Page 10 of The Golden Enclaves
The ankle might have gone to the same cause, at that; he’d been in office for at least sixty years. There’s not much democracy in enclaves; they’re run like a cross between a vicious international corporation and a village full of vexatious eccentrics. Most of the denizens don’t care what the council are doing as long as everything keeps running smoothly from their own perspective, and the only people who get a significant vote anyway are the people who’ve earned a council seat, either by doing something dramatic or because they’ve cleverly arranged to be descended from a founding member. Generally a Dominus stays in the job until they retire or die or their enclave suffers some sort of major disaster.
Just like this one, and I’m sure Martel’s hours in office were now numbered—in favor of Alfie’s father, in fact, given that he’d been the one volunteering to go into the maw-mouth; that’s the sort of thing that people understand comes with a price tag attached. But it was going to take some time for the new situation to become official—especially with the enclave still more than a bit wobbly—and everyone was going to be excruciatingly polite about it in the meantime, obviously. Alfie’s dad made quite a large production of bringing the largest chair over for Martel and setting it opposite me, before taking the one that had quietly edged up for him.
Martel let himself down into it with a sigh and crinkled a gentle, faintly rueful smile at me, an apology for being so creaky, and looked up at Alfie, who bowed a bit and said, “Sir, this is Galadriel Higgins, a friend from school. El, this is Dominus Martel…” He paused, darting a quick look at his dad, who in some way too subtle for me to notice signaled backyes, go on, I merit an introduction now too,and then added, “And this is my father, Sir Richard Cooper Browning.”
“My dear Galadriel, I understand we owe you quite an extraordinary debt,” Martel said, in avuncular tones I’d have been annoyed by, if I weren’t too busy being annoyed at Alfie. I’d noticed the mild oddness of his going byAlfieat school, like a kid in primary; his mates ought to have used his last name instead. But I hadn’t realized it was a deliberate avoidance he must have worked at. And his dad looked familiar because I’d seen that face, with relatively minor edits, staring out at me from all the articles about the founding of the Scholomance that had been plastered over the walls of the school.
I didn’t blame Alfie for not wanting to be known as whatever iteration of Sir Alfred Cooper Browning he was apparently destined to be; I’d gone to some lengths myself to avoid becoming known as the incongruous child of the great healer in the eyes of my classmates. Ididblame him, even more, for making that stupid oath. My dragging him around as my personal helper, after literally wrecking the Scholomance his namesake had built, that would be really marvelous. There clearlywasa family tradition of making dramatic and potentially fatal gestures in the service of your enclave, though.
“Glad to help,” I said, a bit shortly. All right, I could still muster up some annoyance for the avuncular tones, too.
“It ought to go without saying, and yet merits being said, that should you ever choose to make your home here with us, we would be delighted to have you,” Martel said, that bright-blue artifice eye fixed on my face intently, as if he were hoping to peer inside and get a look at my intentions and deepest desires. I wouldn’t have minded a peek myself, since now that I had finished with killing the maw-mouth, I was back to not knowing what to do with myself. But I did know that I very much didn’t want to move myself into London enclave.
“Thanks, but no,” I said, and several of the wizards behind him traded glances, like they couldn’t quite believe it. Why else would I have taken out a maw-mouth for them, after all?
“I understand from Alfred that you are quite committed to your independence,” Sir Richard said. “I hope there is some other way you’ll permit us to repay you.” What he meant was that he really hoped I’d let him ransom his son back—which I didn’t have any objections to, lucky for him, and Ihadthought of something to demand, something big enough to be worth taking on a maw-mouth.
“Yes,” I said. “The gardens.” Sir Richard frowned at me a little; everyone else was glancing round themselves a little confused, as if they thought I meant packing up the gardens and handing them to me. “I want you to open them up, so any wizard who wants can come and spend the day, if they like. The library, too,” I added, because why not? The maw-mouth wouldn’t have left any of it standing. “Not the parts of this place you actually live in; you can keep your mana store to yourselves, your council chambers, all of that place.” I waved my hand towards that awful subterranean complex. “But the rest—share it. That’s my price, if you want one.”
They were all staring at me with an odd mix of expressions. Liesel mostly looked irritated, as if it wasn’t anything she hadn’t expected from idiot me; Alfie’s had a faintly anxious edge, although seeing how his dad was likely to be Dominus soon, I thought his odds of being bought out of his debt to me were considerably better than they might have been. The others were mostly frowning in the intent way you do when you’re trying to understand what the game is, why someone’s asked for something really weird and unexpected that doesn’t make any obvious sense, and some of them were glancing back and forth to see if anyone else had worked it out.
Martel was keeping his pleasant smile lodged firmly in its noncommittal curve. “That…would be quite an undertaking,” he said cautiously, but what he really meant wasplease explain your bizarre request some more.
“The National Trust manage it all right,” I said. “I don’t mind your throwing people out if they piss in the waterfall.”
A woman brayed a laugh, a real jeering goose-honk of one, making everyone jump. I hadn’t noticed her before. She was standing off to one side apart from everyone else, leaning against the railing, but that wasn’t why I hadn’t spotted her: she was in a coat of tattered scraps of mismatched fabric, sewn together with ragged ends fluttering off here and there. All of the scraps were carrying a small bit of minor artifice that insisted they were absolutely fascinating and the most amazing thing you’d ever seen—a typical cheap glamour, except by putting it on a bundle of not-at-all-amazing rags and heaping them all in together, the conglomeration produced a brilliant misdirection effect where you stopped noticing them at all. Even now that she’d deliberately drawn attention, I was having a hard time looking at her properly.
She pushed off the railing. “Little El, all grown up,” she said. “D’you remember me? I don’t think you would. Last time I saw you, Gwen was toting you away slung over her shoulder, howling, after you tried to use a compulsion on me. I kept wobbling and should stop, you said. You were all of four, I think.”
I didn’t remember her at all, but it certainly sounded like a thing that might have happened. I had in fact invented a compulsion spell round that age, all my own; Mum had been years training me out of flinging it at people.
And then I knew who she was. Yancy was the only name she used, and whenever a scruffier sort of wizard came to the commune looking for help, more often than not they saidshe’d sent them, with her respects. Once, I’d asked why, and Mum told me she’d helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn’t tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won’t happen to you.
I had no idea why Yancy washere,though; she wasn’t a London enclaver herself. The opposite, if anything. London enclave had managed to survive the Blitz by opening up loads of entrances all over the city, so even if more than one got bombed in a night, it wouldn’t mean the whole enclave went. After the war, they’d closed most of them up again, but Yancy and her crew had worked out various clever ways of prying and wedging them back open a bit, to get into those unreal spaces I’d mentioned: some sort of vague undefined pockets between the real world and the enclave. They’d camp out in one for months or even years at a time, enjoying the shelter from maleficaria and the convenience of access to the void, until the enclavers managed to find and boot them out, and then they’d scurry away and find another spot to wriggle in through.
So I suppose she did have an incentive to save London from being devoured by a maw-mouth, only why they’d have looked toher,I didn’t quite get. But they clearly had. She said to Sir Richard, “Right, that’s us sorted, too, then. I assume we’re allowed to throw the occasional party on the green, in your charming scheme?” she asked me, in high pleasure, and didn’t wait for an answer before giving another bray. “Nice to meet you,Galadriel Higgins.” She made it sound like a sly joke between us. “Let’s have a chat sometime.” With that, she gave a wriggle that shook all the rags and tatters, and by the time my eyes would focus again, she’d disappeared down one of the paths, although singing loudly enough—just anonsensero ma ro ma ma, gaga ooh la labit from an old pop song over and over—that the waterfall had to get energetic to drown her out.
There was a lot of visible irritation in her wake, with sour looks at Sir Richard. I imagined he’d been the one who’d brought her into the mix, for whatever reason. He managed his own face better, or else he sincerely didn’t mind Yancy. He just gave a bit of a sigh and said to me, in wry tones, “You don’t object to reasonable visiting hours, I hope, or it’ll be nightly raves until seven o’clock in the morning.” He hadn’t been swapping looks with everyone else; he’d just shot a questioning one straight at Alfie, and evidently he’d got enough from that direction to reach the astonishing conclusion that what I wanted was what I’d asked for.
Martel was apparently having more difficulty swallowing the idea. He had gone from polite staring to flat-out staring, and the smile had gone. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to sit here and haggle over details with them; Alfie’s oath would do a better job of negotiating for me. “You asked, so I’ve told you,” I said shortly. “Do it or don’t.”
I took off the power-sharer—I’d like to say it wasn’t a wrench to give it up, but I’d be lying—and held it out to Alfie. He took it from me with another speaking look at his father that was loud enough for me to hear too:see, I told you so.Sir Richard watched the handover with his long face furrowing a bit. I assume his grandfather had negotiated his own deal with London’s council to get it, back in the 1890s, in exchange for the keys to the Scholomance. Probably a permanent council seat for the head of the family, too. Manchester enclave had poured the best part of their strength into getting the place built; London had still got a bargain.
And they’d got a bargain this time, too. They had their enclave; their vast oceans of power, storm-tossed or not; eventheir secret garden was still theirs. They’d only have to endure letting other people tramp through it once in a while, and even that would only help them settle their frothing mana stores at first: getting in a bunch of wizards to stare at and believe in all of the wondrous artifice would probably be just the thing to help stabilize the place. I stood up. “You won’t mind me having a walk before I go.”
“Not at all,” Martel said. He’d pasted the smile back on at last, although it was looking thin. “Please make yourself at home.”
I didn’t go very far. All I wanted was to be somewhere alone and away from everything, and the gardens obligingly took me straight to a small nook draped with vines half hidden from the outside, green and quiet, with the pattering of a side waterfall going past the leaves. It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all. There was nothing to do in the nook but think or feel or be, and I didn’t want any of those things. I couldn’t rest; I wasn’t tired. I would have liked to be, but I wasn’t. Killing a maw-mouth in a single breath, a maw-mouth big enough to eat London, nothing to it. As long as I made up my mind to do it instead of insisting it couldn’t be done, so Orion decided to face it without me.
That was a very bad thought. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to sit here thinking it, in this garden that I’d saved instead of Orion, but it was the only thing my brain could find to think. Precious climbed out of my pocket and roamed over the beautiful twining ironwork railings and the branches, and I tried to just follow her movement with my eyes and breathe in steady waves, in and hold and a long sighing-out, but it wasn’t any use. The lovely soft drugged calm of the drinkAlfie had given me had been completely crushed beneath my irritation and anger, and the more I tried to be inside my head, the more I was aware of the queasy rush of the roiling mana beneath my feet, horribly similar to the grotesque gushing wave of the maw-mouth coming apart around my legs. My stomach turned and I gave up.
What would have helped waswork,but I hadn’t any to do, and if it had been the kind of work I was made for, I couldn’t have done it anyway. I’d handed back the power-sharer, and the tank was empty. So instead I got up and started doing push-ups to build mana. I was still in the very best shape of my life, having trained for the graduation five-hundred-meter dash as though my life depended on it, which it had, and my conditioning was only improved for having spent most of a week being fed and watered and loved in Wales. I did the push-ups properly, all the way down and up again, counting them off.
The poor confused garden slowly opened up the nook to either side to make slightly more graceful room around me, and when I came up from number seventeen, it tentatively offered me a tidy basket of yoga mats in the corner of the space. That would have been within normal operating parameters: surely eight or nine London wizards in expensive athletic wear got together in the early mornings on the regular for a charming group session overlooking the waterfall. They wouldn’t be building mana, though; it would just be for the pleasure of moving their bodies. They ought to come out and spend a weekend in Wales on a retreat. I ignored the basket and made my hands into fists and kept going on the bare stone, counting off my driblets of painfully built mana as they went into the spent crystal still hanging round my throat, the faintest glow starting as I hit thirty.
Round then I noticed that Liesel was standing therewatching me, her arms crossed over her chest and frowning. I loathe push-ups; I’d been half wishing someone would come and give me something else to do, or at least a good shove, and Liesel was certainly the woman for that. But I went all the way to fifty before I let myself get up again, defiantly dripping sweat all over the towering iridescent gladiolas in the nearest planter. I expected her to call me a numpty; I felt like one myself, to be honest. It was too much like lugging a jug ten miles from a weak muddy stream just to water a plant that was standing next to a massive lake.
But she didn’t; she just went on studying me in an odd narrow way. I had the sensation I was on the wrong side of a pane of one-way glass, and on the other side, taking me in, was some vast clockwork machinery full of peering lenses and vibrating with the force of thirty thousand gears churning away. I didn’t enjoy it. “Did you want somethingelse?” I said coldly. “Track down any other maw-mouths?”
