A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(73)
“You’ll still have better odds than a newly inducted freshman, since your own plan seems to be break the wards wide open and let them all come pouring in,” I said. “And that will be the end of the whole place. The mals will go nesting in the res halls and probably break the scouring equipment up here like they did down there. The death rates will double or more. Don’t any of you mean to have kids of your own?”
“I’m going to worry about living that long first, thanks,” Victoria said. “All of you can go back upstairs now and figure out where you want to be. We’re opening up this wall.”
“No, you’re not,” Orion said.
“Think you’re going to stop us?” she said, and even as she was saying it, she flicked the fire whip. The whole thing flamed up instantly and the end whacked Orion into the wall hard, then went coiling up around him fast from ankles to neck. “I’ve got him. Hit the walls, just bash them with anything,” she said, a little tightly: Orion was thrashing in the coil like crazy, and she needed both hands to hold him, but he was definitely not getting out of there anytime soon. “Lev, make sure you have that yanker ready,” she added, and I realized they were all wearing belts with a small hook symbol on them: they’d set up a spell hooked to some other place in the school along a straight line, a few flights up, so the second they did manage to break through, they’d trigger it and be yanked straight back to their safe point before the mals started pouring in.
“Yeah, I’ve got it,” Lev said, the boy in the front row, and Chloe screamed and ducked as the boys in the back row started lobbing good old-fashioned fire blasts at the still-damaged panels, flames splashing over the surface and raining sparks down on us.
“Orion!” Ibrahim yelled, and dashed for him: he cast a shield spell on his hands and started fumbling at the coil to try and pull it loose, but the fire whip was too strong; it kept burning through his shield quicker than he could have any effect.
Liu called out in Mandarin and put up a shield over us, a good one: it flexed with the impacts, letting the fire run down in little streams. It wasn’t big enough to cover the whole wall, though, just the three of us. “The wall!” she said. “Can you fix the parts they’re hitting before they break through?”
Aadhya looked at me. There were a thousand spells in my mouth ready to go: I could have killed all five of them with a word, or for variety’s sake I could have imprisoned their minds and made them my helpless slaves. I wouldn’t even have to pull malia to do it: Chloe had hunkered down behind a shield of her own, but the power-sharer was still wide open, mana flowing like a river. I could have made them fix the wall for us, and even wash the floor after. If only I could have scrubbed my mind clean as easily when it was through.
“We’ll have to do the whole rest of the wall at once,” I told Aadhya, grimly. “Can you open that crucible bigger?”
Her eyes popped. “If you take down the whole wall, something’s going to come in!”
“If it does, our senior friends are going to yank away, and then Orion can get it for us,” I said. “Will the carbon-mixing part work in a single go?”
Aadhya swallowed, but she nodded. “Yeah, the process has a diminishing—yeah,” she said, cutting off her own instinctive explanation. She grabbed her crucible and gave the end a quick hard flip, snapping it open to full size. “Ready.” I stood up and pointed at the wall, and pulled down all four of the remaining panels into a sloshing pool of iron.
So far while we’d been working, nothing had tried to come at us at all. When I took down the rest of the panels, the reason for that became quite horrifyingly clear. One of the seniors’ fire blasts shot through the sudden opening and splashed beautiful shimmering reflections all over the smooth, armored plate atop the argonet head that was completely filling up the space of a maintenance shaft on the other side. It had its eyes closed, apparently taking a peaceful nap before it got back down to the business of breaking in. One little talon, roughly a foot across, was resting atop a ladder. It must have had a tight squeeze of it, getting up. The sides of its head were streaked with familiar iridescent goo: it had evidently used the grogler as lubrication.
“Oh my God,” Chloe said faintly. The argonet cracked open first one and then six and then all nine of its eyes as it realized that dinner had been served early, and it started to pull itself inside.
“Lev!” one of the other boys yelled, and there was a sudden hard popping of air as he triggered the yanker and they were all bungeed back up the stairs—all five of them, including Victoria with her fire whip. It stretched out for a moment, but she must have kept concentrating on it, because instead of breaking, it also yanked Orion, who was still coiled up, and Ibrahim, who was still trying to pull coils away, right along with them. A few moments later, I heard Ibrahim scream faintly from somewhere above: he’d probably let go and fallen out of the yank.
Chloe shrieked, “Put back the wall! Put back the wall!” and then turned and ran up the stairs. Aadhya had already emptied the whole bag of soot into the crucible and was stirring desperately, but the steel wasn’t quite ready yet. The argonet was squirming its huge taloned hand up and through the opening, reaching to grab her before its elbow even got clear.
Lucky for us all, Chloe hadn’t shut off the mana supply. I pointed my hand at the argonet and recited a forty-nine syllable curse that had been used a few thousand years ago to disintegrate the guardian dragon of a sacred temple in Kangra by a group of maleficers who wanted to claim the temple’s supply of a mysterious arcane dust. The dust turned out to be the powdered shed scales of the dragon, which was information that you’d think the priests might have shared more widely in order to prevent just that sort of misguided attempt.