A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(25)

In the middle of the school day, the trip downstairs is loads better. Most kids still try to avoid the workshop this near to end of term, but the stairs and corridors on the way are at least lit up, and we weren’t the only ones when we got there: a trio of seniors at the back had skipped lunch entirely to keep working rather frantically on some kind of weapon they were likely counting on for graduation. We settled on a bench towards the front and Orion came with me to my project locker—I handed him the key and let him open it; that’s always a bad moment—and after nothing whatsoever jumped on us, I took out my mirror frame and we carried the rest of the supplies back to where Aadhya had already got the small gas burner going, a process that normally took me ten minutes each time.

    She’d never bestirred herself to show off for me, but Orion’s presence was all the incentive she needed to put on a display, and it became clear she was even better than I’d realized. She wasn’t going to do the actual enchantments, which would’ve required her to invest mana out of her own stockpile, not something you do for just a favor in return, but she’d volunteered to hold the perimeter, which was a tricky bit of the pour. She set up the barrier around the edge, and Orion mixed the silver with comfortable sureness, even while working with an enormous array of painfully hard-to-get and expensive ingredients that I’d spent most of the last few weeks carefully collecting from the supply cabinets in the alchemy labs—roughly as much fun as getting anything from the shop supply—which he handled as if he could just get a jar of moon-grown tansy and a sack of platinum shavings off the shelf anytime he needed. He probably could.

“All right, Orion, please pour it right into the middle, from as high up as you can reach,” Aadhya said, and added to me in lecturing tones, which I swallowed resentfully, “and make sure you don’t tilt the surface more than twenty degrees, El. You want to keep the flow going into the middle, and just gently spiral it out. I’ll tell you when it’s ready for the incantation.”

Forcing an incantation into a physical material—which then preserves the incantation’s magic and makes it ongoing instead of something ephemeral—is the hard part of making artifice for most people, because the physical reality of the stuff resists you trying to muck with it, and you have to put a lot of power behind it. That wasn’t a problem for me, but the devil was in the details. As soon as my spell hit the silver, it was going to start bubbling. And if the silver hardened with the bubbles in it, there wouldn’t be much of a mirror after. I’d have to scrape the frame clean, gather new materials, and try again without all this lovely help. The proper way to do it is to ease the enchantment into the material seamlessly; that’s what good artificers do. But you’ve got to have a sense for how the substances are reacting, and the ability to coax them along. Coaxing anything isn’t my strong suit.

    So instead, I was going to be throwing power at the problem—specifically a delightful spell that some Roman maleficer had worked up for crushing an entire pit’s worth of living victims into pulp. He’d obviously had a harder time getting life force out of people than I did. On the other hand, his spell was the best option I had found for creating anything like a pressure chamber. It was a hefty 120 lines of ancient Latin and took an outrageous amount of mana, but I had to make the mirror somehow, and for Aadhya’s benefit, I was determined to make it look absolutely effortless.

When Orion finally got round to dumping me, I wanted to come out of this mess with something more than a school-wide reputation for being a bit of a slapper. Getting Aadhya on board as a core ally would do nicely. She had a big network of friends across the school, an eclectic bunch of Americans, Hindi and Bengali speakers, and fellow artificers, and she’d built that into a still-larger network of people who were glad to work with her, as a trader or an artificer. Last year she’d brokered a big deal between some alchemy-track enclavers and a group of artificers she knew and the kids on the maintenance track: that’s why the ceiling in the big alchemy lab had actually been fixed in less than a year after Orion and the chimaera had pulled it down on our heads. If I showed her that I could be a ticket straight through graduation, and she agreed to ally and talked me up, enough other people would know she wasn’t either a fool or desperate and lying. We’d get invitations to join a bigger team for definite.

    As Orion let the stream go, I tilted the mirror in a circling motion, keeping the silver flowing evenly all round. Aadhya held the perimeter really clean and tight, not a single drip running out, and as soon as the last bit of red vanished—I’d painted the surface red to make it easier to see when everything was covered—Aadhya said, “It’s ready!” I put the mirror back down on the platform, recited the mirror enchantment itself—there went half a crystal just on that—and then I put my hands on either end of the mirror, defining the space between them, and cleared my throat, getting ready to cast the crushing spell.

Which of course is when the clear tinkling noise, like melancholy wind chimes, went off behind me: a sirenspider dropping onto one of the metal benches. The seniors at the back must have seen it coming down: they were already heading out of the door, carrying their project with them. Sensible of them not to warn us. Aadhya sucked in a breath and said, “Oh shit!” as a second clangy burst of wind chimes went off, not in harmony. Two sirenspiders. That was almost absurdly bad luck: normally we didn’t even see sirenspiders the whole second half of the year, after their third or fourth molting; by now they were usually down in the graduation hall, spinning webs and eating the smaller maleficaria, getting ready for the big feast.