Page 52 of The Golden Enclaves
But then Orion looked over towardsRuthand pricked up like a hunting dog on alert, sniffing out prey. She had her eyes shut and her hands spread wide, her jaw clenched and trickles of red-stained sweat running off her as she worked: a delicious bonbon, at least, and as if she’d felt the interest, she jerked and opened her eyes and stared back at him, and abruptly stopped her working, her face going blotchy with alarm. She took a step back. All the wizards on New York’splatform were starting to back away as well, terror wiping away smugness as they all suddenly noticed there was a bloodymaw-mouthstanding up there with them, ready for dinner.
Ophelia was the only one not retreating. Maybe she didn’t feel it the same way, or was too determined not to realize what she’d done. She said something to Orion, gesturing out across the plaza, towards all of us massed together on the Shanghai side—maybe thinking he had just got turned round and needed a reminder of who he was meant to be fighting? I don’t know, but the maw-mouth looked over and was apparently willing to take suggestion.
He came down from the platform towards us, a horriblyfluidmovement. Pleased with herself, I expect, Ophelia turned and gestured to Ruth, who had the good sense to eye her in some doubt, shaking her head slightly. But after all, it was clearly an excellent idea to offer Orion an alternative meal plan, so in a moment she did start her working again.
I was standing at the very back of Shanghai’s side, with Li. Orion was walking steadily towards us even as the ground pulled in, like moving walkways in the airport, or a conveyor belt going straight into an incinerator fire. The front ranks of Shanghai’s side were already starting to throw attacks at him over their fortifications, hurling all the same useless spells that people had tried to throw at me, up above, and they did just as much good. Every spell wanted to rip him apart and kill him and hurt him, and he wasn’t catching them and picking them apart; he didn’t need to do that much work. He was just absorbing them without a pause.
People fell back as he came closer, frantically shoving the defenses out ahead of them as they scrambled, a wall of artifice and barrier spells. He paused as he reached it, and then—hereached out,in some way I couldn’t describe. Itwasn’t something I saw, it was something I felt in the same way I could feel magic, or love and rage. But even though it wasn’t visible, it wasthere,a grasping tentacled hunger uncoiling, and everything it touched just—went into him, with shrieks of unraveling almost like human voices. And then itwashuman voices, the first human voices screaming, as he reached through the openings he’d made, and seized hold of the nearest wizards, the stupider or braver ones who hadn’t got far enough out of the way.
I flinched with horror, with every kind of horror there was. All of us did. Even the wizards on New York’s side were flinching back. I could see small distortions in the air around the platform, the other Dominuses trying to open up portals. They didn’t want to watchthis,I suppose. But none of the portals opened. Shanfeng had been right. This wasn’t just a trap for him. It was a trap for all of us. Ophelia did want to take Shanfeng out, because he was the biggest threat: the only wizard in the world whocouldhave built a bigger weapon, if he’d chosen to follow her down the path. But she also wanted every last enclaver in the world, even her own allies, to understand that she had a nightmare weapon she could and would use against all of them, and that meant that when she finally let them out of here and they all went home, they were all going to do exactly what she told them.
I turned back to Shanfeng in desperation, looking for anything, any way to get myself and Orion and everyone else out of this trap she’d built. And hewasholding something out to me, across both palms. A chain with a polished disk the size of a saucer, swirling black and silver, in a powdery black steel frame: a power-sharer, only ten times the size. I could feel the power flowing through it even without touching it. “I can’t force you to save us,” Shanfeng said. “I can only give youwhat you need to do it. All the mana we’d stored to build a second school, freely given.”
I could have slung it at his head, I could have screamed at him. But I couldn’t have heard myself over the rest of the screaming, the struggles of the wizards trying to save themselves. Their shields were already starting to go in bursts of sparks. They were being dragged over the floor by inches, towards Orion.
“Ophelia took her own child and fed it to a maw-mouth, and to pretend she hadn’t done it, she dressed the maw-mouth in her child’s skin,” Shanfeng said. “That is what is standing there. Not the boy you loved, the one who offered himself up to save other children. Would he choose to do this?”
“Shut up!” I snarled at him, so angry it came out of me in a sound of many voices, enough to make him flinch back fromme.“You don’tcarewhat Orion would have chosen. Any more thanshedid.”
I grabbed the disk out of his hands and turned. I blasted out the evocation of refusal all the way over the entire force, a shimmering dome several inches thick, with a glaze of oil-slick rainbows all over the surface. The screams died away into gulping sobs as the evocation shoved Orion back, pushed his grasping reaching arms away.
The wizards he’d grabbed hold of tumbled to the ground, set loose. They all started crawling away on their hands and knees shaking. I ran through the ranks right up to the wall of the dome. The whole distance only took me three steps, because I was going in the direction of Ruth’s pull, and together her intent and mine hauled me straight up to the iridescent wall almost instantly. The dome was covering exactly half the cavern, the curved wall lined up perfectly with the shininggolden inscription in the center,Malice, keep far, holding Orion on the other side.
But he was looking in at me with bright hungry eyes, interested. He reached out to the dome and put his hands on it, and the surface began to run away from around the pressure of his fingers, swirling. It would hold him for a little bit, but not for long. He’d learned how to get through it already once before. A maw-mouth wasn’t mindless hunger. It was made out of the longing of all the wizards together who had made it, their longing to live, all the art and cunning and desperation they could bring to achieve that goal.
And Ophelia had made this one out of the frantic hunger of a whole year of Scholomance students, trying to get through the gates: she’d taken the losers and the enclavers both. Maybe even the enclavers especially, so close they could taste the rest of their enchanted, gilded lives opening up ahead of them. She’d taken all the yearning life out of them, and she’d poured it into the void through her perfectly untainted child, crushing him and then building him back up again around the maw-mouth she’d made.
And even if Orion never looked out of his own face again, she’d still go on trying to use what she’d made. She’d feed the maw-mouth half the wizards in this cavern and afterwards she’d find a way to pen it up until it was wanted once again, and then she’d make a portal and guide it through. And maybe that would even work for a good long while. This thing would go with her, because it would know she was taking it to dinner. She’d have it trained up a treat in no time. And all of those people would go on screaming inside forever and ever, screaming along with the first sacrifice, the single pure soul she’d found to crush down into the void: Orion. And the only person left to stop it was me.
I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. I just stood on the otherside of the dome watching him pushing his way through, with tears running down my face and all the mana in the world dangling at my fingertips, only it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to make a different world.
His fingertips began to work through, and then he closed his eyes and put his face against the dome between them and pushed it through, little by little, the surface separating away from around his nose, and his lips, and his eyes. And as soon as his face broke the inner surface, Orion opened his eyes and looked at me,Orionlooked at me, and he said, “El. Please,” and he wasn’t asking me to get him out at all. He was asking me for the only gift I had to give. And if I didn’t give it, that thing was going to come through and it was going to take me, and everyone else behind me, and probably it would go on forever, deathless, undying, until on some distant day it had finished devouring every last scrap of mana in the world and then slowly gnawed itself away after everything else was gone.
“El,” Aadhya said softly behind me, her voice shaky and terrified and full of tears, but there; she was there, reaching out to put her hand on my shoulder. Liu was there holding her other hand, clutching the lute with tears running down her face. They’d come to me, to be with me, even though everyone else was only desperately trying to get away.
And then Khamis was there too, heaving himself forward with his whole face clenched up with the same determination he’d worn when he’d faced me down at school, and he snarled at me, “Do it! Do it and get it over with, you stupid girl! What else are you going to do, leave him like that? You might as well feed him to Patience yourself.”
I could have punched him in the face; I could have kissed him in gratitude, for the single spark of rage lighting up in me, burning off despair in clean hot fire. “No,” I said savagely,to Khamis, to Orion; to Ophelia and to Shanfeng. “No.I’m not going to leave him like that,” full of a sharp-edged golden clarity like the shining letters at my feet, the prayer from the Scholomance doors:Malice, keep far.
But malice had been inside the Scholomance from the beginning. Those doors had been built on another maw-mouth, a maw-mouth that had refused to be sent away, because there was no better hunting ground in the world. Patience. And it was still here. Orion hadn’t destroyed Patience. The Scholomance was still standing. He’ddevouredPatience, the way Patience had devoured Fortitude, the way that between them they had devoured a century of children’s lives. And all those children were still in there, still screaming, still suffering. I couldn’t leave them like that. I couldn’t leave any of them like that.
I had to kill Orion Lake.
I put the chain with Shanfeng’s massive power-sharer over my head, and then I slung my bag forward and took out the sutras. I opened them and held them up, let the book rise up from my hands, the golden incantations shining. I reached out on either side to Liu and Aadhya, squeezed their hands tight, felt their love and strength in their answering grip.
“Keep hold of me,” I said. “Don’t let go. Please.” Orion had almost made it through the shield, and I could feel their terror, too; their hearts beating through their hands. It wasn’t fair to ask, but I asked it anyway. “Please.”
“We’re here,” Liu whispered, and Aadhya said, shaking, “We won’t let go.” They put their hands on my shoulders, just like when we’d started coming down the well, and after a moment, Khamis put his hands on their shoulders, the contact running through to me like an electrical spark.
Orion broke through the dome. It shattered and went falling away like shards of thin ice, vaporizing before they evenhit the ground. He came towards me, and I didn’t step back. I reached out and took hold of him and gripped him in my hands, all of him: the horrible seething hunger and all the works built on top of it, everything that required that endless fuel. The school that Sir Alfred Cooper Browning had built to save the children of enclavers; the expansion that London had made to let in so many more. The many dozens of enclaves whose maw-mouths had crept into the Scholomance looking to feed, and been swallowed up by Patience and Fortitude in their turn. And Orion. The child that Ophelia had sacrificed to try to stop a rising tide of maleficaria, and I said to him softly, gently, with all my heart, “You’re already dead.”
It barely took any mana at all. I was just telling the obvious truth, telling all of those devoured children the truth: Orion, and everyone who’d gone into the Scholomance and hadn’t come out, and the crushed sacrificial victims under every maw-mouth that Patience had swallowed up. They were already dead, and that was horrible and unfair and agonizing, but it was the truth, and it did, actually, set them free, as the maw-mouth that had devoured Orion, the maw-mouth that was holding Orion up, heard me, and recognized that yes, of course, it too was already dead.
There wasn’t a sloshing rush of flesh and rot: Ophelia’s efficient maw-mouth didn’t need to keep the bodies round, having a better one of its own. But I still felt themgoing,like one single enormous sighing out. And the mana went with them. The mana extracted from all those lives, which had even to this moment been holding up enclaves all over the world, and the Scholomance itself, and the life of one boy; it all went draining away, and Orion’s body shuddered under my hands like the deck of a rolling ship, or the waves beneath it. The ground underneath our feet shuddered and rolled the same way, the bronze doors of the Scholomance groaninghorribly. There were cries and shouts from the platform as all the cracks Ruth had mended began to open up again and widen, the whole room wavering. Rocks were coming down from overhead; this cavern had slid halfway into the void itself, connected to the Scholomance, and it wasn’t going to survive the school coming down.
Orion was almost sliding out of my grip, as if I was trying to hold on to something just as impossible, a different magical wonder built into the void. But I didn’t let go. I held on, to Orion, to the Scholomance, to the teetering distant enclaves that I couldn’t see, all of that magic built on top of a tiny single-celled place in the void where the maw-mouth had been. “You’re already dead,” I said. “Butstay anyway.Stay with us, andshelter all the wise-gifted children of the world,” and made all three of the spells into one: the terrible murderous truth I had to tell the maw-mouth, and the sutras’ longing plea for golden shelter, and the beautiful lie that the Scholomance had been built upon, and into that working I poured all the mana that Shanfeng had given me, the mana that had been saved up to build a school to save the lives of children. The work that Orion had tried to make his own.
I repeated the incantation in Sanskrit from the sutras, the incantation that really just meant “stay,” and then Liu joined in, saying it in Chinese, the version she’d used in Beijing, and Aadhya said it with me the next time in English, “Stay and be shelter,” and even as we were speaking I felt more jolting sparks going through me: Miranda and Antonio and Eman and Caterina had joined our human chain too, behind Khamis, and then there was a thump through us all like a lightning strike: Li Shanfeng had joined the chain behind them.
