A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,56
kind of rope that squished out of my hands almost as fast as I got it, trying to swim through meat. But I could feel my mana just going, a torrent pouring through me to hold my shielding spell up, to keep the hungry thing out of me, and I had no idea how much I was using, how much I had left, whether I’d even have enough left to destroy the thing when I got to wherever I was trying to go, and I was screaming and sobbing and blindly shoving onward without really getting anywhere, and I couldn’t actually bear it lasting any longer. The textbook had been right all along, take anything instead, any other death, because I would rather have been dead than keep going, even with my shield.
So I didn’t keep going. I stopped, and I used the best of the nineteen spells I know for killing an entire roomful of people, the shortest one; it’s just three words in French, à la mort, but it must be cast carelessly, with a flick of the hand that most people get wrong, and if you get it even a little wrong, it kills you instead. That makes it hard to be careless. But I didn’t care. Could I flick my hand properly inside here? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I was just doing something that came naturally, a spell that slipped off my tongue as easily as a breath, and I flicked my hand or maybe just thought of flicking my hand. All around me the horrible stuff went worse, sludging into putrescence, but that one moment of casting the spell had felt easy and good and right, so I did it again, and then again, and again, and again, just for the relief. I threw other killing spells, every one of the dozens I knew, in case any one of them would do it, would make it all stop. But it didn’t stop. The rot and corruption just kept spreading wider around me, organs floating in a sloshing mass, eyes bobbing out of it to press against my shield staring at me, but at least they clouded over and shriveled up when I cursed them, so I kept going, just killing and killing until suddenly between one moment and the next the maw-mouth broke apart over my head and slithered down all around me to puddle like an emptied sack at my feet, disintegrating, the last few eyes already dead and empty before they sank in on themselves as the last of it came apart.
I thought I’d been clawing my way through it for miles, but I’d hardly gone two steps past where the maw-mouth had first grabbed me. There was a thing left on the floor a few feet away from me, a grotesque lump that looked like a deboned chicken, except a person instead, a body that had been crushed into a fetal position. Then that broke apart too into gobbets and sludge, leaving the whole hallway drenched in blood and bile and the last bits of rotting flesh.
All of it was already running away down the drains set in the floor, the carefully, thoughtfully placed drains in the slightly sloped floor that were designed for just this sort of occasion, to efficiently drain away all the evidence of any unfortunate event that might mess up the floors. They started to choke on the sheer quantity, and I thought the pipes might back up, but then the sprayers in the ceiling kicked in automatically with loud grinding thumps, and look at that, they were even up to the task of draining away the wreckage of a maw-mouth’s worth of murder. I didn’t know how many people I’d killed in there. I’d lost count how many times I’d cast killing spells. Of course, I’m sure they were all grateful. All of them would have taken me instead.
I had to take down my shield spell, which was still covering me up. I didn’t need it anymore, and I was going to desperately need every last drop of mana it was using right now. But I couldn’t make myself do it. The outer surface was drenched in rot. The sprayers had stopped, and blood and fluids were draining down, puddling red and putrid yellow around the outline of my shoes, leaving only the three-inch margin of my shield. I didn’t want to put my hands out through it.