“Does this sort of thing usually work for you, insulting people you’re asking for favors?” I said, although it wasn’t very heated; it came out more as a fascinated inquiry. She’d got lucky with the timing of her approach: I still wasn’t able to generate anger, so what I felt mostly was impressed by her chutzpah. I couldn’t even imagine what Liesel had in mind for me to do, unless it was along the lines of set a thief to catch a thief.
“I am not asking you for a favor,” Liesel said. “A maw-mouth broke through the wards this morning. A big one. They’re holding it off from the council room, but not for much longer. Once it gets in there, that will be the end of London. No one’s willing to send help. They’re all afraid for themselves. Well?” She finished on a belligerent note, while my whole stomach turned over and wrapped itself into a small lump like bread dough being punched down.
That would be a true disaster, no matter your feelings on enclaves: London enclave, one of the biggest and most powerful in the world, and all its vast stockpile of mana, going into the belly of a maw-mouth. The thing might get nearly as big as Patience in that one gigantic meal. And in the meantime whoever this maleficer was, ripping apart enclave wards, they would be out there, too, presumably getting ready to have another go. What a spectacular team they could become. It wouldn’t much matter if I refused to fulfill my own prophesied destiny of spreading death and disaster if instead I stood back and let the two of them sort it out for me.
That still wasn’t anything like an inducement, of course. I very much didn’t want to fight a maw-mouth. I’d have done it to save Orion, but that didn’t mean I was ready to make a regular job of it. Everyone’s afraid of being devoured by a maw-mouth, but I’m afraid of it on a much more intimate and specific level. As far as I know, I’m only the second wizard alive who’s ever survived the experience, and the other one’s the Dominus of Shanghai.
But—I had in fact survived, and the maw-mouth hadn’t. I’m completely alone in the distinction of having killed one of them all by myself. Even the legendary Krakow incident of dubious historicity involved a circle of seven, and the purge of Shanghai had required more than forty wizards all told, building mana together for the attempt. And in fact, I’d killed two maw-mouths. A second very small one had come into the school during graduation, lured in by our honeypot trap—and Liesel had seen me destroy it. And that was why she was here to recruit me to come and help.
So it wasn’t an inducement, but it was movement: a hard shove out of the rut I was sitting in. “Well, that’s a magnificent offer,” I said, trying to fend her off. “It’s just what I’ve wanted, to risk my life fighting a maw-mouth for the London enclave. Why exactly did the council think I’d agree?”
“We didn’t ask their opinion. You think there was time to talk it over?” Liesel said. “We came for you ourselves.”
“Who’s we?”
“Alfie and Sarah are down there. I told them to wait.” Liesel waved a hand irritably in the direction of the rest of the commune. “What difference does it make? Do you want a signed contract for payment? You wouldn’t take anything before. Are you going to be a hermit your whole life just because Lake is dead? Grow up! Someone’s tearing down the enclaves of the world, there’s a maw-mouth about to devour London. This is no time for you to sit around crying. He wouldn’t.”
I stood up in outrage—I didn’t whack myself on the roof struts again, but it was a near thing—but Liesel just folded her arms and stared me in the face and didn’t give an inch. Vicious and brilliant as usual, because I couldn’t even argue. Orion would absolutely have sailed off to help, if he’d been alive to do it. And he might have been—if I’d done something different, if I hadn’t panicked and tried to get him just to run away, the last time a maw-mouth had shown up for me to fight.
I didn’t actually say anything to Liesel. She was right, but I could still with great pleasure have slapped her. Anyway, she recognized that she’d won; she gave a short nod and turned and went out of the yurt to wait for me.
I stood there for a moment alone with the irregular dripping. I turned and stared down at the sutras on the bed, the cover a satiny gleaming in the dim light. I bent down and picked them up and carefully packed them into their book chest and stood with it a moment, holding it in my hands. They had ridden me all the way here, back to the summoner, only Mum wasn’t going to be able to do anything with them. They weren’t healing spells. The final incantation needed so much mana capacity I didn’t actually see how it could even be cast by anyone who wasn’t me.
Was I going to do anything with them? I didn’t know anymore, but it clearly didn’t make sense for me to take them to London for a fight. In fact, that was a selfish incentive to go. At least it saved me having to decide right away.
“I’m going to leave you with Mum,” I said. I’d got used to talking to them. “I know she’ll look after you for me until I get back.”
Ordinarily I’d have said a lot more—I’d have fretted and told them how sorry I was to leave them for even a minute, rambled out some plans for them, anything to encourage them to stay. I couldn’t do it this time. If they vanished on me, that would save me the trouble of deciding. I didn’t want that to happen, but only just enough to do what I was doing. I touched the cover once more, then I closed the lid on them, and carried them over to the table and left them there, safely out of the rain.
Then I wrote Mum a note on a scrap of paper: London enclave’s in trouble, I’ve gone to help. I almost left it at that. I couldn’t help thinking that it would have been a decent revenge for Keep far away from Orion Lake. It still hurt like knives to think of him gone with no one missing him, the person and not the power, except me alone. What I really wanted even more was to write her a long juvenile screed telling her off for having judged Orion after what she’d done herself: I could bundle all my miseries up together and heave them out onto the page in one steaming mess.
But I couldn’t bear to do that to her, even if I almost felt I owed it to him. I stood over my scribble for a single lingering moment of sour resentment, wallowing in the fantasy of meanness, and then I added, Home soon. Love, El.
When I turned to the doorway, Precious was sitting up right in the middle of it, glowing white against the overcast sky outside and glaring up at me meaningfully. “You don’t make any sense to take to a fight, either,” I told her, but she ran at me and came up my leg and jumped for the lower hem of my dress, then scampered up and crawled into my pocket. I put my hand inside it and she curled up warm and small and determined within it. “All right,” I said. I couldn’t make myself take her out and put her down.
Liesel was standing impatiently on the muddy footpath, under what was pretending for the benefit of mundanes to be an umbrella but was actually some kind of artifice keeping her dry. It bobbed over between us, and we went down the hill without a single drop making it through.