He scowled at me—my tone might have been just the least bit snide—and then grudgingly said, “We know New York has set up a defense at the doors of the school. Shanghai and Jaipur are preparing an offensive.”
“Which they won’t launch until things have been sorted out here and they decide who’s to be let into the clubhouse,” I finished. “Well, I’m crashing the party instead, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it won’t be tidy. You should pack up your statuary and go home.”
An older man, who had a handful of scars he had deliberately left on—public notice that he was a significant fighter—said something to Khamis in what sounded like incredulous tones, jerking his chin towards me and then the statue, and without waiting for an answer slapped a lancing whip of sharp red light at me, which I expect would have done a great deal of damage to someone else. The basic idea of it resembled a lovely spell that I got my freshman year, which was intended for decapitating a hundred enemies at a go. I caught his line in my hand and let it wrap round twice, and turned it into that other spell, sending the cold blue-white fire searing back towards him. Wisely, he cut loose just before it would have reached him, and I snapped the line back into a tight coil around my hand and tossed it away. I followed that up by throwing another layer of stone on top of the wizard who had nearly broken out one of his arms; it silenced the cursing.
“If you want to stay here killing other people in the dark and letting them have at you back, I suppose you can suit yourself,” I snapped. “But come at me again, and you too can spend the rest of the night chipping your way out of a slab of granite.”
Khamis said something to the other two I didn’t understand, with a gesture towards me that made clear he wasn’t being complimentary. However, my demonstration had made an impression, especially on the third member of the party, an older woman, who argued with the other guy a bit and evidently carried the point; she brought a small flat black sack out from under her aba and tossed it over the statue—the sack remained the size of a small handbag, but the statue vanished into it completely—and then gave one of the handles to the fighter.
She meant to give the other to Khamis, but he said something in a surly way, and she nodded; then the two of them set off with the bag, and he turned back to me and said ungraciously, “All right, I’m coming with you.”
“You’re never,” I said, incredulous. “Why would you come with me?”
“Because you’re a stupid madwoman who can’t be trusted,” he snapped: just the reason to hang about someone, why couldn’t I see that? Then he added, deeply grudging, “Nkoyo asked me to!”
“What?”
“When I told Nkoyo I was coming, she asked me to look out for you,” he said. “You’re her friend, not that you deserve her. I told her if I saw you, I would.” The implication was very clearly that, much to his regret, his girlfriend had an unfortunate lunatic pal who badly needed someone holding her leash, and he, being the very best of all boyfriends, had been saddled with the job.
I could gladly have spent the next hour explaining to Khamis in small words how little he deserved to have Nkoyo so much as speak to him, and how totally useless he’d be to me in every possible way, and if we hadn’t literally been in the middle of a massive firefight, I almost certainly would have had a go at it, at least a little. As it was, I just snapped at him, “Tell Nkoyo thanks ever so. If you want to tag along after me, you’ll have to keep up on your own,” and stormed away back into the garden.
By then, apparently some of the other enclavers had worked out what was going on and who I was. They’d presumably all heard about me before now: their Scholomance students had come pouring back out all at once, to tell them that induction was canceled and so was school, forever, and half the mals in the world were gone. The details would have been of intense and urgent interest, and my name would have come up.
Of course, just because someone’s notable in school doesn’t always mean they’re notable on the outside; my name had gone on a list of people to keep an eye on, rather than the very short list of people who can have an effect on an enclave war. I’d have been bumped up in priority as word started to go round about London and Beijing and Dubai, but everything had happened too quick; the news couldn’t be more than sketchy gossip yet for most enclavers, and they all had what they thought were different and more pressing concerns.