You would also really like to build something that might be of some use at graduation, but her choices were a mana siphon, a shell-piercer, and a garden planter. A mana siphon is a flat-out maleficer tool and anyway the last thing anyone allied with me would ever need. A shell-piercer would’ve been a terrific weapon against constructs, except in the very last line of the specifications, the assignment said that the purpose of this particular one was to acquire usable miercel shells. Miercels are these self-reproducing construct mals that look rather like wasps the size of my thumb. Their shells are made of a mana-infused metal and are quite useful, but a shell-piercer of any combat-appropriate size would fracture them to tiny bits.
“You could probably sell that second one to an enclaver?” I said.
“Not until we’re out,” Aadhya said, making the face it deserved: she was right, nobody inside the school was going to buy a modestly good artificer tool. It wasn’t like the phase-control spell from my sutras, where it was so useful and so expensive on the outside that it was worth someone trading a substantial advantage in here to get it for their family’s future use. Also, there was the question of how the Scholomance would have her test it. I’m sure it would have been generous enough to provide an entire hive of live miercels to practice on.
The last option was a combination sunlamp and self-watering planter that could be stacked to make a vertical garden while using very little mana, for setting up a greenhouse in a tiny space with no natural light. It would have been very nice to have in a Scholomance room, so of course the specifications required the planter to be fifteen feet long, which meant it wouldn’t fit in even a double-wide room. After I finished translating that bit, I realized to my dismay that the one place these planters would have worked perfectly was in those small Golden Stone enclaves I’d been so energetically dreaming of setting up. It was probably my fault Aadhya had got stuck with it: spend a lot of time with your allies, and sometimes their intent can start to influence your own work.
“Sorry,” I said grimly when I handed it over for her to look at.
“Ugh, and it’s going to take forever to meld these layers of chalcedony with the sand,” she said in dismay. “And I’m still not done with the lute.”
She’d been working on the lute in her every free minute since last term, but she badly needed more of them. Aadhya’s got an affinity for exotic materials, especially ones taken from mals. As you might imagine, they have loads of power, but most artificers can’t handle them; either they just don’t work, or more likely the artifice goes wrong in some excitingly malicious way. Aadhya can almost always coax them along into her projects, but the lute was ten times more complicated than anything else she’d done. The sirenspider leg I’d given her had gone to make the body of the lute, and the argonet tooth had made the bridges and the frets, and she’d strung it with the hair Liu had cut off at the start of the year. And then she’d etched sigils of power over the whole thing and lined them with the enchanted gold leaf her family had sent her on induction day. Pulling the whole thing together would’ve been a challenge for a professional artificer with a full workbench of favorite tools, and we’d pinned a large number of our graduation hopes on it.
Senior year, you spend half your time staying alive, half your time on your lessons, and half your time working out a graduation strategy to get you through the hall. If you can’t make that equation add up properly, you die. Most teams spend a lot of time identifying their best approach—are you going to rely on speed and deflection, dodging your way through the horde; are you going to build a massive forward shield and try to bowl yourselves straight to the doors; are you going to turn yourselves gnat-sized and try to hop from one team to another and let them carry you; et cetera.
Our alliance had a very obvious basic strategy: everyone else would keep the mals from interrupting my casting, and I would slaughter everything in a tidy path straight to the doors. Perfectly simple. Only it wasn’t, because most spells can’t slaughter everything. Even La Main de la Mort doesn’t work on everything; it’s useless on the entire category of psychic maleficaria, since those more or less don’t actually exist to begin with. They can still kill you, though.
And not even a share in the New York mana pool was going to be enough to power more than one of my major workings. There were six other New York seniors who’d be in the graduation hall at the same time as Chloe, all wanting hefty quantities of mana for themselves and their own teams, and even if they didn’t mean to cut me off beforehand, they were very definitely going to ration just how much mana I could take during the main event.