Page 8 of The Last Graduate
Orion was trying to fight his way back up, hampered because Chloe was frozen not halfway off him, staring open-mouthed at the elaborate dismemberment. To be fair to her, it was more of a show than I’m letting on. When I cast spells, there are usually copious side manifestations, generally designed to convey to anyone watching that they should probably be fleeing in terror or alternatively dropping to their knees and doing homage. The whole dismemberment happened in roughly the span of half a minute, and there was a lot of futile but violent thrashing involved, along with wailing disembodied shrieks and gusting flares of phosphorescence as the apparition bit went. After it was all over, everything was left neatly lined up in a row, exactly like the supply shop of an alchemist maleficer’s dreams. The remnants of the last victim hadalsoseparated themselves tidily into cleaned bones, flesh, and scraps of skin, in line with the bits of mal. The skull was sitting atop the pile of bones with thin trails of smoke coming out of the sockets. And as the finishing touch, the spongy roll that had been the tongue wrapped itself into a square of the fallen canopy, and another strip of canopy tore away and tied a little bow around it before it rolled into the line.
I’d jumped on a chair to get clear of the various gushing fluids, and the last wafting clouds of phosphorescent smoke were winding around me. My mana crystal was glowing with the power I’d had to pull, but I wasn’t casting a shadow, which meant I was probably glowing myself. “Oh my God?” Chloe said, a little faintly, sort of like a question, frozen in place.
“Hey, can you get off?” Orion said, sounding a bit squashed.
“Just so you know,I was going to say yes anyway,” Chloe said miserably, like she didn’t think I’d ever believe her, as she handed me the power-sharer. “Really, El.”
“I know you were,” I said grimly, taking it, but her expression didn’t change; probably my tone didn’t sound very encouraging. So I added, “If you were going to say no, it wouldn’t have jumped us,” a little pointedly, because she should have figured that much out by then. A mal smart enough to have been quietly lurking in her floor pillows—floor pillows she’d probably inherited from a previous New York enclaver—for years and years, conserving its energy and slurping up anyoneotherthan her who was unlucky enough to be left alone in her room—which is the kind of thing enclavers do, invite friends over for a study group after dinner with the understanding that one ofthemis going to arrive first and make sure the room is all right—hadn’t just leapt at us because it suddenly lost all self-control. It had done it because Chloe was about to get on board withme,meaning that especially delicious me was about to become a much harder target.
Chloe frowned, but she’s not dim, and she’d just had her face shoved in it very firmly, so once she got over the hump of her basic programming, she worked through the implications fast enough that the associated emotions traveled over her face in quick succession. It meant I hadn’t been making everything up. The school reallywasout to get me, and the mals were, too; I reallywasas powerful as that implied—her eyes darted over to the still-standing array of grotesque ingredients as that hit—and anyone hanging round me was almost certainly asking to be in the line of fire.
When she got there, I said, “I have a bunch of storage crystals. I’ll just fill them up and then give this back to you.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment; she was still looking at the ingredients on the floor, and then she said, slowly, “You’re strict mana. Is that—because—” She didn’t go on, but that was because she didn’t have to. Like I said, she’s not dim. Then she looked at me and raised her chin a bit and said in a high voice, like she was declaring it to the world and not just me, “Keep it. You might need more.” I was already fighting down the violent urge to scowl at her like a monster of ingratitude when she added tentatively, “Would you—do Aadhya and Liu need them?”
Which made it a request tojoin our alliance.
I couldn’t even just blurt out a flat unthinking no, because I couldn’t give her an answer to that question without talking to Aadhya and Liu. That meant that I’d have too much time to recognize that the obvious and sensible and evenfairanswer was yes.
I didn’t want to be allied with Chloe Rasmussen. I didn’t want to be one of the lucky ones whose alliance gets scooped up with enormous condescension by some enclaver with mana and friends and a chestful of useful things to spare, which is of course the goal that most people are actively aiming for when they put together a team without an enclaver already in it. Even if that wasn’t what Chloe meant or what we meant, that’s what everyone would think it was. And after all, they’d be right; we’d get Chloe out, and Chloe’s mana would get us out, and we’d be leaving other people behind who didn’t stand a chance.
But she had a right to ask, when I was here asking for her help to start with, and she’d had the guts to ask, when instead she could just have got clear after paying me back for saving her from the attack that only happened because she’d been willing to help me in return for nothing at all. She was offering more than fair value, even if it wasn’t fair that she had it to offer, and if I still wanted to say no to her despite all of that, Aadhya and Liu had the right to tell me I was being a colossal twat.
“I’ll talk to them,” I muttered ungraciously, and as you would expect, the end result was that three days later I had to add Chloe’s name on the wall near the girls’ bathroom, where we had written up our alliances. Liu also put her name on the Chinese translation next to me, the power-sharer on her wrist gleaming and shiny, and then we all went to breakfast together and I had to hear at least twenty bazillion people congratulating us, where by “us” I mean me, Aadhya, and Liu, for having scored Chloe. We hadn’t got nearly as many congratulations when we’d written ourselves up near the end of last term, even though we’d been one of the first alliances to go on the wall.
To cap it off, Orion didn’t congratulate me exactly, but he said, “I’m glad you and Chloe have become friends,” in an alarmingly hopeful way that was very clearly only one unfortunate literature assignment away from turning intocome live with me and be my love,optionally etched onto metal with little hearts around it.
“I’ve got to get to class,” I said, and escaped to the comparative safety of my independent study down in the bowels of the school, where the worst thing that was going to leap at me with devouring attention was a flesh-eating monster.
In a month of school, I’d so far translated a grand total of four additional pages out of the Golden Stone sutras. They contained a single three-line spell in Vedic Sanskrit whose purpose I couldn’t even guess at from the start. It had seven words I’d never seen before which all had multiple translation options. The rest of the four pages was a commentary in medieval Arabic explaining at length why it was just fine to use the Sanskrit spell even though it might seem haram because of the wine used in the casting process. The commentary mostly avoided anything useful like explaining what the spell did that was so great and how the alcohol was meant to be used. Except it didn’tcompletelyavoid anything useful, so I had to dig through the whole frothing thing for the handful of nuggets.
That morning I finally figured out which of the ninety-seven possible meanings went together, and reached the conclusion that the spell was for tapping into a distant source of water and purifying it—something of extremely great interest to people living in a desert and much less so to someone living in an enchanted school equipped with functional if antiquated plumbing. I was just glaring at my finished and useless three-line translation when the furnace vent rattled at my back and a whirling mass of fur and claws and teeth leapt out onto me, exactly as anticipated.
And then it promptly bounced off the shield that I didn’t even have to cast, because Aadhya’s shield holder on my chest had automatically pulled mana from the power-sharer to block the physical contact. Even as I whirled round, the leskit went skidding over the floor into the corner and twisted itself up on its twelve feet. It was odds-on which of us was more surprised, but it recovered quicker; it came at me again and stopped just short to give the shield an experimental swipe, striking a cloud of bright orangey sparks off it.
My normal strategy in a situation like this would have been to distract and run. But by then I could hear screams and more hissing coming from the ventilation: there was a pack of them in the workshop. Leskits don’t usually hunt individually. Mine opened its toothy maw and emitted a loudkrrk krrk krrknoise like an angry ostrich—I’ve never heard an angry ostrich but it’s the noise I’d imagine coming from one—and there was some scrabbling in the vent and another one’s head came poking out. It dropped down and the two of them discussed inskrrksfor a moment and then charged me together, clawing, scraping more deep flaring gouges in the shield.
I stared at them from behind it, and then I slowly said, “Exstirpem has pestes ex oculis, ex auribus, e facie mea funditus,” which was a slight variation on an imperial Roman spell meant to eradicate a host of annoyances that are trying to get at you but are temporarily held back—such as, for instance, a mob of angry locals besieging your evil tower of wizardry and torture. I waved my arm in a broad sweeping-away-vermin gesture at the leskits, who promptly disintegrated, along I presume with all their pals inside the workshop, since the screaming I could hear filtering in through the vent died off into a vaguely confused silence.
For another moment I went on staring at what were now two little piles of ash on the floor, then for lack of anything else to do I slowly sat back down at my desk and went back to work. There wasn’t any reason for me to go running out into the corridor, and still twenty minutes left before the bell. After a few minutes, the door—which had done its slamming routine again just a few minutes before the leskits made their appearance—slid back open in what I possibly imagined was a disappointed way. It didn’t even bang all that loudly.
I spent the rest of the period making a clean copy of the original Sanskrit spell, along with a formal spell commentary of my own, including word-for-word translations of the spell into modern Sanskrit and English to help convey meaning, with several possible variations in connotation, an analysis of the Arabic commentary, and notes on the potential usage. It was the kind of stupid flashy work that you only do if youaretrying for valedictorian, or eventual journal publication, which is a less violently competitive approach to getting post-graduation enclave interest.
I didn’t need to do any of that. There wasn’t an assignment I had to hand in, and I certainly didn’t need to do the work to cast the spell. In fact, I could’ve done that as soon as I’d worked out the pronunciation. Except, of course, that if I ever took the risk of casting a spell without knowing for sure what it was meant to do, it would definitely turn out to be meant to do a lot of murder.
I did all of that silly make-work because I didn’t want to start on a new section. More accurately, I didn’t want to have thetimeto start on a new section. Obviously I didn’t have any regrets about spending New York’s mana on wiping out a pack of leskits, saving my own skin in the process, but I wasn’t going to let myself feelhappyabout it. I wasn’t going to be grateful, and I very much wasn’t going to get used to it, only that was hopeless nonsense; I was already getting used to it. My shoulders wouldn’t stay tense, and I kept forgetting to check the vent behind me, as if it wasn’t the most important thing in the room.
And then at the bell, I went out into the corridor and the crowd of sophomore artificers came spilling out of the workshop, talking excitedly about what had happened to the leskits, and I overheard one of them saying, shrugging, “Comment il les a eus comme ça? J’en ai aucune idée. Putain, j’étais sûr qu’il allait crever,” and I went to my Myrddin seminar in a cloud of outrage as I realized Orion had beenin there,and my leskit-clearing stunt had somehow saved his neck, so Ididhave to be happy I’d been able to do it, and also what had he even been doing down in the workshop with a bunch of sophomores?
“Were you lurking outside my classroom door or something?” I demanded at lunch, as we got in line.
“No!” he said, but he also didn’t offer a remotely convincing explanation. “I just…I had a feeling” was what he served up, and hunched away from me looking so sour and grouchy that I almost wanted to let him off the hook, except my wanting that was so horribly wrong that I didn’t let myself.
“A feeling like you needed to get your arse saved from a pack of leskits?” I said sweetly instead. “My count is up to four now, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t need to be saved! There were only eight of them, I could’ve taken them,” he snapped at me, and he had the nerve to sound actually annoyed, which annoyedme.
“That’s not whatIheard about it,” I said, “and if you don’t like getting rescued in turn, you haven’t got a leg to stand on, have you?”
