The golden enclaves, p.1
The Golden Enclaves, page 1
The Golden Enclaves is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Temeraire LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Del Rey and the Circle colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593158357
International ISBN 9780593597699
Ebook ISBN 9780593158364
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook
Cover design and illustration: Faceout Studio/Jeff Miller, based on images © Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1: The Yurt
Chapter 2: The Gardens of London
Chapter 3: The Old Walls
Chapter 4: The Upper Tier
Chapter 5: Unforgotten Places
Chapter 6: Heathrow
Chapter 7: New York, New York
Chapter 8: The Maleficer’s Den
Chapter 9: Sintra
Chapter 10: The Scholomance
Chapter 11: The Roundhouse
Chapter 12: The Woods
Chapter 13: Beijing
Chapter 14: Dubai
Chapter 15: Maharashtra
Chapter 16: Down the Well
Chapter 17: The Scholomance
Illustrations
By Naomi Novik
About the Author
The last thing Orion said to me, the absolute bastard, was El, I love you so much.
And then he shoved me backwards through the gates of the Scholomance and I landed thump on my back in paradise, the soft grassy clearing in Wales that I’d last seen four years ago, ash trees in full green leaf and sunlight dappling through them, and Mum, Mum right there waiting for me. Her arms were full of flowers: poppies, for rest; anemones, for overcoming; moonwort, for forgetfulness; morning glories, for the dawn of a new day. A welcome-home bouquet for a trauma victim, meant to ease horror out of my mind and make room for healing and for rest, and as she reached to help me, I heaved myself up howling, “Orion!” and sent the whole thing scattering before me.
A few months—aeons—ago, while we’d still been in the midst of our frantic obstacle-course runs, an enclaver from Milan had given me a translocation spell in Latin, the rare kind that you can cast on yourself without splitting yourself into bits. The idea was that I’d be able to use it to hop around from one place to another in the graduation hall—all the better to save people like enclavers from Milan, which is why she’d handed me a spell worth five years of mana for free. You couldn’t normally use it to go long distances, but time was more or less the same thing as space, and I’d been in the Scholomance ten seconds before. I had the hall visualized as crisp and clear as an architectural drawing, complete with the horrific mass of Patience and the horde of maleficaria behind it, boiling its way towards us. I was placing myself at the gates, right back where I had been when Orion had given me that final shove.
But the spell didn’t want to be cast, putting up resistance like warning signs across the way: dead end, road washed out ahead. I forced it through anyway, throwing mana at it, and the casting rebounded in my face and knocked me down like I’d run straight into a concrete wall. So I got back up and tried the exact same spell again, only to get pasted flat a second time.
My head was ringing bells and noise. I crawled back to my feet. Mum was helping me up, but she was also holding me back, saying something to me, trying to slow me down, but I only snarled at her, “Patience was coming right at him!” and her hands went slack, sliding off me with her own remembered horror.
It had already been two minutes since I’d been dumped out; two minutes was forever in the graduation hall, even before I’d packed it full of all the monsters in the world. But the interruption did stop me just banging my head against the gates repeatedly. I spent a moment thinking, and then I tried to use a summoning to get Orion out, instead.
Most people can’t summon anything larger or with more willpower than a hair bobble. But the many summoning spells I’ve unwillingly collected over the years are all intended to bring me one or more hapless screaming victims, presumably to go into the sacrificial pit I’ve incomprehensibly neglected to set up. I had a dozen varieties, and one of them that let you scry someone through a reflective surface and pull them out.
It’s especially effective if you have a gigantic cursed mirror of doom to use. Sadly I’d left mine hanging on the wall of my dorm room. But I ran around the clearing and found a small puddle of water between two tree roots. That wouldn’t have been good enough ordinarily, but I had endless mana flowing into me, the supply line from graduation still open. I threw power behind the spell and forced the muddy puddle smooth as glass and staring down at it called, “Orion! Orion Lake! I call you in the—” I took a quick glance up at the first sunlight and sky I’d seen in four years of longing for them, and the only thing I could feel was desperate frustration that it wasn’t dawn or noon or midnight or anything helpful, “—waxing hours of the light, to come to me from the dark-shadowed halls, heeding my word alone,” which would very likely mean he’d be under a spell of obedience when he got here, but I’d worry about that later, later after he was here—
The spell did go through this time, and the water churned into a cloud of silver-black that slowly and grudgingly served up a ghostly image that might have been Orion from the back, barely an outline against pitch darkness. I shoved my arm into the dark anyway, reaching for him, and for a moment, I thought—I was sure—I had him. The taste of frantic relief swelled through me: I’d done it, I’d got hold of him—and then I screamed, because my fingers were sinking into the surface of a maw-mouth, with its sucking hunger turning on me.
Every part of my body wanted to let go at once. And then it got worse, as if there were any room for that to get worse, because it wasn’t just one maw-mouth, it was two, grabbing at me from both sides, as if Patience hadn’t quite finished digesting Fortitude yet: a whole century of students, a meal so large it would take a long while eating, and meanwhile Fortitude was still groping around trying to feed its own hunger even while it was being swallowed down.
And it had been blindingly obvious to me back there in the graduation hall that we couldn’t possibly kill that monstrous agglomerated horror, not even with the mana of four thousand living students fueling me. The only thing to do with Patience was the only thing to do with the Scholomance: we could only push them off into the void, and hope they vanished away forever. But apparently Orion had disagreed, since he’d turned back to fight even with the school teetering on the edge of the world behind him.
As if he’d thought Patience was going to get out, and in some part of his stupid brutalized brain imagined that he could stop it getting out, and therefore he had to stay behind and be a hero this one more time, one boy standing in front of a tidal wave. That was the only possible reason I could imagine, and it had been stupid enough without shoving me out the gates first, when I was the only one of us who’d ever actually fought a maw-mouth before. That made it so unutterably stupid that I needed him out, needed him here, so I could scream at him at length to impress upon him exactly how stupid he’d been.
I clung to that rage. Rage made it possible for me to keep holding on, despite the heaving putrescence of maw-mouth trying to envelop my fingers, sucking on my skin and my shielding like a child trying to get through a candy shell to the better sweetness inside, trying to get to me, trying to get to every last bit of me so it could devour me down to staring eyes and screaming mouth.
Rage, and horror, because it was going to do that to Orion, Orion who was still there in the hall with it. So I didn’t let go. Staring down into the scrying puddle, I hurled murder at it past his blurry, half-seen shoulder, casting my best, quickest, killing spell over and over, the feeling of a lake of rot sloughing away from around my hands each time, until I was gulping down nausea with each breath I took, and each casting of “À la mort!” went rolling off my tongue on the way out, blurring until the sound of my breathing was death. All the while I kept holding on, trying to pull Orion out. Even if it meant I’d heave Patience out into the world with him and spill that devouring horror into the cool green trees of Wales right at Mum’s feet, my place of peace I’d dreamt of in every minute I’d been in the Scholomance. All I’d have to do was kill it, after all.
That had seemed utterly impossible five minutes before, so impossible I’d just laughed at the idea, but now it was only a low and trivial hurdle when the alternative was letting it have Orion instead. I was really good at killing things. I’d find a way. I even had a plan laying itself out in my head, the clockwork machinery of strategy ticking coolly away in the background of my mind where it never stopped after four years in the Scholomance. We’d fight Patience together. I’d kill it a few dozen lives at a time, and he could pull the mana out and feed it back to me, and together we’d create an unending killing circl
I didn’t let go. I was pushed off. Again.
Orion did it himself. He must have, because maw-mouths don’t let go. The mana I was pouring into the summoning spell was coming out of the graduation supply that was still unending, as if everyone in the school was still putting mana into our shared ritual. But that didn’t make any sense. Everyone else was gone. They were out of the Scholomance, hugging their parents and telling them what we’d done, sobbing and treating the wounds they’d taken, ringing all their friends. They weren’t still feeding me power. They weren’t meant to be. The whole idea of our plan was to sever all connection to the school: we wanted to cram it full of mals and break it off the world and let it float away into the void like a putrid balloon full of writhing malice, vanishing off into the dark where it belonged. It had been going when Orion and I had made that last run towards the portal.
As far as I knew, the only thing keeping it anchored to reality now was me, still clinging to the line of mana coming out of the school. And the only person left in the Scholomance to feed me that mana was Orion. Orion, who could capture mana from mals when he killed them. So at least in that moment, he must still have been alive, still fighting; Patience hadn’t swallowed him up yet. And he must have felt me trying to drag him out, but instead of turning round and helping me to pull him through, he drew away from me instead, resisting the summoning. And the horrible sticky mouthing over my hand pulled away, too. Just as if he was trying to do the same thing my dad had done, all those years ago: as if he’d reached out and grabbed a maw-mouth and pulled it away, letting it have him instead of the girl he loved.
Except the girl Orion loved wasn’t a gentle, kind healer, she was a sorceress of mass destruction who on two occasions had already managed to shred maw-mouths apart, and the stupid bloody fool could have tried trusting me to do it again. But he didn’t. He fought me instead, and when I tried to use my summoning hold to force him to come, abruptly the bottomless ocean of mana ran out from underneath me like he’d taken the plug out of the bath.
In an instant, the power-sharer on my wrist turned cool and heavy and dead. In one more, my wild profligate spell ran sputtering out of gas, and Orion slid out of my grip as if I’d been trying to hold on to a fistful of oil. His outline in the scrying pool vanished into the dark. I kept desperately groping for him anyway, even as the image began fading out at the edges, but Mum had been crouching beside me all along, her face stricken with worry and fear, and now she grabbed me by the shoulders and threw all her weight into shoving me over and away from the puddle, likely saving my hand from being cut off at the wrist as the spell collapsed and my bottomless scrying well returned to being half an inch of water pooled between tree roots.
I went tumbling and rolled back up onto my knees in a single smooth motion without even thinking about it: I’d been training for graduation for months. I threw myself back at the puddle, fingers scrabbling it into mud. Mum tried to put her arms around me, begging me desperately to stop. That’s not why I stopped, though. I stopped because I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t have an ounce of mana left. Mum caught me by the shoulders again, and I turned and grabbed at the crystal round her neck, gasping, “Please, please.” Mum’s whole face was desperation; I could feel her longing to get me away, but then she shut her eyes a moment and with shaking hands reached up and undid the chain and let me have it: half full, not enough to raise the dead or burn cities to the ground, but enough to cast a message spell to scream at Orion with, to tell him to throw me back a line and let me help him, save him. Only it didn’t go through.
I tried and tried, shouting Orion’s name until the crystal and my voice were spent. I might as well have been shouting into the void. Which was where the whole Scholomance had presumably now gone. Just as we’d so cleverly, cleverly planned.
When there wasn’t even enough mana for shouting, I used up the very last dribbles for a heartbeat spell, just trying to find out if he was still alive. It’s a very cheap spell, because it’s stupidly complicated and takes ten minutes, so the casting itself makes almost all the mana it needs. I cast it seven times one after the other without ever getting up off my mud-soaked knees, and stayed there listening to the wind blowing in the treetops and birds making noises and sheep talking to each other and somewhere in the distance a little running stream. Not a single echoing thump came back to my ears.
And when at last I didn’t have mana left even for that, I let Mum lead me back to the yurt and put me to bed like I was six years old again.
* * *
The first time I woke up was so much like a dream that it hurt. I was in the yurt with the door open to let in the cool night air, and outside I could faintly hear Mum singing, the way I had in all my most agonizing dreams for the last four years, the ones that always ended in a jolt when I tried desperately to stay in them for a few minutes more. The truly awful part of this one was that I didn’t want to stay in it. I turned over and went back down.
And when I couldn’t sleep anymore, I just lay on my back in bed staring up at the billowing curve of the ceiling for a long time. If there had been anything else to do, I wouldn’t have gone to sleep in the first place. I couldn’t even be angry. The only person available to be angry with was Orion, and I couldn’t stand to be angry with him. I tried: lying there I tried to think of every savage cutting remark I’d have made to him if he was here right now. But when I asked Orion what were you thinking, I couldn’t make it come out angry, even inside my own head. It was just pain.
But I couldn’t grieve him either, because he wasn’t dead. He was busy screaming while a maw-mouth ate him, just like Dad. People do like to pretend maw-mouth victims are dead, but that’s just because it’s unbearable to think about it otherwise. There’s nothing you can do about it, so if someone you love gets eaten by one, they’re dead to you, and you might as well pretend it’s all over. But I know, I know from inside, that you don’t die when a maw-mouth eats you. You’re just being eaten, forever; for as long as the maw-mouth lasts. But knowing didn’t help. I couldn’t do anything about it. Because the Scholomance was gone.
I hadn’t moved when Mum came in a while later. She put a small tinkling handful of things into a bowl, saying softly, “There you are,” to Precious, who made a squeak that meant gratitude and started cracking seeds. I couldn’t feel sorry I hadn’t thought about her, small and hungry. It was too far away, and I was too far down. Mum came and sat down next to my camp bed and put her hand on my forehead, warm and gentle. She didn’t say anything.
I fought her off a little: I didn’t want to feel better. I didn’t want to get up and go on in the world, agreeing that it was in any way acceptable for the world to keep going itself. But lying there under Mum’s hand, unimaginably safe and comfortable, I couldn’t help but feel stupid. The world was going on anyway whether I gave it permission or not, and finally I sat up and let Mum give me a drink of water in the lopsided clay cup she’d made herself, and she sat on the bed next to me and put her arm around my shoulders and stroked my hair. She was so small. The whole yurt was so small. My head brushed the roof at the edge, even sitting on the camp bed. I could have made it outside on one good jump, if I were stupid enough to leap out into the unknown where anything could be waiting to ambush me.
Of course, that wouldn’t have been stupid at all now. I wasn’t in the Scholomance anymore. I’d set the students free, and jailed all the mals in our place, and then I’d broken the school off the world with all of them crammed hungry inside to gnaw on each other forever. So now I could sleep for twenty hours without a care, and I could go bounding out of my yurt with a song in my heart, and I could do anything and go anywhere in the world I wanted to. And so could everyone else, every last child I’d shepherded out of the Scholomance and all the children who’d never even have to go.
