Page 50 of The Golden Enclaves
He doled out each word at a measured pace, as if he had to keep a firm control over them. It had been fifty years ago, but the tendons in his neck were standing out sharply, and every internal organ in my belly flopped itself completely over in sympathy, sharing the memory of that same horror. I wanted to just scream in his face, or vomit.
“But I couldn’t do it,” he said.
I stared at him. “What?”
“It was a big maw-mouth. It had eaten a lot of lives whenit broke into Shanghai. Too many: I couldn’t kill them all. And my circle was running out of mana,” he said. “That’s how you destroy them, isn’t it? You just kill everyone inside.”
“I used to,” I said, blankly. I was still trying to deal with the idea that apparently an entire circle of wizardshadn’tbeen enough to replicate my method. “Now—I just tell them they’re already dead.”
He nodded in understanding. “But that works for you, surely, because you’ve already done it the hard way, once. You speak to them now from the certainty of their death. I couldn’t do the same. But I had already studied enclave-building by then. I knew the fundamental challenges of establishing a foundation in the void. So when I got close enough to the core of the maw-mouth, I understood what I was looking at. The foundation of some other enclave. The longing of a circle of wizards for a place where they and their children can be safe and powerful. The bottomless hunger that makes us willing to devour others down to their bones.”
He was right, I suppose, but I didn’t see what good that understanding would do you when you were six days deep inside a maw-mouth and running out of mana. “Whatdidyou do?”
“I found only one way to defeat that longing,” he said, tiredly, a sound of years of looking in his voice. “By overwhelming it with our own. I had been working on a tool to clarify the will of a wizard, to amplify it—”
“A reviser,” I blurted, remembering Zixuan using his version against me in the gym.
“Yes. I had one with me. It didn’t help with the killing. Killing is already very simple. But once I was in range of the core—I was able to use it to amplifyourlonging, the longing of my entire circle, to have our home back. To have our ownplace of shelter and power. And there were just enough of us in my circle that, with the help of my reviser, our longingreplacedthe longing at the core. We created a new foundation for Shanghai upon it. But—”
“The maw-mouthwasn’tdestroyed,” I said, sickened, in understanding.
“No. But it was much smaller. The process required as much mana as founding an enclave—and it extracted that mana from the maw-mouth itself. I was left outside. We were able to translocate what was left of it away, before it could take any of us, and put wards up to keep it out. We had our enclave back, even stronger than before, with a doubled foundation. But later that same day, as I lay weeping alone, one of my friends came and whispered to me that another enclave had been destroyed. The enclave in San Diego—on the other side of the world.”
It hadn’t occurred to me before how odd it was to have a maw-mouth from Bangkok squeezing through the Scholomance gates in Portugal, a maw-mouth from Beijing gnawing at London’s gate. But as soon as he said it, with emphasis, I understood at once.
Shanfeng nodded, seeing it in my face. “After the Scholomance was built, more wizard children began to survive. And so more enclaves began to be built. After the Second World War, there was a new one going up in America every five years, sometimes every three years. Their neighbors helped them—for a price. But of course they didn’t want those new maw-mouths lurking nearby. So they opened great portals and sent them far away. To countries with few enclaves, or where the old enclaves had been ruined and destroyed, or made weak, and there was no one who had the power to object. Like China.”
I didn’t demand any proof. It was perfectly obvious. “So you built enclaves enough to even the score, and sent your maw-mouths back the other way.”
“I’ve tried to negotiate agreements with other major enclaves to slow down the pace of enclave creation,” Shanfeng said. “But it doesn’t work. Why would a circle of wizards in Dublin, with enough mana saved, agree to wait and die so that a circle in Guangzhou could have an enclave and live? And though London enclave could have agreed to open their doors to the wizards of the Dublin circle, to give them a home, instead they sold them the enclave spells to build a new one of their own, in exchange for years of mana. Which London needed to pay off their war debts, because they had built five new entrances to protect themselves, and sent the maw-mouths all to India.”
“Wait,” I said, appalled. “Eachentrance—”
“Yes. For each opening to the void, there must be a foundation. And a maw-mouth beneath it.”
That was why Yancy and her crew could wriggle through the old, closed-off doors, I realized. Not just because of mana and memory. Because the maw-mouths beneath London’s gates werestill out there,devouring wizards, all to save London’s fairy gardens from going down under Nazi bombs.
“We have all made as many enclaves as we could, as quickly as we could, even though we knew that in the end, we were building our own destruction together,” Shanfeng said. “And now the pace of that destruction will come more quickly. Because you have killed so many maleficaria, and the maw-mouths have less to eat. So they will have to hunt wizards instead.”
Like the maw-mouth attacking London’s damaged wards, and the one crawling over my family’s compound outside Mumbai. There’d been an arms race going among theenclaves of the world, a race heading to the bottom, and I’d come blundering in and pushed it along faster. I put my hands up, pushing my hair back from my face as if that would give me more air, let me breathe out against the squeezing pressure that was really coming from inside my skull, even if it felt like an external force.
“That isn’t your fault,” Shanfeng said. “It’s ours. None of us could find a way to stop. We debated and quarreled and cheated and made excuses—and the enclaves went up. And so Ophelia decided that she had to break the stalemate—toforceus to stop.” He smiled wryly. “At least, to forceenoughof us to stop. That was what she sought to do.”
“With Orion,” I said, understanding instantly:thiswas theinformationhe really wanted me to have. And I knew that I wasn’t going to want it at all, but I couldn’t walk away from it, either. “What did she do to him?”
“I must first explain the principle,” Shanfeng said. “Fundamentally, a maw-mouth is a method of establishing a point of harmony in the void—a place in the void that can support material reality. The foundation stone is the first core piece of reality that we ask the void to support. Then you can build out from there. But the foundation doesn’t need to belarge.It could be as small as a single atom. You simply couldn’t build a very big enclave on it. But Ophelia didn’t wish to build an enclave.”
“She wanted a weapon,” I said.
“She wanted a child,” Shanfeng said, correcting me mildly but insistently, refusing to take the opening I’d handed him, the chance to make Ophelia out to be a monster, as if he didn’t want it made that easy for himself or me. “An heir, if you will. A conscious reasoning mind that would carry out her goal, with the almost limitless power required to achieve it.”
He paused—working out how he was going to hit me with it, I reckon, while I worked at not screaming at him. “She took a single embryo, and sacrificed it to create a very small maw-mouth,” he said. “But where enclave-builders use that power to establish a foundation, she fed it back into the child she had crushed. That was how she fused the two together to create the being of her vision: a wizard directly in contact with the void. A wizard who was also a maw-mouth.”
I swallowed bile and horror. “How do you know?” I managed, a pathetic desperate stab at fending it off. “Did she give you a rundown?”
“No,” he said. “But we have eyes in New York, as they surely have eyes on us. The year that all the children died at graduation, we realized that someone—either from New York enclave, or with their connivance—had donesomething.We didn’t know what at first. Then we heard of the child, Ophelia’s child, who could kill maleficaria at the age of three. After that, we spent a great deal of effort investigating.”
I didn’t want to believe him. “I’m surprised you didn’t hurry up and make a human maw-mouth of your own,” I said through my teeth. “Couldn’t find someone to stomach it?”
