Page 25 of The Golden Enclaves
We landed in Lisbon in daylight. I hadn’t really been in New York long enough to feel jet lag, and now we were back with the sun where and when my brain expected it to be, which ought to have made me feel better, but instead it made the whole interlude recede into a chaotic nightmare that melted into the other half-remembered nightmares I’d had trying to sleep on the plane, with Ophelia stretched across them like a distorted shape floating on the surface of a murky lake. I had three voicemail messages from Chloe, and half a dozen texts asking me to call when I had the chance. I stared at them and thought of calling her, only I knew what she was going to ask me about, and what was there for me to say? Grab your things and flee the enclave straightaway? Ophelia wasn’t a threat to Chloe at all, unless Chloe started running round yelling to everyone that the future Domina was a maleficer. If anything, she was better off not knowing anything more.
Liesel headed us directly onto a train out to Sintra, and from there to a lavish boutique hotel in the middle of the town. While she and Aadhya made a room appear for us—with money, not magic—I stood in the charming lobby stuffed with antiques and watched the literal army of tourists marching on past towards the old scenic bits of the town, a tide coming in from the train and flowing up either side of the mountain road with taxis and golf carts running through the middle, carrying whoever wasn’t ready to huff their way up on foot.
At first I was only watching because it was there in front of me to look at, but after a bit I started to wonder why they had apparently put the Scholomance entrance in the middle of a tourist trap. There’re enclave entrances in New York, in London, in most of the biggest cities of the world, but that’s because people build enclaves where they already live, and mostly they live in cities, so they have to put up with all the inconvenience and difficulty and mana-expense of building entrances there, where collisions with the mundane are a constant danger.
But the Scholomance was meant to be far away from any other enclaves and hard for maleficaria to find: why hadn’t they tucked it into a truly obscure corner of the world? I understood even less when we tracked down the coordinates and found they were in the middle of an actual museum: an old historical estate, and not evenveryhistorical; the place had been built in the 1900s, after the Scholomance had already been open for more than ten years. It had to be deliberate, but it made no sense.
Our coordinates had been rounded off to three places, so we had to hunt through the whole sprawling estate: it could have been anywhere inside the grounds. And we couldn’t even skip the queue for tickets and slip in through a wallwhen no one was looking; there were just too many people ambling through the picturesque nearby streets, taking selfies against the outer walls. Even if we’d found ourselves all alone for a moment, we couldn’t have counted on it lasting: every few minutes another one of the carts came careering around the turn.
So instead we waited on the queue and bought tickets just like everyone else, and then went through a long droning tour of the preserved house, hearing about the self-important owner and his architect and their fascination with Tarot rituals and initiation rites and primitivism—by which they’d clearly meant nature unspoilt by anyone who didn’t look like them; Aadhya rolled her eyes at me and silently mouthedwhat a dickhead—and all the lavish parties he’d hosted in the gardens. We kept trying to look for a place where someone might conceivably slip away, a door that might lead you out of the world, but the annoying nine-year-old boy in the group got to literally every single one before we could do, yanking on old brass doorknobs and opening antique cupboards while his beleaguered mother kept asking him wearily not to touch things.
When the tour finally spilled us out into the gardens, I was ready to believe that Ophelia had actually sent us out here as some sort of diversion, but when I suggested as much, Liesel said, “She would have sent us somewhere further away and more remote!” which was true, so we grimly set off to wander through the gardens, trying to find the entrance to the world’s most secret and hidden enclave of mystical power, hard on the heels of an entire tour bus of people with their guide carrying a waving flag of Hello Kitty at the head.
The grounds were dazzlingly beautiful, enormously lush, et cetera. Also it was hot as Satan’s tit, to put it in the most colorful terms possible, and what primitivism seemed tomean was that the paths went in loops, meandered aggressively, and the whole thing was full of stairs that pretended they’d been worn naturally into the rock and were therefore uneven. We kept trying to avoid the worst crowds, and as a result managed to go in circles three times in a row, which we only realized when we kept coming past the same distinctive moss-eaten staircase. I was overheated, sleep-deprived, wretched, and when we hit the same bloody staircase a fourth time, I started giggling and couldn’t make myself stop, and had to be taken to the café and revived with cold water and strong coffee.
Liesel was enraged by then herself—I reckon she didn’t much care for primitivism—and she stormed back to the ticket booth, got a map of the grounds, and after I got hold of myself, she led us on a systematic exhaustive tour of the place, and even insisted on our waiting in the painfully long queue to go down into the initiation well. The pamphlet told us it was part of some trumped-up mystical initiation rite of Freemasonry that the owner and his mates had liked to perform. It sounded to me that they hadn’t had enough hazing in university, and in order to justify more of it to themselves as grown men, he’d had to build himself a palace and dress it up as some ponderous mystic rite that none of them really believed in, as if they could cart themselves back in time to a pagan era they’d mostly made up.
I wasn’t in a mood to be fair to them, and also on some level I’d stopped thinking of finding the gates. In my head I was just on a horrible grade school trip that was happening to me as if I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t imagine the Scholomance being in this adult Disneyland sort of place, so I wasn’t wonderingwhyit was here, what any of it was for. I dragged myself through the queue in sullen sweaty annoyance, and into the actual well, which wasn’t literally a well: it was atower that someone had hollowed out of the ground instead of building into the air, with a long spiral stairway going down around the empty space in the middle, people leaning over the sides to take photos up and down and across.
By the third level down, I wasn’t sweating anymore, and I also didn’t have the slightest doubt: the Scholomance was here, somewhere, close by, and whoever had built this place had known exactly what they were doing.
The voices of all the tourists, dozens of conversations in dozens of languages, were bouncing back and forth off the walls and blurring together into a wordless clamoring, deep and insistent: a Greek chorus speaking urgently to you from the other side of a wall, trying to tell you something important. It didn’t seem to matter what they were saying, whether they were laughing or leaning over the edge to take photos; the echoes took everything and mashed it into the single low reverberating message.
The world above had been swallowed up by the dark inside the walls: it had receded into a round white circle of sky, too bright to look at from down here. I didn’t want to keep going, but the walkway was too narrow to pause for long, people crowding behind us and in front of us, pushing us onward. Anyway, I had to keep going. We had to keep going down. We had to goin.
In a city, you wanted your enclave entrance to be as hidden as you could manage, so you could slip in and out of it easily, without drawing attention. If a mundane ever caught sight of a wizard going into an enclave, disappearing impossibly through a wall—that would have cost the enclave an enormous amount of mana, if it didn’t literally make the entrance collapse.
But no one went in and out of the physical doors of the Scholomance on a daily basis. As students, we were broughtin through the induction spell that whisked us in an incorporeal form through the gates and wards all the way up to our freshman dormitories, at hideous expense, during the tiny window of opportunity right after the mals were gorged from graduation or had been cleansed. And at graduation, we walked back out through the doors, but we didn’t pop out into Portugal; the portal spell just sent us back whence we’d come.
The only things that used the doors were themals,and this packed-solid river of mundanes would only make it harder for them to get through. The builders had started with parties and elaborate ceremonies—the owner had surely been a wizard himself, or maybe just the architect; in any case they’d made the place adestinationfor mundanes from the start. And then they’d traded off the solemnity of the fake rituals for the sheer masses of tour groups.
When once in four decades the enclaves did need to send something through the doors into the graduation hall—like New York’s golems installing the new cafeteria equipment after the war—they presumably just hired the whole place out, claimed to be a film crew, and perhaps put out a documentary while they were at it. A documentary that would bring even more tourists here, to go through the ritual over and over and over, each one putting in just a little bit of mana in between the selfies—a moment of delight and wonder, a hint of unease, the half a second when they shut their eyes and imagined they were here alone, put themselves willingly into the story that the guidebooks and the pamphlets told them of initiation, and willingly wentin,going down into the pitch dark below.
The well deposited us in a misshapen tunnel with many branches that didn’t go anywhere, made of weirdly soft limestone, as if they’d been chewed open by something living.The weight of the earth was palpable overhead, and the cheap LED lightstrip they had set up to keep people from tripping didn’t make it less terrible, partly because it so clearly didn’t belong: it was only a feeble struggling effort to hold off the dark. There were no faces even in the crowd. People talked and muttered and someone screamed with laughter somewhere up ahead. Tears were glazing my eyes, blurring the orange light, and my breath was loud in my own ears. All I wanted was to keep going towards the gleams of light that I could just glimpse every once in a while up ahead, along the streaming river of tourists. I wanted to keep going and getout,escape along with them. That was the other reason they’d built this elaborate passageway: to make unsuspecting mundanes walk through the same journey that they hoped for their own children to make, the journey down to the smothering awful dark and back out again on the other side.
But there was a tiny thread of cold air coming at me along the side of the wall, with a faint familiar smell of ozone and iron and machine oil, and a hint of rotting compost: the smell of the Scholomance. I breathed it in, and felt in my gut how close I was, how close we were, and I stopped going along with the river of people. None of them really knew that I was here. None of them could see me. I was just one of a thousand shadows moving with them in the dark, I didn’t matter, and they wouldn’t even notice, they didn’t notice, when I stepped into the next dark tunnel branching and stopped being there.
My foot came down hard on a jagged broken stone. I almost went sprawling on my face before I caught my balance, clenching my abdominal muscles tight instead of using my hands, and straightened up with the evocation of refusal in my mouth and my hands held up in front of me, ready to push it out, but I didn’t need to. Nothing attacked me.
I couldn’t see a thing, but I had a strong impression ofspaceround me, and a moment later Liesel and Aadhya were there on either side of me. We all nearly went over again as they both instantly jerked into casting positions themselves. The floor under our feet was so uneven we were more or less falling down against one another. A faint light appeared a moment later: Aadhya had taken out a round glimmerball, a lacework of gilt brass over a crystal innard, with a satellite ring of brass around it and tiny little propellers like a drone. She gave it an underhand toss upwards, and it whirred to life and brightened slowly, shining over an enormous cavern, so huge it must have been almost as large as the entire gardens overhead, a hollow excavation that made everything up above belatedly feel precarious.
You could tell there had been a massive plaza down here once, with columns and fountains carved into the walls all around: possibly some sort of protective artifice. Now they were only vague suggestions of caryatids and lion’s-heads beneath thick layers of dirt and sludge. There was a green wet dripping everywhere, a stink of mold and stagnant water, and of rust; old scattered relics of dead maleficaria, scorched shells and cracked bits of constructs.
Across the center slab of the stone floor, they’d carved the familiar words at the heart of the Scholomance:To offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world, and around them in curving patterns were monumental versions of the same spells that had been engraved into the Scholomance doors, a litany of protection. I spottedMalice, keep far, this gate wisdom’s shelter guards: deep letters filled with gold that was still bright despite a glaze of algae.
But the spell was cracked right throughgate, a wide dark fissure crossing the curved shape of the words. Massive slabsof stone heaved up in every direction at sharp angles, piles of crumbled shards. The whole plaza was shattered in a sunburst of jagged cracks—radiating out from the immense bronze doors of the Scholomance, which were hanging askew out of their frame in the cavern wall. It looked—well, it looked like a supervolcano spell had gone off here in the recent past.
There was nothing else moving in the whole chamber, except the dripping water coming down from some leaky place overhead, plinking every few moments. There were gaping cracks between the doors and the frame, big enough we should have been able to see through them, but even in the glimmerball’s light, there was nothing but pitch dark on the other side. It could have been a shallow niche in the cavern wall; it could have been the unlit graduation hall; it could have been the empty void. It could have been the side of an enormous maw-mouth, pressed up tightly against the doors on the other side, trying to get out.
“I’m going in,” I said. My voice echoed weirdly off the walls round me, unbalanced. “Stay here.”
“And wait for Patience to come fleeing out ahead of you?” Liesel said caustically. “No. We are safer with you than alone.”
Aadhya just said, “Let’s go.”
I didn’t argue. Maybe I’d known all along that they would come with me, and I’d only told myself that I’d stop them because it was horribly selfish to drag them along, and so I’d had to pretend I wasn’t going to do it. I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.
We went into the Scholomance.
