A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(40)

    I thought I’d been clawing my way through it for miles, but I’d hardly gone two steps past where the maw-mouth had first grabbed me. There was a thing left on the floor a few feet away from me, a grotesque lump that looked like a deboned chicken, except a person instead, a body that had been crushed into a fetal position. Then that broke apart too into gobbets and sludge, leaving the whole hallway drenched in blood and bile and the last bits of rotting flesh.

All of it was already running away down the drains set in the floor, the carefully, thoughtfully placed drains in the slightly sloped floor that were designed for just this sort of occasion, to efficiently drain away all the evidence of any unfortunate event that might mess up the floors. They started to choke on the sheer quantity, and I thought the pipes might back up, but then the sprayers in the ceiling kicked in automatically with loud grinding thumps, and look at that, they were even up to the task of draining away the wreckage of a maw-mouth’s worth of murder. I didn’t know how many people I’d killed in there. I’d lost count how many times I’d cast killing spells. Of course, I’m sure they were all grateful. All of them would have taken me instead.

I had to take down my shield spell, which was still covering me up. I didn’t need it anymore, and I was going to desperately need every last drop of mana it was using right now. But I couldn’t make myself do it. The outer surface was drenched in rot. The sprayers had stopped, and blood and fluids were draining down, puddling red and putrid yellow around the outline of my shoes, leaving only the three-inch margin of my shield. I didn’t want to put my hands out through it.

    I just stood there instead, trembling, still leaking the tears that hadn’t stopped, and when a line of snot dripped down my face, warm and sticky, I wanted to vomit; my whole stomach clenched up into a knot. Then I heard a voice yell, “El! Galadriel! Are you down there?” from the stairs, and it set me loose. I put my hands up through the very top of my shield and shoved it open out and down to the ground, wasting another couple seconds of mana to do it that way, so the filth just went into the last draining mess on the floor.

Orion came off the steps and into the hallway, panting and singed, half his hair burnt short on one side, and when he saw me, he stopped and heaved a deep breath like someone who’s been a bit worried because you stayed out too late, and now, seeing you’re fine, is annoyed. “Glad you made it out safe,” he told me pointedly. “It’s all over, by the way.”

I burst into sobs and buried my face in my hands.





ORION HAD TO more or less carry me back to my room. Possibly less given that he couldn’t actually manage my weight the whole way and had to stop and put me down a few times, and I walked for a bit before I stopped and cried some more and he picked me up again in a panic. He worked out somewhere along the way that something had happened other than me running away from a bunch of mals in the reading room, and when he got me to my room, he tried to get me to tell him about it. I suppose he would have believed me, and if he’d believed me, and told other people, wouldn’t that have done it? Probably not. Everyone thought he was stupidly gone on me, after all, and they’d have asked if he saw it, and he hadn’t.

I didn’t find out. I didn’t want to talk about it at all. I didn’t answer any of his questions, except the last one; I said, “No,” when he finally asked me if I wanted to be alone. He tentatively sat down on the bed next to me, and even more tentatively, after a few minutes, put his arm around my shoulders. It made me feel better, which was awful in its own way.

    I fell asleep at some point. He stayed with me for the whole afternoon, even through lunch, and woke me just in time for dinner with my eyes gummy and my throat sore. I slogged through it dull and blank, taking absolutely no precautions. It was just as well that Orion never left my side. An eyestalk came up from the drains under the table I’d sat down at, which was one of the bad ones and I’d just taken it anyway; the big watery green blob of an eye swiveled around, peered at Orion’s ankles, and slid quietly back under without making a full appearance. I didn’t mention it.

Aadhya said, “Did she have a casting rebound or something?”

“I don’t know!” Orion said, sounding frayed at the edges. “I don’t think so.”

“I heard you killed a manifestation in the library,” Liu said. “Sometimes they can split themselves. Maybe she got partly drained.”

Orion hooked a finger into the chain round my neck and fished my crystal out from under my shirt: it was dark and cracked and empty. That was because I hadn’t protected it properly when I had finally yanked down the shielding spell, but it would’ve looked the same if I’d been shielding against a manifestation and it had broken through. But I didn’t tell him Liu’s guess was wrong, or say anything one way or another. The whole conversation felt like something happening on a TV screen in a program I didn’t even watch, with actors I didn’t recognize. “Right,” Orion said, grimly. “Stay with her, would you?” and then he took off the power-sharer on his wrist and got up.

He went and grabbed one of the mops standing at the edge of the cafeteria waiting for the next maintenance shift, and went round the whole room whacking the ceiling tiles hard. People squawked complaints as mals started literally raining down all over the place, but they were mostly the larval ones who hang around waiting for leftovers; Orion ignored them until he finally hit a nest of flingers in the corner. After he’d killed all nine of them, he came back to the table, put his hand on my chest, and shoved what felt like a year’s worth of mana right into my not-at-all-drained body.