Page 15 of The Golden Enclaves
Also Alfie threw in an earnest look at me as he spoke, and I wasn’t going to be any part of thatus.Just because I hadn’t wanted the entire enclave to be destroyed with every living person in it dying horribly wasn’t the same as adding myself to the roster. “Yes, who can imagine why, it’s not like you’ve been chasing them into the streets on the regular,” I said, with a sniff that went into roller-coaster loops of deep snide green. Liesel only sighed a starburst of exasperation and told Alfie, “I will be back soon.”
“Ready, then?” Yancy said, having a final swig herself. She beckoned us along after her into the labyrinth path, doing a hopping sort of dance between the stones as if it mattered tremendously which particular spot of grass she put her feet on. Liesel started to copy her almost immediately, and in a moment or three—I was having trouble making my brain work—I caught up and realized that itdidmatter. Each time our footsteps came down, little sparkly bursts came out, and the bursts were in different colors depending on where you landed. Yancy was very deliberately going for pale-blue bursts. I couldn’t tell how she knew which way to go, so all I could do was try my hardest to land wherever she’d stepped, which wasn’t easy when the grass sprang back up at once. Liesel and I only managed to land the right color one in two.
But even Yancy sometimes got a dark blue or a white instead, so presumably it was a bit flexible. And after capering around through maybe two labyrinth branches, I became increasingly certain that we were going somewhere, and not just to the center of the maze but somehow past it and on to a completely different destination—the same feeling as walking a long route to class inside the Scholomance, a familiar one, where you can’t be sure exactly how long it’s going to take, but you know you’re getting close, the classroom door will be on your right after the next turn, or maybe the oneafter that; and when Yancy said, “All right, here we go, watch your step going down,” I was perfectly ready to follow her, and did, not only down but out of the world as well.
When I’d just been swanning around a massive enclave built inside the void and out of borrowed space—not to mention having spent four years inside the even-bigger Scholomance—it might seem like nitpicking to complain about being in unreal spaces, but it very much wasn’t. Yancy had mentioned that the enclave had traded in a riding ring for the memorial plaza. When we stepped out of the meadow, we landed inside it: an elaborate pavilion where people would have sat with cool drinks to watch the riders show off on enchanted horses. Out the front I could see the ring, or rather where the ringhad been.It wasn’t quite the brutal emptiness of staring into the void itself: more like looking at the void through a sheet of transparent film that someone had printed with a faint black-and-white photo of an old riding ring, and on the far side of it, there was an even fainter outline of a stable, like a set designer had done a faint pencil sketch on a black backdrop to show the painters where to work.
The pavilion itself just barely qualified as a solid surface. We were walking on old pitted wood planks, and they did look like wood, but they didn’tsoundlike wood. Our footsteps sounded odd and muffled instead, like we were walking across a carpet laid over a wooden floor. That kind of mismatch with reality is a blaring warning sign that you’re in a space that’s about to come apart and drop you into the void, andget out now.It reminded me forcibly of the time at school when I’d aggressively disbelieved in one of the walls—I was eldritched at the time—and the walls had obligingly started to buckle.
But Yancy didn’t seem especially concerned. She looked all around with satisfaction and even gave the front railing a patas she went. “There, you’re holding up nicely, aren’t you?” she said conversationally, to the place. “The whole enclave might have gone into the sea, it wouldn’t drag you down. This old ruin will outlast the rest of the place,” she added over her shoulder to us. “They had Queen Elizabeth out here once, you know.”
“I thought you said they tore the place down a hundred years ago,” I blurted.
“Good Queen Bess,” Yancy said. It was absolute nonsense either way, of course. Wizards were never inviting mundanes into their enclaves, because the enclaves would’ve caved in on themselves under the burden of disbelief. Even when mundanes didn’t have science to helpfully explain the world and happily burned witches at the stake, they didn’t really believe in magic. If you believed in magic, you wouldn’t drag a witch to the stake; you’d have her lob fireballs at your enemies instead. But they didn’t believe in magic, so even if youwerea witch, when they dragged you to the stake and burned you in front of an audience, you’d have a bloody hard time getting yourself out of it. In fact most witches who got caught up in the net didn’t.
But I didn’t contradict Yancy again. Liesel had poked me sharply in the back of the shoulder, and anyway I’d had enough time for my glazed-over brain to work out that the last thing I should be doing was encouraging the place to think of itself as nonexistent. But I couldn’t understand how itdidexist.
Obviously Yancy and her people were propping it up as much as they could—encouraging it to keep on taking up space where they could squirrel themselves away from the prowling hordes of London’s maleficaria, even if they had to be doped to the gills to stand it. Which they absolutely did. If it hadn’t been for Yancy’s potion, I’d have been clawing at thewalls for a way out. But the pavilion felt just as solid as the rest of the universe around me—in other words, not very. I was seeing whispers and wind chimes—not solid wind chimes dangling, which would have been all right; I was seeing thesoundof wind chimes, and don’t ask me to describe it. My mouth tasted like having forgotten something important, and my skin was prickling with colors in harlequin patches all over.
So the stands seemed at least as likely to be real as the heat of the sun that insisted on roaring in my ears. I could imagine that it wasalljust the drugs, and as soon as they wore off, I’d be standing in a perfectly reasonable, perfectly real place. That let my brain believe in the place just enough to endure being here. And yes, on some deeper level I knew too well that it wasn’t real, but anyone who’s made it out of the Scholomance knows how to keep their screaming on the inside.
It was awful, but I could still understand why Yancy and her people chose to live here. The reason wizards live in enclaves—well, the reason wizards live in enclaves is because it keeps their kids from being eaten by maleficaria, but theotherreason wizards live in enclaves is because it makes magiceasier.All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way. That becomes loads easier once you’ve pushed yourself a tidy little nook into the void, but one of those only opens up naturally if your family spend, oh, ten generations or so puttering around, constantly doing as much magic as you can in the same place. It doesn’t happen very often.
Or you and yours can go to enormous amounts of effort and time and build yourselves an enclave—the way my friend Liu’s family in Xi’an were trying to—or much more likely, find some way to get into an existing one. And then the samemana and time that used to grow you a single fireflower can grow you a garden full of them, under massive sunlamps that some artificer has been able to make for the same reason, and you can wander the paths in the shelter of privacy incantations and watch the flights of magical birds that some other alchemist has bred, et cetera. All very nice and wondrous, and then also you can go to bed in a sheltered, shielded alcove somewhere and even if you have to sleep in the attic or a cramped Tudor-era bedroom the width of a sofa, at least nothing’s going to try to eat you in your sleep.
So every wizard—aside from the exceedingly odd exception—wants to be in an enclave, and if you aren’t born into one, and you aren’t brilliant enough to win your way in, the only way you get into one is by signing up to work for them. That’s life for most indie wizards: graduate from the Scholomance, choose an enclave that needs someone with your skills, apply to work for them, and then spend the rest of your days handing over eighty percent of your effort to the enclave, because the twenty percent that’s left over is still twice as much as what you could manage living on your own outside.
Oh, and sorry, it’s not nearly as good a bargain as that in practice. Because mals want to be inside enclaves too. It’s easier for them to exist in an enclave, just like it’s easier for any other magic to happen there, and anyway enclaves are just bursting with delicious mana. So there’s not a single major enclave in the world that isn’t surrounded by mals, all the time. If you work inside an enclave, but you don’t get tostayinside—well, your commute home won’t be as bad as graduation day in the Scholomance, but it’s still not going to be pleasant, and it’s going to happen every single day.
Most wizards who work for London enclave live an hour outside the city or more. They commute along withmundanes for the protection, just like most indie kids go to mundane schools, and your first month of work buys you a professional-quality shield holder, and half of each month after that gets you the mana to keep it charged, so by the time all is said and done, if you’re lucky, you do a bit better than you’d have done on your own, and if you’re unlucky, you do a bit worse, and if you’re really unlucky you get eaten on your way home when you nod off on a bus that clears out before your stop.
And you keep at it anyway, because there’s a dangling carrot up ahead, the enclave seat that’s waiting for anyone who provides roughly thirty years of service. At some newer enclaves, they make it twenty; New York probably demands forty. Most people run out of steam halfway and take a lump sum to retire somewhere a bit further away and less infested with maleficaria, generally a village somewhere that’s got a few wizards who get together to do more modest circle magic and guard each other’s backs. Others—the more realistic sort—aren’t even trying to go the distance; they just do the work in exchange for their kids getting to go to the enclave school and get Scholomance seats.
And the few of us who are quixotic enough to object to the whole grotesque system of squeezing, well, we live in the back of beyond, as far as possible from the crowds of mals around the major enclaves, which not coincidentally is also as far as possible from any other wizards, and struggle to raise enough mana on our own just to put up slightly wobbly shields at night, and normally we get eaten when one of the more dangerous mals drifts out into the wilds and stumbles across us and we don’t have the mana to fight it off.
So I absolutely understood why Yancy and her crew would rather give up on the whole rat race and brew themselves a batch of exotic mind-altering drugs and pry open the hollowunderbelly of London to climb inside for twenty years, a massiveup yoursto the enclave. Pour the champagne and turn over the tables and fuck it all. Why not? Their odds were bad, but their odds had been bad anyway, and at least they’d have a good time before they went. They could probably do absolutely amazing magic in here, fever dream spells that would topple over or go wrong half the time, and none of it would be permanent, but it would be theirs as long as it lasted.
What I didn’t understand was whyLondonhad left enough of the place for them to ever get into at all. Mum had told me that Yancy and her people used old entrances to sneak into the enclave; that had made sense to me, but I’d imagined them hiding in empty rooms or pushing a temporary bubble of space out from the existing parts of the enclave—space that they themselves had borrowed out of the real world. That would have been loads more work and mana for them, so this was better from their perspective, but not as far as the enclave was concerned. London had torn the riding ring down to reclaim the space, which meant the rest of the enclave expected every cubic centimeter of air we were occupying to besomewhere else.The enclave spells were presumably having to do substantial extra work to juggle it round: like in Alfie’s race car, stealing a pocket of space out of the corner of some enclaver’s eye and pretending it was still there until they looked back.
It must have been a massive mana drain. Alfie might claim that Yancy’s people had it in for the enclavers; it seemed much more likely to me that it was the other way round. I could just imagine Martel and the rest of that council totting up the mana that was being siphoned off for these disreputable revels and gnashing their teeth. London wouldn’t havedeliberatelykept this ghostly place hanging round for anyoneto crawl into; they’d have carefully and thoroughly shoved this bit off into the void.
Just like we’d done, with the Scholomance.
I’ve laid it out tidily here, but at the time it took my muddled brain a good ten minutes to gnaw through the confusion to that point. We weren’t walking the whole time: Yancy took us to the most central part of the stands, festooned with massive swoops of glittery bunting that were clearly a more recent addition, which mostly hid away the translucent world outside. Her crew had heaped up glorious mountains of cushions around a scattering of low tables, piles of blankets and soft rugs woven out of things like the flavor of freshly picked strawberries and poems and golden-green—not me being poetic; someone doped on this potion had evidently figured out a way to actually do artifice with what they could perceive. I have no idea what the stuff would have looked like in the real world. Probably it couldn’t exist in the real world; it would just have fallen apart instantly as soon as you got it too close to physics or even a sober pair of eyes.
Once we were inside and we’d sunk down into the impossible nest, I didn’t have to keep pretending the void wasn’tright there, right over there, and we’re about to fall into it.Yancy’s crew had done it up in a really clever way—the drapes didn’tcompletelyhide the outside, which would have made you think about it more and implied that there was something outside that needed hiding, but enough of it that you’d have had to make an effort to look. And even if the cushions and rugs weren’t very real, they were still artifice, and their purpose was to make youcomfortable.If you’ve ever imagined lying down on a cloud and having it hold you up, that’s more or less what it was like. It didn’t make any sense and you knew better, but at the same time, you also secretly reallybelieved that it would work, and were delighted to go along with it when improbably it did.
The section of the stands immediately around us was more solid, and under the layers of cushioning they felt more plausibly like wood. There were gilt and paint and carvings everywhere, some of them magical runes. This surelyhadbeen an old and well-loved part of the enclave, the site of parties and ceremonial events back when wizards still rode things that looked like horses instead of cars. Maybe Yancy’s story was part of an old tradition; maybe the enclavers had told their own children stories about royal visits, and Queen Bess was a bit more plausible than King Arthur, at least. Enough belief and memory poured into this space so that even after the enclave had more or less given it the boot, this one part had lingered on?
“How did you get into this place?” I demanded urgently, when my brain had finally lurched that far. I knew it wasn’t safe to ask the more accurate question—they must have shoved this place off into the void, how did you get itback?—but I thought I could get away with asking that much.
Yancy had sprawled out over a heap of pillows and got hold of a silver jug so much like the ones in the garden above that I was sure it had been pilfered. She was pouring herself a drink into an old-fashioned champagne cup made of elaborate green glass, and the liquid foamed and bubbled and settled down into a froth of pink mousse.
“Give us a spoon, love,” she said, in answer. I looked down at the table: at my place I had a gilt-edged teacup, slightly faded, on a glass plate, and something like a sugar bowl which had been crammed with a tiny forest of tarnished silver spoons, with delicate handles made to look like narrow branches. I slid one over to her, and she passed me the jug in return.
When I poured the liquid into my teacup, I got what looked like a crème brûlée, only when I broke the crust, underneath there wasn’t custard but the blue-violet flames you get from setting brandy on fire. I spooned a bit of them into my mouth gingerly, and then the cup and spoon tumbled down in a smash from my hands while I covered my face, trying to breathe, moans breaking out of me.
It was the taste of summer rain mixed with faint hisses: the taste of being in the gym with Orion, that last day, the very last day before graduation, stupidly kissing him in the pavilion with the amphisbaena falling from the ceiling pipes all around us. It was the taste of everything I’d been thinking in that passionate, greedy moment: that it would be better to have had him just the once, in case we died, only I’d really been thinking about in caseIdied, and how stupid I’d feel to have refused myself this one-last-only-real pleasure I could dig out of the Scholomance.
