Nothing came through the opening.
It wasn’t especially shocking; I’d understood by then. I knew what was on the other side waiting, and they weren’t going to bother coming after one measly student. I’d known all along what it was going to be, really, no matter how hard I’d pretended I didn’t. It wasn’t going to be evil glaciers, or an anima-locust swarm, or a castigator demon. The school had been treating me gently, with kid gloves, bringing me along little by little, but time was running out now, and I had to face it, so I could be ready on graduation day. I’d promised, after all. I’d promised Khamis, and Aadhya, and Liu, and Chloe, and everyone in the entire school.
I couldn’t make myself step through. Even if it was safe right now, in some ridiculous sense of the word, I didn’t want to go look. I didn’t want to have to go back upstairs and tell everyone what we were up against. I didn’t want to spend the next three months thinking about them every single day, making plans, discussing strategies for me to relive the most horrible thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to huddle into a ball against the back of the chamber. I wanted to sob for Mum, for Orion, for anyone at all to save me, and there wasn’t anyone. There was only me. And them. Patience and Fortitude, waiting by the gates, so hungry that they’d licked the entire graduation hall clean.
I knew I had to go look at them, so I couldn’t go back up the ladder—if the school would even have let me run away—but I couldn’t move forward, either. I stayed down there for a very long time. I think it had been close to an hour when there was a small anxious chirp from the shaft, and Precious poked her tiny nose out, clinging to the last rung of the ladder.
I put my hands up to get her, and I cupped her in my hands and put her against my cheek, and my whole face crumpled like discarded classwork and I just sobbed a few times, getting her fur wet with leaking tears. She just poked at me with her nose and put up with it. When I managed to get myself under control, she climbed onto my shoulder, tucked behind my ear, and made soft small encouraging squeaks. I took a deep breath in through my nose and made myself go out into the hall before I could lock up again.
The hall wasn’t completely empty: a family of mature agglos, their tidy shells glittering with mana-infused jewels, bits of glowing artifice, and tiny jars and vials of potions and unguents, had been sleeping peacefully against the far wall, near the cleansing machinery we’d repaired last year. They all woke up at the sound of my footsteps and started humping away into dark corners at top speed, which in the case of adult agglos is about a quarter mile per hour.
The floor was crunchy with amphisbaena scales and the dried-up moltings of juvenile digesters, none bigger than a handkerchief. None of them were actually in sight. The ceiling had faint dark lines patterned across it, the ghosts of the century-old sirenspider webs that had been incinerated in the cleansing. The only things left of the sirenspiders themselves were a few hard melted lumps stuck to the ceiling among them, the stubs of legs poking out in a few places. There was nothing left of other mals at all except a few droppings and skeletons; a few construct mals had collapsed in mechanical heaps here and there, out of mana. A few more scuttling larval things ran away from me, so small I couldn’t even identify them, as I clenched both my hands tight and turned myself bodily to face the gates.
“But,” I said, after a moment, out loud. I stood there stupidly until Precious gave me a nudge, and then I walked across the whole graduation hall, directly up to the massive double doors, the gates to the school. There were two enormous scorch marks on the floor to either side, blackened outlines where the maw-mouths had been, like a police tape to show the position of a removed corpse. The marks had ripples: you could see the mortal flame had burnt off a good few layers, although there had certainly been plenty left of them afterwards.
I’d been half right. The cleansing had worked. Patience and Fortitude hadn’t been killed, but they’d been burnt and blinded, probably thrashing wildly, while the seniors ran out. They had missed their one annual meal. Afterwards, they’d recovered and tried to fill their hollow bellies by devouring all the rest of the surviving mals instead. But after they did that—when there was nothing at all left for them to eat, they’d—gone.
I had no idea where. Had they hidden away somewhere inside the school? They certainly hadn’t got into the main levels—we’d all have heard the screaming. There’re pockets of dead space, many of them, in the hollow area between the top of the graduation hall and the bottom of the workshop floor, and those aren’t really warded, so they could have crawled in there, but they still wouldn’t have had anything to eat. Maw-mouths don’t generally hide, anyway. Had they left entirely? They could have; the wards stop maleficaria from coming in, not going out, and if Patience and Fortitude had gone off to roam the world and trouble enclaves for their suppers, we wouldn’t hear about it until after we got out ourselves.