Page 9 of The Golden Enclaves
The only thing that helped me was that it all began to remind me forcibly of the wretched games of hide-and-seek I’d played as a kid in the commune, where none of the other kids really wanted me to play, but their parents, who loved Mum or had come to the commune to see her, would make them let me. So what they did was make it a game ofkeep away from Elinstead. All of them running and hiding in whispering small groups while I ran desperately from one place to another trying to find someone, anyone, and I knew what they were doing, but I pretended not to and kept trying to play anyway because it was the only playtime I could get; if I ever tried hiding myself, no one would ever come to find me, and they’d all just go play something else without telling me.
It felt insistently like that, with the maw-mouth’s voices sunk back into whispering and mutters and gasping breaths, just on the edge of my hearing and scraping at my brain. It made me soangry,more and more angry as I went, the grating miserableirritationof it building on layers and layers, just like it had back then, until Mum would have to come and get me and take me away because she felt me reaching incoherent rage from all the way across the commune. Only Mum wasn’t here. No one was here. It was only me hunting the sly whispering through the endless horrible murky corridors of this place, and they were deliberately making it go on and on, weren’t letting me find them; in a moment they’d be sniggering at me, at how pathetic I was for submitting to this, enjoying their game at my expense.
Then I rounded a corner and there they were—thereitwas, the hideous mass of the maw-mouth completely filling one of those stumpy dead ends, pulsing and seething and moaning, and for just that one instant, I wasgladI’d found it.
In that same instant, cornered, the whole thing came surging at me, attacking me openly—the way the other kids never had, because they’d all known, the way the maw-mouth had known, that if they ever gave me that chance, that excuse, I could hurt them in some terrible inhuman way. That there was something in me they didn’t dare to face head-on. But the maw-mouth gave me the excuse because it knew I didn’t need one, and for that one heartbeat, that one breath, too crammed full of rage for fear to really grab me again, I screamed at it, “Come on then! Come at me! You’redead,you sack of putrescence, you’realready dead,” pumping myself up like some drunk in a bar. I was going to slaughter and destroy this whole bloated monstrosity—
The whole thing disintegrated. I hadn’t even used any mana, really, but it came apart before it even reached me, the skin of it giving way like holes opening up in a shirt that had been mended with magic for two years too many and now had finally lost too much of itself to keep together, fraying completely apart in an instant. Eyes and mouths and limbs and organs spilled out horribly everywhere, a rotting wave of flesh pouring out like a torrent over the floor of the corridor andsloshingover my feet and my legs like a wave while I screamed again, in pure unadulterated horror this time. A single grotesque contorted body at the center bubbled up to the surface for a moment, in a fetal curl—just like the one I’d seen in the maw-mouth that I’d killed in the library. And then even that was coming apart too, disintegrating and sinking into the mass of corpse matter.
But one exhausted bloodshot eye and mouth, still justbarely linked together by a thin scrap of skin—enough to get a vague idea of the face they’d once been a part of together—floated by at knee height and looked up at me and said, “Please, please, let me out, please,” begging frantically, the way you would if you thought suddenly there was a chance, suddenly you might be able to escape from hell, there was a jailor at the door with a key who could be asked for mercy.
I covered my face with my hands and sobbed out a sickened breath and said it again, half choking, “You’re dead, you’re already dead.” The mouth opened in a round O of protest, but then it sagged and went slack, the eye went unfocused and empty, and they floated away onward: dead, already dead, just like I’d told them to be. The words were a spell; they’d become a spell in my mouth and my rage, and now they would live in me forever, this brutal killing spell I’d made myself—so much more suited to me, really, than the cool superior elegance of La Main de la Mort. Surely some much more refined maleficer had come up with that one, some man with a narrow black beard and a small mouth and a black velvet doublet embroidered with silver, looking with contempt down at his enemy. Someone who had never stood in the dead end of a corridor drenched in buckets of viscera, having to clean up after herself, killing the last few torture victims she hadn’t managed to get the first time round.
Icame out of the corridorstill dripping and sick. I’d thrown up three times, wading out of the horrible remains. I’d always hated, hated the Scholomance drains, the sprayers, the loud roaring bursts when the vacuums went on: all the machinery designed to clean up the messy bits the maleficaria left behind when they killed us. Now I longed for them. The ocean of rot the maw-mouth had left behind might go on sloshing in that empty corridor forever. It didn’t have anywhere to go, at least once it had reached its level. Rivulets of gore were draining away back to the main corridor, making thin sticky trails that ran down it.
I trudged down alongside them for a really long time, dull and plodding, before poor Precious, who’d been dragged along for all this, quivering inside my pocket, put her own nose out and squeaked at me, and it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting anywhere: I’d been going down at least twice as long as it had taken to walk the entire corridor the first time with Alfie.
I stopped and tried to think what to do. I still had thepower-sharer; I hadn’t even had to pull a drop of mana so far. My new murder spell was really efficient. I could’ve killed any number of maw-mouths! What I couldn’t manage was to remember a single bloodyfind me a way outspell, at least not better than the little-kiddie one Mum taught me when I was five: “Up from the hollow, down from the tree; out of the woods, it’s time for tea.” That refined work of high poetry had worked all right for getting me back to the yurt before dinner, but sadly couldn’t quite do the trick of finding me a way out of a top working of misdirection and confusion. Probably part of the enchantment was making it even harder for me to think of anything thatwouldhelp.
Fortunately, I did have one option simple enough to remember: I’d killed the maw-mouth, and payment was due.
“Alfie, I’m lost, get me the hell out of here,” I said out loud, with a tug on the line of obligation he’d handed me, and not a minute later I heard him somewhere up ahead, calling, “El?” uncertainly. He came out of the dark just a few sconces onward, warily picking his way along the corridor and over the still-running trails of effluvia. Liesel had come with him; they both stared at me when I came into sight, and his face turned almost comically dismayed. I hadn’t any idea what I looked like, and didn’t want one; I just wanted tostoplooking like it, right now. Thank goodness Liesel didn’t even bother to ask permission; she just threw a spell at me, something extremely imperative in German that I imagine must have meant something likemy god, get yourself straightened up at once,and it grabbed me and shook me briskly head to toe. I felt a bit like a beaten rug afterwards, but I didn’t mind at all: I was clean, I was clean. On the outside at least.
“What did you—” Alfie started asking, automatically, before he recognized halfway into the sentence that he didn’t want to know, and then just said, “Is it—did you—”
“It’s dead,” I said shortly, which was more than enough discussion about it for anyone, including me. “You’ll have to clean up the mess yourselves.”
He stared at me a moment longer and then grasped that the maw-mouth was gone, and he got to keep being an enclaver and, all right, that his father got to keep living instead of going into a maw-mouth forever, and then he heaved a deep shocked gasp of relief and put a hand over his mouth and looked away, struggling violently to avoid bursting into tears the way he clearly wanted to. He didn’t manage to keep them all from running down his face.
Liesel visibly restrained herself from telling him to pull himself together, a tremendous effort on her part. I had no idea why Alfie had submitted to being acquired by someone who so clearly viewed him as barely suitable raw metal to be hammered forcefully into shape, and still less why Liesel had so determinedly gone after him. She was thevaledictorian;she hadn’t needed to sleep with him to get a place in London, and sleeping with him wouldn’t have got her a place if shehadn’tbeen the valedictorian, so it had been entirely optional. She said to me, “Come. The council will want to see you and thank you.”
What she meant was, she wanted to take me down and display me to the council in triumph, more or less like her own brilliant achievement. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to submit to it. “Thanks, but no. I don’t want to be in this place another moment. Get me out of here.”
Alfie twitched a little, my insistence like a yank on a leash, and said immediately, “Of course, El—let’s get you out into the gardens, I’m sure you need some air.” He sounded sincere, but he’d shortly be regretting that vow to repay me no matter the cost. From Liesel’s scowling,shewas regretting it already. I suppose it felt to her like being a hawk who’s justhooked a fish, only to have a monstrous eagle swoop down and snatch it right out of your talons. Hard luck for her. I wasn’t in the least sorry. I’d become sorry in a few days if I couldn’t getridof Alfie, but not right now.
Liesel wasn’t the sort to bang her head against a wall; she turned to Alfie and said, if a bit ungraciously, “Go, take her out. I’ll tell the others,” making the best of it, and sailed off down the passage.
Alfie took me back the other way and turned in to the very next side corridor—thankfully no sight of the one where the remnants of maw-mouth were presumably still putrefying—and then almost immediately opened a door out into the gardens, like golden Beatrice guiding Dante towards Paradise, leaving poor damned Virgil behind.
Alfie wasn’t grudging about it at all, either, even though I’d done the equivalent of putting spurs to his side. He took me to a place where the waterfall jumped in a solid silver stream just past the edge of another terrace, so I could put my hands into it and cup the water and splash my face and press my hands cool against my cheeks and the back of my neck until I stopped feeling sick. I took Precious out of my pocket and put her on the edge of a small hollow in the rock, filled with clear water, and she rolled her whole body around in it; I would’ve liked to do the same.
Killing the maw-mouth hadn’t fixed whatever damage had been done to the enclave; I could still feel the sloshing tides of mana underneath, and through the power-sharer on my wrist. But my getting rid of it had freed up all the power and all the wizards who’d desperately been trying to hold the thing off, and they were going back to work straightaway. Even while I was standing there, the sunlamps began to brighten—in a few lurching stages, like someone turning a dimmer switch up and down a few times on their way togetting it fully turned on—and the platform itself began to feel a little moresolid,somehow. It didn’t feel anymore like the gardens were about to sink under the wave; now the sensation was more like sitting at a table with one leg a bit short: you couldn’t put any weight on it or it would tip, but it was still standing, with a whole team of people working at top speed to prop it up again.
When I turned back around, Alfie had poured a drink for me out of a silver carafe like the one I’d glimpsed earlier, through the jungle of growth, so those were working again, too. Even though I didn’t want to put anything in my mouth, just the faint sweet smell of the drink made me feel better. So I did cautiously try a single sip, which washed all the sour nausea out of the back of my throat and let me take a clean, deep breath that I hadn’t quite realized I needed.
I drank the rest of it in small swallows, letting each one linger on my tongue, giving Precious drops on my fingertip to suck up, and as I neared the end, I started to feel almost calm. I don’t mean just calmed down, butcalm.In a vaguely intoxicated way, but so what? I hadn’t been really properly calm in more than four years. Not even Mum’s spell had hushed me this way. Of course, Mum would have said that a month in the woods would be a better path to finding this quiet, but as I was instead here, killing maw-mouths, I welcomed this feeling, rolling down through me, tranquil and cool. The horror receded.
Alfie had sat down across from me on one of the smooth polished ordinary-looking stools, which were somehow as comfortable as armchairs, and was studying me with his long face furrowed and anxious. I assumed he was worrying about what I was going to do with this leash he’d shoved into my hands, so when he said, low, “El—I’m so sorry. It’s been so mad, we just tumbled out into the middle of…all this,” witha wave, I just waited a bit cynically for him to get around to asking me to let him out of his oath, and it took me completely by surprise when he went on, “I didn’t even ask you about Orion.”
It was like walking into a door someone had just opened into my face. “I know how close you were,” he kept on, while I sat there trying to cling to the beautiful calm instead of going into squawking sobs or yelling at him in a fury—how darehebe sorry about Orion, how dare he be the first and only person who’d said anything nice or even ordinarily polite to me about Orion? “It’s such a loss. It doesn’t seem right, after everything he did, both of you did.”
And it was all stupid and transparently obvious, and hearing him say it shouldn’t have made the slightest difference, but I jerked a short clumsy nod and put down the glass and then looked away trying not to cry, half angry and half grateful. It didn’t really mean anything, and at the same time it meant everything. I knew he hadn’t really cared about Orion, he hadn’t really known Orion, and it didn’t cost him anything to say a few nice words. But it was still the few nice words you did say, the ordinary unprofound bit of decency you felt obliged to offer another human being when death knocked on the door, and he’d given it, to me and to Orion, as if wewerepeople. Not his nearest and dearest, perhaps, but people he was willing to feel a little bit sorry for. And he also didn’tkeeptalking; he stopped there and just sat with me, in the unending peace and beauty, with the water gurgling past us.
Delicate flowers like deep bells slowly began to bloom on the vines, petals popping back open, and after a little longer, tiny clockwork bees started coming out to poke among them. I could hear the sound of people coming for a good bit before they appeared: another carefully engineered politeness, since surely the passageway wasn’t making their notables take along winding path through the gardens. Probably there was some artifice slowing down our experience of time, so it seemed longer to us than to them. I reached out for Precious and tucked her away in my pocket again. The terrace itself was surreptitiously growing to make room for the oncoming crowd, and more stools and chairs wandered in on all sides with the casual air of pretending they’d been there the whole time.
Alfie got progressively straighter in his chair on roughly the same timeframe, and stood up as they came. I didn’t need him to point out his father; there was substantial overlap, although his father was older, darker, and more staid, and looked weirdly familiar, as though I’d seen him somewhere before. I wondered if he’d ever shown up at the commune, when I’d been younger. Some of the enclavers do; Mum won’t actually turn someone away who’s coming to look for healing, although she’s perfectly willing to speak sharply to them about their lifestyle, so they prefer not to. He had a really lovely suit on, pale cream with creases crisp as knives, a deep-green shirt, and a cravat pinned with a massive robin’s-egg-sized chunk of opal: dressed up for his own demise.
Liesel was with him, along with several other highly polished figures, including the Dominus of London himself, Christopher Martel: a white-haired man leaning heavily on a bronze walking stick, his left eye and a chunk of face down to his cheekbone entirely covered with an elaborate piece of artifice like a monocle. I was reasonably sure the eye underneath, although extremely well done, was artifice itself, or an illusion; he’d probably lost the real one somehow, either directly or by trading it. Healing gets harder for wizards the older you get, but even in your twilight years, you can generally shove off even the most aggressive forms of cancer or dementia for a decade or two by giving up somethingimportant like an eye, if you also have several enormous buckets of mana to spend on the process.
