Shanfeng and Balthasar were in the workshop when I rode the lift up, so I stopped to see if they needed my help for any of the heavy lifting; I’d been able to shave a few solid weeks off their time estimates, just by heaving some of the bigger pieces up the shafts. “No, I think we will not be needing your assistance any further,” Shanfeng said, consulting his many diagrams. “The construction process is on schedule. We will be ready by September.”
“And the trial run of the new induction spells yesterday went fine,” Balthasar said. Then he paused, and hesitantly told me, “Domina Vance decided to retire. Ophelia’s been elected.”
I didn’t congratulate him; I stomped away seething instead. She’d murdered an entire year’s worth of Scholomance students, performed a hideous act of human sacrifice on her own child, and had nearly destroyed us all: obviously the only thing for it was to make her Domina.
I had been trying with some difficulty not to let myself recognize that I was in fact going to be doing exactly what Ophelia had been trying to achieve all along, forcing enclaves to stop proliferating and share. Mum had tried to gently reassure me that I wasn’t anything like her, and that the means mattered as much as the ends, but that wasn’t any help; I already knew. I was just angry. I wanted Ophelia to pay, and instead she was getting almost exactly what she’d wanted, and if she was even sorry about anything she’d done, it was news to me and would stay news to me, since Deepthi had once again firmly warned me off going to New York and shoving Ophelia’s face in a rubbish heap.
The warren of seminar rooms were in the same places they’d always been, meaning that they were in completely different places than any other time I’d been trying to find my way through to any of my lessons. But they didn’t feel the same. The cleansing machinery had been updated and refined, and the walls of mortal flame had gone back and forth a dozen times during the tuning. Even the oldest stains had been scorched away, everything clean and bright in the new lighting that had been efficiently strung throughout the place, tiny constructs made of LEDs and mana, vastly cheaper than the old ones. But it wasn’t the visible stains that were the real difference.
I’d hated the school ever since I’d first come in, as if all along I’d felt the horrible lie that lived down at the heart of it, the rotting flesh beneath our feet. And now that lie was gone, replaced by that plea we’d all made together: stay and shelter us. I was having to work at hating the place, dredging through all my worst memories of being jumped in this corner or that one, sneered at here or there.
I sullenly shoved my way into the gymnasium. I was so determined to hate that, at least, that I didn’t even notice the tiny palm-sized digester that peeled itself off the wall and flung itself towards the back of my head. Stupidly; it hadn’t got halfway when it was snagged out of the air and vanished with a snap, and I jerked round with Orion grinning at me smugly. “I’m opening up a lead,” he said.
I glared at him. “You’re not opening up a lead, you wanker; you’ll be the rest of your life catching up to me.” He only beamed at me, undampened.
We weren’t sure how he was still able to suck mana out of the mals, now that his inner maw-mouth was gone. The only plausible explanation had come from him: he’d shrugged and said, “I’ve always been able to do it,” with the faint air of wondering why we found it surprising. That was the kind of belief that could let you do almost anything. Orion wasn’t being held up by a maw-mouth anymore, but he was still connected directly to the void: we’d just built him a golden new place to stand.
With the Scholomance and a dozen other enclaves piled up on his shoulders like Atlas, except he didn’t seem to even notice the weight was there. All was right with the world again, as far as he was concerned. The bastard wouldn’t even be mad at Ophelia. I’d had to stop talking to him about it. The morning after the fighting, he’d told me earnestly that she’d made a terrible mistake and she’d apologized to him and asked him to forgive her and he had, and I’d nearly gnashed his entire face off in frothing rage. I’d have considered forgiving her after she’d spent the rest of her life scrubbing out the toilets of the families of every last wizard child she’d killed, only I wouldn’t really.
I’d made him come with me to Wales and spend as long as it took to unearth his trauma by talking with Mum and going out with her circle and taking long walks in the woods. After three days, Mum had sat me down firmly and told me that Orion had been distressed for a very good and concrete reason, which I’d fixed, and it was all right for him to be just fine now that it was gone, and I needed to stop trying to make him be traumatized, and also I was the one who needed some treatment. I ended up spending several weeks trudging around the commune with Mum myself, instead, before I couldn’t stand it anymore and wrote to Liesel in desperation to get some work to do.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I added. “There’s not a single child in the school to guard yet, you don’t have to lurk in here like a goblin.”
He said mildly, “I like it here. Anyway, it’s too hot outside,” which was absolute nonsense. It was indeed too hot outside, because it was a sunny day in the middle of August in Portugal and I’d nearly had heatstroke just getting from the palace to the well, but that wasn’t the shadow of an excuse for preferring the gym, even if at the moment it was full of huge old trees rustling softly in a faint breeze, and a wide stream running the whole length of the chamber, up and down a hill and gurgling over grey rocks, with a perfect little red arch of a bridge leading to the pavilion.
We went and sat on the steps together. There was a jug on the table inside with cool water, and one bowl full of fruit, a second one full of edamame.
“How many maw-mouths do you think there are, out there?” Orion said.
I half shrugged one shoulder. I didn’t really want to think about the numbers. When the maw-mouth was killed, the enclave came down in a crash, but it didn’t happen the other way round. Enclaves could be lost from the world, forgotten, their entrances blocked up, their wizards killed or tumbled away in the void. The maw-mouth they’d made didn’t vanish at the same time. It kept creeping on round the world, still endlessly hungry. And how many enclaves had been made in the last five thousand years, all of them set atop lives crushed down into the void? Hundreds at least. And the maw-mouths would all be hiding from me as hard as they could.
But I’d have help, at least. Aadhya had taken Liu home to her place in New Jersey, to get a bit more rest—and an enormous amount of feeding-up—before we started, but the plan was, once the school was well on its way, we were going to meet in Cape Town. There had been seventeen sightings of maw-mouths in South Africa in the last month. Jowani was waiting there for us.
Liesel would be sorting us out a network from London, or rather two of them. The first one was officially a public maw-mouth survey meant to help people avoid them, now that they were attacking wizards more aggressively: people all over the world would be sending reports of maw-mouth sightings to her. The second network was going to be a small and carefully handpicked group of our schoolmates scattered round the world, and they would all be in on the actual project. They’d help get our little hunting party quietly in and out again, ideally no one else the wiser, and also file false sightings of the late unlamented maw-mouths afterwards, just in case we’d been spotted, and in various other ways throw a veil of confusion over my activities.