A Deadly Education

by Naomi Novik

  I dropped out of the shaft into a narrow chamber with its walls and floor covered in almost a solid centimeter of powdery soot, and stinking of what had to be fairly recent smoke. I had the strong suspicion that we were standing in the remains of whatever hopeful mals had been crowding into that shaft behind the argonet, after their encounter with the repaired artifice. I hate this school more than anyplace in the entire world, not least because every once in a while, you get forcibly reminded that the place was built by geniuses who were trying to save the lives of their own children, and you’re unspeakably lucky to be here being protected by their work. Even if you’ve been allowed in only as another useful cog.

  That’s all I was, me and everyone else on our team: the fourth repair crew sent into the graduation hall by the enclavers to try and save their kids. Except for our one hero, who was already going over the walls in full hunting mode, his eyes intent and bright, a small witchlight in one hand shining on his silver hair and pasty skin, which was already getting finely speckled with black as he felt around, smearing through the soot, presumably for a hatch. Although I have no idea why he thought there would be a hatch: anyone sent here would presumably have brought a maintenance hatch with them, and leaving one permanently would have been a stupid vulnerability. The more likely result was he’d make a noise and wake the mals up to our presence. Not that he was concerned; he was so intent on finding a way through that when I poked him in the shoulder, he even absently batted my hand away. So I flicked his ear instead, which recaptured his attention, and when he glared at me, I glared right back and pointed up into the shaft at everyone else still climbing down, and he got a sheepish sort of look and stopped to wait with me.

  The room was oddly shaped: narrow and long, and slightly curved along its length: I realized after a moment we had to be inside the exterior wall of the school. A lot of the maintenance access points I’ve caught sight of over the years have been in those kinds of in-between spaces, not shown on the blueprints. I expect maintenance-track kids keep track of them the way I keep track of library books.

  Vinh was the next one out of the shaft. He instantly went to the inner wall with a little silver ear-cup that he carefully put against the metal in a few places, roughly halfway down the wall, listening. By the time everyone else was down, he’d found a spot he liked. He wiped the soot away, then got out a cloth and a tiny dropper bottle; he put three drops on the cloth, and when he rubbed it over the wall in a small circle, the metal shimmered and went the murky-transparent of one-way glass, and we each took a turn to crouch down and peer through to see what we were in for.

  I’ve been dragged to rugby games on the regular throughout my childhood. Most people consider that you’re not properly Welsh if you don’t have a passionate interest, so of course I aggressively refused to care, but every once in a while Mum would get invited for free and then insist on my coming along for the experience. Once, we even went to a game in the national stadium in Cardiff, one of the biggest in the world: seventy thousand people yowling Gwlad! Gwlad! all together. That was roughly the scale of the place, only we were the ones going onto the field, and the crowd were going to try to eat us.

  The enormous central column of the school’s rotating axle actually looked small where it pierced the hall. There were patches of greasy black-stained metal exposed where various mals and spells had torn away some of the once fancy marble cladding. Thin bronze columns ran up the outer walls and then spoked in over one another to make a ceiling like a bicycle wheel overhead. The marble had crumbled away from between many of them, exposing the metal beneath, and there was one really massive gaping hole across the ceiling that looked like an unpleasant amount of structural damage. Also there were strips of sticky-gleaming nets woven between most of the bronze bars and to the central column, at all sorts of heights, like someone had draped up some elaborate bunting that had all fallen down: the sirenspiders were undoubtedly hiding somewhere above waiting to pounce.

  But we were lucky: the mals had clearly given up on getting up through the shaft. Now they were all jockeying for positions, clustered up to the big sliding walls on either side of the hall, which would open up when the senior dorm came down. Outside our little crawl space, the field was clear, and Vinh silently pointed our eyes toward a pair of huge cylinder shapes against the wall, armored, with pipes and cables coming out, and two large glass sections in the middle: our destination. We had a mostly wide-open path straight to the machinery.

  It had been built—sensibly—in the most deserted area of the room, directly opposite the gates. The official graduation handbook warns strongly against retreating into that area, even temporarily or to cast a more complex working. It might look extremely tantalizing and safe, but there’s a reason that mals don’t hang out there waiting: it’s a bad idea, as is anything else that takes you out of the main herd of fleeing students. If you can do an evocation of arctic light, freeze everyone along your path into place, and zoom out before they thaw, all right. But if you can do that, you can probably do something else that doesn’t require seven minutes of highly interruptible casting time. As a general rule, anyone who doesn’t stay with the pack just gets snagged for dessert when they finally do make their run, because everyone else has gone one way or another and they’ve got the full attention of the room.

  Like we were about to, which was a cheery thought. The mals weren’t directly in our way, but there were still so many of them, clawing and scrabbling over one another to get higher up in the pile, obviously so starved they had no caution left. It was awful to look at the seething mass of them, the awful of walking in the woods and stumbling across a swarm of ants and beetles and rats and birds all devouring a dead badger. Victoria from Seattle had been right to worry about not having to move. When the seniors got dumped into that frantic mass, they’d be ripped apart in moments from all sides in a frenzy. They looked pretty grim when they stood back up from their turn peering through the spyhole.

  At least that made it obvious we really did have to carry on with the plan. There wasn’t any discussion. We all got in line behind Orion, and Vinh opened up another hatch, carefully rigged to the end of the yanker spell, so it would close and then peel away behind us as we shot back through.

  I can’t say much for actually going out into the graduation hall. It wasn’t as bad as going into a maw-mouth? Also, what we were doing was so insane that the mals didn’t react to us immediately. The ones at the walls were too busy struggling with each other, and the rest were the weaker opportunists, huddled in dark corners defensively until there was a lucky chance of a meal. And the real monsters were quiescent in their places: Patience and Fortitude both at the gates softly murmuring to themselves, snatches of nonsense songs and whimpers like a drowsing baby, their eyes almost all closed and tendrils idly pawing the well-cleared space around them.

  Our original plan had been to make a run for the machinery, Orion fighting the mals off us as we ran, and put up the shield when we got there. But when nothing leapt at us right away, Clarita just started walking instead, slowly and methodically with her body held straight. We all fell in behind her. The mals against the walls did start picking up their heads and peering at us, but since no one had ever been this stupid before, they couldn’t immediately make sense of us. Unfortunately, there are heaps of mals that don’t have enough brains to try to make sense of anything, just the equivalent of noses to tell them there are tasty bags of mana in their vicinity. A handful of small scuttling things started towards us, making raspy clicking noises against the floor.

  That was enough to get some of the more hollow-sided chayenas to get up out of their sleeping pack and investigate us, thin drips of violet drool leaking out of the sides of their jaws as they began to pad in our direction. We all started to walk more quickly, and then the enormous hole in the dome turned out not to be an enormous hole but an enormous nightflyer that let go of the ceiling and came gliding down towards us.
Orion said, “Okay, go,” his sword-thing illuminating, and we all pelted away.

  The chayenas charged after us instantly. They’re one of the more stupid crossbreeds: from cheetah to hyena by way of water buffalo and rhinoceros and probably a couple others you can’t tell by looking. They were smashed together in the days of colonial glory by some idiots setting up an enclave in Kenya who wanted more of a hunting challenge. An independent alchemist who lived with the local mundanes was annoyed. She took on some work from the enclavers so they’d let her come and go, and then she quietly enhanced the chayenas with the charming additional feature of a paralytic bite and let them all loose. That was the unpleasant and gory end for the enclave, but the chayenas survived, and now are sometimes bred deliberately as the equivalent of guard dogs. They’re arguably not mals; if you raise one properly, it won’t kill you for your mana even if it’s hungry. Mostly they don’t get raised properly, since the goal is in fact for them to kill intruders for their mana. Mum always gets wound up about their mistreatment.

  At the moment, I felt something other than sympathetic. I’m in fair condition when I haven’t recently had a gut wound, but I haven’t spent the last six months doing wind sprints in the gym. I was at the end of our group. With the power-sharer on my wrist, I had the mana available to kill a whole continent’s worth of chayenas, much less three mangy half-starved ones, but if I turned to cast at them, I’d end up separated and surrounded, and even if I managed to fight my way over to everyone else, I’d blow enormous amounts of our shared mana, which we needed for the repair work.

  But the first chayena was already clawing at my personal shield, and if I waited any longer, one of them was going to get its teeth through it. I had chosen my place to turn, just past a scrap heap of marble and bones, and then Ellen tripped over a broken tile on the floor and went down not two steps ahead of me. Momentum carried me past her, and I didn’t turn back: there wasn’t any point. Her scream had already cut off into a dying gargle, and I knew better than to make it real by looking around. As long as I didn’t look, she didn’t have to be dead, and I didn’t have to have feelings about Ellen, beaming at me two days ago while she told me we were going to make it. I couldn’t afford feelings right now.

  I made it to the machinery and fell into line next to David. The crowd of mals packed up against the walls was turning towards us like some enormous singular blob of a creature, humping itself around and flowing over the ground. The ones that had been at the back were racing for us as fast as they could go, trying to take advantage of their unexpected lead, while the ones that had been up at the front were trying to take it back. Clarita had already started casting. I called out my lines in turn, and we put the shield wall up, even as the repair team yanked off the polished brass that covered the machinery: all according to plan.

  That of course was when Wen said something in Mandarin that I was unhappily certain was very profane.

  And look, to defend myself, there’d been really excellent cause to be suspicious of the seniors, and going close to graduation was only the reasonable thing to do as a result. That said, in retrospect, odds were that the seniors still wouldn’t have been able to carry out an effective backup plan even if we’d gone the night before instead, and allowing a little more time for things to go wrong might in fact have been a better idea. I’d just been completely certain that if they’d gone more wrong than that, we’d all be dead anyway.

  I should have been right about that. We would have been dead under any normal circumstances. We were in the middle of the graduation horde, all alone. We did have the mana of the entire school pouring into us, so we could probably have held Clarita’s shield up against them for twenty minutes of violent pounding. And then we’d have run through the mana, and the shield would have gone down, and they’d have shredded us all.

  But normal circumstances weren’t what we had, because we had Orion.

  It was a truly atrocious experience: standing there just holding up a shield, listening to the repair team clanging away desperately behind us, when I had no idea what the problem was or how long it was going to take to fix it. None of us on the shielding team did; we’d lost Ellen, and Zhen hadn’t come along, as she’d been the fifth-fastest in the repair run. The only way we could have got an explanation right then would’ve involved getting Vinh to tell us about it in French, and at the moment he was kneeling on the ground with his entire torso shoved into the machinery, yelling muffled boomy information that sounded extremely urgent back out to Wen and Kaito, who were frantically ripping apart one of the pieces of artifice that they’d spent so much time putting together in the shop. I deeply regretted not having made time for Mandarin.

  But the whole time, Orion went on performing nonstop heroics, pouring fresh mana into us with every mal he slaughtered. The idea had been that he’d stay behind the shield and foray out whenever something especially dangerous came at us, or threatened to take down the shield. But he hadn’t come back even once to take a drink of water. He just stayed out there completely exposed and went on killing them in front of our faces. And I had nothing to do but stand there like a block, just doing my part to keep the bloody shield going, which was barely an effort because almost none of the mals were making it past him to hit us. We might have been watching him on telly through a safe, thick pane of glass.

  The mals actually backed off, at a point. I’m not really sure how long it had been, it could’ve been ten minutes or a hundred years; it certainly felt like a hundred years. Orion was gasping for breath, his hair dripping and massive sweat stains all down his back, with a ring of deflated, stabbed, incinerated, shredded, and otherwise dispatched mals in a clear semicircle round him, a good foot wide, and the assembled maleficaria on the other side making a wall of glowing eyes and drooling jaws and glinting metal. The scavengers were the only ones still in motion: there were half a dozen, each scooting away happily with the remains of one of Orion’s kills. The others all just held their positions for a good minute before one of them finally tried again, and even then, it didn’t go for him, it tried to go round him and went for us.

  As soon as that one darted round, another dozen came at once, each one trying to take advantage of Orion’s distraction. But we held the shield up against them without any problem, at least not any problem for me, right up until David Pires abruptly went down. I caught a glimpse of his gone-grey face: I think he was dead even before he toppled forward out through the shield. I hope he was dead. Four different mals instantly got hold of him, and the next moment another ten piled on. Orion lunged in that direction, but by the time he got there and the mals all scattered before him, there was literally nothing left, not even a smear of blood: David might have evaporated.

  A hundred mals took advantage of this new opening and came at us, and Orion couldn’t stop the whole wave all at once: they came crashing into the shield, just as it was weakened. A lot of spells cast by more than one person fall apart instantly when anyone goes. Clarita’s had a much better failure mode, the way a conversation can survive when someone leaves the room as long as the other people keep talking. We’d even practiced keeping it up when one of us dropped out. But we hadn’t practiced after holding it for a century of constant attacks, and Maya, who’d been standing between me and David, gave a choking strangled gasp and dropped her part, too, pulling her hand out of mine and staggering a few steps back to collapse into a huddle on the ground, her hands pressed flat against her chest.

  Clarita was already calling out David’s next line, her voice strained; I came in on Maya’s part after and reached out and grabbed Clarita’s hand to close the line: only three of us left now, with Angel Torres on her other side. The shield wavered for a moment like haze above a summer road, and a gigantic suckerworm the length of a decently sized truck erupted explosively out of the crowd of mals and hurled itself right towards us. It smacked onto the shield like a lamprey directly in front of my face, round Sarlac
c-toothed maw full of phosphorescent teeth glazed in neon pink, all of them working to get a hold on the shield so it could start twisting itself round to drill a hole through.

  The shielding spell was a conversation, so I summoned up the memories of all the ways people made clear to me that I wasn’t welcome to join theirs: cold shoulders and deliberately dropped voices. I fixed the idea in my mind as if David and Maya weren’t really gone out of it, they’d just turned away a bit so the suckerworm couldn’t hear enough of what they were saying to join in, because it wasn’t wanted and should shove off, and it helped that it hurt me to think about it; I whispered David’s next lines through my teeth and shoved more mana into the shield on a burst of anger, and the suckerworm lost its hold and slid down to the ground. Instantly seven smaller mals leapt on its back and tore it apart.

  Clarita jerked her head to stare at me, but right then behind us Vinh gave a yowl of triumph and pulled himself out. We couldn’t look round, but I heard the whole repair crew performing the final chant, the first familiar thing they’d done. The mana surge that poured through them was so massive that I could feel it against my back, a crackle like static electricity, and then Vinh and Jane Goh shoved the cover back on over the machinery with a loud clang, and the repair crew were turning and grabbing our shoulders, the sign that they were ready. “Allons, allons!” Vinh was yelling, but we didn’t really need the command. Kaito was helping Maya to get up and grab on, and I started shouting like a madwoman, “Orion, get over here! Orion! Orion Lake, that means you, you tragic blob of unsteamed pudding, we’re going. Orion!” and if you think that should’ve been enough, when he was literally two feet away from me at the time, I agree with you profoundly, except it wasn’t. He didn’t even have the excuse that he was in the middle of a hard fight, because actually he had just cleared another temporary ring around himself and was just crouched and waiting.