A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,121

of violet drool leaking out of the sides of their jaws as they began to pad in our direction. We all started to walk more quickly, and then the enormous hole in the dome turned out not to be an enormous hole but an enormous nightflyer that let go of the ceiling and came gliding down towards us. Orion said, “Okay, go,” his sword-thing illuminating, and we all pelted away.

The chayenas charged after us instantly. They’re one of the more stupid crossbreeds: from cheetah to hyena by way of water buffalo and rhinoceros and probably a couple others you can’t tell by looking. They were smashed together in the days of colonial glory by some idiots setting up an enclave in Kenya who wanted more of a hunting challenge. An independent alchemist who lived with the local mundanes was annoyed. She took on some work from the enclavers so they’d let her come and go, and then she quietly enhanced the chayenas with the charming additional feature of a paralytic bite and let them all loose. That was the unpleasant and gory end for the enclave, but the chayenas survived, and now are sometimes bred deliberately as the equivalent of guard dogs. They’re arguably not mals; if you raise one properly, it won’t kill you for your mana even if it’s hungry. Mostly they don’t get raised properly, since the goal is in fact for them to kill intruders for their mana. Mum always gets wound up about their mistreatment.

At the moment, I felt something other than sympathetic. I’m in fair condition when I haven’t recently had a gut wound, but I haven’t spent the last six months doing wind sprints in the gym. I was at the end of our group. With the power-sharer on my wrist, I had the mana available to kill a whole continent’s worth of chayenas, much less three mangy half-starved ones, but if I turned to cast at them, I’d end up separated and surrounded, and even if I managed to fight my way over to everyone else, I’d blow enormous amounts of our shared mana, which we needed for the repair work.

But the first chayena was already clawing at my personal shield, and if I waited any longer, one of them was going to get its teeth through it. I had chosen my place to turn, just past a scrap heap of marble and bones, and then Ellen tripped over a broken tile on the floor and went down not two steps ahead of me. Momentum carried me past her, and I didn’t turn back: there wasn’t any point. Her scream had already cut off into a dying gargle, and I knew better than to make it real by looking around. As long as I didn’t look, she didn’t have to be dead, and I didn’t have to have feelings about Ellen, beaming at me two days ago while she told me we were going to make it. I couldn’t afford feelings right now.

I made it to the machinery and fell into line next to David. The crowd of mals packed up against the walls was turning towards us like some enormous singular blob of a creature, humping itself around and flowing over the ground. The ones that had been at the back were racing for us as fast as they could go, trying to take advantage of their unexpected lead, while the ones that had been up at the front were trying to take it back. Clarita had already started casting. I called out my lines in turn, and we put the shield wall up, even as the repair team yanked off the polished brass that covered the machinery: all according to plan.

That of course was when Wen said something in Mandarin that I was unhappily certain was very profane.

And look, to defend myself, there’d been really excellent cause to be suspicious of the seniors, and going close to graduation was only the reasonable thing to do as a result. That said, in retrospect, odds were that the seniors still wouldn’t have been able to carry out an effective backup plan even if we’d gone the night before instead, and allowing a little more time for things to go wrong might in fact have been a better idea. I’d just been completely certain that if they’d gone more wrong than that, we’d all be dead anyway.

I should have been right about that. We would have been dead under any normal