Page 49 of The Golden Enclaves
No one paid any attention to us at first. There were only eight of us, after all, and eight wizards weren’t especially important on the scale of this fight. Another dozen appeared on both sides just while I was watching, wizards who hadn’t had to take the long way in; near the goldenJaipurbanners there was a horizontal pulley set up, ropes going into a big curtained box like a magic trick. “That’s a ghandara,” Aadhya said, low. “Long-distance transport artifice. You can pull things in from more than ten miles away.” Four wizards were cranking the gears round as fast as they could go, and every four or five turns, the ropes came out with a wizard on the other end clinging to them, blindfolded, to be quickly helped off and sent into the frantic preparations.
I couldn’t see what the New York side was using, but wizards were coming from somewhere over there as well, more of them every few minutes, like clowns piling improbably out of a car. There was a command center to one side of the doors, a raised metal floor with sections unfolded out from its sides, ready to shut itself back up again into an armored box when the enemy fire began to fly, loaded with senior wizards in there directing things; I spotted Christopher Martel among them talking to a Japanese woman, presumably Chisato Sasaki from Tokyo, and a tall dark-haired man that Caterina said was Bastien Voclain, the Dominus of Paris. Maybe Liesel’s target wasover there: Herta Fuchs of Munich was surely in that crowd, and her daughter and son-in-law might have come along. There were a few other American wizards looking sufficiently impressive that they must also have been Domini or whatever the plural ought to be. And seated amidst the rest of them, an old woman with a tidy cap of silver hair in a black dress with a collar of sapphires and diamonds, who might have modeled herself after a Hepburn photo shoot: Aurelina Vance, the Domina of New York.
On the Shanghai side, the command center was less obvious; there were a dozen cloth pavilions up at the back in ornate drapery, red and blue and green embroidered with silver and gold, concealing anything going on inside. But surely they had their own ranks of the powerful and important gathering.
My plan was already well off the rails, because the one person Ididn’tsee was Ophelia, anywhere. I would have liked to believe that something had gone wrong for her, that she’d lost her grip on power, but I didn’t. If I couldn’t see her, that only meant she was doing something even more horrible than anything I could have imagined, and I had no idea what it was or how to stop it. I didn’t know which side to go to. Presumably Shanghai’s side would have had a stronger interest in helping me stop her, but I’d be more likely to get information about what she was doing on the American one.
I stood there like a lump dithering over which side to go to. It didn’t seem like a choice I’d get to make twice. There was a feeling of a critical mass being reached, as if the space couldn’t hold much more of us, ofmana.If I wasn’t imagining it, the ceiling was receding up into an increasing dark that didn’t belong in the world. This many wizards using this much magic all together was making the place becomeless real.
I’d just made up my mind to head to New York’s side and try to find Liesel among the throng when a spell unexpectedly came flying right at me out of one of Shanghai’s pavilions. I reached out to snag it like the other spells I’d been plucking like ripe fruit, and I failed completely: the thing slid through my grip like trying to grab hold of a water balloon covered in oil. I flinched automatically from the hit before I registered that it hadn’t done me any harm at all; there wasn’t an ounce of malice in the thing. It was only someone taking a polite grip on my arm, conveying the intention to save me from stepping into something really unpleasant like dog poo, and to tug me invitingly another way:please won’t you come.
Which was quite alarming really: whoever had tossed that spell had already worked out, presumably based on gossip and my performance in the gardens above, that you couldn’t use malicious spells on me, butneutralspells would hit just fine. They could easily work out some way to use that against me. The politeness wasn’t a comfort either, more the opposite; if they’d decided I was someone worth being polite to under these circumstances, then they’d decided I was someone really dangerous.
But on the other hand—at least they were willing to talk to me. And I couldn’t actually see Liesel anywhere over on the American side, or even Alfie or Sir Richard for that matter. The only person Ididknow over there was Christopher Martel, who certainly didn’t feel any affection for me and might not feel he’d exhausted the options for trying to use me for his own stupid selfish purposes. He’d already dragged his entire enclave into this mess, for no reason other than to keep clinging to his own power.
“All right,” I said grimly, “I’ll come—” which turned into a loud squawking yelp: as soon as I’d said “all right,” the polite spell snatched me up and thwoomped me like a yanker spellstraight across the field and into the pavilion it had come from in the first place. I wasn’t even left to catch my own balance; the spell stopped me and braced me on all sides at the same time, so it felt almost as though actually I hadn’t moved and the rest of the world had just been neatly rolled over a little bit beneath my feet to put me in the proper spot.
There was a chair right behind my knees, a beautiful one carved of wood with the legs made of storks, and another one directly across from me. They’d both clearly been placed deliberately, waiting, but no one was sitting in there. The only people inside with me were two fighting wizards, wearing quilted silk clothes and holding what really looked a lot like machine guns. They didn’t flinch at my appearance, but I reckon that was because they both seemed to already be as tense as any human being could manage. An odd brazier-looking thing was sitting in the middle of the tent right between the chairs—a spell holder, I realized after a moment. Only normally a spell holder is a pendant-sized thing, and this was the size of a very large charcoal grill and holding a bed of glowing fist-sized coals, each one of them adifferentspell, primed to go off under different appropriate circumstances.
One of them—that tidy yanking spell—was just fading away, crumbling into pale ash. Someone hadpreparedthat spell, in advance. It hadn’t been based on my rampage through the gardens at all. Whoever had cast it hadalreadysomehow worked out that malicious spells weren’t any use on me, even before I’d understood it myself.
I had a bad moment staring at the heap of spells, wondering which of them were about to go off in my face, and then the curtains at the back of the pavilion opened and a short Chinese man came in, wearing a Mao suit made out of some kind of fabric that looked almost like denim, with the buttons made of metal. The guards looked at me withexpressions that successfully conveyed both a passionate desire to riddle me with bullets and also the anguished terror of knowing it wouldn’t do the slightest good. The carved phoenix at the back of the chair uncurled its head to peer at me with similar anxiety.
“Ms. Higgins,” the man said, then seeing myugh noadded, with a faint smile, “or may I call you El? I am Li Shanfeng.”
The Dominus of Shanghai.
“El’s fine,” I said, flatly.
It was no wonder the guards were ready to have at me instantly. Every Dominus was a powerful wizard, the valedictorians of their enclaves and not just of a single year at school; the Dominus of any major enclave was on another level. But Li Shanfeng was just as far beyond them.
All of us at school knew his life story; aside from being excellently dramatic, it was a fairly critical part of recent wizard history. As a boy, he’d survived a maw-mouth attack on Shanghai enclave that had forced them to abandon the place. He’d come out of the Scholomance as the most brilliant artificer graduate in living memory, with offers from every major enclave in the world. Instead, he’d gone home and done what everyone thought couldn’t be done: with a circle of wizards behind him, he’d gone into the maw-mouth and destroyed it, so they could take back the enclave.
And then he’d rebuilt his home from an abandoned half ruin into one of the most powerful enclaves in the world. He’d developed new construction techniques that allowed modern enclaves to build vastly larger and more elaborate structures. That mana-brick stamping machine in Beijing had almost certainly been one of his designs. So had those elaborate new foundation disks. Every powerful Western enclave had paid enormously in mana and treasure to get hold of them, and he’d taken that wealth and used it not just torebuild Shanghai, but to support the other major Chinese enclaves, too, and sponsor dozens more beyond, and ultimately to force a reallocation of Scholomance seats, so they could save more of the independent wizards living near their own enclaves.
It had been a story not just of improbable success but of even more improbable generosity. Big enclaves often supported smaller ones in return for various kinds of tribute and fealty, but he had given away more power than he’d kept, helped other enclaves become so large they could rival his own. It wasn’t the sort of thing enclavers did; it wasn’t the sort of thing any wizards did.
Except of course—now I knew how he’d been doing it. He’d saved his own enclave from a maw-mouth, and then he’d gone off andmade more of them.For every enclave he’d helped put up, he’d unleashed another maw-mouth on the helpless, unprotected wizards of the world who didn’t have enclaves to shelter in, and he’d known,he’d knownwhat he was doing, in a way that even the worst council member couldn’t know. He’d stood inside a maw-mouth and felt that devouring limitless hunger trying to get at him.
Something of that must have shown on my face, because the guards twitched—they didn’t quite raise their guns, but theywantedto. Because they wanted to protect him: theirhero.I looked at them and said to him savagely, “I’m guessing they don’t know, do they.”
Shanfeng spoke to the two guards; they looked horribly miserable but after a moment they went out of the pavilion and left us alone. “No,” he said. “It’s very difficult to tell anyone who doesn’t already know. The compulsion of secrecy is very powerful. It has been attached to the foundation spells for a very long time—from the very beginning, I suspect.”
I suspected, too: it wasn’t the sort of secret you could hopeto keepwithoutmagic, after all. Whoever had come up with this lovely way of building enclave foundations back in the distant mists of time had wanted to sell their spell to all the top bidders—but they’d probably been a bit anxious about what other people would think of their clever solution. So they’d worked up a spell to make sure you couldn’t tell anyone until they first accepted the compulsion to keep it quiet themselves. “Can’t have anyone seeing the dirty washing,” I said.
Shanfeng nodded as if it wasn’t anything to do with him. “The compulsion also requires you to charge fair market value for the spell before you can share it. And the restrictions even carry over onto any improvements or modifications you make to the spells yourself. They were designed to be controlled. Unlike those.” He indicated the sutras strapped across my chest in their protective case. “Please, sit.”
He seated himself; I stayed on my feet. “Did you have any improvements in mind forthem?” I said caustically. “I’m sure they could do loads more if you just added a little mass slaughter here and there.”
“I can see you’re very angry,” he said, demonstrating he possessed all the observational abilities of a dead stick. “You have every right to be. But we don’t have much time. Once Ophelia knows that I am here, she will act. And then…you will have to choose.”
“I don’t see much choice between the two of you. She hasn’t built forty enclaves’ worth of maw-mouths,” I said. Although that wasn’t entirely true. As far as my gut was concerned, hewasbetter. He wasn’t a maleficer at all. I reckonotherwizards had actually carried out the enclave-building spells; he’d just helped them along. Perversely, it only made me angrier, as if there was some virtue in Ophelia getting her own hands dirty.
“Ophelia and I are fighting the same war, and have been for many years,” he said. “It breeds similarity—and compromise. I’ve done many things I regret. But the ones I regret the most are the choices I made without information. That’s what I’m here to offer you, if you’ll take it.”
“By which you mean, you’d like to tell me what a terrible person Ophelia is, and how much better you are,” I said. I’d come over here precisely because I wanted information, and to stop Ophelia, but now I almost wanted more to tell him to go jump in a crevasse. But I swallowed the impulse. Otherwise what would I do? I could storm over to the New York side and talk to Ophelia a bit, get enraged at her again, come over here and chat with Shanfeng, get angry at him, and ping-pong back and forth until I just exploded us all in a final maelstrom of fury. “Go on, then. Tell me something I don’t know.”
If I had ruffled him, he didn’t show it. He paused, and then said in a very level tone, “When I entered the maw-mouth, I was inside armor that I’d built, with a circle of everyone I loved—all my living family, my friends, every wizard I could persuade to help me—fighting to keep it whole around me. It was six days before I glimpsed the core of the maw-mouth. But of course, I was not going anywhere, that whole time. I was only making it smaller. By killing all the people inside it, before they could drag me down into their own torment.”
