So all our planning took place at one remove: how could we get enough mana for me to keep slaughtering mals all the way to the gates. The two key pieces were Aadhya’s sirenspider lute and Liu’s family spell. Liu’s grandmother had sneaked her a really powerful song-spell for mana amplification to bring in, even though she couldn’t cast the spell alone—her affinity was for animals, and anyway it usually took two or three of her family’s most powerful wizards to make it work. After a lot of careful Chinese coaching, I’d got the words down. Our strategy was, just before we sailed into the hall, Liu would play the melody on the sirenspider lute while I sang out the lyrics, and then she’d carry on playing even after I finished. With a magical instrument, the spell would keep going, and our whole team would have the benefit of amplified mana. So Liu would be in the middle of our team, sustaining the spell; Chloe and Aadhya would be on either side of her, covering her and me, and I’d take the lead.
That was the theory, at any rate. Unfortunately, the lute wasn’t quite working according to plan. We’d made one experiment with it a few weeks back while still urgently trying to make a honeypot for Orion. Liu had written a Pied Piper spell for mals with the idea that we’d do a little parade through some section of the corridors one evening, me singing and her playing, and Orion whacking the mals one after another as they popped out at us.
I’ll leave you to imagine how appealing I found the prospect of wandering around loudly calling, Here, kitty, kitty. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to lure mals. But we needed to try out the lute, and Orion didn’t quite beg and plead for us to get him some mals to kill, but he clearly wanted to beg and plead, so after Aadhya finished the last bit of inlay, we agreed to give it a go.
We bolted our dinners and hurried to a spare seminar room down on the shop level, so everyone else would still be upstairs and not in range to see us doing anything this unbelievably stupid. Orion hovered around hopefully, and this time we tied all the mice securely into their bandolier cups as a precaution. That seemed to have been a good idea, because they all set up a frantic squeaking from inside as soon as Liu started tuning the lute and I hummed the line of melody.
In retrospect, the mice were just trying to warn us. Liu hit the first notes, I sang three words, and the mals came from everywhere. The baby mals. Agglo grubs came out of the drain and larval nightflyers started dropping from the ceiling and thin scraps that looked like flat handkerchiefs that were probably going to be digesters peeled off the walls and blobby mimics the size of a little toe and a thousand different unrecognizable flabby things all started coming out of every possible nook and cranny of the entire room and converging on us like a slow horrible creeping wave swelling out of every surface around us.
“It’s working!” Orion said delightedly.
The rest of us, not being absolute madmen, all ran for the door at once, with mals crunching and squishing under our feet and more of them still coming, crawling out of tiny gaps between the metal panels and oozing from the corners and falling from the ceiling and pouring in a torrent out of the air vent and the drain. Orion barely made it out before we had the door slammed and were barricading it fervently against the solid mass of mals. Chloe rushed to seal up all the edges with an entire syringe of mana-barrier gel while Liu and I reversed the invocation and Aadhya unstrung the lute. We locked in place there staring at the door, ready to flee, until we were sure it had stopped bulging out any further, and then we all jumped up and down and shook ourselves wildly and pawed and batted at one another to get the larvae out of our hair and clothes and off our skin and onto the floor where we stomped and crushed them in a frenzy. We’re used to flicking off larval mals—it’s always satisfying to take them out that small when you have the chance—but there’s a horrific difference between one tiny digester trying very hard to eat a single square millimeter of your skin and a thousand of them speckled all over your body and clothes and hair.
All the while Orion stood in the corridor behind us and said, exasperated and plaintive, “But you barely even tried!” and other insane and stupid things until we turned on him in unison and yelled at him to shut up forever and he had the gall to mutter something—under his breath, he wasn’t suicidal—about girls.
I was grateful that we no longer needed to find a way to provide Orion with mals, because after that experience, none of us wanted to keep trying. Except him. He even went so far as to talk to other human beings to try and get more information about honeypots himself. He spent a lunch period with half a dozen kids from the Seattle enclave and a desperate expression, and came up to our study corner in the library afterwards and said, “Hey, I’ve found out how you make honeypot bait,” urgently. “The main ingredient is wizard blood. You just hold a blood drive and everyone donates…” He trailed off, I presume as he heard the words coming out of his own mouth and saw our faces, and then just stopped and sat down with a glum expression. That was the end of working on honeypots.