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 the nearby 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 their kids would 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, because she’d been 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 a story, 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 tell me I 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 staircase between 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 I was here 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.