The younger kids all set up a chorus of yelps and small shrieks as larval mals started to drop from the ceiling and pop out of cracks in the floor and from under bits of rubble to chase the alluring call. Real screams started a moment later as a panel of the floor popped off and a really decrepit-looking voracitor crawled out. The thing was so antique it must have been at least two centuries old, all creaking wood and antique bloodstained cast-iron machinery held together with bundles of intestine-like flesh, with long spindly arms and fingers; it had probably been hiding down there snatching students and other mals almost since the school had opened.
It was near the front of the queue, amid a crowd of freshmen. The panicking and running didn’t have a chance to get under way properly, however, because it ignored them all, fixed its dozen eyes on the line of speakers hanging from the ceiling, and set off crawling along their direction at a good healthy clip. It would presumably have kept going on into the shaft and into the school, only it didn’t have the chance, as Orion dashed over from his station and pounced on it before it got halfway.
There was some more yelling after that, too, but just a few kids who’d been splattered with the gore, and then they were drowned out by loads of people yelling and pointing and gasping: behind me, the doors had cracked. The first coruscating glimmer of the gateway spell spilled out over the steps like the light on the bottom of a swimming pool, a faint staticky crackle going and thin tendrils of the maelstrom wisping out over the floor like a hungry eldritch mal. I couldn’t be angry at Myrthe, I couldn’t; I wanted to turn and jump through more than anything in the world. I pressed my hands hard over my ears and kept singing my silent song, concentrating on the familiar feeling in my throat.
Liesel was booming out, “Group one!” before the doors had even opened fully, and the first three kids ran up the stairs holding hands, a cluster of freshmen from Paris, and vanished out of my peripheral vision. Everyone sighed a little and leaned in, and then recoiled again as a kerberoi bounded in through the gates—what one of those was doing in Paris, I’d like to know—with its heads snapping wildly. The ones on either side had a go at biting, but their teeth skidded off the protective spells the alchemists had put up, and the middle head and the body weren’t paying any mind to anything except bolting along the cable after the speakers. It was running so fast that Orion didn’t manage to get it in time; it galloped into the shaft and was gone.
But it didn’t matter, because more mals were coming, bucketloads of them, mostly dripping wet and trailing stinking sewer water. You can’t have an induction point anywhere that mundanes might see it; if you get spotted, you don’t get inducted, because the amount of mana the school would have to spend to force a portal open for you in the face of a disbelieving mundane would be absolutely insane. Which leads to having induction points in awkward out-of-the-way places, which in turn as you might imagine get ringed round by hungry mals that don’t dare attack a prepared group of grown wizards, but very much want to get into the school.
That had all been part of the plan, of course, only I hadn’t realized how sure I’d been that the plan somehow wasn’t going to work, until apparently it was working. What looked like a hundred mals had already come through even by the time Liesel yelled, “Group two!” and the second group—actually just a single freshman from the far outback of Australia—went for the gate. He had to literally leap into the gate over a river of animated bones that hadn’t stopped long enough to assemble themselves back into skeletons and were just clattering along.
The second he’d gone through, a huge eldritch-infested dingo came through, so fast that it had to have been literally standing at his induction point—presumably guarding it, since it had a binding collar round its throat. A rather dangerous strategy for protection against mals: so much of its fur had fallen off to expose the glowing vapors inside that his family couldn’t possibly have kept it under control for more than another three years at most. But they clearly had needed the help: a horde of red speckled grelspiders came pouring through almost right behind it, their talons clattering over the marble floor as they skittered alongside the line of speakers. They overtook one of the Parisian preycats along the way, and managed to devour it without actually stopping, leaving a hollowed-out furry bag of bones behind them to be crushed flat a few moments later when the radriga came stomping through after the two kids going home to Panama City had jumped.
A team of the best maths students had laid out the order of departure to maximize the flow of mals into the school. A pile of incomprehensible graphs and charts had appeared thirty seconds after the one and only time I’d asked to have the details explained to me, but I did know the general idea was to keep the open portals as far apart from one another as possible, so the turns were deliberately hopscotching round the world. Whatever the artificers had done to keep the portals open was working, too; the distinctly Australian ones kept coming for nearly two minutes.