Everything was working. The whole plan. I felt I could keep singing without a pause for weeks. I couldn’t hear even the delayed music anymore over the roaring tide of maleficaria streaming in, but the mana was flowing into me and out again into the spell. The song was meant to be a beckoning, Come, please come, a banquet waits for you, an alluring invitation, but I didn’t want to just hold open a hospitable door. I wanted to suck in every last mal of the world, and I didn’t deliberately start singing something else, but as I got properly stuck in, the spell I couldn’t hear seemed to become something harder in my mouth, a ruthless demand: Come now, come all of you. I don’t know if I’d changed the words, or if I’d just gone wordless entirely, but the maleficaria were answering: more and more of them were coming, a solid wave of bodies streaming in. Orion wasn’t even fighting any of them anymore, he was just randomly sticking his sword or firing attacks off into the mass, and some of them were falling down dead. The rest kept running along the line of speakers and going headlong up into the school.
I did start to worry that with so many mals coming in, they’d get in the way of the kids trying to get out. I couldn’t do anything about it, the only thing I could do was the calling spell, but I didn’t need to: someone else was doing something about it. Alfie had got all the London seniors to come out of their place in queue with him. They joined hands and made a circle for him, and with them at his back helping, pouring mana into him, he raised up his evocation of refusal and shaped it into a narrow corridor between the front of the queue and the gates, so it let kids go running through and shunted the mals off to the side instead.
Other kids started jumping out of the queue to freshen up the protection spells, or to help the kids on the edges when one of the mals tried to snatch themselves a bite for the road. We hadn’t planned on that, hadn’t practiced it. We hadn’t realized it would be a problem. But there were so many mals that some of them were being pushed to the edges of the widening current and bumping up against the queue area, close enough that the tasty young freshman in the hand was able to overcome the tantalizing lie of the infinite banquet in the bush. But seniors were jumping out of the queue to help, fighting the mals off and pushing them back into the torrent; the younger kids were healing scratches for one another, giving sips of potions to anyone injured.
Liesel started picking up the pace, too: I think she realized that getting enough mals wasn’t going to be a problem. She began firing off the freshmen at a much more rapid clip, waving them through almost without a pause, just yelling, “Go! Go!” The tide of incoming mals didn’t slow any, but the queue began to melt away. Zheng and Min waved to Liu and me before they jumped; maybe two minutes later, Sudarat called, “El, El, thank you!” and ran through with the Bangkok sophomores.
I really hoped they had got clear of their induction point in a hurry, because not a minute later, a truly gigantic naga squeezed its widemouthed hissing head in—or rather its first head, which was followed by two others, before the rest of it muscled in. The heads nearly stretched the entire length from floor to ceiling, endangering the speaker cable. There were lots of yells: it might well have been what had taken out Bangkok. Naga that size are definitely potential enclave-killers, because if you don’t stop them before they get inside your wards, then once they’re in they’ll start thrashing wildly to rip the place apart.
Which it would certainly have done here if given half a chance. I was about to frantically wave Liu in for an instrumental section, which had been our plan if I needed to stop long enough to kill anything especially gruesome, but before I could, Orion took a flying leap from the floor and straight into the middle head’s mouth. It paused and then a moment later he shredded his way out of the base of the neck in a whirlwind, hailing unpleasantly fishy bits and bones and ichor in all directions. All three heads toppled into the still-flowing tide of other maleficaria, and sank beneath it, devoured in less than a minute.
Orion landed in the full churning current still whirling off the detritus, and the mals actually split to go around him as he just stood there, bright-eyed and not breathing particularly hard, and cracked his neck to one side like he’d just got warmed up properly. He even gave me a quick infuriating grin before he plunged back into the fray.
Five minutes later, the very last of the freshmen were gone, and we were well into the sophomores. The mals had squeezed Alfie’s tunnel of access until it was barely big enough to go one across, and we only had fifteen minutes left, so the pacing had been thrown to the winds and everyone was just running at the gates as soon as they came to the head of the queue. I didn’t know any of the kids going now: they were a river of faces that I’d never talked to, never shared a classroom with. Even if I’d sat with them at table in the years before this one, taking a desperation seat with younger kids, I would have kept my head down; I didn’t remember them.