Page 19 of A Deadly Education
A lot of the very oldest and most powerful Sanskrit incantations in circulation, ones whose original manuscripts have been lost for ages, come from copies that were made in the Baghdad enclave a thousand years ago. The book didn’t look or feel a thousand years old, but that didn’t mean anything. Spellbooks wander off the shelves even in enclaves if you don’t have a really good catalog and a powerful librarian keeping track of them. I don’t know where they go when they’re disappeared, if it’s the same as the void outside our rooms or someplace different, but they don’t age while they’re gone. The more valuable they are, the more likely they are to slip away: they get imbued with the desire to protect themselves. This one looked so new that it had probably vanished out of the Baghdad library barely a couple of years after it had been written.
I held my breath turning the pages, and then I was looking at the first page of copied Sanskrit—annotated heavily in the margins; I was probably going to be forced to start learning Arabic, and it was going to beworth it,because the title page more or less saidBehold the Masterwork of the Wise One of Gandhara,and when I saw it, I actually made a horrible squawking noise out loud and clutched the whole thing to my chest as if it was about to fly off on its own.
The Golden Stone sutras are famous because they’re the first known enclave-builder spells. Before them, the only way that enclaves happened was by accident. If a community of wizards live and work together in the same place for long enough, about ten generations or so, the place starts to slip away from the world and expand in odd ways. If the wizards become systematic about going in and out from only a few places, those turn into the enclave gates, and the rest of it can be coaxed loose from the world and into the void, the same way the Scholomance is floating around in it. At which point, mals can’t get at you except by finding a way through the entrances, which makes life much safer, and magic also becomes loads easier to do, which makes life much more pleasant.
There haven’t been a lot of natural enclaves, though. Good luck getting ten generations with enough stability in history to let you make one. Just because you’re a wizard doesn’t save you from dying when your city burns down or someone sticks a sword into you. In fact, even an enclave doesn’t. If you’re hiding inside and your entrances get bombed, your enclave goes, too. I don’t think anyone knows if you actually get blown up or if the whole thing just drops off into the void with you in it, but that’s a rather academic question.
On the other hand, you’d still rather have the enclave than just be huddled in a basement. The London enclave survived the Blitz because they opened a lot of entrances all over the city, and quickly replaced any of the ones that got destroyed. That’s now created a different issue for them; there’s a pack of indie punk wizards in London who survive by hunting out the old lost entrances. They pry them open enough to squirm into sort of the lining of the enclave—I don’t understand the technical details, and they don’t, either, but it works—and they set up shop in there for themselves until the enclave council finds them and chases them out and bricks the opening back up. I know a bunch of them because they all come to Mum whenever something’s wrong with them, which it often is because they’re shacking up in half-real spaces and siphoning off enclave mana through old murky channels, and mostly eating food and drink they’ve magicked for themselves out of it.
Mum sets them right and doesn’t charge them, unless you count forcing them to sit through lots of meditation and her lecturing them about how they shouldn’t be hanging round the enclave and ought to go live in the woods and be spirit-whole like her. Sometimes they even listen.
But London’s not a natural enclave, of course; none of the big enclaves are. They’re constructed. And as far as we know, the very first enclaves anyone everbuilt,about five thousand years ago, were the Golden Stone enclaves. There were ten of them built within a century across Pakistan and Northern India; three of them are still around even after all this time. They all claim to have been built by the author of the Golden Stone sutras, this guy named Purochana who some wizard historians believe was the guy of that name who also shows up in theMahabharata,more or less working for the prince of Gandhara.The wise one of Gandharais how he’s often referred to in medieval sources. In theMahabharata,he’s more or less a villain who builds a house out of wax to try and burn his prince’s enemies alive, so I’m not entirely sure how that squares with him being a heroic enclave-builder, but mundane sources aren’t always very kind to wizards. Or maybe he was trying to build his very flammable house and accidentally stumbled over some way to pop open an enclave instead.
Anyway, it’s almost certain the ten enclaves weren’t actually all founded by the same person. Once you’ve made yourself a tidy enclave to live in, you wouldn’t really move and do it again, would you? But there was one distinct set of spells. And they’ve been lost for ages.
That hasn’t stopped enclaves being built, obviously. Once wizards realized youcouldbuild enclaves, it became a subject of enormous and sustained interest, and artificers came up with methods that let you make better and bigger ones, and the Golden Stone spells got lost over time through disuse. I don’t know much about modern enclave-building, those spells are a very closely guarded secret, but I do know for definite you can’t fit the process into a single book less than an inch thick, even with margin notes. It’s the difference between putting together a log cabin and building the Burj Khalifa.
But despite five thousand years of refining, some of the Golden Stone building-block spellsarestill widely known, because they’re such good building-block spells, especially for manipulating elements and, most famously, the phase of matter, which is a lot more important than that might sound. If you want steam, you can get some by pouring enough heat into a pot of water. But that’s pretty wasteful, mana-wise. Like nine-year-old me wiping out an entire crystal to vaporize a scratcher. But if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on Purochana’s phase-control spell, you don’t have to take the intermediate step of generating the heat and warming up all the surrounding water and the pot and the air around it and so forth. You just take the pot of liquid water and turn exactly the amount of water you want into water vapor, and you spend only exactly the amount of mana required. That kind of mana control is huge; it’s what made enclave-building feasible.
And now Ihadgot my hands on his phase-control spell. It was on page sixteen of the book. When I found it, my hands shaking as I turned the first pages, I had to stop reading and hold the book against my chest again, trying not to cry, because it meant I was probably going to make it out of here alive after all, which I’d been starting to doubt after seeing how badly my mana store had been wiped out. Aside from using the spell myself, I was going to be able to trade it for alot.
Outside the Scholomance, buying the Golden Stone phase-control spell takes the equivalent of all the mana that a determined group of twenty wizards could put together over five years or so. And it’s even harder than that sounds. You can’t just store up mana for five years in a bank and then go buy the spell in a handy bookstore. The only way to get spells that valuable is to barter: find some enclave that’s willing to trade it to you, negotiate a deal for something that the enclave wants but can’t more easily make for themselves—generally that’s because it’s unpleasant or painful or dangerous—then spend five years of unpleasantness to make it and give it to them. And then hope they don’t go back on the deal or tack on a few more demands, which is far from unheard of.
I didn’t keep reading past the phase-control page. Instead I carefully dampened my cleanest rag and gently cleaned off every last speck of dust in every last crevice of every last pattern stamped into the cover. The whole time I talked to the book, telling it how happy I was to have it and how amazing it was and how I couldn’t wait to show it to everyone and one day soon take it home to my mum and use the special handmade leather oil that one of the people at the commune makes to properly clean it and so on. I didn’t even feel stupid. Mum cossets all seven of her spellbooks like that, and she’s never lost one, even though she’s an independent and they’re all really powerful. She keeps them together in a chest with a bit of room: if she ever finds a new one in there, which happens spontaneously sometimes—only to Mum—she says it means one of the others wants to go, and she lays them all out in a circle on a blanket spread under the hole in our yurt and does a blessing on them and thanks them all for their help and says whichever of them needs to leave can go, and sure enough when she’s done packing them back up, there are only seven left again.
“I’ll have to make a special book chest just for you,” I added, a promise. “I was planning to skive off shop class, I’ve finished for this term, but now I’ll keep going just to get your chest begun. It’s got to be perfect, so I expect it’ll take a while.” Then I slept with it cuddled in my arms. I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Holyshit,El,” Aadhya said, when I knocked on her door the next morning before first bell to show it to her. “What did you do for it?”
I was working really hard to forget what I’d done for it. “The library was trying really hard to keep me stuck in with the mals yesterday. It slipped the book onto an upper shelf after I started label-reading down the aisle, and I got lucky and spotted it.”
“That’s unbelievable.” She eyed it longingly. “I don’t know Sanskrit. But I’ll help you run an auction for the phase-control spell, if you want?”
“An auction?” I said. I’d only meant to ask her for help trading it.
“Yeah,” she said. “This is huge, you don’t want to swap it for just anything. I’ll collect secret bids, and the top five bidders get it, for whatever they’ve put up. And they have to promise that they won’t trade it on themselves after. Can you put a copying curse on?”
“No,” I said, flatly. The actual answer was yes, easy as winking, and it would be a good and proper curse, too, but I wasn’t going to.
“You want to ask Liu to do it?”
“No curses,” I said. “No one’s going to be photocopying this or anything. It’s major arcana in Vedic Sanskrit. It’s going to take me a week to make five clean copies, for that matter.”
“You’ve already learned it?” Aadhya gave me a squint. “When? You were a human dishrag yesterday.”
“After dinner,” I said sulkily:obviouslyall thanks to that boost from Orion.
After a moment, she said, “Okay. Can you run a demo? In the shop on Wednesday, maybe? That’ll give me a couple of days to pass the word. Then we can run the auction over the weekend. Seniors will really want in on this with time to get the spell down before graduation. And hey, if we’re lucky, all five of the winners will be seniors and we can do a whole second auction next term after they’re gone.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Thanks, Aadhya. What cut do you want?”
She gnawed her lip for a moment, looking at me, then abruptly she said, “You okay with figuring it out after the auction? See what comes in and what we think is fair. Maybe there’ll be enough shareable stuff I won’t need anything exclusive.”
I had to work at it not to squeeze the book too hard against me. “Fine with me, if you’re sure,” I said, casual around the lump in my throat.
WE WENTto the bathroom and got ready together, and met Nkoyo and Orion to walk to breakfast. “Oh, sweetness,” Nkoyo said, when I showed her the book: I was keeping it on my person, possibly for the rest of my life; I’d rigged up a sling to carry it in across my chest, separate from my other books. “Are you willing to do trades? I know a couple of Somali girls doing Sanskrit.”
I was so happy that when Chloe almost burst out of the girls’ with her hair not quite done, obviously having hurried to catch us up, and called, “Wait for me, there in a second,” I even said, “Sure,” like an ordinarily civilized person, feeling magnanimous, and showed her the book, too, as we walked. She admired it appropriately, although she spoiled my five seconds of friendly feeling by darting a look at Orion that I had no trouble interpreting: she thought he’d got it for me. I couldn’t kick her off our table at this point, any more than she could’ve shoved me when I’d been walking with Orion, that’s just not on, but I would’velikedto.
