the central column, at all sorts of heights, like someone had draped up some elaborate bunting that had all fallen down: the sirenspiders were undoubtedly hiding somewhere above waiting to pounce.
But we were lucky: the mals had clearly given up on getting up through the shaft. Now they were all jockeying for positions, clustered up to the big sliding walls on either side of the hall, which would open up when the senior dorm came down. Outside our little crawl space, the field was clear, and Vinh silently pointed our eyes toward a pair of huge cylinder shapes against the wall, armored, with pipes and cables coming out, and two large glass sections in the middle: our destination. We had a mostly wide-open path straight to the machinery.
It had been built—sensibly—in the most deserted area of the room, directly opposite the gates. The official graduation handbook warns strongly against retreating into that area, even temporarily or to cast a more complex working. It might look extremely tantalizing and safe, but there’s a reason that mals don’t hang out there waiting: it’s a bad idea, as is anything else that takes you out of the main herd of fleeing students. If you can do an evocation of arctic light, freeze everyone along your path into place, and zoom out before they thaw, all right. But if you can do that, you can probably do something else that doesn’t require seven minutes of highly interruptible casting time. As a general rule, anyone who doesn’t stay with the pack just gets snagged for dessert when they finally do make their run, because everyone else has gone one way or another and they’ve got the full attention of the room.
Like we were about to, which was a cheery thought. The mals weren’t directly in our way, but there were still so many of them, clawing and scrabbling over one another to get higher up in the pile, obviously so starved they had no caution left. It was awful to look at the seething mass of them, the awful of walking in the woods and stumbling across a swarm of ants and beetles and rats and birds all devouring a dead badger. Victoria from Seattle had been right to worry about not having to move. When the seniors got dumped into that frantic mass, they’d be ripped apart in moments from all sides in a frenzy. They looked pretty grim when they stood back up from their turn peering through the spyhole.
At least that made it obvious we really did have to carry on with the plan. There wasn’t any discussion. We all got in line behind Orion, and Vinh opened up another hatch, carefully rigged to the end of the yanker spell, so it would close and then peel away behind us as we shot back through.
I can’t say much for actually going out into the graduation hall. It wasn’t as bad as going into a maw-mouth? Also, what we were doing was so insane that the mals didn’t react to us immediately. The ones at the walls were too busy struggling with each other, and the rest were the weaker opportunists, huddled in dark corners defensively until there was a lucky chance of a meal. And the real monsters were quiescent in their places: Patience and Fortitude both at the gates softly murmuring to themselves, snatches of nonsense songs and whimpers like a drowsing baby, their eyes almost all closed and tendrils idly pawing the well-cleared space around them.
Our original plan had been to make a run for the machinery, Orion fighting the mals off us as we ran, and put up the shield when we got there. But when nothing leapt at us right away, Clarita just started walking instead, slowly and methodically with her body held straight. We all fell in behind her. The mals against the walls did start picking up their heads and peering at us, but since no one had ever been this stupid before, they couldn’t immediately make sense of us. Unfortunately, there are heaps of mals that don’t have enough brains to try to make sense of anything, just the equivalent of noses to tell them there are tasty bags of mana in their vicinity. A handful of small scuttling things started towards us, making raspy clicking noises against the floor.
That was enough to get some of the more hollow-sided chayenas to get up out of their sleeping pack and investigate us, thin drips