by Naomi Novik
But despite five thousand years of refining, some of the Golden Stone building-block spells are still widely known, because they’re such good building-block spells, especially for manipulating elements and, most famously, the phase of matter, which is a lot more important than that might sound. If you want steam, you can get some by pouring enough heat into a pot of water. But that’s pretty wasteful, mana-wise. Like nine-year-old me wiping out an entire crystal to vaporize a scratcher. But if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on Purochana’s phase-control spell, you don’t have to take the intermediate step of generating the heat and warming up all the surrounding water and the pot and the air around it and so forth. You just take the pot of liquid water and turn exactly the amount of water you want into water vapor, and you spend only exactly the amount of mana required. That kind of mana control is huge; it’s what made enclave-building feasible.
And now I had got my hands on his phase-control spell. It was on page sixteen of the book. When I found it, my hands shaking as I turned the first pages, I had to stop reading and hold the book against my chest again, trying not to cry, because it meant I was probably going to make it out of here alive after all, which I’d been starting to doubt after seeing how badly my mana store had been wiped out. Aside from using the spell myself, I was going to be able to trade it for a lot.
Outside the Scholomance, buying the Golden Stone phase-control spell takes the equivalent of all the mana that a determined group of twenty wizards could put together over five years or so. And it’s even harder than that sounds. You can’t just store up mana for five years in a bank and then go buy the spell in a handy bookstore. The only way to get spells that valuable is to barter: find some enclave that’s willing to trade it to you, negotiate a deal for something that the enclave wants but can’t more easily make for themselves—generally that’s because it’s unpleasant or painful or dangerous—then spend five years of unpleasantness to make it and give it to them. And then hope they don’t go back on the deal or tack on a few more demands, which is far from unheard of.
I didn’t keep reading past the phase-control page. Instead I carefully dampened my cleanest rag and gently cleaned off every last speck of dust in every last crevice of every last pattern stamped into the cover. The whole time I talked to the book, telling it how happy I was to have it and how amazing it was and how I couldn’t wait to show it to everyone and one day soon take it home to my mum and use the special handmade leather oil that one of the people at the commune makes to properly clean it and so on. I didn’t even feel stupid. Mum cossets all seven of her spellbooks like that, and she’s never lost one, even though she’s an independent and they’re all really powerful. She keeps them together in a chest with a bit of room: if she ever finds a new one in there, which happens spontaneously sometimes—only to Mum—she says it means one of the others wants to go, and she lays them all out in a circle on a blanket spread under the hole in our yurt and does a blessing on them and thanks them all for their help and says whichever of them needs to leave can go, and sure enough when she’s done packing them back up, there are only seven left again.
“I’ll have to make a special book chest just for you,” I added, a promise. “I was planning to skive off shop class, I’ve finished for this term, but now I’ll keep going just to get your chest begun. It’s got to be perfect, so I expect it’ll take a while.” Then I slept with it cuddled in my arms. I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Holy shit, El,” Aadhya said, when I knocked on her door the next morning before first bell to show it to her. “What did you do for it?”
I was working really hard to forget what I’d done for it. “The library was trying really hard to keep me stuck in with the mals yesterday. It slipped the book onto an upper shelf after I started label-reading down the aisle, and I got lucky and spotted it.”
“That’s unbelievable.” She eyed it longingly. “I don’t know Sanskrit. But I’ll help you run an auction for the phase-control spell, if you want?”
“An auction?” I said. I’d only meant to ask her for help trading it.
“Yeah,” she said. “This is huge, you don’t want to swap it for just anything. I’ll collect secret bids, and the top five bidders get it, for whatever they’ve put up. And they have to promise that they won’t trade it on themselves after. Can you put a copying curse on?”
“No,” I said, flatly. The actual answer was yes, easy as winking, and it would be a good and proper curse, too, but I wasn’t going to.
“You want to ask Liu to do it?”
“No curses,” I said. “No one’s going to be photocopying this or anything. It’s major arcana in Vedic Sanskrit. It’s going to take me a week to make five clean copies, for that matter.”
“You’ve already learned it?” Aadhya gave me a squint. “When? You were a human dishrag yesterday.”
“After dinner,” I said sulkily: obviously all thanks to that boost from Orion.
After a moment, she said, “Okay. Can you run a demo? In the shop on Wednesday, maybe? That’ll give me a couple of days to pass the word. Then we can run the auction over the weekend. Seniors will really want in on this with time to get the spell down before graduation. And hey, if we’re lucky, all five of the winners will be seniors and we can do a whole second auction next term after they’re gone.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Thanks, Aadhya. What cut do you want?”
She gnawed her lip for a moment, looking at me, then abruptly she said, “You okay with figuring it out after the auction? See what comes in and what we think is fair. Maybe there’ll be enough shareable stuff I won’t need anything exclusive.”
I had to work at it not to squeeze the book too hard against me. “Fine with me, if you’re sure,” I said, casual around the lump in my throat.
WE WENT to the bathroom and got ready together, and met Nkoyo and Orion to walk to breakfast. “Oh, sweetness,” Nkoyo said, when I showed her the book: I was keeping it on my person, possibly for the rest of my life; I’d rigged up a sling to carry it in across my chest, separate from my other books. “Are you willing to do trades? I know a couple of Somali girls doing Sanskrit.”
I was so happy that when Chloe almost burst out of the girls’ with her hair not quite done, obviously having hurried to catch us up, and called, “Wait for me, there in a second,” I even said, “Sure,” like an ordinarily civilized person, feeling magnanimous, and showed her the book, too, as we walked. She admired it appropriately, although she spoiled my five seconds of friendly feeling by darting a look at Orion that I had no trouble interpreting: she thought he’d got it for me. I couldn’t kick her off our table at this point, any more than she could’ve shoved me when I’d been walking with Orion, that’s just not on, but I would’ve liked to.
I was still looking forward to my breakfast with anticipation, though. Once Aadhya and I passed the word in the food line that I had something really good on offer, people would stop at the table just to get a quick look. It would be a good way to make more connections, especially with other students who had Sanskrit; I could get even more trades out of it in future. Except then we got to the cafeteria and I knew straightaway my book wasn’t going to be the big news of the morning: a senior was sitting alone at the middle of an absolutely prime table. Completely alone, hunched over his tray.
Seniors don’t sit alone, no matter how much the other seniors hate them. Freshmen and even sophs will fill in the spaces at their tables for the cover. Seniors get access to a lot more advanced magic, and by graduation time, they’re also bursting with power, especially by comparison with the average fourteen-year-old. The kind of mals that want to hunt freshmen and sophs avoid them. But this one had been isolated so hard there weren’t even any seniors sitting at the tables around him: they were full of hunched-over desperate loser freshmen.
I didn’t recognize him, but Orion and Chloe had both frozen, staring.
“Isn’t he…New York?” Aadhya said, low, and Chloe said blankly, “That’s Todd. Todd Quayle.” That made it even more incomprehensible. Shunning an enclave kid? And Todd hadn’t gone obvious whole-hog maleficer or anything; he looked totally normal.
A freshman was just making a quick dash back from the busing station, having managed to get his tray on the conveyor without problems. Orion reached out and caught him. “What did he do?” he asked, jerking his head over.
“Poached,” the kid said, without really lifting his head; he darted a wary look at Orion and Chloe from under his untrimmed bangs and hurried on; Orion had dropped his arm and was looking sick. Chloe was shaking her head in denial. “No way,” she said. “No fucking way.” But it was almost the only thing big enough to explain it.
Our rooms are handed out on the day we get dropped into them, and you don’t get to change, even if someone dies. The empty rooms do get cleared out at the end of the year when the res halls rotate down, but the Scholomance decides how to reshuffle the walls to hand out the extra space. The only way you can deliberately change to another room is if you take it, and not by killing someone. You have to go into their room and push them into the void.
Nobody knows what that really means. The void isn’t a vacuum or instant death or anything like that. Occasionally someone will go crazy and try to walk out into the void on their own—you can, actually, walk into it. It doesn’t seem to matter that you can also drop things over the edge. Like that slime you can squish between your fingers or roll into an apparently solid ball: it depends how you’re pushing on it, only with your will instead of your hands.
However, those people never make it very far. They panic and run back, and none of them has ever been able to describe what it’s like in there. If someone’s really determined and takes a running start, occasionally their momentum carries them a little further in before they can turn around, and when they do come out, those people can’t talk anymore at all, at least not in any comprehensible way. They make noises like they’re talking, but it’s not a language anyone else knows or can understand. They mostly end up dead some other way, but a couple of them have made it out of the school alive. They’ve still got magic. But no one else can understand their spells, and if they’re artificers or alchemists, the things they make don’t work for anyone else. Like they’ve been shifted sideways somehow.
That’s as deep as anyone can get into the void on their own. But you can push someone else all the way in—with magic, so you get them far enough in to vanish completely, even though they don’t want to go. And if you do that, if you go into someone’s room after curfew and you push them all the way into the dark like a spellbook you don’t want anymore, even while they’re screaming and begging and trying to get back out, then after they’re gone, you can spend the night in their room, and you won’t get swarmed, because there’s only one person in the room, and it’s your room after that.
Of course, it doesn’t make you very popular with, for instance, anyone else who has a room. And it’s not like you can cover it up, either. As soon as people see you coming out of your new room the next morning, they know what you’ve done. Orion clearly wanted to go right at Todd, then and there; I had to shove him towards the food line instead. “We already missed lunch yesterday. If you want to find out more, we can go sit with him after we’ve got breakfast; it’s not like there isn’t room.”
“I’m not sitting with a poacher,” Orion said.
“Then endure the burning curiosity,” I said. “Anyone in the school will be able to tell you all the gory details by lunchtime.”
“It’s a mistake,” Chloe said again, her voice high and fraying. “There’s no way Todd poached. He doesn’t need to poach! He’s going with Annabel and River and Jessamy, and they’ve got the valedictorian on board. Why would he poach?”
“It’s not like we’ll be with him for long. The senior bell will go five minutes after we sit down,” Aadhya offered, more practically, and Orion clenched his hands and then shot off to the food line at top speed.
I’d underestimated the power of the gossip chain: we got most of the gory details before we even got out with our trays. Todd had taken out a guy named Mika: one of the last stragglers left, the solitary kids who hadn’t made it into any graduation alliance. If stragglers aren’t maleficers, they pretty much don’t make it out alive, and Mika wasn’t a maleficer; he was just an awkward loser who couldn’t manage decent social skills and wasn’t talented enough for even other losers to overlook the lack. If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like a crime deserving of a death sentence, I would agree with you, since I’ll be in the same boat next year if I don’t set myself up in time. But that’s what it was, more or less. Which meant, of course, he’d been the perfect target.
Orion got out first, and he made a beeline for Todd at his table, slammed his tray down across from him, and didn’t sit. “Why?” he said flatly. “You’ve got a team, a belt shield, a power-sharer, plenty of mana—you made a spirit glaive last quarter! But it wasn’t enough? You had to have a better room?”
I put my own tray down next to Orion’s and sat and started eating while I had the chance. Aadhya sat down next to me and did the same thing. Chloe hadn’t come with us after all. After hearing the word in the line, she’d peeled off to a different New York table; all the other New York kids were sitting as far away from Todd as they could and still be in the cafeteria. She’d made the right call; I could already tell Orion wasn’t going to get an answer he was going to like much, if he was going to get one at all. Todd hadn’t even reacted to the question. He was hunched over his tray eating systematically, but his hands were shaking, and he was forcing the food down. He wasn’t a maleficer, either; he wasn’t even enough of a sociopath not to mind killing someone. I didn’t know why he had, but he hadn’t done it for malia. He’d done it in desperation.
“Where was his old room?” I asked.
“Next to the stairs,” Orion said, still staring down at Todd like he could bore a hole through his skull and pull out answers. That is a crap room. A stairwell is for moving round the school, and the mals can use it as much as we do, so next to the stairs on the senior dorm level is the equivalent of being the first item on the food line.
But it’s hardly an insurmountable threat. None of us will take the first item on the food line if there’s a lid covering it, not as long as there’s an easier option in the next tray along. Which there would be, because Todd’s an enclaver, with more than enough mana to put up a good shield every single night, and the other enclave kids would have skipped recruiting a few of the neighboring kids, in solidarity. It didn’t seem worth screwing up his alliance and maybe even his whole life—enclaves don’t openly harbor murderers and maleficers, and literally everyone in the school knew what he’d done.
“Answer me,” Orion said, and reached for Todd’s tray, maybe because he planned to pull it away or shove it in his face, but Todd grabbed it himself first and heaved it up, taking Orion’s tray with it, throwing the whole mess all over him before reaching across the table to give him a good shove. We don’t do a lot of physical fighting in here, everyone thinks of that as a mundane thing, but you don’t need much practice when you’re a six-foot guy who hasn’t been shy about letting other people give you extras for the last four years and the kid on the other side is a shrimp of a junior. Orion staggered back, dripping milk and scrambled eggs, and nearly went over into the next table.
“Fuck you, Orion,” Todd snarled, his voice cracking into a shrill frantic note, undermining his thug line. “You want to get in my face? Big hero on campus, clearing out the mals for everybody. Guess what, you haven’t made a dent in the real crowd. They’re all still down there, and thanks to you, they’re starving. No little ones to snack on. So they’re not waiting for dinner to be delivered this year. I’ve been hearing them working at the stairwell every night for a week, so loud I can’t sleep
. Some of them are already getting through.” He pressed his clenched fists to his temples, his whole face crumpling like a toddler having a wail, tears leaking down. “A fucking maw-mouth went by my room yesterday. Headed upstairs. Didn’t get that one, did you, hero?”
Murmurs and freaked-out gasps went out from around us like an expanding ripple as everyone at the nearby tables overheard. The whole room was absolutely agog and watching the drama unfold, some kids actually standing on benches to peer over other people’s heads and see. Todd laughed a little hysterically. “Yeah, I wonder where it’s gonna settle down. Keep an eye out at the supply room, everybody!” he called out, turning to the whole room and spreading his arms wide and up to take in the kids leaning over from the mezzanine, a parody of a friendly warning. “But yeah, Orion, we’re so lucky to have you here protecting us. What would we do without you.”
It was almost down to the letter my own thoughts about Orion’s heroic campaign, and even more obviously accurate after the last week: a soul-eater in the junior res hall, mimics and sirenspiders in the shop, manifestations and maw-mouths in the library. Todd was right: there had to be a hole somewhere letting them through, a hole they’d forced through in hungry desperation.
Orion didn’t say anything back. He just stood there with egg literally on his face and blobs of porridge clinging to his hair, pale and bewildered. Everyone around was darting uncertain looks at him. I stood up and said to Todd, “You’d sail right out of here, enclave boy. And let the mals eat the kid in the room next to yours instead of you. That’s what you’d do. But yeah, have a go at Orion. Sorry, did I miss why you have more of a right to live than anybody he’s saved? More than Mika? How long did it take for him to stop screaming when you shoved him into the dark? Do you even know, or did you just plug your ears and look the other way until it was over?”