Page 13 of The Golden Enclaves
But I couldn’t help feeling the pull of it. Liesel meant it from her side; it was as fair an offer as anyone could make. We weren’t in the Scholomance anymore, but it was an alliance offer all the same, putting herself on the table, all-in, andshewasn’t a useless person either. So I couldn’t be angry at her for making it, even though I’d have liked to be angry. Instead it was only the familiar bitter taste of wanting things other people had, my face pressed up to the window of the cake shop full of easy sweetness I couldn’t buy. Alfie had said yes in a heartbeat, surely. But I couldn’t.
That wasn’t her fault, though. I put down my glass; the faint heady buzz of the wine had faded out of me completely. “I don’t think it would go all wrong the first moment that I ever compromised on anything,” I said, not rude, only final. “Not the second time, either. But I’m not going to risk doing it until I find out how many times it would take. And you’d be sorry if I did, too, even if you don’t think so now. The only tactics I’ve got are scorched-earth, so that’s what I’ll end up with, if I ever start a war. You’ll have to get your vengeance on your own.”
Liesel could tell I wasn’t just batting it back to her. She didn’t keep going, but only studied me narrowly, and then gave a faintly irritated shrug and poured out another glass from the jug, consoling herself for my intransigence, and sat back into scowling thought. The sunlamps overhead weregently descending into night now, but not the way they had been before; the artifice wasn’t running out of power, it was just creating a different illusion. Pale delicate streetlamps began coming alight along all the paths, and new glowing bell-like flowers opening on all the vines twined round the railings. A dim green-blue twinkling had started inside the waterfall itself. More people were walking through the gardens, their low voices rising up to reach us but only in a wordless murmur that mingled with the tumbling water, and then a burst of raucous music erupted from somewhere I couldn’t see, along with a few shrieks of laughter: a discordance that managed to override the tranquility. I was willing to bet that was Yancy and her crew. It probablywouldbe nightly raves until the official rules descended.
I thought I should get up and go, but I didn’t want to. My legs felt leaden, and my belly a solid immovable mass weighing me down in the chair, a drowsy stupor settling in. I didn’t have anywhere to go; there wasn’t any hurry for me to leave. I could just doze in the chair for a little while, or lie down on the bed and sleep until morning, or perhaps for a week, and then Precious poked her head out of the pocket and gave my thumb a hard bite, just short of breaking the skin, and I jolted loose from the compulsion and was standing up, blinking hard and breathing hard, my heart thumping aggressively. I looked down at the silver jug and shot Liesel a hard look, but she hadn’t jolted herself, the way you would if someone broke out of an enchantment you were weaving; she was just eyeing me with a frown that went to sudden hard alertness as she realized someone else was having a go at me.
She stood up. I was just wondering whether I was going to have to fight past her—even if she hadn’t been trying to trap me, the only other real candidates were London council, and presumably she would have liked to impress them—whenAlfie came running up the stairs two at a time, a small carafe clutched in his hand, so cold it was dripping condensation over his fingers. He stopped, still panting, when he saw me standing, and darted a quick look over at the still-made bed—right, that answeredonequestion; hewasready to be part of the collected set—before he looked at Liesel. “You broke the compulsion?”
“No! She got out of it herself without even trying; what fool thought it was a good idea to try to enchant a tertiary-order entity?” Liesel snapped. “Your father?”
“A what?” I said.
“No,” Alfie said, gulping air. “Martel’s behind it, and some of the others—”
“Gilbert? And Sidney? To keep him in as Dominus, so they’ll have a chance at it themselves, after all.” Liesel was nodding.
“I’m not anentity!” I said loudly, breaking into this extremely important conversation, and Liesel had the gall to look annoyed at me.
“You know you don’t cast on the baseline scale!” she said, lecturing, as if that were perfectly obvious. “You’re at least two orders of magnitude up, maybe even more. Do you want to get away, or to stand here arguing about terminology until these idiots try something else and you end up killing them when you swat them like a fly? Probably one of them is already bleeding from their brain.”
Oh, I wanted to stand here arguing about terminology violently, actually, but Alfie said, “Liesel—I don’t know where we can get her out. The garden gates are all backed up. Father’s people are trying to sort them out, and Gilbert offered to puthispeople on all the other gates—”
“And your father was not suspicious that he was being helpful?” Liesel said caustically.
“He hadn’t much choice,” Alfie said. “Some kind of completely jumbled word has got out about the gardens opening. People think we’ve issued an open call for enclave seats, to replace the wizards who died in the attack. We’ve got people coming over from France hoping to get in for an interview. The artifice was only just barely convinced to let outsiders in at all, and now the works are completely jammed. We’ve got wizardsqueuedoutside all the entrances. Mundanes are going to notice soon, and if that happens—”
I looked more closely down below: apart from the ongoing noise of revelry, the background murmuring had picked up considerably too, and despite the best efforts of the hanging greenery and branches to obscure the view and preserve some sense of solitude, I could catch glimpses of people everywhere I looked, in every gleam of light, on every narrow side path. The gardens were valiantly trying to accommodate everyone, but they were clearly at their limits.
And if mundanes spotted a bunch of people queuing for entry to some bizarre obscure bit of urban decay, of course they’d join the queue, because they’d be curious, and as soon astheygot up to the gates—expecting a dance party in a badly decorated basement and at most some minor sleight-of-hand—and slammed into the already wobbly artifice with all their rock-solid confidence in the laws of physics, down those gates would go.
“Right, because your father’s still trying to get mepaid off,” I said. “Alfie, do me a solid and next time, keep the bloody dramatic oaths to yourself.”
He flushed. “The compulsion’s off. It lifted after the first visitors came in.”
So he’d come up to help me just to help me, and not because he’d had to. “Oh,” I muttered ungraciously.
“Ah,thatis what Martel’s side are after,” Liesel said. “Thecompulsion has gone because your father truly intends to fulfill the request and has begun doing so, but El did not ask for the gardens to be opened only for an hour or two. If they force the garden gates to close again, the obligation would be restored. And if they get El into their power in the meantime, your father would have to negotiate with them to get it lifted again. Martel must have sent the word out himself. Of course everyone would believe it, coming from him.”
She almost sounded approving: yes, such a clever plan, what perfect sense it made, and so what if it meant turning Alfie into a weapon against his own dad, and ensorcelling me. All to claw back a bit more selfish control over the enclave that none of them would have anymore if it hadn’t been for my help, and Alfie putting himself on the line to make it happen. “And you wanted me to work with these people,” I said to Liesel. “Do you know where Yancy’s party is going?” I asked Alfie.
He looked out over the gardens, squinting, and then said, “Oh, those wankers, they’re at Memorial Green.”
Alfie threaded our waythrough a creaky maze of winding stairs up and down the garden, and along narrow inconvenient paths that hadn’t been trimmed lately and were clearly slated for renovation, presumably because all the rest of the paths were crammed with tourists. For the last bit, he had to take us into a residential section of the enclave, an odd stretch that was something halfway between a street full of listed buildings and a school diorama of Tudor architecture made by a thirteen-year-old kid who hadn’t done much research.
There was a narrow cobblestoned pavement just wide enough for the three of us to walk abreast, with half-timbered buildings on either side, each one only the width of its front doorway, with a single leaded window on each of four stories above, and a dormer at the very top. The roofs across the pavement from one another were connected with more timbers, and loose fabric like sailcloth was hung over them, with sunlamps on the other side: not nearly as extravagant as in the gardens, but if you were inside one of those rooms, youcould probably convince yourself that the light coming in was daylight. But from the outside, it was dim and precarious, all those too-thin, too-tall buildings looming unpleasantly, and I was glad to hurry past them and towards the patch of green meadow I could just glimpse at the end of the lane.
I drew a deep breath as soon as we escaped into the open air, and got a faceful of the pungent stink of urine coming out of someone who’d been sucking down phantasmal vapors. A fellow in a tatty neon-blue dressing gown was pissing on a corner of the green, and the wafting smell of the vapors themselves was drifting our way, too. They probably weren’t unpleasant alone, but mixed with the other stench it took on the absolute foulness of someone trying to cover up cat piss by pouring on a bottle of cheap floral perfume.
Alfie sucked in a sharp breath. “That’snot on.” He snapped off a repelling-liquid incantation that he’d probably practiced backwards and forwards to deal with the fairly common category of acid- and poison-spitting mals. It made all the wee, including the healthy amount that had already soaked into the ground, leap up and spray right back all over the blue-robed wizard, who gave a howl of indignation and ripped off the soaked dressing gown and was improbably in a suit of scale armor underneath it.
“I’ll have your fucking bollocks on toast, you bloodless fuck,” the man yelled, fumbling after some kind of weapon he was expecting to be at his side. He was obviously two or three planes of reality off from this one, but in a moment he’d probably have persuaded it to show up, only Liesel heaved an annoyed breath and waved him clean—same spell she’d used on me, perfectly up to the much smaller job at hand—and then told him in the cutting tones of a tea lady on the train after pub day, “Go lie down and go to sleep, you aredrunk,” with a quick twist and flick of her fingers by her side to throw just the least hint of compulsion behind it. He paused, registered that he wasn’t covered in stinking pee, then amiably agreed, “Right, yeah,” and rolled off a few steps to an empty plot of grass and fell over on the ground.
But Alfie looked fully prepared to pick another fight as we approached the festivities. I hadn’t been automatically inclined to care how irreverent Yancy and her people were towards any of the sacred hobgoblins of London enclave, but I have to admit, I didn’t really approve once I got a better look at this Memorial Green of theirs. It wasn’t a political monument, with self-important statues and engraved plaques. It also wasn’t a cemetery, because you don’t get bodies back out of the Scholomance. But here at the far side of the gardens, London had deliberately set aside a wide green meadow, at least a hundred meters across without so much as a single tree to break up the view, and a massive labyrinth of stones had been laid out on the perfectly green grass. Each stone was more or less the size to fit comfortably into a palm, flat and round, made of faintly translucent quartzlike stuff that reminded me immediately of Mum’s crystals. But not like the one I was wearing round my neck, with a faint sheen of mana against my skin. They were like the crystals that I’d burned out completely, fighting the maw-mouth in the Scholomance library; the ones that had slowly gone dull and dead.
I didn’t need to see the names carved into them, stained dark brown, to understand. You couldn’t send messages in or out of the Scholomance, not on paper and not in dreams; you couldn’t even get a heartbeat spell inside. If you were lucky, you got a note from your kid once a year, if they’d given one to a senior who’d survived their own graduation. But London had worked out this solution.
Alfie had surely put his name on a stone like this, and filled it up with mana he’d built himself, and then he’d cut his finger and rubbed blood into the carving until it was full. And his mum and dad had kept it with them, all four years he was away, looking at it every morning and every night. If one day it had started to go dim, they’d have told themselves it was a trick of the light. Maybe after a week they’d have started picking it up and taking it into dark corners, to reassure themselves that really it was still shining. And after two, or three, their friends would have started to be very kind to them, and one day they would have picked up the dull grey empty stone and brought it here and found an open place—there weren’t many, and in some places, the lines had been doubled up—and they’d have put down the only remains of the child they’d sent away to die in the dark.
