A Deadly Education

by Naomi Novik

  “I still think it would be a really good idea for us to get some more people in on this,” Chloe said, looking around nervously. The shop was completely deserted: after yesterday’s excitement, no one was risking it down here unless they absolutely had to go to class, and anyway, I doubt she’d ever been in the shop with less than ten kids around her. Ibrahim and Liu had come along with us to stand watch—well, Liu was standing watch, and Ibrahim was trailing Orion around the room trying to chat with him—but that was it.

  “Ready?” I asked Aadhya, ignoring Chloe; then I spoke the phase-change incantation and pushed the first few inches of the bar of wrought iron we were testing with—left over from some failed project, presumably—into liquid form. Aadhya had the crucible heated and waiting, right underneath it, and as soon as the metal ran in, she sprinkled in the soot with her free hand, in a smooth pattern, frowning in concentration as she made them merge. Then she gave me a quick nod, tipped the crucible over the edge of the rod where the iron had been, and I shoved the metal back into a solid form.

  It did go solid. However, only just barely solid. The blob of metal plonked down on the workbench surface, sizzled violently, melted a hole straight through and fell down towards the shelf underneath, smashed a hole through a stack of panes of glass, set the tarp that was covering them on fire, melted through the second shelf, fell to the floor, melted straight through that, and was gone.

  There was some yelling and flailing—I may have done some myself—before Aadhya grabbed four of the powders she’d asked Orion for, clapped them together, and threw them onto the cheerfully spreading fire. Once that was out, we all gathered and peered down at the hole nervously. It went all the way through what turned out to be an uncomfortably thin floor. All I could make out in the darkness down there, at least from a cautious distance, was one very rusty pipe running past, with a circle of five antique vials, the kind of artifice you only see anymore in museum pieces, turning round and steadily doling out drops of different alchemical substances into an opening in the top of the pipe.

  “Do you think any of the mals will try and get in through there?” Ibrahim said.

  “Let’s fix it and not find out,” Aadhya said. “Orion, can you get some more—” and then we all belatedly noticed that Orion couldn’t get anything, because he wasn’t standing with us: he was at the doorway busy killing a slipslider that had come to investigate our yelling with a dream in its heart, or at least its digestion.

  “Yeah?” he said, coming back, breathing only a little hard, after tossing what was left of the slipslider back out into the hall: when it had tried to squirm out of his grip by dumping its outer layer, he’d grabbed the half-shed skin, pulled it back over the head, and tied it in a knot and kept it that way until it strangled. That wasn’t how you were supposed to kill them, but it seemed to have worked fine.

  It was just as well that we were practicing. It took me several tries to learn how to convince the metal to go back into a really solid form, not to mention back into the specific shape that it had started in, but even once I had, it still wasn’t coming out right. I didn’t melt any more holes through the floor, but I left a dozen contorted lumps of metal that didn’t really look like steel stuck firmly to the surface of the table.

  Chloe said suddenly, “Hey, if it’s steel, don’t you need to fold it?”

  It turned out her dad was an artificer, too: that’s how he and Orion’s dad knew each other. Aadhya looked it up in the metallurgy textbook she’d brought and discovered she was right. “Right, okay, you need to envision the final shape being made up of like one thin layer folded back and forth on itself, like puff pastry or something, instead of a solid block.”

  Using that mental image got me a substance that seemed approximately right. But it became even harder to work out the right pace for me and Aadhya to go so that we could convert the iron in a continuous process. About half of the iron rod ended up in tidy one- or two-inch separate sections scattered around the table.

  And then we hit our stride, swapped out six inches in a row without stopping, and suddenly it was easy, as easy as the wood, as easy as the silver. Aadhya actually laughed out loud. “Oh my God, this is amazing!” she said, holding up the rod, half of it new steel bright and shining, patterned with wavy lines, right up to the hard edge where it met the old blackened iron. “Just look at this, this is so cool.”

  I couldn’t help smiling myself, and even Chloe looked a little reluctantly impressed when we all passed around the rod. “All right, we’ll do the wall repair in work period tomorrow,” I said. We packed up a huge sack of soot, which is one ingredient not at all in short supply around here, and headed back upstairs.

  But as soon as we got into the stairwell, we heard voices coming from below. It made even less sense for anyone to be down there in the middle of the day after yesterday’s festivities. Orion paused and turned down the stairs, going quietly, and when I followed him, everyone else did, too, even Chloe, who threw a half-desperate look at the stairs going sensibly up, but wasn’t going to go it on her own.

  Footsteps started coming back upstairs towards us as we reached the senior dorm level. I grabbed Orion and pulled him off the landing; everyone followed. We all huddled in the dark of the res hall corridor as three seniors went past going up: kids I didn’t know at all, talking in low voices, “…one really good hit to those repairs,” floating out to us as they went. We didn’t really need to hear any more of the conversation.

  “Or, hey, I just had an idea, we could fix the wall right now,” Aadhya said, as soon as their steps faded out of earshot.

  “Yes. Now would be good,” Ibrahim agreed, hushed, as we all nodded. “Now is an excellent time.”

  “You guys can take some extra mana from the pool, to do makeup work for missing class,” Chloe even volunteered.

  We went down to the bottom of the stairs and started in on the work. We could see where the seniors had picked at a few of Orion’s patches already, testing them. Even without help, there were a bunch of visible strain lines and bulging deformations in the walls, like something had been pounding on them from the other side.

  Aadhya fired up the crucible, got a handful of soot, and I started in on the outer wall: iron into the crucible, steel back out. I hadn’t lost the rhythm; the change rolled along just as easily as in the shop. I just kept going and was about halfway along the wall when Aadhya said, “I’m sorry, I need a break,” and I looked round to see that she was almost sagging. She put down the crucible and dusted her hands off the bag of soot, then sat down hard on the next-to-last step with a whoof of breath.

  “I wouldn’t say no,” I said, and sat down next to her, although I felt fine, myself, except for being thirsty. Liu offered us a drink from her water bottle, and I could’ve finished the whole thing alone. Even my gut wasn’t hurting very much anymore. It occurred to me that I might have helped the healing along by pushing it a little yesterday: Mum’s healing spells tend to work with your own body, so if you do something that gets your own system doing things like sending over more white blood cells and building replacement muscle, the magic picks up, too. It had been only a little more than a week, so the flax patch was definitely still working in me.

  The new wall panels looked starkly different next to the old ones, bright with the wavy patterns stretching all over: actually pretty. But Chloe was frowning at them from where she was sitting on the stairs next to Ibrahim. Orion was going back and forth restlessly, up the stairs and back, running a hand over the surface of the remaining old bulged wall panels, peering at the joins. Chloe looked over at him and then at me and Aadhya, a puzzled expression starting, and I thought she was about to say something, but then instead she turned and looked up the stairs and then said urgently, “Guys, I think they’re coming back.”

  We all stood up. The footsteps above slowed down as whoever it was realized in their turn that someone was down here.
When they finally came around the corner, it was in a tight knot ready to fight: two tall boys in the back with both hands poised and ready to cast incantations, a girl and a boy in the front crouching slightly, each with shield holders on their outside wrists, and another girl in the sheltered middle position holding the hilt of a fire whip. Those are horribly versatile because they have kinetic power on top of flame. If you’re good, you can wrap it around things and burn them off, or whip the end back and forth and knock mals—or people—to either side to clear a path. A smart, well-designed graduation alliance team, one that had probably been practicing together for months. When we’re all mixed up in the cafeteria just busy stuffing in food, there isn’t always a big visible difference between the seniors and the rest of us, but here with us opposite them, it was painfully clear just how much difference a year made.

  Except Orion moved instantly to stand in front of us all: it looked a little silly, just skinny him confronting them, but he said, “Something you were looking for?” with his hands clenched, and they all hesitated. He nodded when they didn’t say anything. “Maybe you guys should go back upstairs. Now.”

  “That’s new steel,” the girl in the front row said abruptly: she was looking past Orion at the wall. “They’re replacing the panels.”

  “You’re Victoria, from Seattle, right? I’m Chloe from New York,” Chloe said suddenly to the girl in the middle, trying for a chatty tone that was spoiled by a substantial nervous wobble. “There’s damage to the stairwell, it’s letting in mals from the graduation hall. That’s what Todd Quayle had that complete breakdown over. We’re just fixing it. Orion didn’t want any more of them getting in to hurt anyone.”

  Victoria from Seattle wasn’t buying. “Sure, he wants to keep them waiting down there to hurt us,” she said. “So hey, Orion, are you planning to attend graduation this year and help us out with this horde you’ve whipped into a frenzy? People were saying you took out a grogler the size of a truck yesterday. Who knows if we’ll even be able to move down there.”

  “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.

  The argonet looked puzzled as its talons started to crumble. I don’t think it understood that it was disintegrating, so it kept trying to get in. Fortunately, my spell picked up steam quicker than the crammed-i
n argonet could move, so by the time it got its head thrust into the opening in place of its vanished arm, the disintegration was coming up its neck. I was even able to reach up and pluck one fist-sized tooth, gone loose and wobbly, right out of its mouth just before the spell swept up over the rest of the jaw.

  Aadhya and Liu came to the edge of the hole and stood staring down it with me, open-mouthed, Aadhya clutching the long handle of her stirrer. The line of disintegration kept going down and down the body crammed into the shaft, revealing far more than anyone needed to know about the internals of an argonet. Then Liu gasped and said, “Quick! Quick!” and I realized, right, as soon as the cork disintegrated out of the bottleneck—

  Aadhya whirled around and went back to work on the carbonization. Liu stood to one side of the opening, tense, putting her shield spell over the top of the shaft. A few moments later, she gave a yelp of horror: a small flock of shrikes hadn’t waited for the argonet to dissolve all the way: they’d devoured themselves a path through its body. They came flying up the shaft, whacked against Liu’s shield like sparrows flying into a too-clean window, and immediately started pecking at it violently with their iridescent-gleaming beaks.

  We couldn’t do anything but keep working. Aadhya yelled, “Ready!” She levitated the crucible to the top of the opening and tipped it over, and as the liquid metal came pouring out, I called out the phase-change spell again and shoved the metal back into a single massive sheet, seamlessly stretched from one edge of the remaining wall to the other.

  One shrike just managed to poke a big enough hole in Liu’s shield to wriggle itself through, and it darted through the final gap as I sealed up the wall, leaving a tail feather stuck in the seam. Aadhya was panting for breath, but she started to gasp out a shield spell of her own that would probably have been too late to keep one of us from losing at least a pound of flesh, but the shrike was flying so fast that it didn’t bother to backwing to come at us: instead it kept on going right up the stairs towards the open buffet above, chirping with excitement.