave kid might take it.
I didn’t know anyone else, but we were coming to the very end of the line, and the last group of enclavers, going to Argentina; they’d drawn one of the lowest numbers of the lottery, but they hadn’t kicked up a fuss and demanded to be jumped ahead, or else; and because they hadn’t, none of the other unlucky enclavers had been able to complain. There were four of them, and they went through single-file and fast, one after another, except the last one recoiled screaming—the first screaming I’d heard for a while—as a maw-mouth came rolling in through the gates.
There wasn’t any question about where it had come from, horribly. The boy from Argentina who’d just gone out of the portal wascaught,struggling and screaming, begging for help, for mercy, to be let out, in absolute and familiar terror, as the maw-mouth went on gulping up his body, even as it came through.
I must have stopped singing. I don’t think I could’ve kept singing. It wasn’t a very big maw-mouth. It might even have been smaller than the last one, the first one, the only one I’d ever seen or touched before—the one that would keep living in me for every last minute of the rest of my life. It only had a cluster of eyes, almost all of them brown and black, fringed with dark lashes, horribly like the eyes of the boy being swallowed, and some of them were still conscious enough to be full of horror. Some of its mouths were still whimpering faintly, and others sobbing or gagging.
But it was going to get bigger. It caught three other mals even before it was all the way inside, and reeled them in and swallowed them—even before it had finished engulfing the boy, despite their own thrashing; they didn’t have enclaver-quality shields to hold it off. And the boy would go too, soon enough; as soon as the last of his mana ran out.
“Tomas, Tomas!” the Argentine girl was sobbing, but she wasn’t trying to reach out to him. No one tried to touch a maw-mouth. Not even other mals, not even the mindless most-hungry ones, as if even they could sense what would happen to them if they did.
There was bile climbing up my throat. Liu was still playing; she’d thrown a quick horrified look up at me, but she’d kept going. Alfie was still holding the aisle, with all the London kids behind him, even though surely all they wanted was to flee out the gates, to run for more than their lives, because the worst thing a maw-mouth did was never kill you.
I’d asked them all to help me, and they had; I’d asked them to be brave, to do the good thing that they had a chance of doing, and I hadn’t the right to ask them to do it if I wasn’t going to do it myself. So I had to go down to the maw-mouth. I had to, but I couldn’t, except past it, far down the hall, at the barricade, I could see Orion’s head turn round. If I didn’t go down, he’d come. He’d leave the barricade, let the tidal wave of mals come in behind him, and come for the maw-mouth, because Tomas was screaming, screaming in rising desperation, as the maw-mouth’s tendrils began to creep inquisitively up his chest, towards his mouth and eyes.
I stepped down from the platform and crossed the dais. The last kids in the queue parted to let me through, staring at me as I went, and the shimmer of the alchemical wards ran like water over my skin as I went through it. The mals were still coming through the portal, but they were parting in a wide circle around the maw-mouth, which had paused perhaps for a little digesting, and to feel around inside the scorched outline that Patience had left behind, as if it was considering where to make itself at home. It was like a tiny little inkblot inside that monstrous outline. It couldn’t have had that many lives inside it yet. And I had my own shield up, Mum’s simple brilliant shielding spell that she’d given away to everyone in the world who wanted it, and all it took was mana that you’d built yourself, or that a loving friend had freely given, and Orion was still pouring power into me like a waterfall.
I had to shut my eyes so I wasn’t looking at it, and then I pretended that the gates were in front of me, the gates with Mum on the other side, Mum and my whole future, and that was true, because I couldn’t get there until I’d gone through this, because the bloody horrible universe wanted me to suffer, and I jumped forward into the maw-mouth. Even as the horrible surface of it closed over me, I cast La Main de la Mort with all my rage and the mana of a thousand mals behind it, and I cast it again, and again, and again, my whole face and body clenched tight, and I don’t know how long it was, it was forever, it was three seconds, it was my entire life stretched out to infinity, and then it was over and Liu was yelling at me, “El! El, look out!”
I opened my eyes, kneeling in wet, and turned just in time to cast my killing spell one more time, automatically, right at the slavering horka that had just erupted in through the portal. It tumbled instantly dead, and its corpse went sliding past me down the steps, riding the horrible putrescent gush still draining out of the translucent skin of the maw-mouth, and three other kids were—they were yanking Tomas up, out of the puddle of its remains. His legs where the maw-mouth had enveloped him and started trying to unspool him were raw and bloody in patches, and the power-sharer still on his wrist was crackling; he’d probably overloaded it, pulling enough mana to shield himself. Sarah pulled it off his wrist and flung it away from him; it vanished into the streaming mals and the minor explosion was muffled by their bodies.
I knelt there staring at them, shaking. I didn’t quite believe I’d done it, and I didn’t quite believe it was over, the whole world gone unreal and blurry for me: the streaming mals still going by, Liu’s music still carrying our song.
“Get up!” Liesel was yelling at me. “Get up, you stupid girl! It is time! There are only two minutes left!”
It worked, and I managed to get my feet back under me roughly at the same time poor Tomas did. One of the others had given him a drink of potion, and he was looking very calm and glazed; the last girl from Argentina had got his arm over her shoulders and was helping him balance. Then I realized why Liesel had been yelling so vigorously: Alfie had moved the evocation to cover us, to save us from simply being overrun, but that meant no one else could go. He was trying to force it back into place, against the pressure of the mals still pouring in, and the clock was almost down to the final minute.
But there were only twenty kids left. I didn’t go back into the honeypot calling spell with Liu. Instead I went to Alfie and put my hand on his shoulder, then put my hands beneath his, to take the evocation over from him; he slowly and carefully eased his hands out, and gasped and nearly fell over with release as it came off him. I got a secure grip on it, and then I pushed mana into it, the mana that was roaring endlessly into me, and widened the evocation, shoving mals aside, to make an archway to the gates.
“Go!” I said, and the London kids were gone, and the rest of the line behind them; Liesel jumped down from the platform herself, shoved the mindphone into my hand—I resisted it for a moment, what was the point with everyone gone, but she so determinedly wrapped my hand around it that I gave up and took it, and then she was gone.
The queue was empty. Liu picked the last few notes, letting them fade away so the song-spell would end gracefully, and then she jumped down from the platform with the lute and ran past me through the gateway without wasting a moment on goodbye: the gift of leaving me every last second of the one precious minute we had left, with the music still winding its way through the speakers, before the mals all broke loose from the honeypot enchantment; she only reached out a hand and brushed her fingertips against my arm as she flew by.
And then it was the end. It was just me and Orion—Orion who was still fighting in the mouth of the barricade. The mals were trying and trying to get inside, to get past him, but he’d held them back. The endless tide of them would overwhelm and smother him eventually, even him. There were hours of them—days and weeks of them—already built up; sooner or later he’d fall down for sheer exhaustion, for thirst and hunger and lack of sleep, and they’d have him. But he didn’t need to hold them off for hours, for days, for weeks. He only needed one minute and twenty-six seconds.
“Orion!” I called to him—of course he didn’t do anything as sensible as look over, much less come running—and then, with a half-annoyed, half-grateful thought to Liesel, I yanked up the mindphone and yelled into it. “Orion!” Even though he was fighting, he jerked and looked back at me, and then he killed six more mals and threw a sprinting spell on his feet and put on a flaming burst of speed and skidded to a stop beside me.
“Go through!” I said, but he didn’t even bother to say no, just swung round and put himself between me and the mals now pouring into the hall through the barricade. They weren’t even coming for us right away. I doubt any of them wanted to come at Orion after the last fifteen minutes of slaughter, and the music had already stopped for them, the promised banquet vanished before they’d even reached it. They were only spilling in now because they hadn’t anywhere else to go, with all the pressure pent up behind them.
I planted my feet on the dais and started in on the supervolcano incantation. The first ley lines spiked out from under my feet, running to all the walls like the coronal lines of a sunburst, and then long curving lines went swinging back and forth over the floor after them. When the whole floor was covered, all of them shot together up the walls and through the ceiling, and for a moment I could feel the whole building in my hands, yielding to me—
Yielding the same way the gym floor had yielded to me, that day with all the enclavers ready to fight each other. Yielding—to give me a chance to stop the killing. Tosave more children.
I hadn’t expected to feel sorry. I hadn’t allowed myself to expect that I’d even make it to this moment, so I hadn’t imagined what it would be like if I did, but even if I had, I don’t think I could have imagined that. But for a moment, Iwassorry: the Scholomance had done everything it could for us, given us ungrateful sods everything it had, like that awful story about the giving tree, and here I was about to chop it down. I paused, in that moment between the two parts of the incantation, and though I had to clench every hardened muscle in my gut to keep from flying apart with the potential of the spell gathered in me, I managed to say, softly, “Thank you.” Then I plunged over the line.
I’d never completely cast the spell before, for obvious reasons. I don’t think I’ll ever cast it again. As soon as I was inside it, I knew it wasn’t really a spell for a supervolcano: that was just an example. It was fordevastation,for the shattering of a world. I’d felt instinctively that it would work to take the school down; now I knew that it would.
And the mals knew, too. They did come at us, then—not to kill us but toescape.The honeypot spell had died out, and the last portals had closed; no more of them were coming through the gates. But the whole school was crammed full of them, every last nook and cranny jam-packed, and all of them could feel the end coming: the warning pillar of ash and fire going up into their sky, the spreading grey cloud.
But Orion had flipped his sword-wand-thing open into a long, whiplike length, and he was keeping the whole dais clear; any mal that tried to set so much as a toe on the steps, he killed, and none of them wanted to come up. Little ones tried to dart out through the sides; he killed them with rapid flicks that my eyes couldn’t even follow. I was chanting the final verses of the incantation, and the floor was beginning to heave beneath us. I could feel walls parting, pipes bursting, all through the school, and the low groaning of the floor as it began to separate from the dais. The seam all round was opening up, and a thin black line of empty void was beginning to show through.
The mals were going into a frenzy: they stopped being reluctant, and Orion was fighting furiously, killing them in every direction: nightflyers and shrikes diving at us, ghauls howling in the air, eldritch horrors whispering frantically. There was a squealing of metal behind me, too: the doors were starting to swing shut again. The fiery letters in the air were counting down: forty-one seconds left, and time to go. If a few mals did escape now, after we were gone, it didn’t matter. The job was done; we’d done it. I deliberately stopped on the last syllable but one, and let the spell go. The air around me rippled with the shudder of the spell traveling out—not quite finished, but so close that it would tip over to completion on its own in another moment. I laughed in sheer triumph and cast the evocation of refusal round us and shoved it outward, tumbling the mals away from me and Orion down the steps.
Orion wobbled himself, on the lowest step, and looked round wildly at the mals that had just been pushed out of his reach. “Let’s go!” I shouted to him, and he turned and stared up at me, blankly.
And then the whole floor shook beneath us, and it wasn’t because of my spell. The ocean of mals surrounding us parted like the Red Sea, frantically frothing away to either side as a titanic shape bigger than the doors themselves erupted out of the shaft and came surging towards us, so enormous I couldn’t even recognize it as a maw-mouth at first: the endless eyes and mouths so tiny they were only speckles scattered like stars over its bulk. Any mal that couldn’t get out of its way was consumed without a pause; it just rolled over them and they were gone.
It wasn’t Patience; it wasn’tjustPatience. It was PatienceandFortitude. Scorched and starved, their graduation hall picked completely clean, they’d finally turned on each other. They’d chased each other through the dark underbelly of the school—the school had surelyopenedspaces up for them deliberately, luring them away from the gates to clear the hall for our escape—until one of them had devoured the other and settled in to quietly digest its enormous meal in peace, a century of feeding in a single go, only to be stirred up into a panic when it had felt the school beginning to topple.
