opposite side of the dorms. By the time I got back round, no warning would be necessary. The kids on the other side would already be screaming loudly enough.
But that was the only thing I could do, the only thing anyone could do; the only thing at all, because you can’t kill maw-mouths. When a maw-mouth comes at an enclave, even their goal is defense: hunkering down, closing up entrances, driving away other mals, so the maw-mouth moves on to hunt somewhere else. The greatest wizards alive can’t kill maw-mouths, and they won’t even try, because if you try and you don’t kill it, it eats you and it keeps eating you forever. It’s worse than being killed by a soul-eater and it’s worse than being grabbed by a harpy and taken to her nest to be eaten alive by her chicks and it’s worse than being torn apart by kvenliks, and no one in their right mind would ever try it, no one, unless the girl you’d started dating a few months ago was going to die, her and someone you didn’t even know, not even a person but just a blob of cells that had barely started dividing yet, and you stupidly cared about that enough to trade a million years of agony for theirs.
That maw-mouth wasn’t going after anyone I loved. I didn’t even know any freshmen. After it made a good meal of some dozens of them, it would settle down to digest and recover from the effort of its long climb up. It would probably stay there in their hall, riding down with it one year after another all the way to graduation. When it got hungry again, it would just creep a little way further along the corridor and eat some more freshmen who didn’t have anywhere to go. At least they’d have some warning. The kids it ate today would keep begging and crying and whispering for a long time, or at least their mouths would.
And then it occurred to me, unwillingly—if I could somehow stop the maw-mouth, no one would even know. There wasn’t a single person left in the library stacks right now, not with all the blasting and screaming in the reading room. And the freshmen wouldn’t come out of their dorm rooms if they heard anything in the hallway. It was the end of freshman year, they’d learned by now to just barricade their doors, like sane people. No one but me even knew there was a maw-mouth up here, and absolutely no one would believe me if I tried to tell them I’d done for one. And I’d have to burn up who even knew how much of my hard-won mana stash. I wouldn’t be able to show off afterwards. My reputation would be the least of my worries. I’d spend all of my senior year scrabbling desperately after every last drop of mana I could collect just to try and survive graduation.
I didn’t want to realize any of that. I didn’t want to realize because it mattered too much to me. You never get anything for free in here. But I’d just been handed an incredibly valuable book, and right behind me in the reading room was everything I’d been hoping for, my best chance for survival and a future. I already knew that the school wasn’t holding that out to me for nothing—and here in front of me was the exact opposite. I was being offered a bribe twice over. But why would you bribe someone if you didn’t have to? The school wouldn’t bother trying to keep me off the maw-mouth unless the school thought—that I had a chance. That a sorceress designed from the ground up for slaughter and destruction might just be able to take out the one monster no one else could kill.
I looked around just in time to see Orion go flying across the corridor opening, the white flare of that top-notch shield holder of his going off as he slammed into whatever on the other side. A cloud of rilkes went boiling after him, their wings making the shrieking bird-noise, dripping blood beneath them like rain. I could run right in and vaporize all of them with a single crystal’s worth of mana, just like the scratcher, and end up standing there heroically over gasping Orion, in front of a crowd of enclavers. And no one would even think twice when they heard about the maw-mouth. I wouldn’t