Page 47 of The Last Graduate
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 itwasworking. 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 standingathis 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.
Everything wasworking. 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 getout.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 gettingenoughmals 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’smouth.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 juststoodthere, 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.
Some of them looked at me as they came up close to the head of the queue, and I saw my reflection in their faces: the ocean-green light flickering round me, the mana shining out from beneath my skin, tinted golden-bronze except where it escaped around my eyes and fingernails and mouth, turning me into a glowing lamp upon my pedestal. They ducked their heads and hurried by, and I thought of Orion sayingThere are normal people and we’re not,and maybe he was right, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t know those normal kids and maybe I’d never know them, but each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn’t been written yet, and in its place I’d inscribed one line with my own hand:And then they graduated from the Scholomance.
They were out, so many kids were safely out, and so many mals were still pouring in—mals that wouldn’t be out there to kill anyone else. I wanted them ferociously, wanted them beneath my command, and my desire fueled the spell even more. The mana should have been running low by then: the juniors were more than half gone, and taking their mana with them. But even as I felt the flow waver a little, the first sense of the tide beginning to ebb away, a fresh wave overflowed the banks. I didn’t know what it was at first, and then through my muffled ears I heard people yelling in dismay, and I looked up: the tide of mals had made it through the school, and the first ones had come crashing into the barricade.
I had to keep singing, but I watched them hit, clenched with fear: it was too soon, ten minutes too soon. First there were two or three, and then there were ten, and then almost instantly there was a solid thrashing wall of malice backed up, roaring and hissing and clawing each other in their hunger to get to Orion, and through him to us. Everyone still in the room tensed, and if they hadn’t been packed into the queue by then, with a torrent of mals going by on the other side, people would have broken; I’m sure of it. We’d hoped, we’d planned, for Orion to hold the barricade for just a minute or two, no longer, but we still had more than a quarter of the queue waiting, and it wasn’t possible for anyone to hold off that mass. It wasn’t the graduation horde, it was orders of magnitude built upon it, unstoppable, and he’d simply be smothered and overrun.
Except he wasn’t.
The first wave of mals came at him and died so fast that I didn’t even see how he killed them, and I was watching with unblinking desperation, already tensing in agony, getting ready to do—something, anything, as wild as I’d been watching Nkoyo from the other side of the gymnasium doors. The next wave swept over him, and a handful of them made it past, but only a few steps past; he broke out of the mass of already collapsing corpses, still alight with stupid grinning satisfaction, and caught the last running sherve by its skinny rat tail and dragged it still flailing wildly along behind him as he plunged without a pause back into the fight.
Mana was surging into me; more than a wave, an ocean. “Oh my God,” I heard Chloe say, sounding choked, and when I darted a glance over, I saw she and Magnus and the other New York seniors were all staggering, all their allies too. The power-sharer on my wrist was glowing vividly, like all of theirs, and they were all clutching at any kids round them who would take a handout, literally flinging mana at them—the mana that Orion was suddenly pouring into the shared power supply. The mals were still dying so fast it didn’t seem real, as if they were coming apart even as they got to him.
I hadn’t quite believed, even after Chloe had told me, that literally all the kids from New York had just coasted along for three solid years on the mana Orion had supplied them; I hadn’t understood his whinging about how low he was. But now he was finally being filled up again, enough to share, and it was coming in what felt like a limitless flood. He hadn’t let on how bad it really was, I realized belatedly; he’d only taken the bare minimum. Everything he’d done this year, he’d done starved as low as ever I’d been, in the days before I’d put Chloe’s sharer on my wrist. He’d spent his senior year, the year when our powers really bloom, without enough mana to do what he could do.
And now that he finally had it, I thought I might understand better what he’d told me, because it was soeffortlessfor him. He wasn’t locked in a grim, desperate struggle for his life, counting every drop of mana like a tumbling grain of sand in an hourglass. His every movement, each graceful killing sweep of his sword-whip, every spell he cast, every effort he put forth, they all fed him back, and you couldn’t help but feel, watching it, that he was doing what he was meant for—something so perfectly aligned with his nature that it was as easy as breathing. It made sense suddenly that you’d like it, that it would be everything you wanted to do, if there were something you were thisgoodat, and it rewarded you with endless buckets of mana on top. Your own body would teach you to want it more than anything—want it so much you’d have to learn to want anything else.
Orion didn’t look over at me again, even when he surfaced in between the killing waves; he was too busy. It was just as well, because if he’d looked over at me, I’d have smiled stupidly back at him. I was glad, so glad, even pinned down in this room with all the monsters in the world trying to come at me, at Orion, because it wasn’t despair in his way after all; it was just the clumsiness of learning. Hecouldwant other things. I wasn’t the only thing he’deverwant; I was just thefirstother thing he’d wanted.
The mals were still pouring in, a sea of horrors, and as the seniors started to go, even bigger ones started to come as well: these were the mals who’d been further away from the portals, who’d caught the song calling them in when freshmen or sophomores had first gone through, and now had reached the same induction point and were making it through. Some of them were so monstrous you could barely stand to look at them: zjevarras and eidolons, pharmeths and kaidens, deep nightmare creatures that lurked beneath enclaves waiting for a chance to devour. But even when the worst twisted unreal things came in, there wasn’t any screaming or panic anymore. It was only seniors left now, and we were the survivors of a nightmare ourselves, the ones who’d endured the Scholomance—the last ones who would ever endure it. That wasn’t just a dream anymore; I could see that hope being made real in the sheer number of mals coming through, and Orion was making room for more almost as fast as I could bring them in.
I was starting to believe that it was going to work. I didn’t want to; I was fighting hope away as fiercely as Orion was fighting mals. But I couldn’t help it. The golden seconds were counting away—Liesel had inscribed the timing midair in letters of fire so we could all watch them going. When they reached the two minute mark, that was when I’d stop singing and strike the final blow instead. Only seven and a half minutes left, only seven minutes left, and then Aadhya was calling, “El!” and I looked over and found her: she was almost at the front of the swiftly moving queue. She was smiling at me, her face wet with tears, and in their shine I wasn’t a glowing marvel after all, I was just me, just El, and I wanted to climb down and run to hug her, but all I could do was smile back from up on the platform, and as she took the last few steps forward, she pointed at me and then held her palm against her face:Call me!Her phone number, and Liu’s and Chloe’s and Orion’s, were all inscribed on the thin bookmark that held my place inside the sutras. I didn’t have a phone, and neither did Mum, but I’d promised I’d find a way to call her, if we made it—
And then, the promise was different. It was only ifImade it: Aadhya took the last few steps up the dais, and she went through the doors, and she was—out. She was out, she was safe, she had made it.
I knew all the faces going out now. Some of them didn’t like me; Myrthe stalked past without looking towards me, chin up and mouth tight, except as the last kid in front of her went, and she saw the gateway seething right in front of her, her whole face crumpled into sobs and she was fighting to keep her eyes open even while she ran headlong out, and I was glad, I was glad for her, glad that she’d made it, too; I wanted them all to make it. I’d missed Khamis going, and Jowani and Cora; they were already gone. Nkoyo blew me a kiss with both hands before she ran up the steps and out. I didn’t spot Ibrahim, I’d missed him going out, but I saw Yaakov go past with his head bowed and rocking slightly, wearing a beautiful worn prayer shawl whose fringe was shining with light, his lips still moving even as he walked, and when he passed me, he looked up and I felt a warmth like the feeling of Mum’s hand stroking over my hair, calming and steadying.
The New York seniors were coming up: Chloe waved wildly to catch my eye and put up heart-hands in the air before she went through, and right behind her, Magnus gave me a thumbs-up, condescending to the last, and I didn’t even mind. I’d got them out. I was going to get everyone out. There were only maybe a hundred kids left in the queue—ninety—eighty—no one left I knew, except Liesel going hoarse and Liu beside me playing steadily on, the guiding notes I couldn’t hear but felt in my feet, and Alfie and Sarah and the rest of the London seniors—who should have gone by now; I knew they’d got a higher number than New York in the lottery. But they’d all stayed back, to help Alfie hold the aisle for everyone else.
