He’d shared it with me, too, but it wasn’t an ordinary shield spell that you could set and forget; it was an evocation, and I couldn’t hold it up while also going on a slaughtering rampage of killing spells. But if they sent me in there under a protective spell they were holding up, and the spell failed or slipped away from them—the maw-mouth would be able to get at them through it. Even if they jettisoned the spell right away, as fast as they could, it might get a hold on their mana through the connection, and then that would be that for all of them. According to the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, that was how the three wizards in the Shanghai circle died, and presumably the victims of the last two attempts London had made. None of them had been fresh graduates, either.
So it was a genuine offer of real help, and I hadn’t even had to demand it from them. That wasn’t the way enclavers usually did things. Sarah made a small hitch of breath, not quite on board with Alfie’s generosity, but even she didn’t say no, and Liesel, to give her credit, immediately said, “Yes. I’ll anchor the circle. You lead us in the casting.”
I did appreciate it, except for the significant point that once they’d cast it on me, I’d need to go out there. But Liesel was right as usual. Standing here wasn’t going to improve my lot any, and might make it considerably worse, if for instance the maw-mouth managed to poke through and get a hold on London’s mana store or a few dozen senior wizards to digest.
“Get ready to cast it,” I said, harshly. I took a deep breath and stepped out past Alfie, just onto the walkway, and the maw-mouth—charged us.
I’d seen them move before. They’re ordinarily very unhurried; they like to park themselves in a good fishing spot and linger. But when they do decide to move, they go at shocking speed. It pulled all its tendrils back from the door and came rolling towards us like a hideous churning wave of death, the voices bursting into a fresh anguished noise of sobbing and wailing like it was ripping them apart all over again, extracting more agony from people already shredded, the eyes staring and the mouths contorted in howling. Sarah screamed, and Alfie jerked back half a step—but we were all graduates of the Scholomance, and even as he flinched his hands were coming up.
He had the evocation up over us half a second before the maw-mouth hit. And then it was crashing over us, a terrible churning mass of flesh enveloping Alfie’s small dome entirely, squeezing the surface in so close around us that the horrible crushed intestinal folds of the thing were rolling inches past my face. I did let out a scream myself then, acid bile climbing up my throat, even though I was thinking too, cold clear tactical data points ticking away inside my head. There hadn’t been time to form a circle; Alfie had cast the evocation alone. He couldn’t hold it for more than forty-nine seconds, each one running out from under us like sandy ground giving way, and if I took the evocation over myself, I couldn’t actually kill the maw-mouth. And sooner or later, it would get through.
So my choices were to let it have Alfie and Liesel and Sarah, or let it have us all, and since neither of those were acceptable, that meant I had to somehow kill this vast monstrous thing right now, in however many seconds Alfie had left to hold it off, and that wasn’t enough time, but I didn’t care: I wasn’t going to let it have them, and if that meant it had to die unreasonably fast, it just had to die, that’s all. I fixed that perfect certainty in my head and drew a breath to tell it so in clear small words—and then it rolled the rest of the way over us and was gone, the howling mass already disappearing up the narrow stairs without even slowing down long enough for a single nibble.
I just stood there shocked and still shaking with adrenaline. The dome of refusal burst and came down in a brief cloud of glitter, and Alfie said, quavery, “What—why did it—” only he didn’t finish, because I understood, we all understood at the same time: It was running away. From me.
“Fuck,” I said succinctly, and ran after it.
The maw-mouth kept rolling away at top speed. By the time I reached the top of the narrow spiral, it was completely out of sight somewhere along that endless corridor, the columns vanishing into the dark like an illusion of infinity, as if someone had set up two mirrors facing one another. I stood panting for a moment. No one else had followed me back up—I couldn’t blame them—and I did have a moment of wondering what the hell I was doing, only someone screamed again from inside the maw-mouth, a cracked-glass shriek, and they were inside it, they were trapped inside, like my father, like Orion, and I couldn’t let it have them, either. I ran after it.
The only reason the maw-mouth didn’t manage to completely shake me was the crying of the voices, but in the corridor I couldn’t tell exactly which doorway the sound was coming from, and the cries slowly started to fade out. They gave way to exhausted labored breathing that was somehow even worse, the thick struggling desperate sound coming at me like the maw-mouth itself, all around, rasping out of the corridors and echoing dully against the stone walls.
I kept going down one side passage and back, and another, and another after that. They all ended in dead ends that almost certainly weren’t dead ends if you knew what you were doing. It was possible that the maw-mouth did know what it was doing—it had London wizards in its belly—and had got to the other side of one of them, but I couldn’t stop long enough to go find Alfie and make him help me. If I’d stopped that long, I’d have had to think about what I was doing. Instead I just kept trying doggedly, over and over.
The only thing that helped me was that it all began to remind me forcibly of the wretched games of hide-and-seek I’d played as a kid in the commune, where none of the other kids really wanted me to play, but their parents, who loved Mum or had come to the commune to see her, would make them let me. So what they did was make it a game of keep away from El instead. All of them running and hiding in whispering small groups while I ran desperately from one place to another trying to find someone, anyone, and I knew what they were doing, but I pretended not to and kept trying to play anyway because it was the only playtime I could get; if I ever tried hiding myself, no one would ever come to find me, and they’d all just go play something else without telling me.
It felt insistently like that, with the maw-mouth’s voices sunk back into whispering and mutters and gasping breaths, just on the edge of my hearing and scraping at my brain. It made me so angry, more and more angry as I went, the grating miserable irritation of it building on layers and layers, just like it had back then, until Mum would have to come and get me and take me away because she felt me reaching incoherent rage from all the way across the commune. Only Mum wasn’t here. No one was here. It was only me hunting the sly whispering through the endless horrible murky corridors of this place, and they were deliberately making it go on and on, weren’t letting me find them; in a moment they’d be sniggering at me, at how pathetic I was for submitting to this, enjoying their game at my expense.
Then I rounded a corner and there they were—there it was, the hideous mass of the maw-mouth completely filling one of those stumpy dead ends, pulsing and seething and moaning, and for just that one instant, I was glad I’d found it.