Page 47 of The Golden Enclaves
“It’s better than everyone killing each other,” I snapped at him. “Why areyouhere? Zanzibar’s not got more than five seats, you can’t be on the hook for massive amounts of mana. What do you care if the Scholomance stays up or not? You’re not even allied with New YorkorShanghai!”
He made a gesture of exasperation at my stupidity, made more alarming because he was holding a massive ancientspear incongruous with his gorgeous red suit; it trailed faint shimmering sparkles with every movement, as if there were a second spear made out of light just barely out of alignment with the solid one. The point of it was made of old pitted iron that looked ready to crumble, so it wasn’t the literal weapon it looked like at first glance. He was an alchemist, so I had a strong suspicion it worked on metaphor, and let him pierce an enemy’s shielding so he could hit them with some compound from afar. “That’swhywe are here! That’s why all of us are here!”
“What, you’re trying to get on someone’s good side?” I said sarcastically, and then realized that was exactly it. They were one of those minor enclaves that Ophelia had talked about who hadn’t been bound by mystical long-term contracts. They’d been able to withhold their own mana contributions to the Scholomance, and now they had a temporary advantage over the intermediate enclaves that was out of proportion to their size. Which they were trying to parlay into a longer advantage, by using it in this one critical fight. They were trying to establish an early position on the battlefield, something valuable they’d have to offer when New York and Shanghai started going at it properly. “Andthat’swhy you’ve come out to kill people?”
“Whatshouldwe do?” he snapped. “You’re the one who wanted to destroy the Scholomance, change the world! Now everything will be different. So should we keep out of it, wait until the fighting is over and whoever wins decides to tell us what we must do? At least we will have something to say about it, if we can.”
He wasn’t wrong. He was ready to make a sack of termites out of himself as usual, but he wasn’t wrong. The Scholomance had been the major point of contention among the enclaves, the source of wrestling and arguments for acentury and change. But it had also been the major point of cooperation. Everythingwouldbe different, now that it wasn’t the one resource every enclaver needed and wanted, worth swallowing almost anything to get a piece of it. And for some people, different would be better, and for others, it would be worse. Zanzibar wasn’t stupid for recognizing that this was their best chance to buy themselves some room to maneuver.
And it wasn’t just them, of course—that was why the violence was looking so indiscriminate from the outside. Every single enclave was in it for themselves, and all the little ones were fighting it out here in the gardens while the bigger powers hung back, waiting to decide which of the surviving pieces they’d pick up. We weren’t trapped in the gardens. Anyone could pick up and go home, anytime they liked. But you weren’t getting furtherinunless you demonstrated your ability and your willingness to do whatever it took to get an invitation to the special VIP party. Just like the enclavers in the Scholomance, picking and choosing their graduation allies from among the losers left standing.
“Right,” I said grimly, understanding. “So you’re out here wrangling for scraps at the table. I don’t suppose you know what’s happening on the inside? You doknowthere’s an inside?”
He scowled at me—my tone might have been just the least bit snide—and then grudgingly said, “We know New York has set up a defense at the doors of the school. Shanghai and Jaipur are preparing an offensive.”
“Which they won’t launch until things have been sorted out here and they decide who’s to be let into the clubhouse,” I finished. “Well, I’m crashing the party instead, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it won’t be tidy. You should pack up your statuary and go home.”
An older man, who had a handful of scars he had deliberately left on—public notice that he was a significant fighter—said something to Khamis in what sounded like incredulous tones, jerking his chin towards me and then the statue, and without waiting for an answer slapped a lancing whip of sharp red light at me, which I expect would have done a great deal of damage to someone else. The basic idea of it resembled a lovely spell that I got my freshman year, which was intended for decapitating a hundred enemies at a go. I caught his line in my hand and let it wrap round twice, and turned it into that other spell, sending the cold blue-white fire searing back towards him. Wisely, he cut loose just before it would have reached him, and I snapped the line back into a tight coil around my hand and tossed it away. I followed that up by throwing another layer of stone on top of the wizard who had nearly broken out one of his arms; it silenced the cursing.
“If you want to stay here killing other people in the dark and letting them have at you back, I suppose you can suit yourself,” I snapped. “But come at me again, and you too can spend the rest of the night chipping your way out of a slab of granite.”
Khamis said something to the other two I didn’t understand, with a gesture towards me that made clear he wasn’t being complimentary. However, my demonstration had made an impression, especially on the third member of the party, an older woman, who argued with the other guy a bit and evidently carried the point; she brought a small flat black sack out from under her aba and tossed it over the statue—the sack remained the size of a small handbag, but the statue vanished into it completely—and then gave one of the handles to the fighter.
She meant to give the other to Khamis, but he said something in a surly way, and she nodded; then the two of them set off with the bag, and he turned back to me and said ungraciously, “All right, I’m coming with you.”
“You’re never,” I said, incredulous. “Why would you come with me?”
“Because you’re a stupid madwoman who can’t be trusted,” he snapped: just the reason to hang about someone, why couldn’t I see that? Then he added, deeply grudging, “Nkoyo asked me to!”
“What?”
“When I told Nkoyo I was coming, she asked me to look out for you,” he said. “You’re her friend, not that you deserve her. I told her if I saw you, I would.” The implication was very clearly that, much to his regret, his girlfriend had an unfortunate lunatic pal who badly needed someone holding her leash, and he, being the very best of all boyfriends, had been saddled with the job.
I couldgladlyhave spent the next hour explaining to Khamis in small words how littlehedeserved to have Nkoyo so much as speak to him, and how totally useless he’d be to me in every possible way, and if we hadn’t literally been in the middle of a massive firefight, I almost certainly would have had a go at it, at least a little. As it was, I just snapped at him, “Tell Nkoyo thanks ever so. If you want to tag along after me, you’ll have to keep up on your own,” and stormed away back into the garden.
By then, apparently some of the other enclavers had worked out what was going on and who I was. They’d presumably allheardabout me before now: their Scholomance students had come pouring back out all at once, to tell them that induction was canceled and so was school, forever, andhalf the mals in the world were gone. The details would have been of intense and urgent interest, and my name would have come up.
Of course, just because someone’s notable in school doesn’t always mean they’re notable on the outside; my name had gone on a list ofpeople to keep an eye on,rather than the very short list ofpeople who can have an effect on an enclave war.I’d have been bumped up in priority as word started to go round about London and Beijing and Dubai, but everything had happened too quick; the news couldn’t be more than sketchy gossip yet for most enclavers, and they all had what they thought were different and more pressing concerns.
But Khamis wasn’t the only one of my classmates in the field. You might not think an eighteen-year-old would be the best choice for serious combat, but an eighteen-year-old wizard fresh from the gauntlet of the Scholomance graduation hall is often in the best fighting trim of their lives. Some of them had seen me, and told the older enclavers on their crews, and aside from that, by now I’d circled past all their fortified positions four times, with increasing disregard for whether anyone noticed me.
It’s also possible that I literally shook the earth a little as I came stamping out of Zanzibar’s corner, and maybe I was giving off a bit of smoke and glowing with a visible greenish aura.
For whatever reason, as soon as I emerged, eleven attacks came flying, and these were very much meant for me personally—a wave of deliberate malice and destruction that would have set me on fire, crushed my bones into powder, tangled my mind into gibbering knots, opened the earth beneath my feet. And every last one was only the shadow and pale imitation of what I could have done to them in return. I felt them launch; I was ready to catch all of them and shredthem apart into raw mana, but only nine of them reached me. I looked round for the rest and saw a girl I didn’t know casting a psychic shield at my back, and a little way down the path Antonio from Guadalajara holding up a stone disk carved with a face, its mouth a square open hole sucking in the fire blast: they’d both been in our year.
At nearly the same moment, three other people yelled, “El!” beckoning to me from different parts of the path, other kids I recognized. I took a bit of the mana that Ihadsucked out of the ambush spells and threw up a common lux spell; it’s the easiest light spell there is, so much that even people who’ve never studied Latin use it, but I always used more complicated and expensive ones, because otherwise I got this: a blaze and a roaring like Guy Fawkes between my clapped hands, and then wide ribbons of neon light exploding away from me in zigzagging streaks, leaving behind a haze smelling of ozone, and the light itself a painfully bright churning orb like a miniature sun floating over my head, erupting with sinister flares of violet and green.
I amplified my voice and called out, “I’m not here to fight any of you, but if you haven’t the sense to go home, you’ll have to wait until I’ve gone to go back to killing each other.” There was an ominous roll of thunder for punctuation.
No more attacks flew, at least not immediately. The girl with the psychic shield darted over—I recognized her belatedly after I got a closer look at her face: she was an enclaver named Miranda from Austin who’d been waiting for her transition spells until after leaving school—with an anxious look over her shoulder, as if she’d gone against her own enclave’s orders. A moment later all the other seniors who’d been calling came out to join us, converging on where we were standing with Khamis. “If you need help, El, we’ll help,” Antonio said in Spanish. “What are you doing?”
I looked at them, all round me, and in some part of me, I wanted to say,No, I don’t need help. I don’t needyourhelp.Because they were enclavers, all of them, and not reluctant ones; they were here fighting to put their enclave on top. Because I didn’t want to need help. Because I did need help and if I took theirs, I’d be dragging them behind me into a fight I had no idea how to win. But I couldn’t say no. They had been here fighting, but they’d chosen to come out of the dark, offering to help me.
“There’s a tower dug down into the ground, somewhere round here,” I said, instead. “Help me find it.”
We were trying to find the way down for half an hour; during that time we fended off a handful of attacks without much trouble. That was all we accomplished. The problem was, all of my new allies were combat specialists, which is why they wereherein the first place. We would have made a really top-notch graduation team—even apart from me personally—but none of us were the kind of experienced artificers who could carefully and slowly untangle a massively complex working of access and concealment.
We were also all the impatient type. As the half-hour mark drew near, we all agreed amongst ourselves that after all the brute-force method was the right idea, and moved on to discussing which part of the gardens I should rip up first. We had just started transmuting a couple of litter bins into a giant pry bar, to serve as a sort of metaphorical lever, when Precious jumped out of my pocket and ran off.
