Page 7 of The Golden Enclaves
I eyed him in enormous irritation. If London enclavedidn’tpay me back adequately—which was going to be hard since I couldn’t actually think of anything I wanted on that scale, apart from things I couldn’t get, such as bringing Orion backto life—it was entirely possible he’d have to literally follow me around trying to pay me back for the rest of his life. It’s a very bad idea to promise an evil witch that you’ll doanythingin exchange for her help: that’s how some maleficers end up with loyal Igor-like minions slavishly in their train. It’d look really marvelous, Alfie of London trailing around behind me on a string. Whether I wanted him to or not.
“Don’t make idiotic promises,” I said cuttingly. “I’ll see what I think of when I have a look at the thing. It can’t be much further, can it?” I folded my arms and sulked back into my seat with furious determination to just get this over with.
“It’ll be another—” Sarah began, but my intent won out: the car lurched to a halt and was standing in the vast circular drive of a crumbling monstrosity of a house. We climbed out. It was a giant ugly box of a mansion that wouldn’t have looked out of place as an Asda, if one of the builders involved had stuck a portico of faux Greek columns on the front under the impression that actually they were rebuilding the Parthenon.
Another different builder, without communicating with the first, had been badly misinformed that there was a nice house here and had built an imposing outer wall around the property to safeguard it, festooned with spikes and topped off with a charming froth of barbed wire and security cameras. There was a choked fountain, and the drive was overgrown with moss and weeds gone everywhere, scattered broken bottles and crumpled plastic, with a thick pungent stink of rot and urine lying over everything as if an army of rats inhabited the place.
Absolutely magnificent, by enclave standards. London enclave probably owned six or seven like this in just this postcode, not to mention hundreds of massive flats throughout the city, perhaps whole condemned buildings and crumblingwarehouses, all buried beneath layers of bureaucracy and paperwork. No one would ever come near, except the kind of person that the neighbors would call the mundane police to chase off on your behalf.
Meaning they coulduseall this space, the wasteland of empty rooms and abandoned grounds. They could slip it inside the enclave, and thanks to the flexibility of the void around them, reorganize it there to suit themselves, as if you could look over your flat and decide you’d like thirty square meters moved from the living room to the kitchen that afternoon while you made dinner.
If a mundane ever did poke their nose into the dilapidated wreck of the place, they’d be given just enough of that space back to keep them from noticing while they were here, and if they were mad enough to want to linger for any length of time, with the whine and creak of a rotting house and the mysterious whooshes of air as space moved in and out of reality around them, it was entirely likely that one of the hungry mals lurking round the fringes of the enclave would manage to get them during the witching hours of the night, when mundanes do, briefly, believe in magic.
Alfie led us round the house to the back, and then through the garden along a path of hexagonal stepping-stones. I didn’t take the time to inspect them closely, but they had some sort of runes etched into them. A tiny stone building, rather like a mausoleum for a single occupant, sat far back in the corner of the property, deep in shadow. As we got close, the paving stones started to give a bit underfoot, as if the ground had gone soft and boggy beneath them: the same queasy sensation I’d felt through the power-sharer, something gone wrong. Alfie hesitated a moment with his foot on the next one, feeling it too, then doggedly kept onward.
The doorway of the stone building was empty, with dangling hinges, exposing an empty narrow room beyond with a single broken window and more smashed bottles all over the floor, an invitation to slice your feet to ribbons. “Look away,” he said, and after we turned away and then looked back, the door was in place waiting for us: made of thick planks of stained and dark ancient wood, with a boar-faced knocker holding a ring in its snout and a massive doorknob in the middle, both cast in solid bronze.
I could pick out runes scratched into the old wood, hidden among the other scars and lines: Old English incantations for warding and protection. I’d read Old English for three years solid at school; I’d rarely ever turned up any really useful spells, but I did recognize the extremelyuselessone I’d been assigned in sophomore year: a protection ward against storms at sea. Most probably the planks had been reclaimed from some ancient enchanted ship. Artifice wears out over time like anything, but if you start with something incredibly sound that’s been well maintained, put a lot of effort into restoring it, and then build on the original magic with new layers of incantations going in roughly the same direction, you can end up with something far more powerful than if you started from scratch. Almost certainly no one with hostile intentions towards the enclave could even make it through this door.
The lock clicked at the first touch of Alfie’s fingers, but the door didn’t want to open; he had to put his shoulder to it and push, and then it gave way all at once—too quickly, which meant it was being helped along from the other side—and as he stumbled forward, Liesel instantly fired off one of her snappy lancing spells over his head, which sliced the lurking grom on the other side into two neat halves, top and bottom.
“Your wards really have gone down,” I said, contemplating the perfect cross section through the middle of the grom. It had already done some successful hunting. There were several unfortunately identifiable remains still in the process of digestion, including a few fingers with the nails still on. Sarah was making retching noises. I’d like to say I became inured by being on my own in the Scholomance, but I was born inured, at least to ordinary levels of death and slaughter.
Then I looked up from the still-twitching body. While we’d all been so usefully distracted, the artifice of the doorway had seized the opportunity to work its way around us. Without any warning or even having taken a final step, I was suddenlyinsideLondon enclave, and I wasn’t inured to that at all.
I’ve read about London enclave; I’ve even seen pictures in a few of the Scholomance library books, over the years. But that’s like seeing a picture of a tree, and then actually climbing up in the tree with the branches going every way, the rustle of leaves and the smell and the bark under your fingers scraping and the wind going, and a thousand trees all round your tree, none of them being special and dramatic, just trees, and your tree was also just a tree being a tree, and the picture you’d looked at might be perfectly nice as its own flat thing, interesting and pretty and well composed, but it didn’t have much to do with the reality of the tree.
We—and what was left of the grom—were on a rocky outcrop jutting from the face of a cliff like a terrace, looking down over a vast undulating garden. We were within some sort of huge greenhouse structure, but I barely noticed the shell. It didn’t feel like being in a greenhouse or a garden, and it also didn’t feel like being out in the woods. It was like old fairy-tale illustrations of gardens, where the flowers and vines and trees just pile up improbably on top of one another,everything blooming at once and forever in blithe disregard of the laws of nature.
A small gurgling waterfall was coming down the rock face beside us, continuing on underneath our outcrop and coming out the other side to go leaping down towards another landing, a bit bigger, just visible through nodding branches. I caught a glimpse of a table there, holding an empty silver carafe and narrow glasses and a domed serving tray: the suggestion that you could just turn a corner and be there, and anything you wanted would be waiting for you to eat or drink. We might have been completely alone, or in a small nook with a party in full swing round the corner; you could hear a bit of music over the waterfall if you made an effort.
Our landing had a lacy canopy of white-painted ironwork, overgrown with vines dangling yellow flowers and lamps of stained glass shaped like gramophones sprouting from the columns that held up the corners. There were two stairways going down in different directions: a narrow one of worn-down limestone going between two large boulders and another spiral one of iron descending out of the middle of the landing, along with two paths curving away to either side, each of them a promise of other spaces just out of sight, hidden away behind a curtain of willow and vines and the undulating hillside. Overhead the cliff cantilevered itself out, and vines and trees hung green, and far beyond them glimpses of the glasshouse roof, clearly designed by someone who’d visited Kew and thoughthow small:millions of triangles of stained glass set in thin iron, lightly frosted, giving the illusion of an open sky somewhere on the other side.
An open sky, just starting to go on towards night, even though it was full day outside. There must have been massive sunlamps above there to grow all the plants, but they were all turned down to twilight, or off completely. A couple of thenearby smaller lanterns had come on, evidently for our benefit, but even they were dim and struggling. It felt late. Not just the light, but the hour: the longer I stood there, the more I felt, palpable and certain, that the whole place was starting to fail. Liesel was right, you could feel it; something had gone wrong deep underneath. Whatever anchored this place in the void, it was crumbling like that hideous wreck of a mansion out on the other side.
And I did want to save it. I couldn’t help that, even though I looked over the whole gorgeous sprawling wonder of it and knew instantly that Mum was right. I couldn’t feel it right now, the malia she’d said was part of every enclave; the seasick crumbling sensation was too strong, overpowering everything else. But I didn’t need to feel it myself to be certain that it was there. I had my sutras, and I already had some idea what I could build with them, my own magical doorway to a place of shelter. It wouldn’t be anything like this. You could do a lot with a group of determined wizards working together and the greater-than-magic power of the assembly line, but you couldn’t build a fairy city into the void, a stately pleasure-dome decree, and light up a new sun just for you and yours. There were a few thousand wizards in London enclave, but it would have taken ten times as many to build this place and keep it together. Of course they’d needed malia.
And they kept it running with malia, too, surely; the kind of malia that wouldn’t look like malia. Most of the wizards who worked on this enclave probably lived an hour from the nearest entrance, to avoid the maleficaria that would constantly be hanging round to get at all this bounty of mana. They spent their days and strength to build mana and beauty for the enclave, and slogged home afterwards, and got paid cheap in mundane money and magical supplies and the hope,the tantalizing dangled hope, that one day, they’d get to stay. That theirkidswould get to stay. That wasn’t the kind of malia that would make you sick; the enclavers weren’t forcibly sucking mana out of those wizards and being fought off violently. They’d found a much safer way of extracting what they needed. Just like their kids did inside the Scholomance, leeching off the strength and work of all the loser kids, so they could make it out again to come home.
I wanted to punch Alfie in his sad anxious face for being part of it, him and Sarah and Liesel—who’d been a loser once herself and had chosen to jump on board with it anyway, as though it became all right, what they were doing to all the rest of us, becauseshe’dbeen able to fight her way inside the garden walls.
And also I wanted to wander around these magical gardens for a month, a year; I wanted to go down every single path and find every hidden perfect nook. I wanted to go and taste whatever was in that silver jug, surely something indescribably wonderful. I wanted to climb to the top of this overgrown cliff and follow the path of that jumping waterfall stream all the way through this hidden world.
It wasn’t anything like being inside the Scholomance gym. That place had been a lie: an imitation of the real world we couldn’t get to and most likely would never see again. This wasn’t a lie. This was astory,a fairy tale: it wasn’t pretending to be real, it was just a place that couldn’t be and hadn’t been, a place of perfect beauty. And I could tell that if it sank beneath the wave, I’d lie down by the waters of Babylon and weep as much as any of the enclavers who lived here. I’d never quite be able to remember it properly. It would just be stuck in my head forever as a blurry image, something I kept trying to make come clear and couldn’t.
I was angry at them for everything they’d done to build it,and I also couldn’t stand to just turn my back and let it all come tumbling down. It wouldn’t have fixed anything they’d done. It would only have made an even worse waste of it all. Or maybe that was just an excuse I was giving myself for wanting to save the place; maybe it was just my own greed talking. After all, they weren’t going to tellmeI couldn’t come back for a pleasure stroll after I’d saved it. They’d be afraid to.
Alfie and Sarah and Liesel were all standing there watching me: hopefully, I thought. Like they’d seen me caught by the place. It had to be one of their most powerful recruiting tools, after all. It was only more irritating because it had worked. “Which way?” I said shortly.
“The maw-mouth is at the council room,” Alfie said.
Alfie led us down the narrow staircasebetween the boulders. It ended in a strange small stony hollow, encircled by boulders taller than our heads, and one wall built of stone and marble, with an old Roman-temple-looking doorway. The pediment was held up by two statues of hooded figures, their heads bowed to hide their faces: a man holding an open book and a woman with a goblet in her hands. It was another piece of watchful artifice, just like the enchanted door we’d come through. As I went past them, I felt the strong sense that the man looked up from his book at me. But with Alfie in the lead, they let us through, into a dim hollow atrium.
I expect ordinarily it was a grand, dramatic space. There was a tiled mosaic floor beneath our feet, and statues lining up alongside a pool running the length of the room with a fountain at one end and a skylight overhead. There should have been an illusion of sky up there, made more believable by looking at it in the rippling water, but instead it was only the blank empty void, and the pool was still and pitch-dark,with nothing to reflect. The fountain spout was still letting a few drops fall occasionally like a leaking faucet, every unpredictable drop too-loud and echoing. This had to be the oldest part of the enclave, the one that had been built when London itself was just lurching its way towards becoming a city, and it was clearly meant to make you think of the glory that was Rome. Instead it felt like Pompeii just before the flames, a thin blanket of ash already laid down and more coming.
There was a single raised platform at the far end, with a table and chairs behind it that had the feeling of a bench in a courtroom: it was so clearly meant for a panel of grand superior enclavers to look down on someone come for an audience. This was surely where they welcomed the little people, the desperate supplicants come to be interviewed for the chance of an enclave space. I glared at the empty dais; I was ready to be angry at them even if Iwashere to help them. If the garden above was a fairy tale, there was another story being told in this place, one where the children never came home, and smiling wizards drank a soup of bones.
All the doorways off the room were leading to dark, just barely managing to suggest the slightest hint that there was something on the other side. Alfie stood for a moment uncertainly before he swallowed and set off through one to the left, with what I could only hope was confidence and not just blind hope. I followed after him, still seething, into an endless columned corridor, with more dark passages branching off to either side, and occasionally a tiny cell-like room: the height of enclave luxury in the days of yore, surely, but smaller than our Scholomance dorm rooms now. Standards had changed since the year 200.
