Page 6 of The Golden Enclaves
Their transport was waiting on the hardstanding, looking exactly as weird as they did. Actual posh mundanes—who do visit fairly regularly—would’ve come with a Land Rover or a massive camper van, wearing raw denim and clean trainers. Their car was pretending really hard to be something between an Edwardian racing car and a 1930s Americangangster car, with a ridiculously long bulbous nose and a cab that looked exactly big enough for one person to sit in comfortably.
But the racing car opened a door and let us inside, with no difficulty about room, even though there were now four of us to cram into it. I don’t mean we were suddenly in Narnia or the TARDIS or anything. You can’t actually create real space, no matter how much mana you have, and even if you’ve got some way into the void—limitless as far as anyone’s ever found out—that’s very much not a pleasant place to try to exist as a real person. Enclaves generally resort to buying up large luxury apartments in the vicinity anytime they want to expand, and borrowing that space to use internally, but the further away the real space is, the more expensive the borrowing gets. Not even London enclave would waste the gobs of mana it would take to build and use a car that would hop you into some massive physical space regardless of how far away you were from it.
The car had to make do with space borrowed from its own oversized bonnet, which wasn’t actually housing an engine, and a bit of psychic misdirection. When I got in, I was still just in a car, if an especially tidy one with polished brass fixtures and unnaturally pristine white leather seats: one of which was wide open for me, and came with the vague impression that everyone else was fairly crammed in. Likely we wereallfairly crammed in, and just being given the space in turn, whenever our brains started to notice.
Alfie got in last and pulled the door shut after him, and instantly we roared off like a cavalcade of jets. Clearly the equivalent of the car yelling, “Yes, here’s myengine,you can tell I’ve gota real enginedriving me along,” at anyone who cared enough to notice. As soon as we had gone into the trees and out of sight, the sound died completely, and then we were zipping along in perfect quiet, the countryside smearingpast in my peripheral vision. I glanced out the window once, not a minute after we’d left, and we were already on a road I didn’t know; the car was clearly sneaking through the world at unreasonable speeds. Probably that was why the antique design: the windows were minuscule and you couldn’t see in or out very easily.
“Is there enough time for you to tell me what’s going on?” I said, looking away to let the car get on with it.
“If weknew,” Sarah muttered. She’d also upgraded since school, her hair in a mass of coiled braids woven through with a golden chain, and a dress of woven gold straps and flowing green chiffon embroidered with subtly disguised gold runes; it had resolutely refused to tangle up her legs or get muddy or wet in the least. She was almost as tense as Alfie, although she was eyeing me in a way that suggested she wasn’t convinced they hadn’t just graduated from the frying pan to the fire.
But Alfie had jumped ahead and was already taking out one of my least or rather most favorite things: a power-sharer. It was notably nicer than any of the ones I’d seen at school: the band was woven silk bound every few centimeters with thin strips of platinum that had been coated with some kind of iridescent layer, with tiny raw opal chunks embedded in the center of each one. It was designed like most of them to pass for a watch in public; this one even had a round inky glass plate for a face, like some sleek digital thing set into an elaborate antique frame, only Apple hasn’t managed the trick of accessing the void yet, and that’s what was under the glass. I wasn’t sure what I thought of carrying a nice little hole in reality around with me, but I took it anyway, trying not towantit. Without much success. My fingers curled round it like claws the instant Alfie handed it over to me. I could feelthe power on the other side: all the power in London’s vast and ancient mana store, without a single barrier in the way.
“And they give new graduates unlimited lines now?” I said, with a façade of coolness, while I put it round my wrist and let it fasten itself up. It made the torrent of power I’d had in the Scholomance feel like a narrow creek.
Alfie was still staring at it himself, even as I put it on. “My father gave it to me,” he said, low and tight. Usually the first thing you do when you get out of school is to start eating like a team of horses, but his face hadn’t had time to fill in yet; his cheekbones were thin sharp lines under his skin. “It’s a family heirloom…” He stopped and looked up at me desperately. “Liesel told you there’s a maw-mouth?”
“What I’m not clear on is why your council’s not taken care of it themselves,” I said. “Therehavebeen maw-mouths killed by a circle before. London must be able to do it if anyone can.” All right, so the only recorded case in modern history was the one in Shanghai, and several wizards died in the process, but given the alternatives, you’d think it would have been worth a try.
“They’re trying! Do you think we’re stupid?” Sarah said to me angrily. “We aren’t looking to be told what any idiot can look up in theJournal of Maleficaria Studies.”
I think she’d have liked to pick a fight, and I’d have been happy to oblige her, but Liesel was already jumping in to lecture me instead. “This isn’t a maw-mouth coming out of nowhere. You think maw-mouths come after big enclaves, full of wizards, warded, all strong? They know better. I told you already, the enclave was hit by somethingelsefirst. If London wasn’t so old, so strong, the whole place would have gone, just like Salta and Bangkok. Salta didn’t just lose wards; the whole enclave collapsed. London is stronger, it didn’t come down, but the damage is still terrible. All the establishedthaumaturgical channels for the flow of mana have been disrupted! Do you not understand what that means?”
I did not, as it happens, understand what that meant, and judging by Alfie and Sarah’s faces, they weren’t completely clear on it themselves. None of us were thick or anything; it’s just that kids who go for valedictorian in the Scholomance aren’t on the same bell curve with the rest of us. I do strongly suspect that I know at least a dozen incantations that would disrupt established thaumaturgical channels very thoroughly, but those are the kind of spells I avoid thinking about as much as possible. “Well, it sounds bad,” I said dryly. “Could you spare a detail or two?”
“No, and I shouldn’t have to,” Liesel said. “You can feel it anywhere in the place. You can feel it there!” She pointed at the power-sharer on my wrist. The only thing I’d noticed myself was the hideously alluring promise of infinite power, but I put my fingertips on the blank face and shut my eyes, trying a small pull—I would’ve quite liked to pull alot—and instantly I did feel it. The power was there, endless oceans, but the oceans were churning, ninety-foot swells rising and crashing down again, whirling into maelstroms.
“You see?” Liesel said as I opened my eyes again. “I have not seen myself, but the damage must be somewhere in the enclave foundations. This maleficer has found some way to damage them, so they can get at the mana store.”
Which did make perfect sense. Even the most vile maleficer in the world wouldn’t go around picking fights with an entire enclave for no reason. But if they had worked out a way to get at the mana store of an enclave—absolutely. The bigger the better.
“Most likely they are staging an attack on the foundation point—the place in the void where the enclave is established. Such an attack would resonate throughout the enclave, throweverything off at once, the people and the artifice, all the wards.” Liesel moved her hands together back and forth, like sloshing a bucket around. “And then the maleficer can strike at the mana store and steal as much as they can while the rest of the enclave is disrupted. So London did not collapse, because it is old enough and large enough that it has more than one foundation point, but it will still be months settling. And in the meantime—”
“The maw-mouth hit you,” I finished.
Sarah had managed to cool off a bit in the interval. “Three wizards have already gone in, one after another, with a circle backing them,” she said to me, more controlled. “They’re all dead. All three, and a lot of the circles, too. More than a dozen senior wizards, we think.”
“Youthink?”
“They’re not exactly holding normal council sessions in the middle of this!” Alfie said. “All that we know for certain is that the first three tries didn’t work, and—and there’s only time for one more attempt.” His voice wobbled around it. “Tonight. With three full circles, reinforcing each other. They’ll all draw down as much mana as they can hold beforehand to try to avoid the disruptions. But…but Liesel thinks…”
“It’s not going to work,” Liesel said brutally. “Of course it’s not going to work. Three times they’ve tried already, and each one failed in less than a day. In Shanghai, it took weeks to get at the core of the maw-mouth, and it only takes one bad moment for everything to go wrong. His shield flickers for a moment, the maw-mouth takes him, and then it will drain the circles until the others break. With three circles, he will last a little longer, but he still won’t get to the core in time.”
Alfie swallowed hard and said without looking at me, “It’s—my father is—he’ll be going in. He’s volunteered.”
“It’s a stupid waste,” Liesel said.
“But it’s all right for me, is it?” I said, sourly. I didn’t feel like being sorry for Alfie or his dad.
Liesel snorted. “You killed that maw-mouth at graduation in five minutes, with mana you were pulling from a crowd of stupid frightened children!”
“It was barely the size of a Shetland pony! Oddly I have the feeling that the maw-mouth that’s killed a dozen senior wizards in London is a tiny bit bigger.”
“So what?” Liesel said contemptuously. “Your chances are still better. You’re not going to try?”
I scowled at her with enormous violence, because of course I had to try, but my expression was obviously open to misinterpretation; Alfie leaned forward and grabbed my hand in both of his and said, in ragged desperation, “El—I don’t know what you’d want, I don’t know what I can do, what anyone could do, to pay you back, but—I’ll find a way. Anything. If the council won’t make it good somehow, I’ll do it myself. My word and my mana on it.”
Which might sound stupid and old-fashioned, but wasn’t in the least.My word and my mana on itis a perfectly valid incantation, when you do it properly and mean it. It’s as valid as, for instance, an open-ended summoning, where you put everything you possibly have on the line to get what you want, only in this case what Alfie wanted was me, helping him, and to get it, he’d just offered to meet whatever the market rate for killing a maw-mouth would be.
