We reached the landing for the shop level then. The senior hall was still further below, and there was a faint glow of light coming up the stairs from there. But the archway opening onto the classroom corridor itself was pitch black; the lights had gone out. I stared at the open maw of it grimly as we came down the last steps: that was what his moment of hesitation had netted us. And if mals never went for him, that meant whatever was lurking around down there was going to go for me.
“I’ll take the lead,” he offered.
“You’d better believe you’re going to take the lead. And you’re holding the light, too.”
He didn’t even argue, just nodded and put out his left hand and lit it up using a minor version of the same incandensing spell he’d used on the soul-eater. It made my eyes itch. He was all set to just march straight into the corridor; I had to yank him back and inspect the ceiling and floor and prod the nearby walls myself. Digesters that haven’t eaten in a while are translucent, and if they spread themselves out thinly enough over a flat surface, you can look straight at them and never realize they’re there until they flap themselves around you. The landing is a high-traffic area, so it’s especially popular with them. Earlier this year, one of the sophomore boys rushing to get to class on time got caught, and he lost a leg and most of his left arm. He didn’t last for long after that, obviously.
But the whole area round the landing was clear. The only thing I did turn up was an agglo hiding under one of the gas lamps, shorter than my pinky and not worth trying to harvest even for me: only two screws, half a lozenge, and a pen cap stuck onto its shell so far. It scuttled away over the wall in a panic before diving into a vent. Nothing reacted to its passage. At night, in a dark corridor on the shop level, that wasn’t a good sign. There should have been something. Unless there was something especially bad up ahead that had scared the others away.
I put a hand spread out on the back of Orion’s shoulder and kept my head turned to look behind us as we headed onwards to the main workshop entrance, the best way for a pair to walk together when there’s an imminent threat. Most of the classroom doors were standing ajar just enough that we wouldn’t get the warning of a doorknob turning, but not enough for us to get a good look into any of the rooms as we passed, dozens of them: aside from the workshop and the gym, most of the bottom level is taken up with small classrooms where seniors take specialized seminars. But those all end after the first half of the year; at this point all the seniors are spending all their time doing practice runs for graduation, meaning the seminar rooms are the perfect place for mals to snooze in.
I hated having to trust Orion to watch where we were going. He walked so casually, even through an unlit hallway, and when he got to the shop doors, he just pulled one open and walked on inside before I realized what he was doing. Then I had to follow him or else be stuck out in the dark corridor alone.
As soon as I stepped through the door, I grabbed a fistful of his shirt to stop him going on further. We halted just inside, the shining light in his hand reflecting off all the gleaming saw-blade teeth and the dull iron of the vises and the glossy obsidian black of the hammers, and the dull stainless steel of the shop tables and chairs lined up in neat rows filling the massive space. The gas lamps had all been turned down to tiny blue pilot dots. The squat furnaces at the end of each row had tiny flickers of orange and green glowing through the vent slits, the only sickly light. It felt weirdly crowded despite having not a single person in it. The furniture took up too much room, as if the chairs had multiplied. We all hated the workshop more than anything. Even the alchemy labs are better.
We stood still for a long moment in which nothing whatsoever happened, and then finally I deliberately stepped on the back of Orion’s heel just to pay him back. “Ow!” he said.
“Oh, sorry,” I said insincerely.
He glared at me, not entirely a doormat. “Will you just get the stuff and let’s go,” he said, like it was that easy, just go wild and start rummaging through the bins and so forth, what could go wrong. He turned to the wall and flipped the light switch. Nothing came on, of course.
“Follow me,” I said, and crossed to the scrap metal bins. I picked up the long tongs hanging by the side and cautiously used them to flip open the lid. Then I reached in and took out four big flat pieces, shaking them thoroughly and banging them violently against the side of the nearest table. I wouldn’t have tried to carry that many myself, but I’d make Orion carry them, and then I’d have extra to trade someone another time.
After getting the scrap, I didn’t go for the wire, because that would’ve been an obvious choice; instead I had him reach into one of the other bins for a double handful of screws and nuts and bolts, which wouldn’t be much use for repairing my door, but were worth more, so I could trade them to Aadhya for some of the wire I knew she had and even have some left over. I put them into the zip pockets of my combats. Then there wasn’t any help for it: I had to have a pair of pliers.
The tool chests are large squat containers the size of a body, which they have in fact contained on at least two occasions since I’ve been here. You can’t keep the tools you take out during class time—if you try, it’ll come after you—so the only time you can get a tool for private use is after hours, and it’s one of the best ways to die, since the kind of mals that climb into the tool chests are the smart ones. If you open one incautiously—
Orion reached out and lifted the lid while I was still debating strategy. Inside, there was absolutely nothing but several neat rows of hammers, screwdrivers of all sizes, spanners, hacksaws, pliers, even a drill. Not a one of them leapt up to smash him in the head or rip off one of his fingers or poke out his eyes. “Get a pair of pliers and the drill,” I said, swallowing my seething envy in favor of maximizing the value of the situation. A drill. No one in our entire hall had a drill. I hadn’t heard of anyone other than a senior artificer even seeing them more than once or twice.
Instead he grabbed a hammer and in one smooth motion whirled and smashed it down right over my shoulder, directly into the forehead of the thing that the dull metal chair behind me had turned into: a molten grey-colored blob with a maw full of jagged silver teeth opening along the seam where the seat met the back. I ducked under his arm and behind him and slammed the lid down on the tool chest and got it locked before anything else could come out of it, and then I turned round and saw four more chairs had pulled up their legs and were coming at us. There had been too many of them.
Orion was chanting a metal-forging spell. The nearest mimic started glowing red-hot, and he hit it with the hammer again, beating a huge hole into its side. It made a grating shrieking noise out of its sawtooth mouth and fell over. But meanwhile the others had all sprouted knife-blade limbs and charged—at me.
“Look out!” Orion shouted, uselessly: seeing them was not the problem. I knew a terrific spell for liquefying the bones of my enemies, which would have done nicely in the given circumstances if I’d wanted to blow a tankful of mana and if there hadn’t been any Orion around to be liquefied right alongside the more immediate enemies. There was only one spell I could afford to cast. I shouted out the Old English floor-washing charm, and jumped aside as all four of the chair-mimics skidded on the wet soapy slick and shot past me straight at Orion. I grabbed two of the pieces of scrap and ran for the door while he fought them. I’d use my bare hands to wrap on the wire if I had to.