Page 54 of The Golden Enclaves
And as soon as I gotclose enoughto one of them, once I had a maw-mouth in my sights—then Deepthi, and the four other members of my father’s clan who’d inherited some degree of her gift, wouldknowwhich enclave was going to go down when I destroyed it. And then they’d tell the enclave, the way she’d told Dubai, and they’d also offer to come over and replace their foundation stone just in time. The way I’d done in Dubai.
So every time I tracked down a maw-mouth, another enclave would have to open up their doors, and one by one they’d absorb all the wizards who would have built new enclaves. Maybe more wizards would even start to work strict mana, over time: my family would share the spells from the sutras freely, and surely other enclaves would want to have the power in-house. And the more maw-mouths I destroyed, the quicker it would happen.
Deepthi was still waiting for an answer: was I content? I took my hand off the sutras, and left them in her lap. “I’ll find a way to be,” I said, firmly, and meant it. I’d told Orion as much myself: I was alive, and out of the Scholomance, and so was everyone I loved, and I hadn’t had any right to expect even half that much.
So the next thing I did, obviously, was go back to the Scholomance.
I hugged Mum goodbye at the airport; she was going back to Wales. “Maybe you’ll have two homes, now,” she said tome, smiling through tears, and kissed me. “Come soon.” I boarded my own flight to Portugal after she’d gone.
The big placards on the outer walls of the museum park still saidCLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, and there were polite blank-faced guards on the gates making sure no mundanes got inside. But in the gardens the worst of the mess had already been tidied up, statues returned to their proper places—whether that was by repairing them and putting them back into their niches, or by turning them back into people. One mistake had been made in that direction which had resulted in several people getting chased round the garden with arrows until the single-minded Diana in question had been turned back into stone.
The way to the school was temporarily wide open, by which I mean it was only three spells of concealment to work through and then ten minutes slogging through dank tunnels to get back to the entry plaza. But the doors were back on their hinges, and the repairs in the graduation hall were almost completely finished; the sound of work was echoing down the big maintenance shafts from the upper levels, where massive teams of artificers were hard at work installing the new dormitory levels, almost twice the former size. The rooms would be a bit bigger, too, but not for luxury: from now on there were going to be two students to each one.
Shanfeng and Balthasar were in the workshop when I rode the lift up, so I stopped to see if they needed my help for any of the heavy lifting; I’d been able to shave a few solid weeks off their time estimates, just by heaving some of the bigger pieces up the shafts. “No, I think we will not be needing your assistance any further,” Shanfeng said, consulting his many diagrams. “The construction process is on schedule. We will be ready by September.”
“And the trial run of the new induction spells yesterdaywent fine,” Balthasar said. Then he paused, and hesitantly told me, “Domina Vance decided to retire. Ophelia’s been elected.”
I didn’t congratulate him; I stomped away seething instead. She’d murdered an entire year’s worth of Scholomance students, performed a hideous act of human sacrifice on her own child, and had nearly destroyed us all: obviously the only thing for it was to make her Domina.
I had been trying with some difficulty not to let myself recognize that I was in fact going to be doing exactly what Ophelia had been trying to achieve all along, forcing enclaves to stop proliferating andshare.Mum had tried to gently reassure me that I wasn’t anything like her, and that the means mattered as much as the ends, but that wasn’t any help; I already knew. I was just angry. I wanted Ophelia topay,and instead she was getting almost exactly what she’d wanted, and if she was even sorry about anything she’d done, it was news to me and wouldstaynews to me, since Deepthi had once again firmly warned me off going to New York and shoving Ophelia’s face in a rubbish heap.
The warren of seminar rooms were in the same places they’d always been, meaning that they were in completely different places than any other time I’d been trying to find my way through to any of my lessons. But they didn’t feel the same. The cleansing machinery had been updated and refined, and the walls of mortal flame had gone back and forth a dozen times during the tuning. Even the oldest stains had been scorched away, everything clean and bright in the new lighting that had been efficiently strung throughout the place, tiny constructs made of LEDs and mana, vastly cheaper than the old ones. But it wasn’t the visible stains that were the real difference.
I’d hated the school ever since I’d first come in, as if all along I’d felt the horrible lie that lived down at the heart of it, the rotting flesh beneath our feet. And now that lie was gone,replaced by that plea we’d all made together:stay and shelter us.I was having toworkat hating the place, dredging through all my worst memories of being jumped in this corner or that one, sneered at here or there.
I sullenly shoved my way into the gymnasium. I was so determined to hatethat,at least, that I didn’t even notice the tiny palm-sized digester that peeled itself off the wall and flung itself towards the back of my head. Stupidly; it hadn’t got halfway when it was snagged out of the air and vanished with a snap, and I jerked round with Orion grinning at me smugly. “I’m opening up a lead,” he said.
I glared at him. “You’renotopening up a lead, you wanker; you’ll be the rest of your life catching up to me.” He only beamed at me, undampened.
We weren’t sure how he was still able to suck mana out of the mals, now that his inner maw-mouth was gone. The only plausible explanation had come from him: he’d shrugged and said, “I’ve always been able to do it,” with the faint air of wondering why we found it surprising. That was the kind of belief that could let you do almost anything. Orion wasn’t being held up by a maw-mouth anymore, but hewasstill connected directly to the void: we’d just built him a golden new place to stand.
With the Scholomance and a dozen other enclaves piled up on his shoulders like Atlas, except he didn’t seem to even notice the weight was there. All was right with the world again, as far as he was concerned. The bastard wouldn’t even be mad atOphelia.I’d had to stop talking to him about it. The morning after the fighting, he’d told me earnestly that she’d made a terrible mistake and she’d apologized to him and asked him to forgive her andhe had,and I’d nearly gnashed his entire face off in frothing rage. I’d have considered forgiving her after she’d spent the rest of her life scrubbing out thetoilets of the families of every last wizard child she’d killed, only I wouldn’t really.
I’d made him come with me to Wales and spend as long as it took to unearth his trauma by talking with Mum and going out with her circle and taking long walks in the woods. After three days, Mum had sat me down firmly and told me that Orion had been distressed for a very good and concrete reason, which I’dfixed,and it was all right for him to be just fine now that it was gone, and I needed to stop trying to make him be traumatized, and alsoIwas the one who needed some treatment. I ended up spending several weeks trudging around the commune with Mum myself, instead, before I couldn’t stand it anymore and wrote to Liesel in desperation to get some work to do.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I added. “There’s not a single child in the school to guard yet, you don’t have to lurk in here like a goblin.”
He said mildly, “I like it here. Anyway, it’s too hot outside,” which was absolute nonsense. It was indeed too hot outside, because it was a sunny day in the middle of August in Portugal and I’d nearly had heatstroke just getting from the palace to the well, but that wasn’t the shadow of an excuse forpreferring the gym,even if at the moment it was full of huge old trees rustling softly in a faint breeze, and a wide stream running the whole length of the chamber, up and down a hill and gurgling over grey rocks, with a perfect little red arch of a bridge leading to the pavilion.
We went and sat on the steps together. There was a jug on the table inside with cool water, and one bowl full of fruit, a second one full of edamame.
“How many maw-mouths do you think there are, out there?” Orion said.
I half shrugged one shoulder. I didn’t really want to thinkabout the numbers. When the maw-mouth was killed, the enclave came down in a crash, but it didn’t happen the other way round. Enclaves could be lost from the world, forgotten, their entrances blocked up, their wizards killed or tumbled away in the void. The maw-mouth they’d made didn’t vanish at the same time. It kept creeping on round the world, still endlessly hungry. And how many enclaves had been made in the last five thousand years, all of them set atop lives crushed down into the void? Hundreds at least. And the maw-mouths would all be hiding from me as hard as they could.
But I’d have help, at least. Aadhya had taken Liu home to her place in New Jersey, to get a bit more rest—and an enormous amount of feeding-up—before we started, but the plan was, once the school was well on its way, we were going to meet in Cape Town. There had been seventeen sightings of maw-mouths in South Africa in the last month. Jowani was waiting there for us.
Liesel would be sorting us out a network from London, or rather two of them. The first one was officially a public maw-mouth survey meant to help people avoid them, now that they were attacking wizards more aggressively: people all over the world would be sending reports of maw-mouth sightings to her. The second network was going to be a small and carefully handpicked group of our schoolmates scattered round the world, and they would all be in on the actual project. They’d help get our little hunting party quietly in and out again, ideally no one else the wiser, and also file false sightings of the late unlamented maw-mouths afterwards, just in case we’d been spotted, and in various other ways throw a veil of confusion over my activities.
All very clever, but I was fairly sure that people were still going to work it out sooner or later. Later, most likely, because we’d just packed a decade of upheaval into a singlefortnight, and everyone was still reeling. Even most of the people who’d joined the chain of mana down in the cavern didn’t fully understand what exactly we’d done. They’d come into the working because they’d seen Shanfeng helping us, or Ophelia, or because they’d been terrified of having the roof fall in on their heads, and mostly they’d come away with the idea that Shanghai and New York had made peace, and as part of the terms, they’d saved the Scholomance together.
But a fair few people had seen me kill a maw-mouth by now, or knew that I could do it, and every council member knew what was holding their enclaves up, after all. Eventually, someone hostile would put those two things together, and I hadn’t the shadow of an idea for what I’d do then. Shanfeng and Ophelia might be all for my crusade, but it was easy to feel that way when you were at the top of the world’s most powerful enclaves. Other enclavers would be more than a bit put out.
I’d suggested to Aad and Liu that maybe they ought to just go home and not get too involved, but Liu had said, “No,” firmly and immediately. Which would have been understandable ifhomehad been Beijing enclave, but it wasn’t anymore. Shanfeng had made a quiet arrangement with the new council they’d elected: Beijing had taken in seven of Shanghai’s own long-term hirelings—still several years away from earning places and fully willing to settle for a bit less room—and Liu and her immediate family had been given places in Shanghai enclave instead.
“What about Yuyan?” I tried—Liu had already put her on the list for Liesel’s second network—but Liu had just smiled at me a little watery and said, “Maybe after Shanghai replaces their foundation.” I couldn’t exactly argue that, could I.
And practical Aadhya had just shrugged at me and said, “El, I’m not a crazy person, so I’m not going to spend the rest of my life doing this. But I’m ready to spendsomeof my lifedoing this, because it’s worth doing, and right now is when you’re going to need the most help figuring out how to get it done. Anyway, if someone’s going to try to get at you through me and Liu, they’ll do it whether we’re with you or not. That was the price of admission when we put our names up on the wall. However,” she added pointedly, “I’m stipulating right now, no more youth hostels. That place smelled like the boys’ bathroom back at school. You can sleep on the floor in my hotel room if you need to demonstrate your asceticism.”
