by Naomi Novik
I could also have stayed parked at the desk, except then I still wouldn’t know what the whatever was, and if something really bad had made it into the library, it could just as easily flee from Orion and come for me. Anyway, I’d been looking for an excuse to show off: what more could I ask for? Taking out something big in the reading room would be a great one, as long as Orion didn’t kill it before I got there. Maybe I could even save him.
Filled with all the hazy glory of that vision, I got up and went after him, though at a healthily cautious pace. As soon as I got into the Sanskrit aisle again, I heard the alluring song that had called him: faint screams, traveling from the reading room. I couldn’t tell what was instigating the screaming, but the sheer number of voices suggested it had to be something impressive. I’d been wise to go slowly, though: I was barely in the Vedic era and Orion was already rounding the corner into the main incantations aisle far ahead, disappearing out of sight again, and the lights were dimming on his heels, making a long dark stretch of aisle ahead of me.
I stayed focused on the spine labels and stuck to my deliberate pace, the best way to keep the library from playing any tricks on me. But the aisle was already being unreasonably slow and grudging, and then it got worse: I was looking for familiar books, as landmarks, and I caught sight of two entries from my little catalog, written by the same author in the same decade, with an entire bookcase between them. I had to start deliberately reading the last label on every row out loud and letting my fingers bang into the end of each shelf to force it to let me make any real progress.
Which was extremely odd, because I could hear the screaming from the reading room getting louder. Flashes of red and violet light were appearing at the distant end of the aisle: that was Orion’s combat magic going, which I was starting to be able to recognize just by the rhythm of the spell bursts. There was clearly a huge fight in the offing. Normally the school is more than happy to dump you into a mess like that if you’re stupid enough to go towards it. Unless, it occurred to me, the maleficaria in question had a real chance of taking Orion out. I was going towards the reading room with the intent to help him, after all, and in magic, intentions matter. Of course the school would have liked to be rid of him, seeing how he’s been throwing off the balance and starving the place.
I didn’t like that idea at all, and I even more didn’t like how much I didn’t like it. Getting attached to anyone in here except on practical terms is like sending out an engraved invitation to misery, even if you don’t pick out an idiot who spends all his time hurling himself into danger. But it was too late. I already didn’t like it enough that I had to make a special effort to stop myself from stupidly breaking into a run. I forced myself to slow down even more instead and actively look at every single thing on the shelves. That’s contrary to instinct, but it’s the best way to force the library to let you get through. If an aisle is taking longer to walk, there have to be more bookcases on the same subject, and the more books the library has to dredge up out of the void to fill them. If you’re going slow enough to look at all the spines, you’re almost sure to find a really valuable and rare spellbook among them. So the school is almost sure to let you make progress instead.
Except what actually happened was that scads of unfamiliar books and manuscripts started appearing on the shelves. Many with numbers that I’d never seen before, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the Sanskrit aisle the last two years. Some of the numbers were weirdly gigantic, meaning they’d been cataloged really early on and hadn’t been relabeled since. The school really didn’t want me getting to the end of the aisle. I narrowed my eyes and looked even harder, and three shelves onward, I caught a gleam of gold off the spine of a thin volume, almost completely hidden between two heaped stacks of palm-leaf manuscripts, on a high shelf just at the limit of my arm’s reach, with no label at all.
No labels means a book that has been freshly pulled from the void, never on the shelf before at all, which means it’s valuable enough to hide really aggressively. And a book stuffed among palm-leaf manuscripts meant spells valuable enough that someone had copied it, centuries later, and in this case also bothered to gild the cover. I first noticed the book peeking out while I was two steps away, didn’t take my eyes off it for a second as I got closer, and then I grabbed the edge of the shelf with one hand, jumped, and snagged it off. I could practically feel the whole bookcase lurch under me with resentment as I came down. I wasn’t stupid enough to try and look inside, which would have made it subject to collection. I kept looking straight ahead down the aisle and got it stuffed into my bookbag without even breaking stride. But I could tell just from my fingers sliding over the cover that it was really properly good. It wasn’t just the spine that was gilt, there was some sort of stamped pattern all over, and a folded-over flap to keep it closed.
The aisle did start to move quicker after that. I indulged in feeling smug for a moment, as if I’d beaten the library; I’d made it hand me something good and now it was going to have to let me go, since it didn’t want me collecting any more prizes. And it didn’t, of course, but I was still being an idiot. You don’t ever get anything in here without paying for it. Ever.
I moved at speed through the more modern languages, until at last I got close enough that in the next flash of Orion’s magic, the library couldn’t keep me from getting a glimpse of the distance between me and the main incantations aisle, and I burst into a quick sprint that got me close enough I could still see the end of the aisle even after the spell-light had faded. It had taken me at least twice as long to get there as Orion. The screams were louder, and other noises too: a high-pitched shrilling, vaguely birdlike, and then a lower snarling became audible as I rounded into the main aisle. After a couple of cautious steps further on, a third sound came, like the wind whistling through dead leaves on an early-winter day.
The first two sounds could possibly have gone together. You get all sorts of ridiculous cross-breeds in the bestial or hybrid category, mals created when some excessively clever alchemist stuck together two incompatible creatures for fun and profit—if by profit you mean eventually getting eaten by your own creations, which seems to happen to almost every maleficer who goes off on that particular tangent. Crossing a wolf with a flock of sparrows might sound stupid, but it’s not even unlikely. But the third sound was completely out. It wasn’t precisely like the manifestation that Mum put down on Bardsey Island during the summer that she dragged me the whole width of Wales on foot along the old pilgrim way, that one had sounded more like bells ringing, but it was close enough to be unmistakable.
If a manifestation had somehow formed inside the school, the library was just the sort of place it would like. But I was surprised it had popped into the reading room. Why not stay in the nice dark stacks where it had probably been feeding off the occasional lost student for ages? And why at the same moment as something else—two something elses, I mentally amended, because the shrilling and the snarling were now clearly coming from different parts of the reading room, too far apart for separate heads on one creature. That made no sense, and even less after I heard Orion shout, “Magnus! Put down a slickshield!” Those are only useful against the oozes, which don’t make any sound at all except squelching. That made four mals in the library, all at once. It would be like a pre-graduation party going in there.
And if Magnus was still in there casting defensive spells instead of running the hell away, that meant that one of the mals was keeping at least the New York corner and therefore also a heap of other kids from getting out. It was the most perfect gift-wrapped opportunity to show off that I could possibly have asked for. The main aisle was even lit the whole way down to the reading room like an airport runway.
I didn’t charge down the aisle and throw myself into the beautifully visible fray. I’d been a little slow on the uptake about the book, but I’m never that slow. The library had wanted to keep me in the Sanskrit aisle, but now it want
ed me in the reading room. That meant it wasn’t trying to stop me saving Orion. It just didn’t want me in this aisle. And it wanted me out of here so badly, it was even holding out everything I’d been sitting in the nook dreaming about, wanting.
So I stopped instead, right there in the corridor, and then I turned around and looked into the dark behind me.
The library air vents are in the aisles, old tarnished brass gratings set in the floor. Their edges catch the light when you’re walking in the library, thin gleaming lines reflecting even when the lights are dim. I couldn’t see the one that should have been behind me. I couldn’t hear the annoying grate of the old grimy fans, or even the omnipresent rustle and scrape of pages shifting: as if even the books on the shelves had gone still, like sparrows when a hawk is circling. The background noise wasn’t just being drowned out by the noise of the fighting behind me. I held my own breath to listen, and I heard faintly the sound of many other people breathing, soft and dark and heavy. The lights overhead were out completely, but Orion’s next spell-burst was coming, another flash of light. My whole body was clenched and waiting for it, and in the next flare of deep-red light I met half a dozen human eyes watching me, scattered over the thick rolling folds of the translucent, glossy mass that was just bulging its way out of the vent, many mouths open and working for air.
Because I usually have to sit in the front rows of Maleficaria Studies, I have an especially good view of the graduation day mural centerpiece, featuring the two gigantic maw-mouths who have pride of place on either side of the gates. They’re the only mals that have names: ages ago some New York enclavers started calling them Patience and Fortitude, and it stuck. They remain purely decorative, though; we don’t study maw-mouths in here. There’s no point. There isn’t any way to stop a maw-mouth killing you. If you get out the gates quickly enough, they don’t get you. Or if something else kills you first. That’s the only practical advice the textbook offered about them: if you’ve got a choice, take the something else. But once they’ve got you, even a little curl of a tentacle around your ankle, you’re not getting away. Not on your own.
The flaring light of Orion’s spell went out behind me, and I stood there staring into the blind darkness until the next one came, a long firecracker burst of bright greens and blues. The maw-mouth was still there. It blinked back at me with some of its borrowed eyes: brown eyes in a lot of shades and shapes, occasional blue eyes and green eyes, gliding gently in opposite directions or alongside each other over the surface as it kept flowing up and out of the vent, some of them getting buried and others rolling out into the light, pupils contracting in the brightness. Some of them had wide staring expressions, others blinked rapidly, others looked glazed and dull. The half page on maw-mouths in the sophomore-year textbook also informed us in clinical prose that no one is certain what happens to those consumed by maw-mouths, and there is a substantial school of thought that believes their consciousness never actually ends and they just get exhausted into silence. For further reading, see the seminal literature by Abernathy, Kordin, and Li in the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, who discovered that it was possible to direct a communications spell to even a long-digested maw-mouth victim and receive back a response, albeit nothing but incoherent screaming.
I made Mum tell me how Dad died when I was nine. She didn’t want to. Before then, she just said, “I’m sorry, love, I can’t. I can’t talk about it.” But the morning after the scratcher, sitting huddled in bed with my arms around my already knobbly knees, staring at the streaked-metal walkway made out of the first hungry thing that had come out of the dark for me, I said, “Don’t tell me you can’t talk about it. I want to know.” So Mum told me, and then she spent the rest of the day crying, in deep gulps, while she went round doing her rituals and putting things away and cooking, barefoot the way she almost always was. I could see the ring of tiny pockmarked scars around her ankle, the familiar ring. I’d liked it before; it fascinated me. I’d 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 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 c
an’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.