Page 42 of The Golden Enclaves
All the while, a cool pleasant breeze came steadily in my face with a faint hint of dampness. It wasn’t like London’s magical sunlamps, either; the sun and the wind were real sun and real wind, the same color and flavor as the outside. We reached the end of the alleyway and I saw the sun and air were coming into the enclave through wind towers—squarehollow towers built outside a century ago or more, meant to catch and funnel breezes into the walled streets. When they’d brought the old buildings in, they’d left the tops of them outside, sitting on some skyscraper roof I suppose, and added small enchanted mirrors to coax the sunshine in along with the wind.
I knew it even as Jamaal’s grandfather led us towards the middle one and unlocked a massive iron-banded door: the foundation stone was inside. Some sort of twisted irony, having the lovely comfortable breeze blowing at you, the sunlight glowing above, all of it flowing to you over that piece of hideous work. Of course it wasn’t just irony at work. These towers weren’t magical buildings on their own, like the sage’s house in Beijing; they hadn’t been imbued with power by seven generations of wizards. But someone, some mundanes,hadbuilt them with the right passionate intent, with care and love: trying to make shelter, a place of coolness and relief in the desert. The founding enclavers had probably done a mystical survey and settled on them as the perfect spot, just the right place to punch a hole through into the void. Just like finding someone strict mana to put under their stone.
I didn’t go inside. “You’ll have to tear the walls down round it,” I said.
The work went a little slowly at first; not because they weren’t desperate to save their enclave, but because they couldn’t quite believe in the oncoming attack. The enclave was still there, still solid all around them. It was a warning of hurricanes with a clear blue sky above stretching for miles in every direction. Even the senior wizards, who’d already agreed with their own mouths, had a hard time putting their metaphysical pickaxes to the tower and opening it up.
Or maybe they just didn’t want to open the tower up, sothey wouldn’t have to see what they’d done. Because once they had fairly started, the first large chunk taken out of the doorway and their borrowed sunlight hitting the smooth round disk of iron set there in the floor, so all of them could see it, the pace began to quicken. And by the time they’d got the last bits down, they were all going full-tilt, pulling it down in massive chunks, leaving them in a great massed heap, dust rising in a cloud all round us. But none of the dust clung to the iron disk. It stood stark and heavy against the warm golden stones, and no one went near it.
The rest of the enclavers had already begun making their building-blocks. They didn’t need me to bring out the sutras for that, though, since they had a piece of artifice to do the job. It wasn’t the same as the massive stamping machine in Beijing—that one had been very expensive, I imagine—and looked more like a small oven. But they had a dozen of them lined up: each wizard stepped up to it and put in a double-handful of the dust and broken chunks from the shattered tower, and they put their hands on the oven and sent the mana in, and when the light faded, they reached in and brought out a single flat stone, all of them in different colors, some smaller and some larger, polished and rough.
It took a few increasingly frantic hours, all the new contributors coming inside one after another down the central lane to get their paving stones and then go line up in the other two lanes, waiting huddled together. Ibrahim came away with a polished green disk barely the size of a pound coin—he hadn’t had enough time out of school to save up anything, but he’d obviously been let in for services rendered in bringing me in, and I couldn’t help but be glad for him. His brother and sister-in-law, who’d both been working for the enclave for years, were there, too, that narrow uneven bargain they’d made suddenly paying off in spades. His parentshadn’t any other children who had escaped the grinding teeth of maleficaria, but his aunt and uncle had come with their ten-year-old daughter and their six-year-old son, who’d never have to go to the Scholomance just for the thin hope of survival. His family had collectively scrounged up all the mana they could, hurriedly selling off a few magical heirlooms and mortgaging years of their work, to get together the two years of mana that the most vulnerable members of their family had to pay to get in.
It was an absurdly low price for an enclave place. Almost any wizard could pull together that much. Of course, there was one other significant price: having to come inside a condemned building. Everyone knew about the warning. The pressure built with every other person coming nervously inside to make their paving stones, then going to line up in the alleyways and wait, tensed and watching the walls around them for the first sign of cracking, for the storm to come rolling in, all of us together in a race we were running against a rival we couldn’t see.
But any wizard would still take the chance at the price, because it was a price theycouldpay, a reward thatwouldbe given, if we all made it to the other side. It wasn’t a lifetime of drudgery and constant fear with nothing but a thin scrap of hope to help you along the way. And to give them this much credit, the enclave could have made more of a bidding war of it, thrown the call open worldwide and driven up the price. Instead they’d come down on the side of letting in people they’d already vetted: all their workers, all the Scholomance allies the recent graduates could ring up, whoever could make it quick enough.
I spotted Ibrahim and Jamaal’s ally Nadia in one of the queues, and before the process had finished, Cora arrivedtoo, fresh from the airport without even a bag, running to hug Nadia and Ibrahim and Jamaal fiercely, wiping tears away, before she got in the queue; and then she saw me and after a moment got out of the queue and came to me. I waited there like a block wondering what she wanted even straight up to the moment when she put her arms round me, too. I managed to behave like a human being and hug her back, my throat tight.
Ibrahim kept watching the last trickle of people streaming in through the central lane while pretending he wasn’t, turning his green stone over and over in his hands, and then he put it away in his pocket and turned his back as the stragglers brought up the end, the last of the enclavers coming back in from outside, the oldest wizards and mums with small kids, going one after another to put a handful of dust into the baking ovens, even the babies bringing out pea-sized pebbles with their mums’ hands cupped round theirs. The houses were thickening up, gaining a sense of solidity as the last of the borrowed space eased back in with them, from all those conference rooms and empty offices.
I looked at Ibrahim, who’d stayed with me by the ruined tower the whole time. “I’ll wait.”
Ibrahim didn’t look up. “I don’t know if he’s even got the message.” His voice was a little ragged, thready, and then Nadia gave a cry, “Ibi!” and he turned and was running down the alleyway, dodging people left and right: Yaakov was coming in with the very last three people. A frail ancient man, bent almost double, was creeping precariously balanced between Yaakov’s arm and a spindly walking stick whose carved inscriptions weren’t powerful enough to keep him upright alone. An only ordinarily old woman with exhausted eyes was on his other side, carrying a small child limply asleep onher shoulder. Ibrahim stopped just short of them all, and then Yaakov reached out his free arm and they had buried their faces against each other’s necks, standing together.
For just a moment: everyone was impatient with fear, longing to hurry them up. I couldn’t help but feel it too: the old man’s every creaking step stretched out agonizingly long, even with Ibrahim helping on his other side now, and I had rotten sinkhole ground beneath my feet and the weight of a thousand innocent lives on my shoulders, all the people who’d come here because I’dtoldthe enclavers to let them in. I could see Jamaal’s grandfather glancing at me, wanting to tell me to go ahead and get on with it, wondering if I’d do it, and before he could ask so I’d have to find out, I went to the almost gone heap of tower bits and grabbed a chunk and started dragging it on the ground round the iron disk, making chalky circles like places to stand, as if I were getting ready for a casting, even though it wasn’t necessary, while Yaakov and his family got their paving stones.
Liesel either realized what I was doing or couldn’t resist the golden opportunity to organize something into better order; she started corralling some of the enclavers and telling them where everyone ought to stand, and having them establish a tidy traffic pattern so everyone would flow out of one lane to make the next circle, and then away into another. “In Beijing,” Liesel said to me abruptly, after everyone had got the idea and was on their feet and queuing up. “You said at the end, replacing the foundation, they put the last bricks in together.”
I nodded. “I couldn’t have lifted them by then.”
“Why notallthe stones at once, then?” she said.
So I didn’t touch a single brick with my own hands; instead, Liesel and her helpers counted off a precisely calculated number of people in from the lane and had them formup in a circle round the iron disk with their own paving stone. Then each of them cast a little bog-simplehoverspell on the thing, parents casting them for children too small to do it themselves, and left it floating there in midair just a few inches above the ground. Then off they all marched down into the other lane, making room for the next group.
It was a tidy way to keep from making the stones grow unbearably heavy along the way, and then at the end, five of the loudest-voiced men bellowed out a count, just like they had in Beijing. Everyone ended their hover incantation at once, and the paving stones came down like an inverted explosion, the outer ring landing first and each inner one coming down with more and more force, until the innermost ones smashed down onto the iron disk, burying it somewhere far beneath, and together we all called out the final incantation—a better translation this time, since I’d been able to give it to some professionals with a bit of warning—and the shining spell welled up in brilliant glowing from underneath to a massive ululating chorus of voices calling in unison,stay, be shelter, be home for us.
The banquet did get eaten, afterwards. The doors and courtyards were all flung open to celebrate, all the newcomers invited in somewhere by one enclaver or another. Dancing and music spilled out into the alleyways, everything from traditional songs to modern pop from seventeen different countries, while people rapidly got drunk on liquor and enchanted vapors and relief.
And for once—I waswanted.Ibrahim and his allies reaching out to put their arms round me and Liesel, wanting to take us back with them to Jamaal’s family compound, a massive courtyard house right there at one end of the right lane.I would have been so desperately glad to join in the massive catharsis, to find release somehow. Liesel took my hand and looked an invitation at me, and I wanted to stay, but I couldn’t.
Becauseit was still there.We’d built the enclave a new foundation now, a wide round plaza full of those beautiful stones—but the old one was still there, a spongy mass beneath that I could still feel even when apparently no one else could, a horrible version of the princess and the pea.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, brutal and crass, and I pulled my hands away and forced my way through the lane, past all the joyful press of bodies that kept wanting me to join them. People whose faces I’d only glimpsed for a moment were looking at me andsmiling,reaching out, and I couldn’t reach back to any of them. I just put my head down and bulled on through to the other end, which was just as crowded, and there managed through sheer desperate insistence to make the way out open up for me, a low hatch falling open in a wall when I banged on it. I ducked through and came stumbling out of the door, a janitorial closet tucked away behind the impersonal marble lobby of the office block. The security guard did a double take when I burst out past him, and got up frowning as if he half thought of coming after me, but he could see I wasn’t carrying anything, and I was moving fast, so he gave it up for a bad lot and sank back down in his chair.
I kept going bang out of the doors and into the sweltering heat of the Dubai afternoon. It dragged me to a stop sooner than I wanted; I had to stagger into a massive mall the size of a small city itself and sit down by a fountain just to breathe. I was feeling too many things at once: the ferocious joy of the foundation spell, the power and longing of all those people’s hopes still running through me, and my own recoiling from the deep horror beneath, both of them twisted up with my own longing for Orion, who was out there in the world livingwith that same horror buried under his own skin, impossible to escape. My body was shaking with exhaustion and heat and energy, and my mobile buzzing madly in my pocket until I just turned it off. I sat there for fifteen minutes getting my breath back and letting everything else settle, until one single feeling came up to the surface above all the rest, and if you can’t guess which one it was, presumably you’ve only just started reading at this particular point in the story.
The attack, the prophesied attack, hadn’t come. It hadn’t come before I’d got here, and it hadn’t come during the casting, and now it wouldnevercome. Why would it? I’d buried the vulnerability beneath that new foundation plaza built of mana, mortared with hopes and dreams and love, and there wouldn’t be any chance to steal mana from the place. Why would any maleficer bother wasting their time attacking it? So that wastwoprophecies that hadn’t come true, now. Like the one thing my great-grandmother couldn’t properly foresee wasmeand my choices; as though hergiftwas assuming the worst of me, the same way everyone else in the world always had.
I got up and went out to the taxi stand. I’d noticed on the way in from the airport that loads of the drivers here seemed to be Indian, come over to work for the mundane version of enclaves. Three of them were standing outside together smoking, and I said to them in English, “I need to go to Mumbai.”
“I’d like to go to Mumbai,” one of them said, wistfully. “Are you from Mumbai, pretty girl?”
“My father was,” I said, in Marathi.
They told me to wait until one of them got a ride to the airport, and then he let me sit up front with him and ride along. After Iqbal dropped off his passengers, he took me over to the terminal with the cheaper regional flights. I laydown on a bench in a quiet corner and catnapped until it got late, the whole place going quieter and quieter. When the security lines were empty, I went into the loo nearest to the gates, where I was now the only person. There was a cleaning cart inside. I took the spray bottle of blue cleanser off and used it to make a dripping outline of an archway on the back wall, and then I balled my hands into fists and rested them on the wall inside, shut my eyes, and recited a useful modern American spell: “Get ready, get set, and go, go, go,” thumping on the wall along with the punctuation, and on the last one I dropped my hands to my sides and just walked straight through and out the other side, into the facing loo on the other side of security.
There was one flight to Mumbai on the board. I went to the gate and waited until everyone had boarded, and then I asked the people on the desk if there were any seats left, and if I could have one. The woman attendant started telling me officially how I was to get on a standby list, but I stopped her. “I know I’m not allowed,” I said. “I haven’t got a ticket and I haven’t got any money. If there’s a seat empty, and you’ll let me go sit in it anyway, I’d be grateful, that’s all.”
