Page 53 of The Golden Enclaves
I gasped with the surge and said it again,stay,even though I couldn’t hear myself speaking anymore; more hands and voices were coming, everyone on Shanghai’s side streamingto join in, power crackling through the line into me, and then Liesel’s voice was calling out over the noise, “Not in a single line! Get closer and spread out!” and she pushed in next to me, putting a hand directly on my back, another supporting branch. Alfie was right next to her, reaching to touch me as well with Sarah gripping his free hand. In another moment, his father was there too in a line behind him. Wizards from both sides were crowding in now, all of us saying it together: “Stay,” getting louder and louder even as the Scholomance and Orion both shook from their foundations.
He was getting heavier and heavier in my grasp, as if I was trying to hold him up, along with the entire school and all those other enclaves loaded up on his shoulders, against the dragging undertow of all the sloshing power of stolen mana draining away from under them. But everyone behind me was trying to help, trying to hold them—and then Ophelia and Balthasar were there, too. But they didn’t join the chain: instead they came all the way up and put their own hands directly on Orion, next to mine.
And then Aadhya, my darling Aad who’d taken that first mad flyer on me, gritted her teeth and put her hand on Orion too, and other people started to grab on to them, spreading out the weight, pouring in more mana. We were all holding on to him and just saying it over and over,stay,in all the languages of the world, and beneath our feet a golden light was rising up out of the widening cracks in the carved inscriptions, filling them in, starting to make them whole, and there was light all around us, warm, full of hope, as Orion lurched forward under my hands, like someone who’d just been pulled back onto solid footing. He gasped and reached out to me, reached his hands out to cup my face, and he said in a ragged, broken voice, choosing, “I’ll stay. El, I’ll stay,” and kissed me, through our tears.
The taxi dropped me and Mumat the gates at the end of the drive, a cloudpuff of small green birds going up out of the trees as we stopped. We waited until the car had driven away before we opened the gates and walked down to the compound together, between the high walls and the jungle singing on either side. It was drizzling a little, but we didn’t open our umbrellas, the mist and breeze cool and pleasant on our skin in the heat. We didn’t rush. Mum had got more and more quiet as we came, and she’d closed her eyes to meditate a few times in the car on the way. She didn’t stop now, but she took my hand, gripping it a little too tight.
We didn’t make it quite halfway before my grandmother was running down the drive to meet us, as if she’d been lying in wait with eyes on the road: maybe those birds. She stopped a few lengths away, hesitant, looking at Mum and me with her eyes wet and uncertain too, her arms half held out, and then I felt Mum take a deep breath and let it out, a deliberate release of fear and pain, and she let go of me and steppedforward with her own hands held out. Sitabai almost jumped to meet her, reaching out to grasp them.
The first night, Sitabai and my grandfather had us to a quiet dinner in their own living room; the second night we asked in a handful of other people, second and third cousins who were just a few years older than me. The gathering size gradually ramped up over the course of the visit, until we were eating with the whole family in the courtyard on the last night.
Mum had sat and talked with Deepthi that whole morning, and then she’d gone out into the jungle, to a little waterfall cliff that my grandfather had shown us that he’d said Dad had loved. She’d spent the rest of the day there and come back with her peace—not quite intact, maybe, but expanded, I thought. She’d hugged me and whispered, “I’m glad I came.”
I wasn’t certain that I was myself, yet, but I thought I might have to keep coming back to make sure.
But I’d had to come back at least the once. I’d put it off as long as I could. I’d been sleeping with the sutras under my pillow again, just like at school. But on that last night, as the platters and the younger children all got carried off to be washed and put away for the night, I finally made myself take the sutras out of their box, and I took them over to where Deepthi was sitting in her sheltered corner of the courtyard, the breezes whispering in through slatted walls.
I sat next to her while she held the book in her lap and opened it to the back with the tidy insertion Liesel had written up, ten solid pages full of casting diagrams and new incantations. I’d spent almost a month working on it with her and Liu and Aadhya: most of it inside London enclave, grimly seasick every single minute with the hideous feeling of all their maw-mouths still lingeringout there,somewhere in the world, gnawing endlessly on their victims.
“I can’t help you with Munich, but,” I’d said, on my way toasking what she’d want for helping me, and Liesel had just waved an irritated hand as if she wasn’t letting go of a years-long dream of revenge and said, “Enough. Of course we have more important things to do,” and thewein that sentence was one that Icouldbe a part of, after all.
Alfie had talked his dad into letting us come in and look at all of London’s foundation stones, putting together a plan for replacing them. The first one in the council chamber, at the heart of that old Roman villa at the bottom, carved of limestone that had been worn horribly soft over the centuries with the Latin spells going muddled around the edges; the ragstone blocks from the Conquest and the Tudor age that now stood underneath their massive library and the green plaza of the dead children—the dead children thatwere,after all, only the ones they’d chosen to put on display, and not all the ones who’d died to keep the enclave up.
The biggest one was the one forged of steel, the one that was buckled down the center, deeply deformed: the one they’d built on Fortitude’s back, in 1908, to put up their fairy-tale gardens in the void. That one didn’t make me queasy anymore. All its engraved spells were gone, blurred together as if someone had melted them in a forge, but if you looked at it from a slant, you could almost make out a single word instead:STAY.As if the golden spell we’d all cast together, before the gates of the Scholomance, had gone rolling all the way down through the terrible chain of death, through Orion and Patience and whatever had been left of Fortitude, and fixed the foundation back into the void.
But there were five more besides that, the foundation stones laid hurriedly down in the midst of the war. They’d been built with less mana, so they couldn’t support more than a corridor or two on their own, but the maw-mouths had gone out into the world all the same. And they werestillout in the world, somewhere. Still devouring all the victims they’d ever taken, and looking always for more.
So Aadhya and Liesel had helped me tease apart the sutras to find the lines of power in the spells, those beautiful golden lines I held in my hands as I built a new foundation, as I spoke to the void and asked it tostay.And Liu had worked out a way you could perform the spells with achorusof casters at the center, instead of a single voice. As long as they wereallstrict mana.
“Sanjay and Pallavi have already got the incantations down,” I said: two of my many, many cousins, who both happened to be specialists in Vedic Sanskrit incantations. “They’ll be able to teach the others.”
Deepthi nodded, her face sad, and reached out to cup my face with her cheek. “Are you content?” she asked me softly.
I didn’t answer her right away. I wasn’t sure. I put my hand out to touch the sutras again, let my fingers stroke over the familiar pattern of the cover again; I could have drawn it with my eyes closed by now. That was still the work I wanted, the work I could have done with joy. But other peoplecoulddo that work, now. And I had to be glad about that. I’d had to find a way for other people to do it, because if I was the only one, like Purochana had been, the only wizard in a thousand years able to build enclaves of golden stone, then after I was gone—everyone else would go back to the way they already had. They’d start making maw-mouths once again. And I knew that for bloody certain, because they were ready to do itnow,while I was still right here.
Everyone had joined in to help during that last panic at the doors of the Scholomance, down to the most vicious and selfish council member in the world, but that was because they’d been trapped in a cavern about to come in on their heads, and it had been a matter of immediate self-preservation. But now—well, the rulers of forty enclaves had been in that cavern, with unlimited access to their enclaves’ mana stores. I didn’t know how much mana it had taken to replace all that old stolen power underneath the Scholomance, underneath the other enclaves, but I suspected most of their coffers were empty. And they wanted to refill them.
Literally the morning after, I’d been sitting up in the highest corner of the Sintra gardens, with the dust of the near-collapse still clinging to my skin, when Antonio and Caterina had come to me bright-eyed and eager to ask if I’d be willing to join them as a founding council member in a new enclave they wanted to put up. They wanted to build a sort of wizard daycare, where indie wizards who didn’t have extended family could drop their little kids off for the week and pick them up for the weekends and holidays when they had more time to look after them. If it went well, they could start one on every continent! A whole franchise of enclaves!
And they could actually do it, they assured me, because the council members of their two enclaves had offered to give them awonderfulrate on the enclave-building spells.
They went on for several minutes just brimming over with grand plans and idealism before they noticed my expression and also the simmer of storm clouds gathering overhead, and trailed off uncertainly. If it had been anyone else, I’d probably have howled them off the face of the earth; as it was, I told them to go and ask Aadhya or Liesel why that was an extremely bad idea, and they nodded and hurried away and left me to seethe my way through realizing that my career goals had gone obsolete.
If they were left to their own devices, enclaves would go on selling the same old spells, because that was how enclaves got loads of their mana. And wizards on the outside would go on buying them, because they wanted huge modernenclaves, and they wouldn’t know exactly what they were buying—they wouldn’twantto know—until they’d already poured half the mana that they’d raised over decades into the price, and couldn’t get it back out again. And then they’d get to make Shanfeng’s choice: to let their children die in the maw-mouths built by other enclaves, or make a new one of their own.
I’d tried to stop it with words, with explanations. But it was almost impossible even just to tell people about the maw-mouths underneath the enclaves. The compulsion spells were even nastier than we’d realized. All the people in charge of things like, for instance, theJournal of Maleficaria Studies,or the secret Facebook group that all the older wizards were in, werecouncil members,all of whom had needed to sign on to the compulsions before they were allowed to attain those rarefied positions. And it wasn’t just that they couldn’t tell other people, they were compelled tohidethe information. Anytime we tried to post something online, it would get taken down or altered, and our accounts kept getting locked and deleted.
And the harder we tried, the worse it got. I was on my third phone now because the two before had been mysteriously fried shortly after I’d used them to group-text a few dozen people. The only reliable way I’d found for sharing the information was literally for one of us who already knew to personally tell people, face-to-face. And we were already being called trolls and overimaginative children, to boot. It wasn’t going to be very hard for people to put that comforting wall back up, in front of their own eyes or someone else’s.
I’d tried going at it from the other direction, too. I’d passed the word to every council member in front of the Scholomance gates that I was willing to replace their foundation stones, too, and all they’d need to do was gather the mana to do it with. And I’d passed the word around to all theindependent wizards, too, as best I could: I would build them a brand-new Golden Stone enclave with just a few years’ worth of mana beneath it.
I’d had a grand total of zero takers so far. To get the mana to replace a foundation stone, most of the enclaves would have to open their doors to three times as many wizards. And one of the little golden enclaves wouldn’t have enough room to do more than tuck kids in at night. There were a few wizard circles, mostly ones formed by our classmates, who hadstartedon saving up the mana. But all the ones that already had it—well, they were having a hard time agreeing to spend it on a golden enclave, when the old enclaves were offering the spells to build massive modern ones at cut-rate prices.
It wasn’t going to stop. It wasn’t ever going to stop, not if Ileft them to their own devices.So someone else would have to do the work that I’d wanted to do, the work of building that sang to me, and I would have to go and do the work I didn’t want, the terrible work that only I could do.
Because there was one and only one thing that would make enclavers throw their doors wide open to all the independent wizards of the world, replace their foundations, and turn their enclaves into shelter for them all.Fear.Of the unknown maleficer, the scourge of enclaves, still roaming the world, about to bring them down. That was why they’d done it in Beijing, and that was why they’d done it in Dubai: because they hadn’t had any other choice. They’d had to share or watch their whole enclave go sliding off into the dark. And when that was your choice, suddenly sharing didn’t look so intolerable after all. That was how Alfie had talked Sir Richard and the rest of London council around to the urgent necessity of replacing all of those eight remaining maw-mouth foundations: he’d persuaded them that their odds of getting hitagainwere too high for comfort.
So I couldn’t do the work I wanted myself, but I could make room for the work in the world: by fulfilling Deepthi’s prophecy and bringing death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world. By hunting down the maw-mouths that stood beneath them.
