Alfie threaded our way through a creaky maze of winding stairs up and down the garden, and along narrow inconvenient paths that hadn’t been trimmed lately and were clearly slated for renovation, presumably because all the rest of the paths were crammed with tourists. For the last bit, he had to take us into a residential section of the enclave, an odd stretch that was something halfway between a street full of listed buildings and a school diorama of Tudor architecture made by a thirteen-year-old kid who hadn’t done much research.
There was a narrow cobblestoned pavement just wide enough for the three of us to walk abreast, with half-timbered buildings on either side, each one only the width of its front doorway, with a single leaded window on each of four stories above, and a dormer at the very top. The roofs across the pavement from one another were connected with more timbers, and loose fabric like sailcloth was hung over them, with sunlamps on the other side: not nearly as extravagant as in the gardens, but if you were inside one of those rooms, you could probably convince yourself that the light coming in was daylight. But from the outside, it was dim and precarious, all those too-thin, too-tall buildings looming unpleasantly, and I was glad to hurry past them and towards the patch of green meadow I could just glimpse at the end of the lane.
I drew a deep breath as soon as we escaped into the open air, and got a faceful of the pungent stink of urine coming out of someone who’d been sucking down phantasmal vapors. A fellow in a tatty neon-blue dressing gown was pissing on a corner of the green, and the wafting smell of the vapors themselves was drifting our way, too. They probably weren’t unpleasant alone, but mixed with the other stench it took on the absolute foulness of someone trying to cover up cat piss by pouring on a bottle of cheap floral perfume.
Alfie sucked in a sharp breath. “That’s not on.” He snapped off a repelling-liquid incantation that he’d probably practiced backwards and forwards to deal with the fairly common category of acid-and poison-spitting mals. It made all the wee, including the healthy amount that had already soaked into the ground, leap up and spray right back all over the blue-robed wizard, who gave a howl of indignation and ripped off the soaked dressing gown and was improbably in a suit of scale armor underneath it.
“I’ll have your fucking bollocks on toast, you bloodless fuck,” the man yelled, fumbling after some kind of weapon he was expecting to be at his side. He was obviously two or three planes of reality off from this one, but in a moment he’d probably have persuaded it to show up, only Liesel heaved an annoyed breath and waved him clean—same spell she’d used on me, perfectly up to the much smaller job at hand—and then told him in the cutting tones of a tea lady on the train after pub day, “Go lie down and go to sleep, you are drunk,” with a quick twist and flick of her fingers by her side to throw just the least hint of compulsion behind it. He paused, registered that he wasn’t covered in stinking pee, then amiably agreed, “Right, yeah,” and rolled off a few steps to an empty plot of grass and fell over on the ground.
But Alfie looked fully prepared to pick another fight as we approached the festivities. I hadn’t been automatically inclined to care how irreverent Yancy and her people were towards any of the sacred hobgoblins of London enclave, but I have to admit, I didn’t really approve once I got a better look at this Memorial Green of theirs. It wasn’t a political monument, with self-important statues and engraved plaques. It also wasn’t a cemetery, because you don’t get bodies back out of the Scholomance. But here at the far side of the gardens, London had deliberately set aside a wide green meadow, at least a hundred meters across without so much as a single tree to break up the view, and a massive labyrinth of stones had been laid out on the perfectly green grass. Each stone was more or less the size to fit comfortably into a palm, flat and round, made of faintly translucent quartzlike stuff that reminded me immediately of Mum’s crystals. But not like the one I was wearing round my neck, with a faint sheen of mana against my skin. They were like the crystals that I’d burned out completely, fighting the maw-mouth in the Scholomance library; the ones that had slowly gone dull and dead.
I didn’t need to see the names carved into them, stained dark brown, to understand. You couldn’t send messages in or out of the Scholomance, not on paper and not in dreams; you couldn’t even get a heartbeat spell inside. If you were lucky, you got a note from your kid once a year, if they’d given one to a senior who’d survived their own graduation. But London had worked out this solution.
Alfie had surely put his name on a stone like this, and filled it up with mana he’d built himself, and then he’d cut his finger and rubbed blood into the carving until it was full. And his mum and dad had kept it with them, all four years he was away, looking at it every morning and every night. If one day it had started to go dim, they’d have told themselves it was a trick of the light. Maybe after a week they’d have started picking it up and taking it into dark corners, to reassure themselves that really it was still shining. And after two, or three, their friends would have started to be very kind to them, and one day they would have picked up the dull grey empty stone and brought it here and found an open place—there weren’t many, and in some places, the lines had been doubled up—and they’d have put down the only remains of the child they’d sent away to die in the dark.
This simple unbroken green was more expensive than ten palaces. The one thing that’s really limited inside an enclave is space. The winding paths of the fairy gardens weren’t just a lovely aesthetic choice: they had to be winding, so that the artifice could shuffle them in and out of existence as easily as possible. Having a clear view from one end to the other made that impossible.
Yancy was there with about twenty other wizards between the ages of fourteen and eighty, all sprawled out comfortably over the green and the stones, some of them drinking but most of them gathered round a big cast-iron pot set up in one of the lanes with a balefire going underneath it. It had a lid with two big stovepipe openings that were belching irregular gouts of a heavy, iridescent smoke; they caught it in big carved-bone drinking horns and put their faces inside to breathe it in. There was a massive speaker pumping out a deep bass rhythm, and a musician sitting on top playing an electric violin along with it. There wasn’t a socket anywhere I could see, but he wasn’t letting that stop him. Some others were dancing, a couple of them doing balance-beam walking on top of the lines of stones.
“Galadriel Higgins!” Yancy sang out as we came into view, and waved a silver flask in my direction, a lizard sculpted clinging round the surface and glaring at me with a yellow gimlet eye. “Hero of the hour, slayer of the foul beast, opener of the enclave gates. Come and have a drink!”
“It’s El, thanks,” I said, and was about to explain why I couldn’t, but Alfie took two steps in at them with clenched fists and broke in, “Out of curiosity, do you not know that you’re trampling over dead children, or do you not care?”
I have to admit, I didn’t entirely disagree with him. Although partly that was because the whole arrangement reminded me forcibly of parties at the commune, which no one ever told me about, and at which if I showed up started to leak people very quickly until suddenly someone was saying, “You’ll see the bonfire goes out all the way, won’t you, El?” and then it was just me alone getting cold in the dark and shoveling dirt onto the embers in a frantic hurry so I could leave before a mal popped up to eat me.