A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(85)

Like we were about to, which was a cheery thought. The mals weren’t directly in our way, but there were still so many of them, clawing and scrabbling over one another to get higher up in the pile, obviously so starved they had no caution left. It was awful to look at the seething mass of them, the awful of walking in the woods and stumbling across a swarm of ants and beetles and rats and birds all devouring a dead badger. Victoria from Seattle had been right to worry about not having to move. When the seniors got dumped into that frantic mass, they’d be ripped apart in moments from all sides in a frenzy. They looked pretty grim when they stood back up from their turn peering through the spyhole.

At least that made it obvious we really did have to carry on with the plan. There wasn’t any discussion. We all got in line behind Orion, and Vinh opened up another hatch, carefully rigged to the end of the yanker spell, so it would close and then peel away behind us as we shot back through.

    I can’t say much for actually going out into the graduation hall. It wasn’t as bad as going into a maw-mouth? Also, what we were doing was so insane that the mals didn’t react to us immediately. The ones at the walls were too busy struggling with each other, and the rest were the weaker opportunists, huddled in dark corners defensively until there was a lucky chance of a meal. And the real monsters were quiescent in their places: Patience and Fortitude both at the gates softly murmuring to themselves, snatches of nonsense songs and whimpers like a drowsing baby, their eyes almost all closed and tendrils idly pawing the well-cleared space around them.

Our original plan had been to make a run for the machinery, Orion fighting the mals off us as we ran, and put up the shield when we got there. But when nothing leapt at us right away, Clarita just started walking instead, slowly and methodically with her body held straight. We all fell in behind her. The mals against the walls did start picking up their heads and peering at us, but since no one had ever been this stupid before, they couldn’t immediately make sense of us. Unfortunately, there are heaps of mals that don’t have enough brains to try to make sense of anything, just the equivalent of noses to tell them there are tasty bags of mana in their vicinity. A handful of small scuttling things started towards us, making raspy clicking noises against the floor.

That was enough to get some of the more hollow-sided chayenas to get up out of their sleeping pack and investigate us, thin drips of violet drool leaking out of the sides of their jaws as they began to pad in our direction. We all started to walk more quickly, and then the enormous hole in the dome turned out not to be an enormous hole but an enormous nightflyer that let go of the ceiling and came gliding down towards us. Orion said, “Okay, go,” his sword-thing illuminating, and we all pelted away.

    The chayenas charged after us instantly. They’re one of the more stupid crossbreeds: from cheetah to hyena by way of water buffalo and rhinoceros and probably a couple others you can’t tell by looking. They were smashed together in the days of colonial glory by some idiots setting up an enclave in Kenya who wanted more of a hunting challenge. An independent alchemist who lived with the local mundanes was annoyed. She took on some work from the enclavers so they’d let her come and go, and then she quietly enhanced the chayenas with the charming additional feature of a paralytic bite and let them all loose. That was the unpleasant and gory end for the enclave, but the chayenas survived, and now are sometimes bred deliberately as the equivalent of guard dogs. They’re arguably not mals; if you raise one properly, it won’t kill you for your mana even if it’s hungry. Mostly they don’t get raised properly, since the goal is in fact for them to kill intruders for their mana. Mum always gets wound up about their mistreatment.

At the moment, I felt something other than sympathetic. I’m in fair condition when I haven’t recently had a gut wound, but I haven’t spent the last six months doing wind sprints in the gym. I was at the end of our group. With the power-sharer on my wrist, I had the mana available to kill a whole continent’s worth of chayenas, much less three mangy half-starved ones, but if I turned to cast at them, I’d end up separated and surrounded, and even if I managed to fight my way over to everyone else, I’d blow enormous amounts of our shared mana, which we needed for the repair work.

But the first chayena was already clawing at my personal shield, and if I waited any longer, one of them was going to get its teeth through it. I had chosen my place to turn, just past a scrap heap of marble and bones, and then Ellen tripped over a broken tile on the floor and went down not two steps ahead of me. Momentum carried me past her, and I didn’t turn back: there wasn’t any point. Her scream had already cut off into a dying gargle, and I knew better than to make it real by looking around. As long as I didn’t look, she didn’t have to be dead, and I didn’t have to have feelings about Ellen, beaming at me two days ago while she told me we were going to make it. I couldn’t afford feelings right now.

    I made it to the machinery and fell into line next to David. The crowd of mals packed up against the walls was turning towards us like some enormous singular blob of a creature, humping itself around and flowing over the ground. The ones that had been at the back were racing for us as fast as they could go, trying to take advantage of their unexpected lead, while the ones that had been up at the front were trying to take it back. Clarita had already started casting. I called out my lines in turn, and we put the shield wall up, even as the repair team yanked off the polished brass that covered the machinery: all according to plan.