Page 22 of The Golden Enclaves
She gave a very faint sigh. “I don’t think you will. You don’t have much time, and you’re not getting the mana anywhere else.”
I would’ve told her I wasn’t taking a drop of anything she called mana, but Liesel broke in on us. “Why do we not have time?” she demanded, and that did stop me, because it was clearly something I needed to know.
Ophelia turned away and went to the nearest couch and sat down; she reached out a hand and a glass of water was waiting on the small table next to it for her, cold enough to dew the sides. “Keeping the Scholomance going takes about fifty lilims per day, per seat.”
The number sounded like nonsense. We don’t measuremana on an individual level; it’s too wobbly for that. The same thirty push-ups that build you a shield spell’s worth of mana one day won’t build you enough to light a candle the next. You just build as much as you can, and when you need to cast a spell, either you have enough mana or you don’t. But on the major enclave level, you can start to average it out over the two thousand wizards working for you, all day every day, and then make yourself a budget, and plans. And in that kind of a budget, fifty lilims is roughly equivalent to the mana you’d let a hired wizard take home in a year—the amount that’s twice what they could manage to raise on their own working outside an enclave. So she was talking about ludicrous amounts, vats of mana just pouring into the school, every single day.
“And your plan worked,” Ophelia went on. “Every maleficaria survey in the world is reporting a giant drop in sightings over the last week, since graduation. The big one in Tokyo just came out this morning, showing a drop of ninety-two percent from the week before graduation. With these enclave attacks happening, a lot of people want to ditch the school permanently and keep all their mana at home. We’ve already got fifteen minor enclaves who haven’t put in their contributions for the month.” She shook her head as if it disappointed her. “Fortunately, the major enclaves can’t pull out that easily. Anyone with more than five seats had to sign on to the long-term contracts, and they can’t stop the flow unless the Board of Governors votes to close down the school. But the way things are going right now, about half of the school’s mana supply will be gone by next week.”
She didn’t have to spell it out further: if the Scholomance needed that much mana to function, every single day, then I couldn’t possibly raise enough mana on my own to get back inside. I wouldn’t even be able to try and fail, change mymind, and come back here to ask her for it after all. Not even New York enclave could give me enough to open it up again, once everyone else pulled out.
But that didn’t mean the whole thing would begone,either. If it was manaandbelief that kept places from falling away into the void, then pockets of the Scholomance would be lingering on for years if not decades. And Patience would ooze its way into one of those pockets and sit there as long as it lasted, digesting slowly away.
“I’ve been trying to put together a team to go inside myself,” Ophelia continued. “I’m having a hard time getting one, and I’m already flat-out offering seats on the open market at this point. So I reallydon’twant to have a fight with you. I want you to do exactly what you want to do anyway.”
“Why?” I said. If she had the gall to tell me it was because of Orion, because she loved Orion, and wanted to save him pain—
She didn’t. She only tilted her head slightly, a clear-eyed raptor examining a potential bit of prey. “Does it matter?” she asked me, and what she was asking wasDo you need me to tell you another story about it?My gorge rose. I wished shehadtold me that it was for Orion, after all.
I might have said,No, thanks, give me what I need and I’ll be on my way,just to get away from her, from the horrible understanding that this had been in Orion’s life, the poisoned ground he’d had to grow in. I wanted to go and do something clean and simple like fight my way through a horde of maleficaria and kill the world’s largest maw-mouth. But I couldn’t do that.
“Yes,” I said. “It matters. I’m not going to help you reattach the Scholomance and dump all the maleficaria in the world back in, just so your enclave can keep the power it represents.”
She gave a snort, like I’d said something funny. “Power? It’s a giant mana pit. We’re carrying more than twice our fair share, we cover all the shortfalls. But it’s still a massive chunk of capital infrastructure, and it’s the only long-term solution we’ve got. Yours is just temporary. We’ll be right back at the seventy-five percent child mortality rate in sixty years, and then we’ll have to build another Scholomance. I don’t want to throw this one away. At the very least, we should keep it going on a subsistence level until we need it again. What I’d really like is to find some way to use it to repeat your technique on a regular basis instead, but from what we’ve heard,” she nodded towards Chloe, “it’s not going to be all that easy.”
“Wait,” Liesel said sharply. “Why so soon? We calculated that it would be more than a hundred years to reach a mortality rate of fifty percent. That was why it was worth it, sacrificing the entire school—”
“I’m guessing you kept the maleficaria generation rate steady when you crunched your numbers,” Ophelia said. “It’s not steady. The more wizards there are—and you just saved a whole lot of them—the more mals there will be.”
“Why would more wizards surviving mean more mals?” I said. “We’llkillmals.”
She gave me what wasn’t quite a pitying look, because she didn’t have enough pity to manufacture one. “We’ll make more than we kill. Did you think it was all crazy maleficers in secret labs cackling, or careless mistakes? Any cheating does it. Remember?You must never use any mana you do not generate yourself. Any use of malia leads to the generation of maleficaria.First page of every single textbook, the Freshman Orientation Handbook, the contract you signed to get into school?”
I did remember it, and sourly, because no one else paid any attention to it. The real reason no one used malia at school was because there weren’t a lot of options for getting hold ofit. Outside, almost everyone cheats at least a little; they steal from ants or beetles, wither a vine or a patch of grass, without ever seeing the damage they do. Mum didn’t let me get away with that sort of thing, but most parents do it themselves.
Ophelia nodded. “Whenever somebody needs a little more mana than they’ve got, they steal it from somewhere, seems like no big deal—but you end up with a negative flow of mana. When that negative flow gets big enough, a mal will generate around it. It’s not a secret. But people do it anyway.” She lifted her hands to the heavens.
“Is that meant to be funny?” I said, with a surge of rage—her sitting there sounding exasperated about anyoneelse,about kids who were using the tiniest scrap of malia in desperation—
Ophelia paused. “Why do you think I did it?”
“Didwhat?” I snarled. “Turnedmaleficer? I expect you wanted to be Domina. Does that make you better than a loser kid who cheats a little so they can survive to the age of majority?” Out of the corner of my eye, Chloe involuntarily cringed back with a hand over her mouth, already distressed enough before I’d openly accused the most powerful wizard in her enclave of being a flat-out evil witch. Aadhya just looked grim. Liesel had unobtrusively urged them both round to the far side of the room closer to Balthasar, presumably on the theory that if itdidcome to flinging spells, better to be over there, out of Ophelia’s line of fire.
And Balthasar himself—he wasn’t surprised in the least, clearly; he was just looking at us both—mostly atme,even—with a kind of sad concern, yes, how unfortunate that I’dnoticedhis wife was a monster, it was too bad I found it so upsetting—
“You know, El, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you didn’t get half the mals in the world to come runningwith mana that every last kid in the school honestly built for themselves,” Ophelia said, with the bite of an adult who’s got tired of an unreasonable child yelling at them. “Someone in there got someone else to do their homework with a compulsion, or stole a little mana out of their best friend who fell asleep at the library table. Just because they handed it to you afterwards doesn’t make a difference to the universe. It just makes a difference toyou.”
It was a sharp, accurate hit; of course that was true, and I knew it, and I didn’t have an answer for it, except the wrong answers: I hadn’t known for sure, I hadn’t done it myself, I’d been doing something good enough to justify using it, she was worse—
Ophelia gave me a mirthless smile, a thin slice of winter. “I didn’t do it for power. I’m a New Yorker. There’s mana to spare around here. Everyone I work with in the lab voluntarily lets me pull from them and gets paid back twice as much.”
I stared at her in horror, imagining it vividly, a collection of poor desperate bastards in her laboratory letting themselves be drained by a maleficer, crossing their fingers this wouldn’t be the time she went over the line and sucked them dry. “So you jettisoned your anima on purpose, then? Too inconvenient, all those twinges of conscience?”
“Anima and conscience haven’t got a thing to do with each other,” she said, a strong statement that I didn’t believe for a moment. “The kind of maleficer who deliberately starts murdering people doesn’t have one to start with. But all the psychopathic wizards in the world put together aren’t the real problem. The problem is thateveryonecheats. And then we get more mals, and our kids die, and still everyone cheats, because the two things are too far apart. You can live your whole life without cheating once, like you’re trying to do,and still your kid’s just as likely to get eaten, and meanwhile someone else cheats every day and their kid sails on through. The only solution we’ve got so far forthatare enclaves.”
“Enclaves you’ve builtwith malia,” I said, the malia I could feel even now, the uneasy subtle sloshing back and forth still going beneath my feet.
She didn’t even bother to deny it. “It’s a numbers game,” she said instead. “The malia it takes to make an enclave and keep it going might look like a lot, but it’s still less than what you’d get if the same wizards were all cheating on their own, trying to survive. Economies of scale work in magic too. And wizards mostly don’t cheat in an enclave, because they don’t have to. But enclaves…” She paused, looking at me, and her mouth quirked briefly, a curl of one corner. “Enclaves have their own unique costs. And the wizards in an enclave might not cheat, but they also don’t want to share. There’s a squabble over every new seat we add and every new person we hire, because no one wants to give up a square inch of their own space. And every year, more of us survive, and it gets worse. We need better solutions.”
