A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(67)

As I wasn’t myself a noble hero with a limitless store of mana and all the sense of an unvarnished deck chair, I went down slowly and cautiously. Nobody came up past me: it was the middle of the school day, and this close to end of term the seniors were only in their res hall after curfew anyway. The grinding was even louder after I passed their landing: it was clearly coming from the bottom of the stairs, and I was horribly sure that I was going to find Orion down there with it.

    I was nearly down to the next turn in the stairs when he came flying back up towards me, literally: he’d been thrown bodily through the air. He smashed into the wall and fell almost exactly at my feet, gasping. He stared up at me puzzled, and then a gigantic jellyfish-translucent tentacle came groping up around the corner, feeling for him, and he sat up and slashed at it with the thin metal rod he was clutching in his hand. If you would like to envision the dramatic results, get a very large bowl, fill it with jelly, take a toothpick, and very gently press it into the surface and lift it away. If the indentation stays for longer than a second, you’ve had more of an effect than he did.

Orion looked at the rod with a confused and betrayed expression: it had to be some artifact that had switched off. The tentacle was going straight for his arm in return. I had to reach out and touch it—I used the very tip of my left little finger—and shock it with the electrical-charge spell I’d got from Nkoyo. It recoiled long enough for me to grab Orion by the arm and help him scramble to his feet, and also to drag him up a few steps. Then I met resistance. “No, I have to—” he said.

“Get your brains beaten out against the stairwell?” I snarled at him, and pulled his head down as the tentacle lashed back over our heads.

“Allumez!” he said, and the rod burst into blazing white-hot flames between us. It nearly took off my eyelashes. I fell back on my bum and skidded down the stairs all the way round the next turning myself, where I got an absolutely beautiful view down the staircase into a horrible mass of writhing jelly tentacles at the very bottom. They had got themselves wound around everything that could be gripped, every inch of the railing and into the vents. They were straining to the utmost to pull the rest of whatever the mal was through a tiny cockroach-sized gap in the lower bottom corner of the stairwell. Which meant it was effectively trying to rip the staircase open. I couldn’t remember ever noticing on the blueprints what was on the other side of the staircase wall over here, but at the moment, there was a graduation mal on the other side, which meant that somehow there was a path for mals to make it up here from the hall, despite all the wards and barriers along the way, and the staircase was our last line of defense. If this one made it through, all its friends would follow. It would effectively start graduation early. Except, since the senior hall hadn’t been separated from the rest of the school yet, the waiting mals would instantly come pouring up for all of us.

    After my first moment of pure aaiiugh, I noticed the deflated blobs littering the bottom of the stairs and howled, “No, wait!” but it was too late. Orion had just sliced off the tentacle still bashing at his head. The enormous chunk of the end fell down, sizzling, and the rest recoiled down to the mass, where it pressed the cut end into the middle of the knot, turning into a lovely bowed curve, and split itself elegantly into four tentacles, each already starting to swell into the size of the original one, and all of which went grabbing for more things to yank on.

Orion staggered down and pulled me to my feet. “Get out of here!” he said, and was about to sail right back into it. I had to grab his hair and yank. “Ow!” he yelled, and nearly took my arm off with the flaming sword. “What are you—”

    “It’s a grogler, you brainless cod!” I yelled at him.

“No, it’s a hyd—oh shit, it’s a grogler,” Orion said, and just stood there for a dazed, gaping moment. Which we had to spare, since the grogler was currently ignoring us in favor of continuing its straining efforts to rip open the delicious extra-large snack pack for itself and every other mal down in the graduation hall.

“How aren’t you dead yet?” I said, bitterly. To be fair to Orion, not that I felt like being fair to him, the grogler was so big that you couldn’t see the thin pink cords running through the center of the tentacles, or the big red knot that was presumably somewhere in the middle of that mass. It had likely broken a million tentacles just bashing them against things, long before Orion had got himself down here. Groglers aren’t known for patience or long-term strategy, but apparently sufficient hunger was sufficiently motivating. “Well?”

“Um,” he said. “I’m thinking.”

“About what?” I said. “Freeze it, why don’t you!”

“I don’t have a good freezing spell!”

“What do you mean, you don’t have a good freezing spell?” I said, glaring at him. “You’re from New York.”

He looked guilty and muttered, “I can’t get mana out of the mals if I freeze them.”

The whole stairwell trembled around us.

“Who cares!” I said. “Get mana out of the next one!”

“So I haven’t learned any!” he yelled.

“Oh, for the love of the Great Mother Goddess,” I said, with all the heartfelt disgust I could produce, which that phrase itself induces in me to begin with, and I grabbed my crystal and started to put together a picture in my head while I tapped into my already badly depleted store of mana: in the shop, the senior girl had been telling me that nitrogen was more than half of the air, so I envisioned it condensing into a solid shell over the grogler’s skin, just a few millimeters thick.