A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,53
always try to touch it when I saw it when I was little, and I’d asked Mum about it a lot more often than I asked her about what happened to Dad. She’d always pushed off that question, too, but I hadn’t realized it was the same question.
The one and only way to stop a maw-mouth is to give it indigestion. If you rush into the maw-mouth on your own, with a powerful enough shield, then you have a chance to get inside before it can start eating you. In theory, if you manage to reach the core, you can burst it apart from there. But mostly people don’t get that far; there’re only three known cases where that’s ever been done, and by a circle of wizards. The only realistic goal for a single wizard is to distract it. That’s all Dad did. He grabbed the tentacle and pulled it away from Mum, back into the mass of the maw-mouth. He had time to turn around and tell her he loved her and loved me, the baby they’d only just realized was on the way, and then the maw-mouth got through his shield and swallowed him up.
Maybe it had even been this one. I knew it hadn’t been Patience or Fortitude. Those two are so big, they don’t move around anymore at all, and they rarely eat students except by accident. They spend graduation day eating up any other maw-mouths that unwarily come in reach of their tentacles, and the biggest other maleficaria. This one was clearly more energetic. There’s never been a maw-mouth in the actual halls of the school before. As far as I know, of course, but they’re not the kind of maleficaria where nobody escapes to tell the tale. You have lots of warning from the people screaming and thrashing as they’re being swallowed. But the ones in the school have always been happy to wait down below for the annual feast.
The next flare came from the reading room as the maw-mouth finished pulling the last bit of itself out of the vent, the mass briefly keeping the boxy shape it had been squashed into, before it softened back into blob. It just sat there, its silent mouths working, taking long deep breaths, as if it was recovering from the massive effort of getting up here to hunt. I didn’t run; I didn’t need to. Even small maw-mouths don’t eat one at a time. If it gobbled me up, it would have to sit here digesting before it moved again, and in the meantime everyone else would clear out. That was why the library had been trying to keep me away: so I wouldn’t give a warning. It wanted to give the maw-mouth a good sporting chance to eat not just Orion, but everyone in the reading room. Not to mention those four powerful maleficaria that had probably come up here running away from the maw-mouth in the first place.
I took the first slow, careful step backwards in the dark, towards the reading room. And then another after that as Orion’s next spell went off behind me, and then the maw-mouth let out a deep sighing from all its mouths and was moving—away. I froze, wondering if I’d seen wrong, but Orion had just cast some variety of a prisoning-dome spell, and the neon-pink glow lingered, reflecting off the glossy folds as the maw-mouth went rolling over itself with a sudden startling speed, eyes and whispering mouths coming up and going back under in waves.
It wasn’t going for the reading room. It was going the other way, straight for the stairway at the end of the aisle, the one that went down from the library to the freshman dorms. Where all the youngest kids would be holed up in their rooms right now, all the ones who didn’t have an enclave to get them in at one of the safe tables in the reading room, doing their homework in pairs and crowded trios. The maw-mouth would stretch itself out along the hall, blocking as many doors as it could reach, and then it would start poking tendrils inside to pull the tender oysters out of their shells.
And there was absolutely nothing I could do to save them. The quickest other way to get to the freshman dorms was to run through the reading room and down the other half of the incantations corridor to the staircase there, and I’d come out on the