A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,101

iron we were testing with—left over from some failed project, presumably—into liquid form. Aadhya had the crucible heated and waiting, right underneath it, and as soon as the metal ran in, she sprinkled in the soot with her free hand, in a smooth pattern, frowning in concentration as she made them merge. Then she gave me a quick nod, tipped the crucible over the edge of the rod where the iron had been, and I shoved the metal back into a solid form.

It did go solid. However, only just barely solid. The blob of metal plonked down on the workbench surface, sizzled violently, melted a hole straight through and fell down towards the shelf underneath, smashed a hole through a stack of panes of glass, set the tarp that was covering them on fire, melted through the second shelf, fell to the floor, melted straight through that, and was gone.

There was some yelling and flailing—I may have done some myself—before Aadhya grabbed four of the powders she’d asked Orion for, clapped them together, and threw them onto the cheerfully spreading fire. Once that was out, we all gathered and peered down at the hole nervously. It went all the way through what turned out to be an uncomfortably thin floor. All I could make out in the darkness down there, at least from a cautious distance, was one very rusty pipe running past, with a circle of five antique vials, the kind of artifice you only see anymore in museum pieces, turning round and steadily doling out drops of different alchemical substances into an opening in the top of the pipe.

“Do you think any of the mals will try and get in through there?” Ibrahim said.

“Let’s fix it and not find out,” Aadhya said. “Orion, can you get some more—” and then we all belatedly noticed that Orion couldn’t get anything, because he wasn’t standing with us: he was at the doorway busy killing a slipslider that had come to investigate our yelling with a dream in its heart, or at least its digestion.

“Yeah?” he said, coming back, breathing only a little hard, after tossing what was left of the slipslider back out into the hall: when it had tried to squirm out of his grip by dumping its outer layer, he’d grabbed the half-shed skin, pulled it back over the head, and tied it in a knot and kept it that way until it strangled. That wasn’t how you were supposed to kill them, but it seemed to have worked fine.

It was just as well that we were practicing. It took me several tries to learn how to convince the metal to go back into a really solid form, not to mention back into the specific shape that it had started in, but even once I had, it still wasn’t coming out right. I didn’t melt any more holes through the floor, but I left a dozen contorted lumps of metal that didn’t really look like steel stuck firmly to the surface of the table.

Chloe said suddenly, “Hey, if it’s steel, don’t you need to fold it?”

It turned out her dad was an artificer, too: that’s how he and Orion’s dad knew each other. Aadhya looked it up in the metallurgy textbook she’d brought and discovered she was right. “Right, okay, you need to envision the final shape being made up of like one thin layer folded back and forth on itself, like puff pastry or something, instead of a solid block.”

Using that mental image got me a substance that seemed approximately right. But it became even harder to work out the right pace for me and Aadhya to go so that we could convert the iron in a continuous process. About half of the iron rod ended up in tidy one- or two-inch separate sections scattered around the table.

And then we hit our stride, swapped out six inches in a row without stopping, and suddenly it was easy, as easy as the wood, as easy as the silver. Aadhya actually laughed out loud. “Oh my God, this is amazing!” she said, holding up the rod, half of it new steel bright and shining, patterned with wavy lines, right up to the hard edge where it met the old blackened iron. “Just look at this, this is so cool.”

I couldn’t help smiling myself, and even Chloe looked a little reluctantly impressed when we all passed around the rod. “All right, we’ll do the wall repair in work