Page 20 of The Golden Enclaves
I could still with absolute joy have picked up a chair and smashed it over his head, because what right did he have being so astonished about it, but at least it wassomekind of caring, something that wasn’t just grotesque and selfish, and when he turned back to me, his face was wet. “I’m sorry. El—El? I’m sorry. Please, come sit back down. Please.” He tried to smile an apology at me, wavering. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed—”
Once I had stopped blazing away, I couldn’t help but recognize he’d had every sensible reason to assume the worst of me, and apparently now he might help after all, so I did grudgingly go back to the table with him. Only he didn’t want to talk to me about how I was going to get back into the school. He just wanted to talk to me about Orion. How we’d become friends, every word we’d ever said to one another—most of which had been unpardonably rude—and everything we’d ever done vaguely in the vicinity of each other.
Mum would have approved tremendously. For me it was the slow hideous excruciatingness of a root canal performed with dull instruments and no anaesthesia. Unfortunately, now that his dad’s feelings had actually appeared, Ididrespect them, so I couldn’t refuse him. But he almost wasn’t grieving. He drank up everything I told him with unbearable happiness, as if Ihadbrought Orion back to him. He hung on every word of every trivial human interaction we’d ever had, and I couldn’t help but remember Orion telling me earnestly how his father had given up his own work to homeschool him, trying to keep him from sneaking away to hunt mals; how his parents had longed for him to want anything else, to care about anything else.
I couldn’t bear it. In desperation I even aggressively told Balthasar about my plan to take Orionaway,how Orion had said he’d come to Wales and set off round the world with me, trying to get him to let me stop, only even that didn’t make his dad sorry in the least. He just got almost glassy-eyed at the idea that Orion had been making plans for the future, which only made things worse.
I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. “Look,willyou help me get back in?” I demanded baldly, instead of giving Balthasar the next story he was asking for, and he paused and apparently only then remembered what I’d told him I was there for in the first place, or at least took it seriously for the first time; I suppose he’d mentally filed it away as nonsense when Chloe had told him about it.
In fact, he still wasn’t taking it seriously, not the way I needed him to. “El,” he said, instead, with all the gentle kindness of someone having to break bad news, “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how much it means that you want to save Orion from this, that you care about him that much. But he wouldn’t want you to do this.” Almost certainly spot-on, but I didn’t care in the least what Orion would’ve wanted. As far as I was concerned, he’d given up the right to an opinion after he’d shoved me out the gates without asking me formine.“It’s—the situation is complicated. Even if you’re right about what happened…” He paused as if he were trying to think through what he was going to say.
“If I’m wrong,” I said, “I won’t do anything but waste mana. But I’m not wrong. Patience got him.” I forced myself to say it. “I tried to pull him out. I felt Patience get hold of him.”
Balthasar shook his head a little. “If you’re right, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t…Killing a maw-mouth, any maw-mouth, not to speak of Patience—it’s not like killingother mals, not even powerful ones. Ophelia, Orion’s mother, she’s done research into—”
“I’ve done it three times,” I said flatly. “You can ask London if you don’t believe me. I did one at their council chamber doors just yesterday.”
I’m sure that Chloe had told him; I think Balthasar had simply been having so much difficulty swallowing the idea that I’d really cared in some way about Orion that he’d completely put aside the equally indigestible idea of my going in to kill Patience, much less having any chance of success in this endeavor. He didn’t want to swallow it now, either. In fairness to him, it was a ludicrous thing to claim. But Liesel backed me up, and slowly it went down; he sat back in his chair staring at me, and I could see his face changing as he gathered up all the bits and pieces of information about me that he’d left scattered round while he’d been thinking of me only in conjunction with Orion, and assembled them together into an alarming picture.
Or, I suppose, a potentially useful one. I couldn’t think of him as a heartless weevil anymore, but after all, it’s not some revelation that enclavers love their kids; it doesn’t stop them being enclavers. It’s why most of them became enclavers in the first place, or their parents or someone even further removed into the past. And Orionhadbeen their game-changing mal-killer. Even if Balthasar improbably seemed to care more about Orion’s brief happiness than his long-term usefulness, the rest of New York certainly wouldn’t. For all I knew, Orion’s mum was going to have a hard time becoming Domina without him, and a replacement might have been called for.
Maybe I was being unfair. Balthasar could instead have been thinking about my chances of success, and whether it was worth sending me in, whether I could really save Orionfrom agony. But there wassomekind of calculation going on behind the stilling lines of his face. And I’d just spent an hour talking about Orion with him, cutting paper-thin slices of my heart to lay out on a plate, and I’d hated every minute of it, but he’dcared,he’d really truly cared, and it had, after all, made me feel better to have shared it with him, to have been able to grieve Orion with someone else who’d loved him. I didn’t want him to say anything that would make me despise him.
“That’s the only reason I’ve come,” I said, before he could say anything at all. “If the Scholomance is still there, if it can be reached, Patience is still in there. And everyone it’s ever devoured is still screaming. It won’t end for them unless I stop it. It won’t end for Orion. That’s why I’m asking. I don’t need a circle, and I don’t need help. All I need is mana and a map.”
He didn’t tell me any more reasons why I couldn’t do it, and he didn’t, thankfully, drop any hints about enclave seats. Instead, after a moment, he only said, softly, “You’d better come talk to Ophelia.”
I knew that New York had its front door in Gramercy Park, a private gated garden square that was somehow—yes,somehow;I’m sure the enclave hadn’t anything to do with it—still hanging on in the middle of Manhattan. Orion had made a point of showing it to me on a map, as if he’d wanted to be sure I could find it. The enclave owned a shifting assortment of the surrounding townhouses and flats—they sold and bought new ones every so often, following the vicissitudes of the housing market; one of the many perfectly mundane ways New York arranged to have what I gathered was a blazing amount of money even by enclave standards—and asubstantial stake in an insanely expensive hotel on the corner, whose rooms were quietly borrowed whenever they were empty.
But presumably that entrance was barricaded at the moment, under the circumstances. Instead Balthasar took us uptown on the subway to Penn Station—a massive and hideous low-ceilinged place filled with noise and grime and cheap fast-food shops—and in the back of a cramped newsstand, where the woman on the cash register nodded to him, he opened up a tiny door markedEMPLOYEES ONLY, and we stepped through and went down a short dark corridor.
My whole body was still tight with misery and the remains of anger. So I didn’t even notice at first, but with every step down the corridor, the sensation got stronger until my stomach was full of it: a low queasy seasick feeling just like in London, only not quite as bad, and I slowly realized that ithadn’tbeen their mana store, sloshing around. I’d just felt it more strongly over there, maybe because of the damage. Thiswaswhat Mum had meant, the feeling of the malia that enclaves were built upon, only I couldn’t understand how they couldn’t feel it, all the time; how they could stand it. “Doyoufeel it?” I whispered to Aadhya, low, but she only looked back at me puzzled, and when I explained it, she shut her eyes and stood for a moment, frowning, and then she said, “Maybe? It doesn’t really feel like being on a boat to me. It’s like driving, maybe, with the engine going.”
Chloe had turned round from an open archway at the other end to wait for us anxiously. We slowly went to her, and the archway deposited us in an astonishing entrance hall on the scale of Kings Cross, a gargantuan vaulted ceiling mounted on stone pillars, full of lamps and arches. It was the exact opposite of the carefully crafted layout of London’s fairy garden with all its deft concealed angles that let thespace move to where it was needed. Twenty-six enormous archways led out of the hall just as if they were going to trains, only they were full of the pallid grey clouds of an overcast sky, churning with possibility: New York’s famous gateways. The one going to London stood pitch black, completely shut down.
The hall was certainly imposing and dramatic, but I hadn’t any idea why anyone had built it inside an enclave, with the attendant waste of space. It wasn’t as though New York City had loads of room going begging. But by the time we’d got halfway across the stubborn floor, which persisted in being exactly the size it was, exactly like the endless corridors in Heathrow, I’d realized they hadn’t. This was a real place. Someone had literally built this whole enormous building solidly on theoutside,and they’d just—moved it in. It was equal parts amazing and outrageous: how had they done it without anyone noticing?
The Scholomance had been really constructed, too, but that was why the iron skeleton of the structure had been built in tidy individual sections in the factories of Manchester, each one quietly shipped to the final destination under cover of night, popped in through the doors—wherever those were, which hopefully I’d be told soon enough—and bolted on to the rest of the growing structure from inside. There had also been a lot of elaborate spells that had encouraged those sections to stretch out along the way. The largest classrooms and the cafeteria had all been built out of negative space, and the outer walls had all been at least halfway fictional.
No one had built this marble hall in sections, and it hadn’t been inflated, either. Every last square inch of the ground was so perfectly solid that probably youcouldhave brought a mundane into the place without so much as a ripple. “Howdid you get this placeinhere?” Aadhya was hissing to Chloe as we hurried after Orion’s dad.
“What?” Chloe jerked to glance around: couldn’t even be bothered to notice the everyday local miracle. “It’s just the old Penn Station. The enclave bid on the demolition, and then brought it inside while they pretended they were knocking it down.”
“What vandal would demolish this place to build that rat’s-nest we just came out of?” I said, in flat disbelief. Chloe just shrugged, but as soon as I’d asked, I had the strong suspicion that the enclave had made it very much in the private interests of whatever marauder or twenty had made it possible for them to snaffle the place right out of the city. Using a building made for transport, with probably a million mundane people gone through each of those archways, going somewhere different, full of purpose and bent on journeying—that was the kind of psychic foundation you couldn’t make or buy, no matter how rich an enclave you were, and undoubtedly it had made it significantly easier to build all these gateways.
The place was full of wizards rushing through at almost exactly the same pace as the mundanes in the station outside, with the same sense of urgency. There were small guard stations flanking each archway, charming brass-and-iron follies with a single seat inside, clearly intended for some bored guard to spend the day sitting in. Only at the moment, there were ten grim-faced and heavily armed wizards stationed next to each one of them instead. The gateway going to Tokyo—that was the one they reckoned Shanghai was most likely to hit, presumably—had at least thirty guards, and they’d installed a huge spiky steel wall in front of it that looked more suited to a medieval siege than its surroundings.It was even decorated with scowling brass heads of eagles, and enormous talons protruding from the bottom edge.
Despite the elevated security, no one stopped Balthasar bringing us through. The guards were easy to pick out in their uniform of thick tufted armor—undoubtedly highly practical, meant to muffle and absorb all sorts of magical attacks, although it did make them look vaguely like angry sofas. They were all carrying the same weapons as well, long metal poles with a thin slice of an axe blade and a focusing crystal mounted on the top, again sensible; if you can jab a physical object right up close at an enemy wizard, you can often get a spell off past their defenses.
They were only the cannon fodder, though: hired wizards working for the enclave. The real powers in the room weren’t wearing uniforms. I picked out half a dozen of them along the way without half trying, as if some instinct of mine was sniffing them out as potential threats. There was a really beautiful and really dangerous man in red leather pants and a long-sleeved turtleneck of iridescent black snakeskin that almost seemed to melt into his actual skin at the hard-to-see edges, who wore a single short blade at his side roughly the length of my forearm. He was standing talking quietly with a fat grey-haired woman in a flowing kaftan of embroidered silk who was slumped on one of the benches and radiating the impression of having undergone great trials just to get herself there, only when she answered him, I could literally feel her voice through the floor, wordless, as if she had the whole room under her hand, like that volcanic spell I’d used to smash the Scholomance off the world.
A tall man was leaning against one of the columns and reading a paper copy ofThe New York Times,wearing an elegant old-fashioned suit and hat and leather shoes, with a heavy antique gold watch on his wrist and a wolf-headedcane under his arm; he looked so much as though he could have been moved into the enclave along with the train station itself that he had to have been doing it on purpose. To move around through time, maybe? It’s a brilliant fighting technique, although most people can’t stand it any more than they can stand the unreal places. As much as I understand it, you can’t go back in time and change things; what you can do is essentially haul yourself towards the past so vigorously that you stop beingherefor just long enough that you can then pop yourself back into the present moment in a different spot, without any bother about physically moving there, or inconveniences like shields that might be between your two locations.
A girl with pink-and-green-streaked white hair and bushy eyebrows was sitting on the floor in an isolated corner with her eyes closed. She only had on a paper-thin black cotton dress and not a single visible weapon. She was vaguely familiar; after a moment I recognized her as one of the top seniors during our freshman year—not the valedictorian, but she’d still bargained herself a guaranteed spot after the obstacle course had opened that year, by doing a demonstration for several senior enclavers where she’d slaughtered her way through it, all alone. I certainly hadn’t been invited to the demonstration, so I didn’t know exactly how she’d done it, but she had been alchemy track, and there was a small potion bottle on the floor next to her. Her hands were clenched in her lap tightly, so I suspected she wasn’t looking forward to repeating the experience, whatever it was.
But that’s the price for using a tidy trick like that to get yourself into an enclave. They’ll expect you to use it for them again, whenever they need you to. That had been my own plan, or at least I’d thought it had been my plan, those first three years at school: to barter my power for a ticket straightto a major enclave, where they’d take me in and keep me safe the rest of my life, just to have me in reserve when something terrible happened. Something like an enclave war, and I didn’t need to have it spelled out for me in small words that we were on the verge of one.
None of them stopped us. The woman on the bench just said, “Balthasar,” a deep booming, as we went by, and nodded him on with a wave of her hand despite us tagging along behind him.
