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 it was working. 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 standing at his 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 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.