Page 8 of The Golden Enclaves
I could barely see where we were going. There were sconces on the wall, but they were almost all dark, with only a handful still flickering with the tail ends of candlelight: justenough for us to barely see where we were putting our feet, and to make our shadows go dancing crazily over the walls around us, looming and wavering. The corridor went on for much longer than it possibly could have, even if the building was the size of a rugby pitch, stretching itself out with our unease. The sound of distant voices drifted out towards us from the side passageways, too muffled to make out words, clear enough to carry anxiety and fear. The nauseating heave of the mana ocean was still moving beneath my feet, and the anger leaked out of me little by little until it was all gone, and the only thing left was heavy cold dread.
All my Scholomance-honed instincts told me maleficaria were lurking on the other side of every dark doorway. The feeling only got stronger the further we went without being pounced on, because that always means one thing: there’s somethingworseup ahead, the kind of mal that eats the other mals, and it’s time to skive off from class and go to work in the library. Which was quite correct in this case, and we knew exactly what was up ahead. The very worst of the worse, and we were heading straight on towards it, and getting closer with every minute. The others knew it too; I could hear them all breathing raspily, loud in the narrow corridor. And then I realized it wasn’t onlyourbreathing I was hearing.
They all realized it a moment later. Alfie stopped short. The murmuring through the network of passageways was resolving into clearer sounds: gasps, whimpers, sobbing breaths. A woman screamed, “Help, oh god, help me,” very briefly—a shrill exhausted cry that lasted only a moment, but echoed horribly down to us through half a dozen doorways. Someone who’d been eaten recently, if they still had the energy to be screaming. Probably someone Sarah had known: she’d drawn in a stuttering breath behind me, and when I glanced back, in the dim light I could see she had the back ofher hand pressed over her mouth, tears gathered like a glaze over her dark eyes.
She looked back at me. “At graduation, you got that boy out of the maw-mouth,” she said, barely above a whisper, a miserable kind of begging in her voice. I’d preferred the hostility.
“He hadn’t properly gone down yet.”
“But—”
“No,” I said flatly, but Sarah kept staring at me, her face wobbling like jelly, as if she wasn’t ready to trust me for it. “It would be like trying to put a single cow back together out of a butcher’s case.”
She jerked her head round away from me, as if she didn’t want to have heard it; but what was she doing asking me for it, then? “Let’s go,” I said to Alfie. He had a white, nauseated look, but after a moment, he steeled himself and went square-shouldered and marched onward down the corridor.
The voices got louder and louder. Alfie kept walking steadily, resolute, just when I wouldn’t have minded slowing down a little myself. I’d been spot-on about this maw-mouth being bigger than the small one I’d killed at graduation; how pleased I didn’t feel to be proved right. It was going to be worse than the one in the library, too. I remembered the sound of that one much too well, the soft heavy breathing in the dark stacks amid the silenced books. That one had been small enough to squeeze its way up through the Scholomance air vents, and even so it had been unbearably, hideously large.
I couldn’t have been inside it for long. It had only burned through nine of my mana crystals: a fortune to me, but even in the Scholomance, Alfie would have glanced at my box full of them and smiled politely and said, “Really nice, El; have you filled them all yourself?” Out here Sarah would haveworn a handful of them as trinkety jewelry. I’d been pulling from them so hard they must have gone in a minute each. It hadn’t felt like nine minutes; it hadn’t felt like anything. Time hadn’t really existed. There had only been the maw-mouth, endless, and the only way out had been to kill it and kill it and kill it, one death for every life it had swallowed, as fast as I could go. And I’d survived only because I could kill very, very fast indeed.
We came to the end of the corridor abruptly. It ended in a staircase, forked in half and twisted round itself like a double helix, both sides going down. The maw-mouth voices were whispering upwards out of both. The hooded stone figures from the entrance were here, too, standing together at the top of the stairs. Alfie went to the one with the cup, took a pin from his pocket and pricked his finger to let a few drops fall in, then turned and rubbed a smear from his bloody finger across the pages of the open book. The smudge looked black in the dim light, and then it was gone, soaking away into the stone. Alfie glanced away for a moment, to make it easier for the magic to work; we all did the same. But nothing had happened; he darted a look back towards us with alarm starting in his face, but when he turned back the second time, the woman’s statue on the left had turned and was facing towards the passage on her side.
He heaved a shuddery breath and led us down again, but creeping now, step by slow step around the tight corkscrew curve until abruptly it yawned open again into a huge cistern chamber wide enough to drive a lorry through, full of deep water, with a stone walkway running all the way down the middle to an enormous doorway at the far end. The same two carved figures stood there atop a flight of stairs, holding up mana-lamps on either side of a massive red-painted door.
The maw-mouth was enveloping the entire doorway,including the statues. It had poured itself up the stairs over the whole gateway, and the two lamps, the only light, were struggling to shine in an underwater way through its body, making it too visible: something between liquid and jelly and cloud, horrible deconstructed parts seething throughout.
It was pawing around the edges of the doorway plaintively, like a cat asking to come inside, grunts and complaining noises mixed in with the moans and weeping coming from its many mouths. Tendrils were trying to squirm under the door, feeling over all the edges, poking into the hoods of the figures: looking for any kind of vulnerable spot to start prying open the delicious treat. The same way the other one had tried to prymeopen.
We had all stopped in the narrow bottleneck of the stairwell, frozen. The maw-mouth rolled half a dozen eyes over its surface to peer at us. Some of them were fresh enough to be weeping, or staring at us in desperate recognition. The maw-mouth could still use them, either way. I wanted to vomit; I wanted to scream and run away. Sarah was panting in short terrified breaths behind me, and Alfie’s whole body was a rigid line, held against trembling.
“There is no sense standing here,” Liesel said, brusque and too loud. “What do we do?”
That was a charmingly inclusive question, except none of them could do a thing, so really she was sayingget on with it, El,which would have annoyed me more helpfully if I weren’t also terrified out of my skin. The only useful thing she was doing was blocking the way out, which meant I couldn’t actually run away.
“We’ll make a circle and keep it off you, as long as we can,” Alfie said, without looking back at me: that would have required taking his eyes off the maw-mouth. “You know the spell, Liesel.” They’d been allies before we’d turnedgraduation inside out, and I’m sure they’d worked really hard together on perfecting his best defensive casting: a refusal spell, one you could use to keep out essentially anything you didn’t like, which would certainly include any part of a maw-mouth.
He’d shared it with me, too, but it wasn’t an ordinary shield spell that you could set and forget; it was an evocation, and I couldn’t hold it up while also going on a slaughtering rampage of killing spells. But if they sent me in there under a protective spell they were holding up, and the spell failed or slipped away from them—the maw-mouth would be able to get at them through it. Even if they jettisoned the spell right away, as fast as they could, it might get a hold on their mana through the connection, and then that would be that for all of them. According to theJournal of Maleficaria Studies,that was how the three wizards in the Shanghai circle died, and presumably the victims of the last two attempts London had made. None of them had been fresh graduates, either.
So it was a genuine offer of real help, and I hadn’t even had to demand it from them. That wasn’t the way enclavers usually did things. Sarah made a small hitch of breath, not quite on board with Alfie’s generosity, but even she didn’t say no, and Liesel, to give her credit, immediately said, “Yes. I’ll anchor the circle. You lead us in the casting.”
I did appreciate it, except for the significant point that once they’d cast it on me, I’d need to go out there. But Liesel was right as usual. Standing here wasn’t going to improve my lot any, and might make it considerably worse, if for instance the maw-mouth managed to poke through and get a hold on London’s mana store or a few dozen senior wizards to digest.
“Get ready to cast it,” I said, harshly. I took a deep breath and stepped out past Alfie, just onto the walkway, and the maw-mouth—charged us.
I’d seen them move before. They’re ordinarily veryunhurried; they like to park themselves in a good fishing spot and linger. But when they do decide to move, they go at shocking speed. It pulled all its tendrils back from the door and came rolling towards us like a hideous churning wave of death, the voices bursting into a fresh anguished noise of sobbing and wailing like it was ripping them apart all over again, extracting more agony from people already shredded, the eyes staring and the mouths contorted in howling. Sarah screamed, and Alfie jerked back half a step—but we were all graduates of the Scholomance, and even as he flinched his hands were coming up.
He had the evocation up over us half a second before the maw-mouth hit. And then it was crashing over us, a terrible churning mass of flesh enveloping Alfie’s small dome entirely, squeezing the surface in so close around us that the horrible crushed intestinal folds of the thing were rolling inches past my face. I did let out a scream myself then, acid bile climbing up my throat, even though I was thinking too, cold clear tactical data points ticking away inside my head. There hadn’t been time to form a circle; Alfie had cast the evocation alone. He couldn’t hold it for more than forty-nine seconds, each one running out from under us like sandy ground giving way, and if I took the evocation over myself, I couldn’t actually kill the maw-mouth. And sooner or later, it would get through.
So my choices were to let it have Alfie and Liesel and Sarah, or let it have us all, and since neither of those were acceptable, that meant I had to somehow kill this vast monstrous thing right now, in however many seconds Alfie had left to hold it off, and that wasn’t enough time, but I didn’t care: I wasn’t going to let it have them, and if that meant it had to die unreasonably fast, it just had to die, that’s all. I fixed that perfect certainty in my head and drew a breath totell it so in clear small words—and then it rolled the rest of the way over us and was gone, the howling mass already disappearing up the narrow stairs without even slowing down long enough for a single nibble.
I just stood there shocked and still shaking with adrenaline. The dome of refusal burst and came down in a brief cloud of glitter, and Alfie said, quavery, “What—why did it—” only he didn’t finish, because I understood, we all understood at the same time: It wasrunning away.Fromme.
“Fuck,” I said succinctly, and ran after it.
The maw-mouth kept rolling away at top speed. By the time I reached the top of the narrow spiral, it was completely out of sight somewhere along that endless corridor, the columns vanishing into the dark like an illusion of infinity, as if someone had set up two mirrors facing one another. I stood panting for a moment. No one else had followed me back up—I couldn’t blame them—and I did have a moment of wondering what the hell I was doing, only someone screamed again from inside the maw-mouth, a cracked-glass shriek, and they were inside it, they were trapped inside, like my father, like Orion, and I couldn’t let it have them, either. I ran after it.
The only reason the maw-mouth didn’t manage to completely shake me was the crying of the voices, but in the corridor I couldn’t tell exactly which doorway the sound was coming from, and the cries slowly started to fade out. They gave way to exhausted labored breathing that was somehow even worse, the thick struggling desperate sound coming at me like the maw-mouth itself, all around, rasping out of the corridors and echoing dully against the stone walls.
I kept going down one side passage and back, and another, and another after that. They all ended in dead ends that almost certainly weren’t dead ends if you knew what you weredoing. It was possible that the maw-mouth did know what it was doing—it had London wizards in its belly—and had got to the other side of one of them, but I couldn’t stop long enough to go find Alfie and make him help me. If I’d stopped that long, I’d have had to think about what I was doing. Instead I just kept trying doggedly, over and over.
