A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,11

were joking. I didn’t try to persuade him. It’s easy to claim to be a massively powerful dark sorceress; no one’s going to believe me until I prove it, preferably with hard evidence. “Where do you get all the power, anyway?” I asked him instead. I’d often wondered. An affinity makes certain spells considerably easier to cast, but it doesn’t make them free.

“From them. From the mals, I mean. I kill one, then I save that power to fire off the next spell. Or if I’m low, I borrow some from Magnus or Chloe or David…”

I ground my teeth. “I get the idea.” He was naming off all the other students from the New York enclave. Of course they did power-sharing, and of course they had their own power sink to boot, like my crystals, except some enormous one that every student from New York had been feeding into for the last century. He literally had a battery to pull on for his heroics, and if he could pull mana from killing maleficaria—how?—he probably didn’t even need it.

We reached the landing for the shop level then. The senior hall was still further below, and there was a faint glow of light coming up the stairs from there. But the archway opening onto the classroom corridor itself was pitch black; the lights had gone out. I stared at the open maw of it grimly as we came down the last steps: that was what his moment of hesitation had netted us. And if mals never went for him, that meant whatever was lurking around down there was going to go for me.

“I’ll take the lead,” he offered.

“You’d better believe you’re going to take the lead. And you’re holding the light, too.”

He didn’t even argue, just nodded and put out his left hand and lit it up using a minor version of the same incandensing spell he’d used on the soul-eater. It made my eyes itch. He was all set to just march straight into the corridor; I had to yank him back and inspect the ceiling and floor and prod the nearby walls myself. Digesters that haven’t eaten in a while are translucent, and if they spread themselves out thinly enough over a flat surface, you can look straight at them and never realize they’re there until they flap themselves around you. The landing is a high-traffic area, so it’s especially popular with them. Earlier this year, one of the sophomore boys rushing to get to class on time got caught, and he lost a leg and most of his left arm. He didn’t last for long after that, obviously.

But the whole area round the landing was clear. The only thing I did turn up was an agglo hiding under one of the gas lamps, shorter than my pinky and not worth trying to harvest even for me: only two screws, half a lozenge, and a pen cap stuck onto its shell so far. It scuttled away over the wall in a panic before diving into a vent. Nothing reacted to its passage. At night, in a dark corridor on the shop level, that wasn’t a good sign. There should have been something. Unless there was something especially bad up ahead that had scared the others away.

I put a hand spread out on the back of Orion’s shoulder and kept my head turned to look behind us as we headed onwards to the main workshop entrance, the best way for a pair to walk together when there’s an imminent threat. Most of the classroom doors were standing ajar just enough that we wouldn’t get the warning of a doorknob turning, but not enough for us to get a good look into any of the rooms as we passed, dozens of them: aside from the workshop and the gym, most of the bottom level is taken up with small classrooms where seniors take specialized seminars. But those all end after the first half of the year; at this point all the seniors are spending all their time doing practice runs for graduation, meaning the seminar rooms are the perfect place for mals to snooze in.

I hated having to trust Orion to watch where we were going. He walked so casually, even through an unlit hallway, and when he got to the shop doors, he just pulled one open and walked on inside before I realized what he was doing. Then I had to follow him or else be stuck out