Page 36 of The Golden Enclaves
On the other side of that wall, some wizard had just crammed thirty years or more of mana and work and longing into this brick. They’d built it out of their longing for an enclave, and it didn’t really matter that they didn’t know exactly what was happening in this room. Because they did know, they had to know, thatsomethingevil and horrible was going to happen in this room. They were only over there in the other room because they didn’t want towatch.They would surely have rather been somewhere even further away, but they couldn’t be; this spell needed both their power and theirintent,so they had to be here, they had to be part of it.
But they had found this way to keep their eyes shut and their noses pinched. They just had to be willing to hand over their work to these eight people, the people who were so hungry for council seats and power that they were willing to get their hands really dirty. And everyone over in that room was willing to do that, just so long astheygot to walk out ofthat other room as enclavers, with their futures of safety and luxury assured. So they wanted their brick to stay right where it was, and that was why I could barely move it.
Liu’s family had put themselves in front of me with their backs to the council members, except for her uncle, who had turned to face the other three. He began leading them in an intricate flowing pattern something like a group of people doing tai chi, but perfectly synchronized. It was a mana-building exercise that they’d clearly practiced together for years and years, slow and very deliberate, and as the council members struggled out of the stone one by one, itsnaggedthem, and they had to join in.
I had to look away because I could feel it trying to nabme,too. I put my head down concentrating and kept dragging the brick up the side, millimeter by millimeter. It was going to take an agonizingly long time to get Liu out, if I could do it at all. They’d already filled the top of the disk almost halfway. The room was so dim I couldn’t be sure, but there might have been something wet trickling out of those slots at the bottom, those slots that hadn’t only been made to let out air. I wanted to burst into tears. “I’m coming, Liu, hold on,” I panted out, in case she could hear me. “I’m coming. Precious! Precious, can you see her?”
Precious put her head out of my pocket and jumped down to the disk, and then without even going down the side, she squeaked up at me urgently and put her paw down on the surface, and her white fur started glowing, literally. In the light, I could see the disk was engraved all over in Chinese characters.
I could make out enough of them to know that it wasn’t a single spell. It was like the gates of the Scholomance: a compilation of spells all doing the same thing, reinforcing one another, and even before Precious’s light faded out, I’d pickedout the same phrases being repeated over and over in different ones:eternal life, longevity, deathlessness,and I understood in a mingling of relief and rage: Liuwasalive in there. Because she wasn’t meant to get out of this too early. She was meant to dieslowly.Even if her body was being shattered and her hips and shoulders had been crushed under the weight of all these bricks, thesefuckingbricks that wouldn’tmove,and I gave a howl of rage and heaved the second brick up and over the edge. The disk even shifted slightly up, a millimeter maybe.
But that was only the second brick. My arms and back and legs were all shaking with effort, and my time was running out. Three of the council members had started chanting an incantation: they were still being forced to go along with the mana-building exercise, but it wasn’t going to stop them casting whatever they were doing, and from the words I could overhear, it wasn’t going to be very nice. These strangers who were trying to murder my friend, these strangers who agreed with Ophelia in New York, with Christopher Martel in London, with Sir Alfred Fucking Cooper Browning and the rulers and founders of every other enclave in the world, that it was worth doing this one horrible thing to someoneelse,to avoid all the other horrible things that might happen tothem.
I didn’t know what to do and I knew exactly what to do. I could have pointed at any one of them and just whacked them off the face of the earth with a careless flick of my hand, the insignificant insects that they were, troubling me. I could have sludged the marrow of their bones and let it run out of their bodies while they collapsed, writhing and screaming, the way they’d been about to do to Liu. I could have clawed their brains out of their skulls and made them into the obedient minions they had made out of everyone in thatother room who’d agreed to hand her over to be mangled in this ritual.
Instead I turned to the wall with the postbox hatch in it. It was made of stone, so my Roman spell wouldn’t do, but that was all right. We were inside an enclave, and that wall was barely even there; it was a polite fiction, a curtain for all of them to hide behind, in both directions, from each other and from what they were doing. “À la mort,” I said, and waved the whole thing out of existence.
Liu’s mum gave a squawk of protest. On the other side of the wall was a massive auditorium, nearly the size of the Maleficaria Studies room back at school, and it was full of wizards sitting in small orderly groups. The last few were waiting to come down to a stamping machine artifice that was making the bricks—which apparently weren’t the product of one wizard, buttenof them.
The council members had stopped chanting their spell, possibly out of bewilderment that I’d done anything this apparently stupid; the wizards on the other side were all still frozen in surprise and confusion. They were all laid out in the amphitheater as tidy as you like. For one instant I had a beautifully clear opening for anything I wanted to do, to any and all of them.
I clenched my hands into fists at my sides and used the stupid little compulsion spell I’d made up as a furious child, the one I’d eventually stopped using because every time I tried it, Mum gently untangled it before I could get anywhere with it, and then sat me down for a really long conversation about why we couldn’t force people to do what we wanted, which obviously every last one of these wankers had missed. “Do as I say, and not as I do, and what I want, I’ll make you,” I chanted, clearly a masterpiece of high arcana, only I pushed it out at all of them with a massive wall of New York’s manabehind it, and then I said in Chinese, “And what I want is for you to stop and listen to me, so I don’t have tokill you all!”
I meant it with total sincerity, and since they didn’t want me to kill them all either, that had the extremely helpful quality of aligning their self-interest with my compulsion. A total silence descended as everyone stopped; even the ordinary background rustling of clothing and faint coughs went still.
I dragged in a deep breath and gestured to the cylinder pit. “This is what you’re doing. You’ve put a living girl inside that thing, someone who trusted you, someone who wanted to help you, and you’re crushing her slowly. You’reall doing it.All of you. That’s what you’re doing to make your enclave. That’s what you’re putting at the very heart of it. Torture, and pain, and betrayal, and—”
I stopped. I’d been going to saymurder,only I understood, suddenly, with a terrible nauseating clarity, that murder was the one thing that wasn’t on the agenda at all. Of course it wasn’t.Deathlessness, eternal life, longevity.
“A maw-mouth,” I said. The words came out of my mouth small and quiet, and they dropped into the silence of the room like stones going into a deep well. “You’re making a maw-mouth.”
It was obvious once I knew. The tiny slots cut in the bottom of the cylinder, for something to come oozing out. The sewer grating where they’d tied up four people, bound and gagged so they couldn’t shield themselves against the hungry newborn monster looking for its first meal. And then it would drop through the grate while it digested. Tidy. You wouldn’t have wanted it to turn round and have a go at the council members, after all. Surely the sewer dumped out somewhere into the real world, maybe into the streets of Beijing, where it would go creeping away to hunt amongst the independentwizards of the city, all those poor bastards hovering round the enclave hoping for work.
And as soon as I knew what they were doing, I also knew why. A maw-mouth tookeverything.It extracted all the mana you could make, everything that came from your desperate failing struggle to keep itout of you,and it kept squeezing you forever. It didn’t just get you and your agony, it got all the mana your agony could ever build, borrowed in advance. And they needed that to build an enclave…because the final working had to be done all in one go, by a single wizard.
I’d noticed that bit ages ago in the Golden Stone sutras:one voice calling to the void, in a single breath.A circle of wizards wouldn’t do. One caster only, convincing the void that no, really, this one part of it was fixed and permanent, even though the void was the exact opposite, and wanted to be nothing and everything all at once. Channeling a vast torrent of mana into that persuasion.
I simply hadn’t paid that particular constraint much attention, because it wasn’t going to be my problem. My problem was going to be making certain I didn’t get anything wrong out of the twenty-six different incantations that had to be combined into the casting. That was what I’d been working on, trying to learn. As soon as I’d got that nailed down, just hand me a truckload of mana and let me go, and I’d knock you up an enclave quick as you like.
But of course itwouldhave been a problem for any other wizard in the entire world. It made sense, after all, of why the sutras had been lost. That ancient long-ago wizard who’d written the sutras, who’d gone round India knocking up the first-ever constructed enclaves for other wizards—he’d been like me, atertiary-order entity,or at any rate someone who could cast that great final working. So even though he’dwritten it down for others, it had been useless, because no one else could make it work.
Those other wizards still desperately wanted to build enclaves of their own, though. Purochana had shown them itcouldbe done, you couldmakean enclave, so once they’d understood the general idea, they’d tried and tried and eventually some sufficiently clever and vicious bastard had found a solution. A way to get that much mana through a single wizard, to narrow the power down to that one singular point. Alas, the process produced a very unfortunate side effect, but oh well. You could shoo that nasty maw-mouth right out to fend for itself. And if it fended for itself by eating other wizards’ children, well, from inside your tidy new enclave you’d never have to hear them screaming.
There were tears running down my face. I wasn’t the only one. No one else was saying a word, but there was an amphitheater of faces staring down at me full of horror, refusal, recoiling. I could hear my own ragged choked breathing rasping back at me off the walls, mingled with theirs. The way you heard a maw-mouth coming from a distance, full of strangled human voices.
A maw-mouth is the worst thing that can happen to a wizard. They’re the monsters that keep us awake at night. Probably every last wizard in that enormous amphitheater had made it out of the Scholomance, running past Patience and Fortitude, inches away from endless hell. All of these wizards, they’d known that something bad was going to happen in here, that Liu wasn’t going to come out again, but they hadn’t knownhowbad. Surely they’d told themselves a story—it was just one death, one sacrifice, for everyone’s sake. Maybe there had been a lottery, something they’d told themselves was fair.
And the eight people in this room—who wouldn’t meetmy eyes when I looked at them, who’d known what they were really doing—they’d told themselves a different story: Ophelia’s story. The story that every council member in every enclave had been telling themselves for thousands of years, since the very first time someone hadbuiltan enclave out of death instead of gold. It was theirresponsibilityto do the terrible thing for everyone else. To bear the scars of it like a burden, as if there was something noble in doing something so horrible that most people couldn’t stand doing it, for the sake of those squeamish people.
I wanted to sweep all of them off the face of the earth. But they were just ordinary people, after all. The people in this room weren’t any worse than the enclavers I’d known at school, andtheyhadn’t been any worse than the losers I’d known at school, except that they’d been enclavers, and that hadn’t been their choice, not really, or at least not a human choice that ordinary people made. The enclavers had been born enclavers, and the losers had been born outside, and I was more or less the only loser in the world who hadchosennot to be an enclaver.
And that was a choice I hadn’t wantedmyself.I’d tried not to make it. It was Mum’s choice, and I knew that at the heart, that was the choice to care about, to forgive, even the Philippa Waxes and Claire Browns of the world; even theOphelias;the most horrid and miserable people, who didn’t deserve to be forgiven, because otherwise no one deserved to be forgiven.
And if Mumhadn’tmade that choice—if she had ever chosennotto forgive someone, if she’d chosen to refuse healing and care to someone because they had been just too awful—then the worst thing that would have happened was, that one person would have gone off into the world, sick and desperate. But forme—my choice was to find some way to forgive these people, these horrible people, or sail out and startblasting the whole world bare. Because enclaves all over the world, every enclave built for thousands of years, had been made this same way.Enclaves are built with malia,Mum had said, and how right she’d been. If I was going to eradicate this one, whywouldn’tI keep going? The people in this room weren’t any worse than the people in the cold polished vaults of London, the ones who’d been so grateful for my help to fight off a maw-mouth attheirgates, after they’d made one of their own and sent it roaming the world.
So why wouldn’t I go back to London and rip it down, with every man, woman, and child inside its walls? Why wouldn’t I head to New York straight after, and go down the line from there, bringing death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world, right on schedule? Just because I hadn’t watched their ceremony firsthand, just because they hadn’t picked on my own friend? That would make me exactly like these people in the amphitheater, hiding behind their comforting wall.
But Iwaslike those people, surely. The only difference was the wall. I didn’t have one. I had to hold the power and I had to commit the act, both, inside my own body and mind. I couldn’t hand a tidy bit of mana over to someone else to do the dirty work, and I also couldn’t tell myself that I was just doing what everyone else wanted me to do, and if I didn’t, someone else would. I had to look my own selfishness in the face, each and every time. And I didn’t like doing it, did I? The wall wasn’t for nothing, after all.
