He came down from the platform towards us, a horribly fluid movement. Pleased with herself, I expect, Ophelia turned and gestured to Ruth, who had the good sense to eye her in some doubt, shaking her head slightly. But after all, it was clearly an excellent idea to offer Orion an alternative meal plan, so in a moment she did start her working again.
I was standing at the very back of Shanghai’s side, with Li. Orion was walking steadily towards us even as the ground pulled in, like moving walkways in the airport, or a conveyor belt going straight into an incinerator fire. The front ranks of Shanghai’s side were already starting to throw attacks at him over their fortifications, hurling all the same useless spells that people had tried to throw at me, up above, and they did just as much good. Every spell wanted to rip him apart and kill him and hurt him, and he wasn’t catching them and picking them apart; he didn’t need to do that much work. He was just absorbing them without a pause.
People fell back as he came closer, frantically shoving the defenses out ahead of them as they scrambled, a wall of artifice and barrier spells. He paused as he reached it, and then—he reached out, in some way I couldn’t describe. It wasn’t something I saw, it was something I felt in the same way I could feel magic, or love and rage. But even though it wasn’t visible, it was there, a grasping tentacled hunger uncoiling, and everything it touched just—went into him, with shrieks of unraveling almost like human voices. And then it was human voices, the first human voices screaming, as he reached through the openings he’d made, and seized hold of the nearest wizards, the stupider or braver ones who hadn’t got far enough out of the way.
I flinched with horror, with every kind of horror there was. All of us did. Even the wizards on New York’s side were flinching back. I could see small distortions in the air around the platform, the other Dominuses trying to open up portals. They didn’t want to watch this, I suppose. But none of the portals opened. Shanfeng had been right. This wasn’t just a trap for him. It was a trap for all of us. Ophelia did want to take Shanfeng out, because he was the biggest threat: the only wizard in the world who could have built a bigger weapon, if he’d chosen to follow her down the path. But she also wanted every last enclaver in the world, even her own allies, to understand that she had a nightmare weapon she could and would use against all of them, and that meant that when she finally let them out of here and they all went home, they were all going to do exactly what she told them.
I turned back to Shanfeng in desperation, looking for anything, any way to get myself and Orion and everyone else out of this trap she’d built. And he was holding something out to me, across both palms. A chain with a polished disk the size of a saucer, swirling black and silver, in a powdery black steel frame: a power-sharer, only ten times the size. I could feel the power flowing through it even without touching it. “I can’t force you to save us,” Shanfeng said. “I can only give you what you need to do it. All the mana we’d stored to build a second school, freely given.”
I could have slung it at his head, I could have screamed at him. But I couldn’t have heard myself over the rest of the screaming, the struggles of the wizards trying to save themselves. Their shields were already starting to go in bursts of sparks. They were being dragged over the floor by inches, towards Orion.
“Ophelia took her own child and fed it to a maw-mouth, and to pretend she hadn’t done it, she dressed the maw-mouth in her child’s skin,” Shanfeng said. “That is what is standing there. Not the boy you loved, the one who offered himself up to save other children. Would he choose to do this?”
“Shut up!” I snarled at him, so angry it came out of me in a sound of many voices, enough to make him flinch back from me. “You don’t care what Orion would have chosen. Any more than she did.”
I grabbed the disk out of his hands and turned. I blasted out the evocation of refusal all the way over the entire force, a shimmering dome several inches thick, with a glaze of oil-slick rainbows all over the surface. The screams died away into gulping sobs as the evocation shoved Orion back, pushed his grasping reaching arms away.
The wizards he’d grabbed hold of tumbled to the ground, set loose. They all started crawling away on their hands and knees shaking. I ran through the ranks right up to the wall of the dome. The whole distance only took me three steps, because I was going in the direction of Ruth’s pull, and together her intent and mine hauled me straight up to the iridescent wall almost instantly. The dome was covering exactly half the cavern, the curved wall lined up perfectly with the shining golden inscription in the center, Malice, keep far, holding Orion on the other side.
But he was looking in at me with bright hungry eyes, interested. He reached out to the dome and put his hands on it, and the surface began to run away from around the pressure of his fingers, swirling. It would hold him for a little bit, but not for long. He’d learned how to get through it already once before. A maw-mouth wasn’t mindless hunger. It was made out of the longing of all the wizards together who had made it, their longing to live, all the art and cunning and desperation they could bring to achieve that goal.
And Ophelia had made this one out of the frantic hunger of a whole year of Scholomance students, trying to get through the gates: she’d taken the losers and the enclavers both. Maybe even the enclavers especially, so close they could taste the rest of their enchanted, gilded lives opening up ahead of them. She’d taken all the yearning life out of them, and she’d poured it into the void through her perfectly untainted child, crushing him and then building him back up again around the maw-mouth she’d made.
And even if Orion never looked out of his own face again, she’d still go on trying to use what she’d made. She’d feed the maw-mouth half the wizards in this cavern and afterwards she’d find a way to pen it up until it was wanted once again, and then she’d make a portal and guide it through. And maybe that would even work for a good long while. This thing would go with her, because it would know she was taking it to dinner. She’d have it trained up a treat in no time. And all of those people would go on screaming inside forever and ever, screaming along with the first sacrifice, the single pure soul she’d found to crush down into the void: Orion. And the only person left to stop it was me.
I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. I just stood on the other side of the dome watching him pushing his way through, with tears running down my face and all the mana in the world dangling at my fingertips, only it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to make a different world.
His fingertips began to work through, and then he closed his eyes and put his face against the dome between them and pushed it through, little by little, the surface separating away from around his nose, and his lips, and his eyes. And as soon as his face broke the inner surface, Orion opened his eyes and looked at me, Orion looked at me, and he said, “El. Please,” and he wasn’t asking me to get him out at all. He was asking me for the only gift I had to give. And if I didn’t give it, that thing was going to come through and it was going to take me, and everyone else behind me, and probably it would go on forever, deathless, undying, until on some distant day it had finished devouring every last scrap of mana in the world and then slowly gnawed itself away after everything else was gone.
“El,” Aadhya said softly behind me, her voice shaky and terrified and full of tears, but there; she was there, reaching out to put her hand on my shoulder. Liu was there holding her other hand, clutching the lute with tears running down her face. They’d come to me, to be with me, even though everyone else was only desperately trying to get away.