Chapter Two #2
“We’re not going to panic,” she told herself as much as her students as she watched the door to make sure her barrier spell held.
“Brief exposure to a pall won’t cause lasting damage, and this rune should keep it contained, but we do need to find another way out of the building.
” The unsaid hung in the air among them—more than a brief exposure was dangerous.
In the short term, it could cause a host of physical effects like nausea, vomiting, and fatigue.
In the long term…well, Maggie wasn’t even going to think about that right now.
Hopefully the other stairwell was clear.
When she was confident no more slime was oozing through the cracks in the door, Maggie herded her students through the hallway toward the other stairs.
It was absolute chaos. Students darted around, shouting at one another and swarming the stairwells.
Maggie spotted Dahlia, shepherding her own students through the mayhem.
“Dahlia!” she shouted over the din. “It’s a pall.” Even through the crowd, Maggie saw Dahlia mutter a curse under her breath. “Is the south stair clear?” Dahlia pushed her way through the gathered students, taking only a moment before she was back, waving everyone on.
When Maggie finally reached Dahlia, the other professor was still muttering under her breath. “Do those dingbats in Alchemy know the rest of this building is full of people?” Maggie shrugged as she held the door open, counting her students as they evacuated the hall one by one.
“It filled the northern stairwell,” Maggie told Dahlia, still not quite believing it herself.
Though they were dangerous, most palls could be quickly contained and dissipated, becoming more of a nuisance than a real threat.
They were cleared up before they caused significant damage, or they were sealed into a small space.
Maggie understood that, theoretically, a pall could fill an entire building, but she’d never seen it. Never even heard of it.
Another crash startled Maggie, Dahlia, and the students streaming past them, who all ducked in unison as if the floor above them was about to cave in.
Maggie braced herself, but then the door on the landing above sprang open, and coughing, sputtering students spilled out.
Pall slime coated their clothing, iridescent and smelling strongly of sulfur, and their hair was dotted with heavy dust. Apart from the greenish, nauseated looks on their faces, they were in one piece.
Maggie ushered them forward to join the throng of students exiting the building.
When she was satisfied that all the students from the second floor were on their way out of Ilex Hall to safety on the lawn, hopefully following the evacuation protocol they had gone over on the first day of class, Maggie turned to Dahlia.
“I’m going up to make sure everyone is out.
Can you keep my students with yours at the meeting point? ”
They parted ways, with Dahlia impatiently running behind the last student and Maggie going against every instinct in her body to run up toward the pall.
Adrenaline pushed her up the stairs. When she reached the third-floor landing, she eased a stitch in her side with one hand and took out her chalk with the other.
As she pressed her chalk into the old wood grain of the door to draw the first line of the rune, it opened suddenly and knocked her back.
Her stomach dropped as she lost her balance, tilting toward the stairs behind her.
She waved her arms wildly, trying to find anything to hold on to, trying to regain her balance, but then a strong hand gripped her forearm and pulled her upright while slamming the door shut again.
“We need to evacuate the building now,” the man who grabbed her snarled as Maggie caught her breath, her hands on her knees as she thanked the gods below for the solid ground beneath her feet.
“What do you think we’ve been doing?” she snapped. Fortunately, she had not lost her chalk in her near fall, so she returned to the door and began drawing the rune again. The man pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away her work. “Hey!”
“We need something stronger than this,” he huffed.
“Not if there are still students or staff in here!” Anything stronger would lock people inside the hallway with the pall, unable to get around the powerful magic he was suggesting they use to stop it from spreading.
He whipped around to face Maggie. In the frenzy, she hadn’t gotten a good look at him after he grabbed her, and she hadn’t stopped to consider whom she might be yelling at.
Arthur Taliesin. The Arthur Taliesin. Lead alchemist and director of the labs on the third floor.
Son of the late internationally renowned alchemist Rowena Taliesin and famous in his own right.
They stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the door and Maggie’s ruined rune.
She nearly tipped back again trying to get a good look at him.
Maggie was not a small woman, but Taliesin towered over her.
He looked down his nose at her, and his features sorted themselves into an impressive scowl.
His skin was unusually pale, surely because of his exposure to the pall, contrasting starkly against dark brown, nearly black hair that had fallen from its styling into his eyes.
His wire-framed glasses were smudged with dusty fingerprints, and his sweater was dotted with pall slime.
Somehow, none of it made him any less handsome, a fact that annoyed Maggie greatly.
She had been a little starstruck when Taliesin joined the faculty in the fall, they all had been, but it had faded quickly.
Taliesin was aloof and rude on a good day, and she’d been avoiding him since a particularly contentious budget meeting in November when she’d learned exactly the kind of person he was.
“My lab is the only one with a three p.m. session, and I sure as hell didn’t leave any of my students in there,” he said angrily, a bite of indignation in his voice.
Maggie’s expression of surprise melted into a scowl to rival Taliesin’s.
If Arthur Taliesin’s Materials Alchemy class was the only one in session, that must mean the pall formed in his lab.
She had thought of Taliesin as many things—rude, inconsiderate, pompous—but she’d never thought of him as incompetent or reckless.
“Now get out of here before the pall slips through this door and makes the rest of this building uninhabitable.”
As if on cue, the force of the growing pall pressed against the door and it creaked on its hinges.
Slime oozed through the cracks, and Maggie gagged on the smell.
Instead of listening to Taliesin, she threw her weight against the door.
He huffed in disapproval and patted his pockets, looking for his own piece of chalk.
“Godsdamn it,” he spat when he came up empty.
Maggie held out her chalk with a self-satisfied smirk that Taliesin did not return.
He took it from her palm and, above her head, drew the more complicated symbol, his movements elegant and his rune lines more confident than her own.
The door creaked again, and Taliesin added his weight to hers, their shoulders pressing together as they leaned into the door and Taliesin spoke the incantation aloud.
Maggie noted that his pronunciation of the Diadhan words left something to be desired and she would have, perhaps, used a slightly different translation for the word seal, but it didn’t matter.
The rune activated, and pall slime stopped oozing through the cracks.
Maggie and Taliesin sagged against the door, spent.
Some of the slime dripped down onto Maggie’s arm, and she wiped it away as best she could with a grimace.
Taliesin pushed off the door, pocketed her chalk, and started toward the stairs without so much as a thank-you for her help.
“You know,” she muttered as she followed behind him, “you could have asked the Diadhan scholar to say the incantation.” If Taliesin heard her, he didn’t acknowledge it.
Instead, he patted the pocket where he’d placed her chalk just moments before.
There was another drawn-out creak from the door hinges, and both professors looked upward, but his spell held. “We should seal the other doors,” she said, her annoyance momentarily forgotten.