A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(38)

    Maybe it had even been this one. I knew it hadn’t been Patience or Fortitude. Those two are so big, they don’t move around anymore at all, and they rarely eat students except by accident. They spend graduation day eating up any other maw-mouths that unwarily come in reach of their tentacles, and the biggest other maleficaria. This one was clearly more energetic. There’s never been a maw-mouth in the actual halls of the school before. As far as I know, of course, but they’re not the kind of maleficaria where nobody escapes to tell the tale. You have lots of warning from the people screaming and thrashing as they’re being swallowed. But the ones in the school have always been happy to wait down below for the annual feast.

The next flare came from the reading room as the maw-mouth finished pulling the last bit of itself out of the vent, the mass briefly keeping the boxy shape it had been squashed into, before it softened back into blob. It just sat there, its silent mouths working, taking long deep breaths, as if it was recovering from the massive effort of getting up here to hunt. I didn’t run; I didn’t need to. Even small maw-mouths don’t eat one at a time. If it gobbled me up, it would have to sit here digesting before it moved again, and in the meantime everyone else would clear out. That was why the library had been trying to keep me away: so I wouldn’t give a warning. It wanted to give the maw-mouth a good sporting chance to eat not just Orion, but everyone in the reading room. Not to mention those four powerful maleficaria that had probably come up here running away from the maw-mouth in the first place.

    I took the first slow, careful step backwards in the dark, towards the reading room. And then another after that as Orion’s next spell went off behind me, and then the maw-mouth let out a deep sighing from all its mouths and was moving—away. I froze, wondering if I’d seen wrong, but Orion had just cast some variety of a prisoning-dome spell, and the neon-pink glow lingered, reflecting off the glossy folds as the maw-mouth went rolling over itself with a sudden startling speed, eyes and whispering mouths coming up and going back under in waves.

It wasn’t going for the reading room. It was going the other way, straight for the stairway at the end of the aisle, the one that went down from the library to the freshman dorms. Where all the youngest kids would be holed up in their rooms right now, all the ones who didn’t have an enclave to get them in at one of the safe tables in the reading room, doing their homework in pairs and crowded trios. The maw-mouth would stretch itself out along the hall, blocking as many doors as it could reach, and then it would start poking tendrils inside to pull the tender oysters out of their shells.

And there was absolutely nothing I could do to save them. The quickest other way to get to the freshman dorms was to run through the reading room and down the other half of the incantations corridor to the staircase there, and I’d come out on the opposite side of the dorms. By the time I got back round, no warning would be necessary. The kids on the other side would already be screaming loudly enough.

But that was the only thing I could do, the only thing anyone could do; the only thing at all, because you can’t kill maw-mouths. When a maw-mouth comes at an enclave, even their goal is defense: hunkering down, closing up entrances, driving away other mals, so the maw-mouth moves on to hunt somewhere else. The greatest wizards alive can’t kill maw-mouths, and they won’t even try, because if you try and you don’t kill it, it eats you and it keeps eating you forever. It’s worse than being killed by a soul-eater and it’s worse than being grabbed by a harpy and taken to her nest to be eaten alive by her chicks and it’s worse than being torn apart by kvenliks, and no one in their right mind would ever try it, no one, unless the girl you’d started dating a few months ago was going to die, her and someone you didn’t even know, not even a person but just a blob of cells that had barely started dividing yet, and you stupidly cared about that enough to trade a million years of agony for theirs.

    That maw-mouth wasn’t going after anyone I loved. I didn’t even know any freshmen. After it made a good meal of some dozens of them, it would settle down to digest and recover from the effort of its long climb up. It would probably stay there in their hall, riding down with it one year after another all the way to graduation. When it got hungry again, it would just creep a little way further along the corridor and eat some more freshmen who didn’t have anywhere to go. At least they’d have some warning. The kids it ate today would keep begging and crying and whispering for a long time, or at least their mouths would.

And then it occurred to me, unwillingly—if I could somehow stop the maw-mouth, no one would even know. There wasn’t a single person left in the library stacks right now, not with all the blasting and screaming in the reading room. And the freshmen wouldn’t come out of their dorm rooms if they heard anything in the hallway. It was the end of freshman year, they’d learned by now to just barricade their doors, like sane people. No one but me even knew there was a maw-mouth up here, and absolutely no one would believe me if I tried to tell them I’d done for one. And I’d have to burn up who even knew how much of my hard-won mana stash. I wouldn’t be able to show off afterwards. My reputation would be the least of my worries. I’d spend all of my senior year scrabbling desperately after every last drop of mana I could collect just to try and survive graduation.

    I didn’t want to realize any of that. I didn’t want to realize because it mattered too much to me. You never get anything for free in here. But I’d just been handed an incredibly valuable book, and right behind me in the reading room was everything I’d been hoping for, my best chance for survival and a future. I already knew that the school wasn’t holding that out to me for nothing—and here in front of me was the exact opposite. I was being offered a bribe twice over. But why would you bribe someone if you didn’t have to? The school wouldn’t bother trying to keep me off the maw-mouth unless the school thought—that I had a chance. That a sorceress designed from the ground up for slaughter and destruction might just be able to take out the one monster no one else could kill.