A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,110

can stop”—she waved a hand in a spiraling circle, making a gesture of drama—“about how evil we are because we don’t want to die. It doesn’t help anyone. We know what we have to do, if we don’t want to pay it back with blood. We have to pay it back with work.”

Clarita turned back to Orion. “There’re more than four thousand of us in here right now. Ten times more wizards than built the Scholomance in the first place. We’ve got a little more than a week. All of us put in work, build all the mana we can, and you go down into the graduation hall and use it to fix the scouring machinery down there. And that will clear the hall before we graduate, enough that our class doesn’t all have to die. Because we’ll have paid back the debt together.” She had to raise her voice to finish: a wild babbling of conversation had erupted throughout the entire room.

Her plan certainly had a nice sound to it. If you put aside the challenge of getting to the cleansing equipment downstairs, the challenge of repairing it wasn’t insurmountable at all. We wouldn’t have to invent anything new. The detailed blueprints for the whole school that are on display everywhere include the engines that generate the walls of mortal flame for cleansing. The best artificers would be easily good enough to create replacement parts, and the best maintenance-track kids would be easily good enough to install them.

You could really hear in the changing pitch of voices in the room that everyone was beginning to get excited about the idea. If we did get the cleansing fires running in the graduation hall, it wouldn’t just be the seniors this year who saw the benefits. There would be fewer mals in the school for years, and the cleansing might run again for our graduation, and the sophomores, too.

Unfortunately, you can’t, in fact, put aside the challenge of getting to the equipment. It broke for the first time back in 1886. The first repair crew—the original idea the enclaves had for school maintenance was that paid crews of grown wizards would pop in through the graduation gates every so often and come up, ha ha—anyway, the first crew sent in didn’t come back out again and also didn’t repair a thing. The second and much larger crew did manage to get the equipment repaired, but only two of them made it back out, with quite the alarming tale to tell. By then, the graduation hall was already home to our senior resident maw-mouths and several hundred exceptional horrors—the kind smart enough to realize that once they wriggled in through the gates, they could just lie around the hall and wait for an annual feast of tender young wizardlings. And the cleansing failed again in 1888. There were wards protecting the machinery, but somehow the mals kept getting through. They didn’t have anything to do all year but sit around down there bashing on things, I suppose.

There were enough recriminations flying among the enclaves by then that Sir Alfred himself personally led in a large crew of heroic volunteers to install what he insisted would be a permanent repair. He was the Dominus of Manchester—he’d won the position for having built the school—and was generally agreed to be the most powerful wizard alive at the time. He was last seen going screaming into Patience or possibly Fortitude—witness accounts differ about which side of the gate the maw-mouth in question was on—along with about half of his crew. His “permanent” repair got dismantled again three years later.

There were a few more attempts by groups of desperate parents with graduating children, but they all just ended up with the parents dead and no repairs done. Manchester was in chaos with its Dominus and several of its council dead, enclavers all over the world were howling. People were talking about abandoning the school entirely, except then they’d be back to where they began, with more than half their children dying. In the midst of that, London enclave more or less organized a coup, took the Scholomance over, then doubled the number of seats—the dorm rooms became significantly smaller—and opened the place up to independent students. Rather in the same spirit as the seniors who wanted to bring our class along for graduation.

And it worked splendidly. The enclaver kids do make it out alive almost all of the time—their survival rate usually hovers around