El uses the phase-control spell to melt in just a little bit of the iron from the damaged wall, the size of a quarter, not big enough to let something really dangerous get through. I have a spell process to infuse carbon into iron, to turn it into steel. I’ll do that to the melted iron, and then she can put it back solid again. We could do it in a running cycle, the way you were doing it with the silver during the demo,” she added to me. “And if anything squeezes through one of the holes we make in the wall while we’re working, Orion can take it out.”
That was a wildly ambitious plan, only as far as any of us could see, the only other option was to make new walls in the shop in pieces, tote them down to the stairwell, and ask the mals nicely to stay back while we swapped them in. After first asking all the seniors nicely to stay out of the shop for the next three days, while we recruited about ten artificer-track students to make these new walls in the first place.
“How much mana would this take?” Ibrahim said.
“Shedloads,” I said. “The phase-control spell is unbelievably cheap for what it does, but it’s not free. Melting down an entire wall of solid iron isn’t going to be like doing a tiny bit of silver or picking a single chemical out of a piece of wood. Fortunately, we’ve got a solution.” I turned and looked at Orion pointedly.
He blinked back at me. “I don’t know if there will be enough mals coming through for me to keep feeding you mana the whole time?”
“Just take it from your enclave power-sharer,” I said. “You put enough in, they can’t complain, surely.”
“Well—I could ask Magnus—”
“Wait, what?” I said. “Why would you have to ask anyone?”
He paused for a weird moment, and then he swallowed and said, “I don’t…I have a hard time paying attention to…if I have open access to the power bank, I’ll just use it. So my sharer’s got a block.” He tried to sound casual about it, but he was looking away.
None of us said anything. Ibrahim looked utterly horrified. It was a shocking feet-of-clay moment for him, I suppose: Orion Lake, blocked from his own enclave share because he didn’t have basic mana control. That’s like admitting you wear nappies because you wet yourself now and again.
Only in this case, it was more like he was being forced to wear a nappy and wet himself now and again so all of his enclave mates could go on happily enjoying the mana he was pouring into their share, the streams of mana those greedy selfish bastards were milking out of him every time he took out another mal. I wanted to rip the power-sharer right off his wrist and go and chuck it at Chloe’s head and tell her that Orion was right not to care about a single one of them, and we were going it alone, I was taking him to live in a yurt in Wales when we got out of here, and every last wizard in New York could set themselves on fire and cry about it.
I couldn’t speak because I was so mad. And annoyingly, I’d underrated Ibrahim again; he was actually the one who broke the silence and said, “But—aren’t you the one who—I heard you get mana from the mals—”
Orion shrugged a little without meeting anyone’s eyes. “Everyone puts in mana. It’s not a big deal. I can get some whenever I need it.”
“But,” Ibrahim said.
“Later,” I told him, and he looked over at me and I assume gathered from my expression that yeah, it was an absolute mountain of rubbish that I wasn’t going to let stand five seconds longer than it needed to, once we weren’t all a few days away from even more sudden and unpleasant death than normal. He subsided, and I said to Orion, “Not Magnus. We’ll ask Chloe.”
* * *
CHLOE’S BRILLIANT INPUT on our plan was, “But wait, why don’t we just put in a maintenance request?”
She said it as if that was a completely reasonable and obvious suggestion, and Orion actually rubbed his face and looked over at me a bit sheepishly, like oh, he hadn’t considered that option, he really should have had more sleep. We went in for a round of staring around at each other with equal degrees of what sort of