But one exhausted bloodshot eye and mouth, still just barely linked together by a thin scrap of skin—enough to get a vague idea of the face they’d once been a part of together—floated by at knee height and looked up at me and said, “Please, please, let me out, please,” begging frantically, the way you would if you thought suddenly there was a chance, suddenly you might be able to escape from hell, there was a jailor at the door with a key who could be asked for mercy.
I covered my face with my hands and sobbed out a sickened breath and said it again, half choking, “You’re dead, you’re already dead.” The mouth opened in a round O of protest, but then it sagged and went slack, the eye went unfocused and empty, and they floated away onward: dead, already dead, just like I’d told them to be. The words were a spell; they’d become a spell in my mouth and my rage, and now they would live in me forever, this brutal killing spell I’d made myself—so much more suited to me, really, than the cool superior elegance of La Main de la Mort. Surely some much more refined maleficer had come up with that one, some man with a narrow black beard and a small mouth and a black velvet doublet embroidered with silver, looking with contempt down at his enemy. Someone who had never stood in the dead end of a corridor drenched in buckets of viscera, having to clean up after herself, killing the last few torture victims she hadn’t managed to get the first time round.
I came out of the corridor still dripping and sick. I’d thrown up three times, wading out of the horrible remains. I’d always hated, hated the Scholomance drains, the sprayers, the loud roaring bursts when the vacuums went on: all the machinery designed to clean up the messy bits the maleficaria left behind when they killed us. Now I longed for them. The ocean of rot the maw-mouth had left behind might go on sloshing in that empty corridor forever. It didn’t have anywhere to go, at least once it had reached its level. Rivulets of gore were draining away back to the main corridor, making thin sticky trails that ran down it.
I trudged down alongside them for a really long time, dull and plodding, before poor Precious, who’d been dragged along for all this, quivering inside my pocket, put her own nose out and squeaked at me, and it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting anywhere: I’d been going down at least twice as long as it had taken to walk the entire corridor the first time with Alfie.
I stopped and tried to think what to do. I still had the power-sharer; I hadn’t even had to pull a drop of mana so far. My new murder spell was really efficient. I could’ve killed any number of maw-mouths! What I couldn’t manage was to remember a single bloody find me a way out spell, at least not better than the little-kiddie one Mum taught me when I was five: “Up from the hollow, down from the tree; out of the woods, it’s time for tea.” That refined work of high poetry had worked all right for getting me back to the yurt before dinner, but sadly couldn’t quite do the trick of finding me a way out of a top working of misdirection and confusion. Probably part of the enchantment was making it even harder for me to think of anything that would help.
Fortunately, I did have one option simple enough to remember: I’d killed the maw-mouth, and payment was due.
“Alfie, I’m lost, get me the hell out of here,” I said out loud, with a tug on the line of obligation he’d handed me, and not a minute later I heard him somewhere up ahead, calling, “El?” uncertainly. He came out of the dark just a few sconces onward, warily picking his way along the corridor and over the still-running trails of effluvia. Liesel had come with him; they both stared at me when I came into sight, and his face turned almost comically dismayed. I hadn’t any idea what I looked like, and didn’t want one; I just wanted to stop looking like it, right now. Thank goodness Liesel didn’t even bother to ask permission; she just threw a spell at me, something extremely imperative in German that I imagine must have meant something like my god, get yourself straightened up at once, and it grabbed me and shook me briskly head to toe. I felt a bit like a beaten rug afterwards, but I didn’t mind at all: I was clean, I was clean. On the outside at least.
“What did you—” Alfie started asking, automatically, before he recognized halfway into the sentence that he didn’t want to know, and then just said, “Is it—did you—”
“It’s dead,” I said shortly, which was more than enough discussion about it for anyone, including me. “You’ll have to clean up the mess yourselves.”
He stared at me a moment longer and then grasped that the maw-mouth was gone, and he got to keep being an enclaver and, all right, that his father got to keep living instead of going into a maw-mouth forever, and then he heaved a deep shocked gasp of relief and put a hand over his mouth and looked away, struggling violently to avoid bursting into tears the way he clearly wanted to. He didn’t manage to keep them all from running down his face.