Page 16 of The Golden Enclaves
And I couldn’t be sorry even now, but the swallow was burning in my gut, a memory that would be in me forever, and what if maybe Orion hadn’t shoved me through the gates after all, if I hadn’t more or less traded him the promise of something he’d wanted more than his own life? If I hadn’t told him,Yes you can come to Wales, you can come to me—the promise that would only have been good if I’d lived to get to Wales in the first place—and so when a maw-mouth the size of a city had come roaring towards us, he hadn’t been willing to take the chance that he’d be the only one to make it out alive. It was the taste of that, too. The taste of Orion going into the belly of a maw-mouth, a maw-mouth that apparently Icould,after all, have killed.
Yancy didn’t bat an eyelash at me whimpering agony into my hands. I suppose it was a fairly common reaction. It would have taken some bad luck for people to land in hercrew, surely. They weren’t raising their own kids in here; the kids that came to them were the ones that had fallen or been kicked out of the rest of the world before they’d ever slipped through the back doors of the enclave.
When I surfaced, still shaking, Liesel was grimly eyeing her own mug without enthusiasm—a big clay cup with an octopus sculpted round it and tentacles to make the handle, with a round orange glass eye peering back at her. She took the jug and poured until it was full, though, and took a spoonful of the absinthe-green jelly she got, shutting her eyes as she did. She didn’t whimper, but she sat there absolutely rigid, her mouth and her body and her hands clasped tight around the cup in her lap, all straight hard lines as if she was caging up whatever she was feeling. Then she opened her eyes and put the cup down with a hard click on the table. The octopus unwound itself and climbed inside and started eating the rest of the jelly.
Yancy smiled at us, mirthlessly, and tipped the remnants of her own glass down her throat in a single swallow. She didn’t look as though she’d enjoyed hers, either. A toll of sorts, maybe; this place would still need mana to keep going, and London would be trying to keep it from getting any, so anyone who stopped in had to pay up?
That made sense also, except for the part about it not having fallen off into the void completely in the first place. But Yancy still wasn’t taking questions; instead she said to Liesel in the bright impersonal small-talk of sharing a lunch table with a stranger you didn’t much want to know, “So you’re the new arrival, are you? Hard luck for you, the whole place getting knocked sideways just as you get in.”
“Bad luck would be if the enclave had gone down,” Liesel said, with the severity of correcting someone who’d made a mistake in a group presentation. Her face was still rigid andremote, and she sounded mechanical more than anything else, although I could see a thin gleaming-steel thread of irritatedwhy must I explain something so obvioussurfacing out of her voice and twining away into the air to go in a ring around her head, a bit like those fairy stories where the girl gets cursed and frogs and beetles come out of her mouth when she speaks. “Now there will soon be council vacancies, and Sir Richard will need reliable allies. He cannot give Alfie a position immediately, but he can make me secretary. I am too young to have been given a position of any kind otherwise for five years at least…”
Excellent planning, but it wasn’t a match for Yancy’s tone at all. Liesel had been knocked for a loop, or else she’d never have said it all out loud anyway. Or perhaps she would have; she’d probably jettisoned all her spreadsheets of carefully planned niceties with enormous relief once she’d made valedictorian.
Yancy only said vaguely, “Oh, how nice,” veryyour slip is showing, darling.“So how’s your mum, El? Still gathering moss out there in the woods?”
I wasn’t ready to talk, and in fact had been giving real thought to some more howling, but the automatic programming kicked in. “She’s fine,” I said, which was a hilarious lie both in my speaking in coherent tones at all, and also about Mum, who was probably lying on her face in the mud somewhere right now, thinking about Dad gone into a maw-mouth and wondering if I was ever coming home again. “Any more trouble with—?” I left it there; I had to say something, but at the moment I couldn’t have remembered for my life what it was Mum had helped her with.
“Nothing to fuss about,” Yancy said, keeping the conversation empty of information. “Lovely weather we’ve been having lately.”
With every line, it felt more and more like an odd playacting, carrying out some sort of ritual exchange—mimicking what ought to have been happening here, whathadhappened here, over and over, enclavers politely smiling at each other with their teeth hidden while they jockeyed for power, for standing. I ought to have said something back, kept playing the part. But I couldn’t. I understood the idea: I was meant to want to be screaming and still keeping up the side, all to build more mana, only it was too hard. I just managed to sit there woodenly.
But Liesel had got the idea and said, “Yes, very nice,” so Yancy could say, “Shall we go for a stroll?” and I got up and followed them out.
The one positive aspect of the experience was that I’d completely stopped thinking about the place being halfway into the void. Likely that’s why Yancy was able to take us onward. She took us out through the back of the canopy, lifting apart two massive brocade drapes, and we ducked through behind her and were at the top of a narrow concrete stairway going down to a cramped tunnel made of bricks.
We had to go single file. Dim caged lamps on the ceiling flickered to life only as Yancy stepped beneath them, and went out again right on my heels, so we were traveling in a small island of mud-yellow light that left everything stained the color of old sepia photographs, matte and papery, and all around us a pitch dark that was justbarelynot the void. As if we were somehow calling each chunk of the space into existence only long enough to get through it, like getting a reference text out of the void that you only needed for a single essay and throwing it back afterwards. It didn’t make any sense even with magic; it was the idea that you could climb up into the sky by taking a ladder rung from below you and putting it above you, stepping onto it, and then grabbing therung you’d just left, putting it up above the other one, with the ground getting left further and further behind—it was just silly, a cartoon joke to laugh at, not something to believe in. It was almost impossible to think of it as a space that really existed outside of us, and under normal circumstances, probably I’d have thought about that too much, and then I’d have been one of those people who never came back out again.
But I wasn’t thinking about how the passage was one step up from the void and how likely it was to tip off. I wasn’t even carefully trying tonotthink that. Instead I was thinking the opposite: how it was so much more real than it ought to have been, how itdidexist, and about how I needed Yancy to stop long enough that I could grab her by the arms and shake her until the answers came out that I needed, the answers that I knew I didn’t want, and I didn’t want them with so much sickening intensity that the passage actually started to get longer around us, lights flickering on further up ahead, aplink-plinkdripping sound starting, and a breath of musty air moved in our faces.
An unreadable poster loomed out of the dark, smeared by damp, and Yancy abruptly turned, opened a door I hadn’t noticed in the wall, and swung out through it very quick, almost a dancing movement; the instant Liesel and I were out, she shut the door hard behind us and wheeled round with her arms spread to gather the two of us up on either side, and she hustled us away as fast as she possibly could, through another short narrow unlit tunnel and up three steps in a rush. I expect she was trying to keep us from noticing that the door—possibly the tunnel itself—wasn’t really there anymore behind us. She had us out of the space before we even had a chance to register where we were, squinting painfully against fluorescent lights that had come on in an unpleasant buzzing glare: a wide tunnel with a roof like someone had made awaffle out of steel girders, one of the old air-raid shelters in the Underground.
This must have been one of the emergency back doors the enclave had opened during the Blitz: sensible of them to have one leading to the deep underground shelters. They’d probably quietly dug themselves that small narrow side tunnel when the authorities weren’t looking, and then blocked it up again after the war. There was still just a hint of something vaguelysoftabout the place, just like that crumbling ruin of a mansion that Alfie had taken us through. The enclave had closed up the old exit, to save themselves the trouble of guarding it, but I would have laid money they had somehow bought or rented out this place and were now using most of the room inside the enclave. It would certainly have cost less than expensive architectural monstrosities in primo London postcodes.
But the shelter itself was still a real place in the world, inexpressibly comforting. The sickening quivery feeling beneath my feet was gone so completely I only just now managed to register how horrible it had been, feeling it all this time. The tunnel was filled with identical old bunk bed frames stretching the whole length, stacked with handwritten-labeled boxes full of aggressively boring things like ancient videotapes and sewer planning surveys from the 1980s and proceedings of subcommittees with long acronyms. I went straight for the nearest one and put my hands on the cold clammy metal and then put my cheek against it too, taking deep gulping breaths full of rust and mildew and mold and dust and tar and oil and paint and dirt, a cocktail of underground stinks, and when the walls and floor shuddered with a train going by somewhere on the other side, noisy and cranky and tooth-rattling, I shuddered with almost delirious relief. My whole brain devoured every wonderful reasonablepredictable sensation. I could with pleasure have spread myself out over the dirty concrete floor and possibly licked it.
“Here, have one,” Yancy said. I lifted my head. Liesel had sat down on the floor herself and was leaning back against the opposite wall with her eyes shut. Yancy was unwrapping a packet of small square wafer biscuits. She pulled one out and crunched into it, and handed the packet to me: they smelled of lemon and vanilla.
“What’s this?” I said, feeling what I think was reasonably wary.
“A biscuit,” Yancy said, with a snort of laughter. “Go on. It’ll settle your stomach.” Liesel lurched up to get one herself. They were real too, plain ordinary sugar and flour and artificial flavorings that were absolutely natural by comparison; we reduced the whole packet to crumbs in a few minutes. Better than licking rusty cabinets.
Yancy watched us devour the biscuits. I hadn’t quite finished gobbling when she said, a little airy, “Well, that was interesting. That tunnel’s usually an hour’s walk with people who all know the way. Mind telling me how you did it?”
The sweet powdery wafer dust on my tongue had a faint aftertaste. I was a Scholomance graduate, so my brain had both noticed it and already classified it asnot going to kill you,which meant it was safe enough to eat in desperation, and I had been as desperate for it as I’d ever been for a slice of stale toast with only one spot of mold or a brown apple slice or a bowl of noodles fished out from one end of a pan with a miasmic wriggler on the other. So I hadn’t stopped eating, but now that the biscuits were down, I knew there had been something on them, nothing really nasty but a quiet little nudge that would only last a few minutes at most:go on, tell old Yancy what she wants to know.
Knowing that you’ve been enchanted doesn’t stop itworking, necessarily, but in this case Yancy had asked me a really unfortunate question, because it dragged me straight out of the overwhelming physical relief of being in the real world and smashed me back into the reason why I’d been able to get out: the questions I didn’t want to ask and had to ask. “It wasthere!” I said, my voice fraying like rotting cloth. “The enclave shoved those places off into the void, but they werethere.Why aren’t theygone?”
Yancy spread her arms, smiling. She wasn’t even lying, really; she was just sayingsorry, not telling you my most valuable secrets.“How should I know? I know they’re there, that’s good enough for me.”
“Not forme,” I snarled, taking a step towards her, and the whole tunnel washed over with green underwater light, the air clenching into a cold fist around us.
I didn’t have any coherent intention in mind. What I did have in my mind was the visceral sickening pressure of a maw-mouth trying to get in at me, the pulsing wet hunger all around me, something that wouldn’t ever be satisfied, couldn’t be satisfied, that wanted to crush me into living putrescence and feed on my agony forever. Only it wasn’t me, it was Orion. If the Scholomancewasn’t gone,if the Scholomance wasthere,then I was going to have to go back into it. Not to save him; I’d missed my chance to do that. Instead I was going to have to find Patience, and I was going to have to look at Orion’s eyes looking back out at me from that horrible endless crushing mass, hear his mouth say,Please, El, please let me out,and then I’d have to tell him that he wasalready dead,so I could make that true, because there wasn’t anything else you could do for someone who’d gone into the belly of a maw-mouth.
Yancy took a step back from me and lost her smile, the bland mocking smile that had been meant for thefour-year-old kid she’d remembered from the commune, easy to transfer to the teenage witch with her little enclaver buddies, coming to ask her for a way out. It hadn’t annoyed me before. She’d mocked the Dominus of London to his face in the middle of his enclave; I imagine she’d have smiled at anything less than a maw-mouth.
But I wasn’tanything less.I was the thing that maw-mouths ran away from in the dark, and I suppose whoever the maleficer was, destroying enclaves left and right,theymight be hiding from me, too, or trying to suck up power to fight me with, as if they’d caught a hint of me coming out of the Scholomance before I’d even made it out the gates.
And Yancy would have tweaked Sir Richard’s nose for him, but she wasn’t stupid. She stopped smiling at me and pulled her hands up into a defensive casting position that wouldn’t have done her any good, because the ground beneath my feet was real, but it was also a little bit part of London enclave, and I’d given back the power-sharer, but I didn’tneeda power-sharer. The power-sharer had made the mana a gift, freely offered, but I could have reached out to the still-sloshing oceans of power and grabbed away as much as I wanted, and tipped over the whole reeling enclave most likely and smashed the whole shelter into pieces while I was at it.
