She didn’t have to spell it out further: if the Scholomance needed that much mana to function, every single day, then I couldn’t possibly raise enough mana on my own to get back inside. I wouldn’t even be able to try and fail, change my mind, and come back here to ask her for it after all. Not even New York enclave could give me enough to open it up again, once everyone else pulled out.
But that didn’t mean the whole thing would be gone, either. If it was mana and belief that kept places from falling away into the void, then pockets of the Scholomance would be lingering on for years if not decades. And Patience would ooze its way into one of those pockets and sit there as long as it lasted, digesting slowly away.
“I’ve been trying to put together a team to go inside myself,” Ophelia continued. “I’m having a hard time getting one, and I’m already flat-out offering seats on the open market at this point. So I really don’t want to have a fight with you. I want you to do exactly what you want to do anyway.”
“Why?” I said. If she had the gall to tell me it was because of Orion, because she loved Orion, and wanted to save him pain—
She didn’t. She only tilted her head slightly, a clear-eyed raptor examining a potential bit of prey. “Does it matter?” she asked me, and what she was asking was Do you need me to tell you another story about it? My gorge rose. I wished she had told me that it was for Orion, after all.
I might have said, No, thanks, give me what I need and I’ll be on my way, just to get away from her, from the horrible understanding that this had been in Orion’s life, the poisoned ground he’d had to grow in. I wanted to go and do something clean and simple like fight my way through a horde of maleficaria and kill the world’s largest maw-mouth. But I couldn’t do that.
“Yes,” I said. “It matters. I’m not going to help you reattach the Scholomance and dump all the maleficaria in the world back in, just so your enclave can keep the power it represents.”
She gave a snort, like I’d said something funny. “Power? It’s a giant mana pit. We’re carrying more than twice our fair share, we cover all the shortfalls. But it’s still a massive chunk of capital infrastructure, and it’s the only long-term solution we’ve got. Yours is just temporary. We’ll be right back at the seventy-five percent child mortality rate in sixty years, and then we’ll have to build another Scholomance. I don’t want to throw this one away. At the very least, we should keep it going on a subsistence level until we need it again. What I’d really like is to find some way to use it to repeat your technique on a regular basis instead, but from what we’ve heard,” she nodded towards Chloe, “it’s not going to be all that easy.”
“Wait,” Liesel said sharply. “Why so soon? We calculated that it would be more than a hundred years to reach a mortality rate of fifty percent. That was why it was worth it, sacrificing the entire school—”
“I’m guessing you kept the maleficaria generation rate steady when you crunched your numbers,” Ophelia said. “It’s not steady. The more wizards there are—and you just saved a whole lot of them—the more mals there will be.”
“Why would more wizards surviving mean more mals?” I said. “We’ll kill mals.”
She gave me what wasn’t quite a pitying look, because she didn’t have enough pity to manufacture one. “We’ll make more than we kill. Did you think it was all crazy maleficers in secret labs cackling, or careless mistakes? Any cheating does it. Remember? You must never use any mana you do not generate yourself. Any use of malia leads to the generation of maleficaria. First page of every single textbook, the Freshman Orientation Handbook, the contract you signed to get into school?”
I did remember it, and sourly, because no one else paid any attention to it. The real reason no one used malia at school was because there weren’t a lot of options for getting hold of it. Outside, almost everyone cheats at least a little; they steal from ants or beetles, wither a vine or a patch of grass, without ever seeing the damage they do. Mum didn’t let me get away with that sort of thing, but most parents do it themselves.
Ophelia nodded. “Whenever somebody needs a little more mana than they’ve got, they steal it from somewhere, seems like no big deal—but you end up with a negative flow of mana. When that negative flow gets big enough, a mal will generate around it. It’s not a secret. But people do it anyway.” She lifted her hands to the heavens.