Page 21 of The Golden Enclaves
“Ruth, Grover,” he said, nodding back to them both, without breaking stride. He led us to one of the narrow brass-and-ironwork staircases going down through the floor. Going into the dark out of the brilliant light of the hall left us blinded and blinking for an unsettling moment that cleared up only as we came off the landing below and were in the narrow plush-carpeted corridor of a Gilded Age mansion block. Elegant wooden doors with knobs in the middle took turns with dim green-shaded lamps held up by brass hands, appearing at irregular intervals going down the length.
It wasn’t nearly as real a place as the transport hall above. It only took a few steps before we were at a door marked33. Balthasar swung it open for us and let us in. I made it a few steps inside before I realized and stopped short, standing just inside the handsome sitting room—he’d brought us to his own flat. I’d assumed he was taking us to some council chamber, some garden or library or something of the sort.
Of course I couldn’t turn round and sayno wait let me out.But I wanted to, because this was where Orion had lived, this had been his home, and I was here, and he wasn’t. I wanted to run away at once, and I wanted to go prowling over the whole place, looking for any last scraps and shreds of him I could gather up and squirrel away inside myself, and hold on to him like holding on to one of the lost places.
By mundane standards, it was a cozy little place, the sort that a real estate listing would callcharming,meaning not quite as large as you’d like. By enclave standards, it was enormous, and with an almost unimaginable luxury:windows.The short wall of the sitting room was made entirely of panels of one-way mirrors in ironwork, and on the other side you could see a garden, a gardenoutsidein the real world. It looked like the yard of a townhouse, nine feet square at most, but the brick walls were covered with ivy and rosebushes, and all the space was filled with large plants in pots. The windows surely didn’t open—you wouldn’t want an actual opening to the outside world in your enclave home, since dozens of mals would try to get in—but it was still real sunlight and greenery.
One long wall was entirely full of bookshelves and a fireplace, and in front of it a small sofa and two large comfortable chairs were arranged round a rug large enough for a child to sprawl upon, playing. There were photographs scattered over the bookshelves, and I wasn’t close enough to see them clearly, but there was someone in them with silver-grey hair.
“Make yourselves at home,” Balthasar said, an invitation to go on and stab myself in the chest, just as I liked. “I’m going to go get Ophelia. Chloe, would you mind helping the girls with the pantry, if they’d like anything?”
I didn’t want anything I could get in a pantry. I left Chloe showing the others how the sleek antique cupboard in the wall opened up to reveal a bank of illuminated drawers just like the old Automat food carts we’d enjoyed every year on Field Day, if those carts had been full of beautiful food that you’d actually want to eat, and also polished to a high sheen instead of nearly blackened with a century of grime and tarnish. I went down the corridor instead, slowly, to the door at the farend of it, the door that was shut. I passed a sliding door half open, going to what looked like the inside of a garage, the workshop where Orion had told me his dad had tried to keep him busy; there was another door ajar on my right, with a mirror on the wall showing a glimpse of a large canopied bed, hangings of grey velvet and mosquito-netting glimmering faintly with light, and when I paused to look at it, the mirror clouded over uneasily and I think something inside it started to peer back at me, only Precious made an alarmed squeak of warning, and I hurried on before it managed to pull itself together.
I stood in front of the closed door for a long time. I didn’t want to open it. I didn’t want to open it almost as much as I hadn’t wanted to open the door of the maintenance shaft in the Scholomance and go out into the graduation hall, expecting to see Patience and Fortitude waiting for me. No one was going to make me open this door; the Scholomance wasn’t going to bully me through it. But I opened it anyway, because I couldn’t walk away from it either, so there wasn’t anything else to do.
Orion wasn’t there. In any sense of the word. The room looked almost exactly like one of the pages of the glossy in-flight magazine from the seat-back pocket on the aeroplane, advertising toys for boys: bat, ball, a football, a basketball and a hoop mounted on the back of a door, an American football, a racquet and tennis balls still in the plastic tube, another ball, a fishing rod, two different cameras, a remote-controlled car, three Lego kits and five science kits, a television mounted on the wall with shelves beneath it holding at least four different video game systems, a computer on the desk with a gigantic monitor, neatly filled bookshelves, a row of stuffed animals.
And every last item was as pristine as if it were still in that advert waiting to be shipped off to some lucky happy boywho would use it, just as soon as someone had dusted it off a bit. The kits were still in cellophane.
The only thing in the room that showed any sign of use, besides the bed, was a single large cardboard box tucked away in the corner, fairly battered, and full of weapons. At first glance, they might have been toys, too: the swords sized for a child, the coiled whip, the assortment of maces and flails. But they weren’t toys. Actually some of them still had vivid purple ichor stains, which is what you get when you don’t properly clean the corporeal surfaces of your weapon after you’ve used it to kill a psychic mal, which based on my personal experience of Orion’s dorm room was extremely unsurprising.
It hurt to look at it and see everything he’d ever told me, everything Chloe had ever told me, that I hadn’t wanted to believe.I never wanted anything except to hunt,he’d insisted. Chloe and the other New York seniors had literally offered me a spot in this enclave, their single most valuable bargaining chip to recruit help and resources for graduation, just because Orion had made a friend of me for the span of two weeks. Also they’d tried to murder me,mostlyby accident, on the suspicion that I was a maleficer who was enchanting him. But now I didn’t mind that nearly as much as the looming possibility that they’d had some real reason to be worried, after all.
This had been Orion’s life, this awful stale barren room full of plastic and desperation, a mass of sacrificial offerings his parents had made to try and turn him intoa normal person,and instead had only managed to make him recognize he wasn’t one. And I’d have liked to comfortably keep on hating them for that, only I couldn’t hate them for that and also hate them for letting a ten-year-old hunt maleficaria. I couldn’t have it both ways, and I had the sinking feeling I also couldn’t have it one way or the other, either.
But if I couldn’t blame them—then there was something I couldn’t understand here, a gaping void between the Orion who’d lived in this room and the Orion I’d known, the boy who’d made a friend of me because Ididn’tsuck up to him, who’d squabbled with me over the lunch tables when I told him to do his homework and smugly counted points for every time he’d saved my life, who’d listened to me and cared about me andlovedme.El, you’re the first right thing I’ve ever wanted,he’d told me, and I hadn’t wanted to believe that, or at most I’d wanted to believe that he’d beentrainedthat way. But if it wastrue,then I didn’t understand how to put the two halves of his life together, the one his parents and his friends had been holding, and the one I’d held myself. It was a puzzle with an enormous missing piece, and I stared into the room as if I could somehow save him after all, if I only found it now, too late.
“El?” Balthasar said, and I looked down the corridor. He was standing at the other end. I pulled Orion’s door shut—I hadn’t even let go of the knob—and walked back towards the sitting room. It was oddly hard to do, my steps coming slower, one after another, elongating almost as if I were back in the stretching staircases of the Scholomance. It was only a short corridor in a small flat, so I couldn’t stretch it out very far, but I took as long as I possibly could have; I didn’t want to get to the other end, and I didn’t even understand why, until I came into the sitting room and Orion’s mum was standing there talking to my friends. She turned when I came in, and there wasn’t any more difficulty seeing where Orion had come from.
She was a maleficer.
I’ve always hada really remarkable nose for picking out maleficers. I knew Jack was a mana-sucker with human blood under his fingernails even when everyone else in our year thought he was a charming lad, friendly and generous by Scholomance standards. I knew Liu was dabbling—in a much more restrained way—when everyone else only considered her a bit aloof and awkward.
Malia isn’t like drugs. When you first start messing with the stuff, that’s when it leaves marks—blackened fingernails and milk-white eyes, an unpleasant sticky aura, things like that; Mum calls them symptoms of lesions in the anima, which is the badly defined word we use for whatever it is in wizards that lets us build and hold on to mana, unlike mundanes. The term has as much scientific validity as aether or the four elements or humors—a fair number of wizards have gone in for medicine and neuroscience trying to find the anima, and no one’s had much luck yet—but everyone hates not having a name for it, so anima it is. What we do know perfectly well is that the more you mess with malia, the moredamage you do to whatever it is, and the harder it becomes for you to keep building and holding on to mana of your own. Sometimes people with damage of that sort show up at the commune, wanting Mum’s help. She doesn’t help them the way they really want her to; she doesn’t do spirit cleanses and patch them up and send them off to do it again. All she’ll do is give them a chance to spend however many months or years it takes, working off their debt in the woods with her. Mostly they go away again, but a few of them have stuck it out.
But when you commit to the maleficer lifestyle, give up making mana of your own at all and switch to using malia exclusively, that’s when the path really smooths out before you. Serious maleficers don’t have to worry about people getting uneasy round them, or even any outer signs, at least not until they cross the finish line far up ahead and the worn-thin outer façade peels away, years of accumulated psychic pollution exposed all in a rush, and they graduate to their final form, the ancient stringy sorcerers and hideous crones that show up in fairy stories, mashing bones in a mortar and pestle. It’s a puzzle no one’s going to solve: do they look that way because that’s what people think of when they think ofevil mage,or have the stories been told because at that stage the maleficers get desperate enough to even go after mundanes, having to work harder and harder and more grotesquely to extract enough malia from hapless victims to keep themselves from falling apart entirely?
Ophelia wasn’t in the end stage, certainly. Oddly, she also wasn’t especially beautiful, which most maleficers are until they aren’t anymore. She was an ordinary, well-kept middle-aged woman, slim in a way that suggested she exercised every day and practiced portion control, with a smooth cap of short-cropped brown hair and clear grey eyes horribly likeOrion’s, with posh mundane clothing and a light coating of expensive makeup. Or rather, that’s the woman she looked like. At the commune, a lot of the regulars would sneer when those women turned up for the yoga weekends; I’d liked that it wasn’t just me sneering for once. But Mum had always said that it was good to care for yourself, however you chose to doit.
That wasn’t what Ophelia was doing. She was just wearing the skin of it on the outside, like camouflage. It was really good camouflage, too. Aadhya and Chloe and even Liesel were smiling, charmed and made welcome, until they saw my face. Aadhya immediately put her hand in her pocket, I’m guessing because she had some kind of protective artifice in there, and Liesel shifted a step back, putting herself in a position to fire off an offensive spell from behind a shield. Poor Chloe’s face went almost comically horrified.
Ophelia was smiling too, untilshecame round and saw my face, and then she paused and said, “Well, I guess that makes things easier for me,” in a brisk tone, the smile folding up and packing itself away like a raincoat made unnecessary by a change in the weather. “But you’re probably freaked out. Do you want to go somewhere more public?”
What I wanted more exclusively with every passing second was to get as far away from her as I possibly could. She wasn’t like Jack. Jack had been a tiny pathetic worm of a parasite just trying to gnaw himself a way to survival. She was a pillar of darkness in a clear sky, the promise of mushroom clouds billowing, with all the power of New York enclave behind her. She was what I’d been trying not to become, my whole life, and I couldn’t imagine anything I could do against her. I desperately wanted an ocean of mana; if Alfie had offered me the London power-sharer again in that moment, at the cost of having him tag around behind me his entire life,I’d have taken it in a heartbeat, yes, just give it to me; yes, please, hurry.
“Take a few breaths,” Ophelia advised, when I didn’t answer her. “I’m not looking to start a fight in my living room. In my worst-case scenario, you’d destroy my enclave. In the best case, you’d be dead. And I don’t want you dead. Why don’t you sit down? Would you like some tea?”
She delivered all of this with the air of a mildly beleaguered teacher in a junior school—not the slightest hitch when proposing either that I might destroy New York enclave, or that she might kill me. The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understandwhyI might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do. It was even reassuring, in an odd way. But not enough for me to want to sit down and have a cuppa, pretending there wasn’t something worse than a maw-mouth across from me.
“Haveyoubeen destroying the enclaves?” I blurted out, a brief shade away from panic.
She tilted her head. “You mean that, don’t you?” I just stared at her. “No, I haven’t been.” She didn’t even try to say it in any kind of convincing way—not indignant or even urgent. She simply said it, and left me with the dampening impression that I was being a silly goose: what use was it to make her say anything about it? If shehadbeen, and she didn’t want me to know, she would just have lied without the slightest difficulty. For that matter, if she’d told me shehadbeen doing it, that might have been a lie just as easily, for her own reasons. I wasn’t getting any information out of her; she was just making noises to be polite.
And what if shewasthe one smashing enclaves apart? I could certainly have believed it. She wouldn’t have batted aneye at ripping London open just to make it look less likely that New York was behind it when she went after Beijing. But so what? Was I going to loudly declare that I was going to stop her wicked plans? Inmybest case, if I managed to convince her that I meant it, she’d come at me immediately, of course, and I was standing in the middle of her enclave, in her very own house, with a significant fraction of all the people in the world I cared about—and bloody hell, Liesel had somehowjoinedthat group, which would teach me to shag people I didn’t want to like—in range. I couldn’t come up with a single idea for how to get us out of here if Ophelia meant to stop us, at least not any idea that didn’t include my turningintoher, or even worse.
She waited long enough to let all of that sink in, more or less forcing me to quell my own nascent panic, then added, “Balthasar tells me that you’d like to go back into the Scholomance.”
And I did still want that, but I wasn’t taking anything from this woman. “I’ll manage it on my own,” I said. “We’ll just be going.”
