Page 45 of The Golden Enclaves
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “After that…I’ve got to do something about Orion.”
“You cannot go back to New York,” Liesel said immediately.
“So I’ve been told,” I said. “Any better ideas for me?”
She didn’t have one off the top of her head, so we hung up. I did try to go back to sleep. It was still hot, but I was on a hanging bed on a porch outside my grandmother’s room, draped with vining flowers and thin shimmery netting that had been imbued with a gentle spell encouraging mosquitoes to go elsewhere and dragonflies to come near: they darted around, the swaying lamp shining iridescent off their bodies, and the fountain gurgling was distantly audible, one courtyard over. It wasn’t like Wales at all, except it was just like it,just like being in the yurt. There wasn’t any evil lurking down beneath my feet.
I was still so exhausted that my skin felt scraped-tender, but my brain was humming as if the dragonflies had got inside my skull. The real answer to Liesel’s question was, I hadn’t the foggiest clue what I was going to do next. I had only just barely grasped what was going on. When I destroyed the maw-mouths, I wasn’t just destroying the monster. I was undoing the grotesque lie of deathlessness that had created them in the first place, the lie that anchored the enclave foundations into the void. And so…down went the enclave, and all the enclavers with it, from the most guilt-stained council member to the most innocent child. Sudarat, that poor kid, telling me her story last year in the gym:I took my grandmother’s dog for a walk and when I came back, everyone was gone.Her grandmother, her mother and father, her little brother, her home. I’d done that to her, left her standing alone in the street with a small dog, utterly bereft in a world full of things that wanted to devour her.
But I couldn’t besorryfor it, could I, because my other choice had been standing by while the maw-mouth that kept her home standing devoured dozens of equally innocent freshmen and piled them into the endless agony of feasting going on and on inside its belly. Maw-mouths never got full. They never stopped hunting. Nothing killed them. Except me.
But now if someone called to beg my help with killing one, I’d know that I was taking out an enclave along with it, and everyone inside. I’d savagely resented enclavers at school, but they were still just people. And even if an enclave had been started on a heap of malia, I didn’t see what the use was in just smashing the whole place apart. It wasn’t the fault of the buildings, or even of most of the people inside them. I’d been caught by the dream of London’s fairy gardens, eventhough I was also the one who had wrecked their wards by frantically ripping lives out of Fortitude at graduation: the maw-mouth they must have tucked inside the Scholomance to feed.
I wasn’t sorry to have saved their gardens; I wasn’t sorry Beijing and Dubai were still standing, now with more people safe inside them. And Iwassorry about Salta and Bangkok. But I also wasn’t sorry I’d destroyed the maw-mouths. The people who’d died in Salta and Bangkok had onlydied.They weren’t being endlessly tortured to death so someone else could live in luxury on their graves. Death was what youhopedfor, if you were inside a maw-mouth. Death was your only chance of escape.
So what did all of that mean? I knew what Mum’s answer would be:first, do no harm.But that answer didn’t work for me. If someone called me in desperation, trapped with a maw-mouth coming for them, I couldn’t let it get them. But if I destroyed it—I’d be sending an entire enclave tipping off into the void, and very likely with every last person in it. My own personal trolley problem to solve.
I gave up on any more sleep and went to go and sit by the fountain, letting the sound of the water fill my ears. I opened the sutras, turning the pages and looking at them without trying to read them, just seeing them as art, the sweeping beautiful lines and the gleam of gold and vivid jeweled colors in the ink. A shining promise of safety that people were ready to buy with murder. And they wouldn’t stop making that bargain, because they couldn’t get it any other way. I couldn’t build enclaves for all of them, I couldn’t even fix all their enclaves, and they wouldn’t want my enclaves anyway. Surely there were already people in London and Beijing and Dubai who were starting to feel resentful and angry about the space they’d lost, the power they’d have toshare.Wizards whoknew the secret of building enormous enclaves, who knew all the spells, and could cast them again. I didn’t know how to stop any of it.
The sky was coming on towards dawn, birdsong rising, and Deepthi came slowly out of the inner courtyard and sat creakily down with me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk to her. She’d shaped my entire life with a handful of words, and even if she’d done it to save me from horror, I couldn’t quite make myself be grateful. I didn’t want her doing it again.
She didn’t say anything though, just sat with me, being with me the way Mum did, and slowly a sense came growing over me that she’d gone through this before. All her life, she’d had to choose for the people she loved, knowing she might kill the love in them while she did it. My grandfather hadn’t walked out of the house last night after all, but he hadn’t forgiven her. He’d known that her prophecies sometimes came true slantwise, but he hadn’t been able to imagine that she’d say those words, condemn his son’s only child, if they hadn’t been true in spirit and not just in the letter.He would have taken you up the mountain and holding you in his arms, leapt.That was the only answer he’d found inside himself, the only way he could have borne to save the world from me.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to forgive her either. Like Sudarat might not forgive me, when she knew the truth. Like the seniors from Salta, who’d escaped the Scholomance only to find their home destroyed and their families gone.
“How do you stand it?” I asked Deepthi abruptly.
“Sometimes I didn’t,” she said. “Sometimes I’ve tried to make others choose, even when I knew that would be enough to take the choice away. And when I did that…I lived with what I had seen, when it came to be in the world. So, when I cannot bear to do that, I choose. And then I hope I have done well.”
That wasn’t especially comforting, as a road map. At least all Deepthi was doing was saying words to people; they still went off and made their own choices. I was going to be tearing down enclaves with my own hands, every time I took out a maw-mouth. Could I make up for it by putting up new ones?
I handed Deepthi the sutras and let her hold them on her lap; her mouth shaped the words of the Sanskrit as she turned the pages. “Arjun dreamed of them,” she said. “Even as a boy. Ever since he heard the story of our old home.Aaji, one day we will live in a golden enclave again.If I put him to bed, he would ask me if I had seen it. If I told him no, he would say,not yet.”
“I’ll make one for you,” I said, my throat tight.
She closed them and stroked the cover as reverently as I could have asked, although her eyes were wet. But then she reached out over them to take my hand in both of hers. “But not with this,” she said softly.
I looked down: she was holding my left hand. The one with the New York power-sharer on it. I swallowed. I hadn’t really been pulling from it. I’d put Dubai and Beijing up with their own mana, not mana taken from New York. I’d got to Mumbai on my own mana. And I’d killed the maw-mouth with my own, too. It wasn’t hard to kill them anymore, with my own new spell. Really I was just pointing out an obvious fact. Of course they were dead; they’d been crushed into jelly. Just like of course you couldn’t build a house in the void. It was a transparent lie, the same lie on both sides: the lie ofdeathlessness.
But…I hadn’t taken the power-sharer off, either. I’d had it there in case I needed it. Even now that I knew what Ophelia had done to help fill the mana store that was feeding this one. I slowly unclasped it and took it off my wrist. I held it in my hands, and then I flicked it out of existence. It wasn’thard. A jerk of my hand and barely a whisper of mana and it was gone.
Deepthi gave a small sigh that was relief, as if she’d watched me get safely over a hurdle she hadn’t known for certain I would take. “Our family has mana saved,” she said. “We will build more. And when we have enough, if the universe wills, you will come back and raise it for us.”
I nodded, and then I said, “Where am I going?” because I couldn’t come back unless I left, but before she answered, my mobile rang again: Liesel calling. I looked at Deepthi; she nodded a little. I picked up. “That was quick,” I said, slowly.
“The war has started,” Liesel said without preamble. “Alfie just called me. The Scholomance has been attacked.”
“I didn’t do anything!” I said.
“Not by you! Why would I be calling to tell you?” I could all but see her exasperated expression. “Singapore and Melaka sent in a team to demolish the doors completely, so they would be released from their mana commitments. New York sent in a team to stop them, but the attackers fortified a position and called in allies. And Shanghai has declared they are coming.”
Liesel didn’t need to spell things out any further: I could see everything spiraling from there. All the enclavers were terrified. None of them knew who was destroying the enclaves, they all thought they might be next, and they all suspected other enclavers. The enclaves of the world had been a massive powder keg even before we’d gone into the Scholomance. I’d lit the fuse the moment I’d taken out Bangkok, and now the explosion was here, the real fulfillment of the prophecy: the death and destruction I’d already brought to all the enclaves of the world, even if I never killed another maw-mouth at all.
There’re all sortsof formal rules for enclave wars, codified in an elaborate treaty to which virtually every enclave in the world is a signatory, all of which get ignored the instant that doing so nets someone a significant victory. But some of the rules are just practical.
You don’t fight to take territory. If you attack someone else’s enclave, you aren’t hoping to move in, even if you manage to kill all the inhabitants, because they’ll have left precautionary vengeance spells all over the place. So the only sensible goal of an attack on another enclave is to smash it up completely and send it careening off into the void.
Or, if you’re less vicious and more practical, you’re looking to establish a position where youcoulddo that, and then you hold the enemy over a barrel and demand a ransom in mana, one so huge that paying it will seriously constrain their operations. You might have a team of seventeen artificers who arrange themselves in a particular pattern within the halls of the enclave; you might have a single incanter who manages to seize control of the mind of your Dominus andgets them to pull some sort of self-destructive maneuver; you might pour in a vat of unstoppable acid or send a small army of gnawing constructs, and some enclave at some point in time has done all of those things to another.
