She looked back at me. “At graduation, you got that boy out of the maw-mouth,” she said, barely above a whisper, a miserable kind of begging in her voice. I’d preferred the hostility.
“He hadn’t properly gone down yet.”
“But—”
“No,” I said flatly, but Sarah kept staring at me, her face wobbling like jelly, as if she wasn’t ready to trust me for it. “It would be like trying to put a single cow back together out of a butcher’s case.”
She jerked her head round away from me, as if she didn’t want to have heard it; but what was she doing asking me for it, then? “Let’s go,” I said to Alfie. He had a white, nauseated look, but after a moment, he steeled himself and went square-shouldered and marched onward down the corridor.
The voices got louder and louder. Alfie kept walking steadily, resolute, just when I wouldn’t have minded slowing down a little myself. I’d been spot-on about this maw-mouth being bigger than the small one I’d killed at graduation; how pleased I didn’t feel to be proved right. It was going to be worse than the one in the library, too. I remembered the sound of that one much too well, the soft heavy breathing in the dark stacks amid the silenced books. That one had been small enough to squeeze its way up through the Scholomance air vents, and even so it had been unbearably, hideously large.
I couldn’t have been inside it for long. It had only burned through nine of my mana crystals: a fortune to me, but even in the Scholomance, Alfie would have glanced at my box full of them and smiled politely and said, “Really nice, El; have you filled them all yourself?” Out here Sarah would have worn a handful of them as trinkety jewelry. I’d been pulling from them so hard they must have gone in a minute each. It hadn’t felt like nine minutes; it hadn’t felt like anything. Time hadn’t really existed. There had only been the maw-mouth, endless, and the only way out had been to kill it and kill it and kill it, one death for every life it had swallowed, as fast as I could go. And I’d survived only because I could kill very, very fast indeed.
We came to the end of the corridor abruptly. It ended in a staircase, forked in half and twisted round itself like a double helix, both sides going down. The maw-mouth voices were whispering upwards out of both. The hooded stone figures from the entrance were here, too, standing together at the top of the stairs. Alfie went to the one with the cup, took a pin from his pocket and pricked his finger to let a few drops fall in, then turned and rubbed a smear from his bloody finger across the pages of the open book. The smudge looked black in the dim light, and then it was gone, soaking away into the stone. Alfie glanced away for a moment, to make it easier for the magic to work; we all did the same. But nothing had happened; he darted a look back towards us with alarm starting in his face, but when he turned back the second time, the woman’s statue on the left had turned and was facing towards the passage on her side.
He heaved a shuddery breath and led us down again, but creeping now, step by slow step around the tight corkscrew curve until abruptly it yawned open again into a huge cistern chamber wide enough to drive a lorry through, full of deep water, with a stone walkway running all the way down the middle to an enormous doorway at the far end. The same two carved figures stood there atop a flight of stairs, holding up mana-lamps on either side of a massive red-painted door.
The maw-mouth was enveloping the entire doorway, including the statues. It had poured itself up the stairs over the whole gateway, and the two lamps, the only light, were struggling to shine in an underwater way through its body, making it too visible: something between liquid and jelly and cloud, horrible deconstructed parts seething throughout.
It was pawing around the edges of the doorway plaintively, like a cat asking to come inside, grunts and complaining noises mixed in with the moans and weeping coming from its many mouths. Tendrils were trying to squirm under the door, feeling over all the edges, poking into the hoods of the figures: looking for any kind of vulnerable spot to start prying open the delicious treat. The same way the other one had tried to pry me open.
We had all stopped in the narrow bottleneck of the stairwell, frozen. The maw-mouth rolled half a dozen eyes over its surface to peer at us. Some of them were fresh enough to be weeping, or staring at us in desperate recognition. The maw-mouth could still use them, either way. I wanted to vomit; I wanted to scream and run away. Sarah was panting in short terrified breaths behind me, and Alfie’s whole body was a rigid line, held against trembling.