“There is no sense standing here,” Liesel said, brusque and too loud. “What do we do?”
That was a charmingly inclusive question, except none of them could do a thing, so really she was saying get on with it, El, which would have annoyed me more helpfully if I weren’t also terrified out of my skin. The only useful thing she was doing was blocking the way out, which meant I couldn’t actually run away.
“We’ll make a circle and keep it off you, as long as we can,” Alfie said, without looking back at me: that would have required taking his eyes off the maw-mouth. “You know the spell, Liesel.” They’d been allies before we’d turned graduation inside out, and I’m sure they’d worked really hard together on perfecting his best defensive casting: a refusal spell, one you could use to keep out essentially anything you didn’t like, which would certainly include any part of a maw-mouth.
He’d shared it with me, too, but it wasn’t an ordinary shield spell that you could set and forget; it was an evocation, and I couldn’t hold it up while also going on a slaughtering rampage of killing spells. But if they sent me in there under a protective spell they were holding up, and the spell failed or slipped away from them—the maw-mouth would be able to get at them through it. Even if they jettisoned the spell right away, as fast as they could, it might get a hold on their mana through the connection, and then that would be that for all of them. According to the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, that was how the three wizards in the Shanghai circle died, and presumably the victims of the last two attempts London had made. None of them had been fresh graduates, either.
So it was a genuine offer of real help, and I hadn’t even had to demand it from them. That wasn’t the way enclavers usually did things. Sarah made a small hitch of breath, not quite on board with Alfie’s generosity, but even she didn’t say no, and Liesel, to give her credit, immediately said, “Yes. I’ll anchor the circle. You lead us in the casting.”
I did appreciate it, except for the significant point that once they’d cast it on me, I’d need to go out there. But Liesel was right as usual. Standing here wasn’t going to improve my lot any, and might make it considerably worse, if for instance the maw-mouth managed to poke through and get a hold on London’s mana store or a few dozen senior wizards to digest.
“Get ready to cast it,” I said, harshly. I took a deep breath and stepped out past Alfie, just onto the walkway, and the maw-mouth—charged us.
I’d seen them move before. They’re ordinarily very unhurried; they like to park themselves in a good fishing spot and linger. But when they do decide to move, they go at shocking speed. It pulled all its tendrils back from the door and came rolling towards us like a hideous churning wave of death, the voices bursting into a fresh anguished noise of sobbing and wailing like it was ripping them apart all over again, extracting more agony from people already shredded, the eyes staring and the mouths contorted in howling. Sarah screamed, and Alfie jerked back half a step—but we were all graduates of the Scholomance, and even as he flinched his hands were coming up.
He had the evocation up over us half a second before the maw-mouth hit. And then it was crashing over us, a terrible churning mass of flesh enveloping Alfie’s small dome entirely, squeezing the surface in so close around us that the horrible crushed intestinal folds of the thing were rolling inches past my face. I did let out a scream myself then, acid bile climbing up my throat, even though I was thinking too, cold clear tactical data points ticking away inside my head. There hadn’t been time to form a circle; Alfie had cast the evocation alone. He couldn’t hold it for more than forty-nine seconds, each one running out from under us like sandy ground giving way, and if I took the evocation over myself, I couldn’t actually kill the maw-mouth. And sooner or later, it would get through.
So my choices were to let it have Alfie and Liesel and Sarah, or let it have us all, and since neither of those were acceptable, that meant I had to somehow kill this vast monstrous thing right now, in however many seconds Alfie had left to hold it off, and that wasn’t enough time, but I didn’t care: I wasn’t going to let it have them, and if that meant it had to die unreasonably fast, it just had to die, that’s all. I fixed that perfect certainty in my head and drew a breath to tell it so in clear small words—and then it rolled the rest of the way over us and was gone, the howling mass already disappearing up the narrow stairs without even slowing down long enough for a single nibble.