“Not at all,” Martel said. He’d pasted the smile back on at last, although it was looking thin. “Please make yourself at home.”
* * *
I didn’t go very far. All I wanted was to be somewhere alone and away from everything, and the gardens obligingly took me straight to a small nook draped with vines half hidden from the outside, green and quiet, with the pattering of a side waterfall going past the leaves. It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all. There was nothing to do in the nook but think or feel or be, and I didn’t want any of those things. I couldn’t rest; I wasn’t tired. I would have liked to be, but I wasn’t. Killing a maw-mouth in a single breath, a maw-mouth big enough to eat London, nothing to it. As long as I made up my mind to do it instead of insisting it couldn’t be done, so Orion decided to face it without me.
That was a very bad thought. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to sit here thinking it, in this garden that I’d saved instead of Orion, but it was the only thing my brain could find to think. Precious climbed out of my pocket and roamed over the beautiful twining ironwork railings and the branches, and I tried to just follow her movement with my eyes and breathe in steady waves, in and hold and a long sighing-out, but it wasn’t any use. The lovely soft drugged calm of the drink Alfie had given me had been completely crushed beneath my irritation and anger, and the more I tried to be inside my head, the more I was aware of the queasy rush of the roiling mana beneath my feet, horribly similar to the grotesque gushing wave of the maw-mouth coming apart around my legs. My stomach turned and I gave up.
What would have helped was work, but I hadn’t any to do, and if it had been the kind of work I was made for, I couldn’t have done it anyway. I’d handed back the power-sharer, and the tank was empty. So instead I got up and started doing push-ups to build mana. I was still in the very best shape of my life, having trained for the graduation five-hundred-meter dash as though my life depended on it, which it had, and my conditioning was only improved for having spent most of a week being fed and watered and loved in Wales. I did the push-ups properly, all the way down and up again, counting them off.
The poor confused garden slowly opened up the nook to either side to make slightly more graceful room around me, and when I came up from number seventeen, it tentatively offered me a tidy basket of yoga mats in the corner of the space. That would have been within normal operating parameters: surely eight or nine London wizards in expensive athletic wear got together in the early mornings on the regular for a charming group session overlooking the waterfall. They wouldn’t be building mana, though; it would just be for the pleasure of moving their bodies. They ought to come out and spend a weekend in Wales on a retreat. I ignored the basket and made my hands into fists and kept going on the bare stone, counting off my driblets of painfully built mana as they went into the spent crystal still hanging round my throat, the faintest glow starting as I hit thirty.
Round then I noticed that Liesel was standing there watching me, her arms crossed over her chest and frowning. I loathe push-ups; I’d been half wishing someone would come and give me something else to do, or at least a good shove, and Liesel was certainly the woman for that. But I went all the way to fifty before I let myself get up again, defiantly dripping sweat all over the towering iridescent gladiolas in the nearest planter. I expected her to call me a numpty; I felt like one myself, to be honest. It was too much like lugging a jug ten miles from a weak muddy stream just to water a plant that was standing next to a massive lake.
But she didn’t; she just went on studying me in an odd narrow way. I had the sensation I was on the wrong side of a pane of one-way glass, and on the other side, taking me in, was some vast clockwork machinery full of peering lenses and vibrating with the force of thirty thousand gears churning away. I didn’t enjoy it. “Did you want something else?” I said coldly. “Track down any other maw-mouths?”
She made a rude sniffing noise, then said, “Don’t start crying.” I gawked at her indignantly, drawing breath, and then she hit me with it: “Everything else worked. It was only you and Lake left. What went wrong?”
I didn’t especially want to cry; I’d quite have liked to punch her, though. “Why? Keeping it in mind for next time we need to trap all the maleficaria in the world?” I snarled at her.
“Is he dead?” Liesel said, as if she were speaking to a small child, albeit presumably one whose feelings she didn’t care about brutalizing.