I expect he hadn’t bothered arguing with her for long. What was the point? She didn’t have the necessary information. She’d never stood inside a maw-mouth and felt it trying to get at her, trying to take everything. You couldn’t use a maw-mouth. You couldn’t keep it fed to its satisfaction. It never got full. All you did, each time you fed it, was grow its hunger for more. Ophelia didn’t know that. But I knew, and Shanfeng knew, and Orion knew. So when she’d asked him to come here, to help her with her grand design of crushing half the enclaves of the world and terrifying all the rest into meek submission, he’d come along, but he wasn’t here to help her. Even as Ophelia was talking to him, he was scanning the rest of the room, looking at faces.
Looking for me.
And when he found me in the crowd, all the way across the rapidly shrinking cavern, the worst part of it was—his shoulders came straight down. Our eyes met, and for a single clear bright moment—it wasn’t longing in his face, it wasn’t even love; he’d’ve needed hope for anything like that. He looked at me and only me, and all I saw was—relief. Relief, and trust, the utter bastard, trusting me to— And then he relaxed just as if he’d taken a good long deep breath and let go of some terrible burden he’d been carrying. Only what he let go of was—himself. Of the thin fragmentary shreds of hope that Mum had given him, in that tiny hut deep in the woods: the only thing she’d been able to do for him. The relief slid down over his face like a lowering blind that took all emotion with it, and what it left behind was the thing—the maw-mouth—that I’d found sitting quietly alone in the Scholomance, because it didn’t have anything left to hunt.
But there was a full buffet laid on here.
Ophelia frowned and reached out a hand to Orion, as if she’d noticed something had gone wrong, and then paused, just before she touched him. The thing with Orion’s face glanced at her bright-eyed and empty, and she took a step back. It didn’t immediately go at her. After all, she was only a single wizard, and a strict-malia maleficer at that, who didn’t have any mana of her own and rationed the amount of malia she pulled. She wasn’t more than a single broken crisp by maw-mouth standards.
But then Orion looked over towards Ruth and pricked up like a hunting dog on alert, sniffing out prey. She had her eyes shut and her hands spread wide, her jaw clenched and trickles of red-stained sweat running off her as she worked: a delicious bonbon, at least, and as if she’d felt the interest, she jerked and opened her eyes and stared back at him, and abruptly stopped her working, her face going blotchy with alarm. She took a step back. All the wizards on New York’s platform were starting to back away as well, terror wiping away smugness as they all suddenly noticed there was a bloody maw-mouth standing up there with them, ready for dinner.
Ophelia was the only one not retreating. Maybe she didn’t feel it the same way, or was too determined not to realize what she’d done. She said something to Orion, gesturing out across the plaza, towards all of us massed together on the Shanghai side—maybe thinking he had just got turned round and needed a reminder of who he was meant to be fighting? I don’t know, but the maw-mouth looked over and was apparently willing to take suggestion.
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.