A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(84)

    I didn’t pause again. After another century of climbing, a light abruptly bloomed below my feet, and I let out a very quiet but explosive sigh of relief: Orion had got out the other end, and the lack of instant howls and gnashing meant it was moderately sheltered. I heard a few similar sighs come out in the shaft above me, too.

I dropped out of the shaft into a narrow chamber with its walls and floor covered in almost a solid centimeter of powdery soot, and stinking of what had to be fairly recent smoke. I had the strong suspicion that we were standing in the remains of whatever hopeful mals had been crowding into that shaft behind the argonet, after their encounter with the repaired artifice. I hate this school more than anyplace in the entire world, not least because every once in a while, you get forcibly reminded that the place was built by geniuses who were trying to save the lives of their own children, and you’re unspeakably lucky to be here being protected by their work. Even if you’ve been allowed in only as another useful cog.

That’s all I was, me and everyone else on our team: the fourth repair crew sent into the graduation hall by the enclavers to try and save their kids. Except for our one hero, who was already going over the walls in full hunting mode, his eyes intent and bright, a small witchlight in one hand shining on his silver hair and pasty skin, which was already getting finely speckled with black as he felt around, smearing through the soot, presumably for a hatch. Although I have no idea why he thought there would be a hatch: anyone sent here would presumably have brought a maintenance hatch with them, and leaving one permanently would have been a stupid vulnerability. The more likely result was he’d make a noise and wake the mals up to our presence. Not that he was concerned; he was so intent on finding a way through that when I poked him in the shoulder, he even absently batted my hand away. So I flicked his ear instead, which recaptured his attention, and when he glared at me, I glared right back and pointed up into the shaft at everyone else still climbing down, and he got a sheepish sort of look and stopped to wait with me.

    The room was oddly shaped: narrow and long, and slightly curved along its length: I realized after a moment we had to be inside the exterior wall of the school. A lot of the maintenance access points I’ve caught sight of over the years have been in those kinds of in-between spaces, not shown on the blueprints. I expect maintenance-track kids keep track of them the way I keep track of library books.

Vinh was the next one out of the shaft. He instantly went to the inner wall with a little silver ear-cup that he carefully put against the metal in a few places, roughly halfway down the wall, listening. By the time everyone else was down, he’d found a spot he liked. He wiped the soot away, then got out a cloth and a tiny dropper bottle; he put three drops on the cloth, and when he rubbed it over the wall in a small circle, the metal shimmered and went the murky-transparent of one-way glass, and we each took a turn to crouch down and peer through to see what we were in for.

I’ve been dragged to rugby games on the regular throughout my childhood. Most people consider that you’re not properly Welsh if you don’t have a passionate interest, so of course I aggressively refused to care, but every once in a while Mum would get invited for free and then insist on my coming along for the experience. Once, we even went to a game in the national stadium in Cardiff, one of the biggest in the world: seventy thousand people yowling Gwlad! Gwlad! all together. That was roughly the scale of the place, only we were the ones going onto the field, and the crowd were going to try to eat us.

    The enormous central column of the school’s rotating axle actually looked small where it pierced the hall. There were patches of greasy black-stained metal exposed where various mals and spells had torn away some of the once fancy marble cladding. Thin bronze columns ran up the outer walls and then spoked in over one another to make a ceiling like a bicycle wheel overhead. The marble had crumbled away from between many of them, exposing the metal beneath, and there was one really massive gaping hole across the ceiling that looked like an unpleasant amount of structural damage. Also there were strips of sticky-gleaming nets woven between most of the bronze bars and to the central column, at all sorts of heights, like someone had draped up some elaborate bunting that had all fallen down: the sirenspiders were undoubtedly hiding somewhere above waiting to pounce.

But we were lucky: the mals had clearly given up on getting up through the shaft. Now they were all jockeying for positions, clustered up to the big sliding walls on either side of the hall, which would open up when the senior dorm came down. Outside our little crawl space, the field was clear, and Vinh silently pointed our eyes toward a pair of huge cylinder shapes against the wall, armored, with pipes and cables coming out, and two large glass sections in the middle: our destination. We had a mostly wide-open path straight to the machinery.

    It had been built—sensibly—in the most deserted area of the room, directly opposite the gates. The official graduation handbook warns strongly against retreating into that area, even temporarily or to cast a more complex working. It might look extremely tantalizing and safe, but there’s a reason that mals don’t hang out there waiting: it’s a bad idea, as is anything else that takes you out of the main herd of fleeing students. If you can do an evocation of arctic light, freeze everyone along your path into place, and zoom out before they thaw, all right. But if you can do that, you can probably do something else that doesn’t require seven minutes of highly interruptible casting time. As a general rule, anyone who doesn’t stay with the pack just gets snagged for dessert when they finally do make their run, because everyone else has gone one way or another and they’ve got the full attention of the room.