A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(2)
Sullenly down came—thump—a gigantic volume titled Amunan Hamwerod packed completely full of spells written in Old English—my weakest dead language—and it didn’t open to any particular page, either.
That sort of thing is always happening to me. Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction. It’s all my mum’s fault, of course, just like my stupid name. She’s one of those flowers and beads and crystals sorts, dancing to the Goddess under the moon. Everyone’s a lovely person and anyone who does anything wrong is misunderstood or unhappy.
She even does massage therapy for mundanes, because “it’s so relaxing to make people feel better, love.” Most wizards don’t bother with mundane work—it’s considered a bit low—or if they do, they hunt themselves out an empty sack of a job. The person who retires from the firm after forty-six years and no one quite remembers what they were doing, the befuddled librarian that you occasionally glimpse wandering the stacks without seeming to do anything, the third vice president of marketing who shows up only for meetings with senior management; that sort of thing. There’re spells to find those jobs or coax them into existence, and then you’ve provided yourself with the necessities of life and kept your time free to build mana and make your cheap flat into a twelve-room mansion on the inside. But not Mum. She charges almost nothing, and that little mostly because if you offer to do professional massage for free, people will look at you sideways, as well they should.
Naturally I came out designed to be the exact opposite of this paragon, as anyone with a basic understanding of the balancing principle might have expected, and when I want to straighten my room, I get instructions on how to kill it with fire. Not that I can actually use any of these delightful cataclysmic spells the school is so eager to hand out to me. Funnily enough, you can’t actually whip up an entire army of demons on just a wink. It takes power and lots of it. And no one is going to help you build mana to summon a personal demon army, so let’s be real, it takes malia.
Everyone—almost everyone—uses a bit of malia here and there, stuff they don’t even think of as wicked. Magic a slice of bread into cake without gathering the mana for it first, that sort of thing, which everyone thinks is just harmless cheating. Well, the power’s got to come from somewhere, and if you haven’t gathered it yourself, then it’s probably coming from something living, because it’s easier to get power out of something that’s already alive and moving around. So you get your cake and meanwhile a colony of ants in your back garden stiffen and die and disintegrate.
Mum won’t so much as keep her tea hot with malia. But if you’re less of a stickler, as most people are, you can make yourself a three-tier cake out of dirt and ants every day of your life, and still live to 150 and die peacefully in your bed, assuming you don’t die of cholesterol poisoning first. But if you start using malia on a grander scale than that, for example to raze a city or slaughter a whole army or any of the thousand other useless things that I know exactly how to do, you can’t get enough of it except by sucking in mana—or life force or arcane energy or pixie dust or whatever you want to call it; mana’s just the current trend—from things complicated enough to have feelings about it and resist you. Then the power gets tainted and you’re getting psychically clawed as you try and yank away their mana, and often enough they win.
That wouldn’t be a problem for me, though. I’d be brilliant at pulling malia, if I was stupid or desperate enough to try it. I do have to give Mum credit there: she did that attachment parenting nonsense, which in my case meant her lovely sparkling-clean aura enveloped mine enough to keep me from getting into malia too early. When I brought home small frogs in order to mess with their intestines it was all supremely gentle, “No, my love, we don’t hurt living creatures,” and she would take me to our corner shop in the village and buy me an ice cream to make up for taking them away. I was five, ice cream was my only motivation for wanting power anyway, so as you can imagine I brought all my little finds to her. And by the time I was old enough that she couldn’t have stopped me, I was old enough to understand what happens to sorcerers who use malia.
Mostly it’s seniors who start, with graduation staring them in the face, but there’re a few in our year who’ve gone for it already. Sometimes if Yi Liu looks at you too quickly, her eyes are all white for a moment. Her nails have gone solid black, too, and I can tell it’s not polish. Jack Westing looks all right, all blond smiling American boy, most people think he’s a delight, but if you go past his room and take a deep breath in, you get a faint smell of the charnel house. If you’re me, anyway. Luisa three doors down from him vanished early this year, nobody knows what happened to her—not unusual, but I’m reasonably sure what’s left of her is in his room. I have a good sense for this sort of thing even when I’d rather not know.
If I did give in and start using malia, I’d be sailing through here borne on—admittedly—the hideous leathery bat wings of demonic beasts, but at least there’d be some kind of wings. The Scholomance loves to let maleficers out into the world; it almost never kills any of them. It’s the rest of us who get soul-eaters popping under our doors in the middle of the afternoon and wauria slithering up out of the drain to latch on to our ankles while we’re trying to take a shower and reading assignments that dissolve away our eyeballs. Not even Orion’s been able to save all of us. Most of the time less than a quarter of the class makes it all the way through graduation, and eighteen years ago—which I’m sure was not coincidentally near when Orion was conceived—only a dozen students came out, and they were all gone dark. They’d banded into a pack and taken out all the rest of the seniors in their year for a massive dose of power.