Or you and yours can go to enormous amounts of effort and time and build yourselves an enclave—the way my friend Liu’s family in Xi’an were trying to—or much more likely, find some way to get into an existing one. And then the same mana and time that used to grow you a single fireflower can grow you a garden full of them, under massive sunlamps that some artificer has been able to make for the same reason, and you can wander the paths in the shelter of privacy incantations and watch the flights of magical birds that some other alchemist has bred, et cetera. All very nice and wondrous, and then also you can go to bed in a sheltered, shielded alcove somewhere and even if you have to sleep in the attic or a cramped Tudor-era bedroom the width of a sofa, at least nothing’s going to try to eat you in your sleep.
So every wizard—aside from the exceedingly odd exception—wants to be in an enclave, and if you aren’t born into one, and you aren’t brilliant enough to win your way in, the only way you get into one is by signing up to work for them. That’s life for most indie wizards: graduate from the Scholomance, choose an enclave that needs someone with your skills, apply to work for them, and then spend the rest of your days handing over eighty percent of your effort to the enclave, because the twenty percent that’s left over is still twice as much as what you could manage living on your own outside.
Oh, and sorry, it’s not nearly as good a bargain as that in practice. Because mals want to be inside enclaves too. It’s easier for them to exist in an enclave, just like it’s easier for any other magic to happen there, and anyway enclaves are just bursting with delicious mana. So there’s not a single major enclave in the world that isn’t surrounded by mals, all the time. If you work inside an enclave, but you don’t get to stay inside—well, your commute home won’t be as bad as graduation day in the Scholomance, but it’s still not going to be pleasant, and it’s going to happen every single day.
Most wizards who work for London enclave live an hour outside the city or more. They commute along with mundanes for the protection, just like most indie kids go to mundane schools, and your first month of work buys you a professional-quality shield holder, and half of each month after that gets you the mana to keep it charged, so by the time all is said and done, if you’re lucky, you do a bit better than you’d have done on your own, and if you’re unlucky, you do a bit worse, and if you’re really unlucky you get eaten on your way home when you nod off on a bus that clears out before your stop.
And you keep at it anyway, because there’s a dangling carrot up ahead, the enclave seat that’s waiting for anyone who provides roughly thirty years of service. At some newer enclaves, they make it twenty; New York probably demands forty. Most people run out of steam halfway and take a lump sum to retire somewhere a bit further away and less infested with maleficaria, generally a village somewhere that’s got a few wizards who get together to do more modest circle magic and guard each other’s backs. Others—the more realistic sort—aren’t even trying to go the distance; they just do the work in exchange for their kids getting to go to the enclave school and get Scholomance seats.
And the few of us who are quixotic enough to object to the whole grotesque system of squeezing, well, we live in the back of beyond, as far as possible from the crowds of mals around the major enclaves, which not coincidentally is also as far as possible from any other wizards, and struggle to raise enough mana on our own just to put up slightly wobbly shields at night, and normally we get eaten when one of the more dangerous mals drifts out into the wilds and stumbles across us and we don’t have the mana to fight it off.
So I absolutely understood why Yancy and her crew would rather give up on the whole rat race and brew themselves a batch of exotic mind-altering drugs and pry open the hollow underbelly of London to climb inside for twenty years, a massive up yours to the enclave. Pour the champagne and turn over the tables and fuck it all. Why not? Their odds were bad, but their odds had been bad anyway, and at least they’d have a good time before they went. They could probably do absolutely amazing magic in here, fever dream spells that would topple over or go wrong half the time, and none of it would be permanent, but it would be theirs as long as it lasted.
What I didn’t understand was why London had left enough of the place for them to ever get into at all. Mum had told me that Yancy and her people used old entrances to sneak into the enclave; that had made sense to me, but I’d imagined them hiding in empty rooms or pushing a temporary bubble of space out from the existing parts of the enclave—space that they themselves had borrowed out of the real world. That would have been loads more work and mana for them, so this was better from their perspective, but not as far as the enclave was concerned. London had torn the riding ring down to reclaim the space, which meant the rest of the enclave expected every cubic centimeter of air we were occupying to be somewhere else. The enclave spells were presumably having to do substantial extra work to juggle it round: like in Alfie’s race car, stealing a pocket of space out of the corner of some enclaver’s eye and pretending it was still there until they looked back.
It must have been a massive mana drain. Alfie might claim that Yancy’s people had it in for the enclavers; it seemed much more likely to me that it was the other way round. I could just imagine Martel and the rest of that council totting up the mana that was being siphoned off for these disreputable revels and gnashing their teeth. London wouldn’t have deliberately kept this ghostly place hanging round for anyone to crawl into; they’d have carefully and thoroughly shoved this bit off into the void.
Just like we’d done, with the Scholomance.
I’ve laid it out tidily here, but at the time it took my muddled brain a good ten minutes to gnaw through the confusion to that point. We weren’t walking the whole time: Yancy took us to the most central part of the stands, festooned with massive swoops of glittery bunting that were clearly a more recent addition, which mostly hid away the translucent world outside. Her crew had heaped up glorious mountains of cushions around a scattering of low tables, piles of blankets and soft rugs woven out of things like the flavor of freshly picked strawberries and poems and golden-green—not me being poetic; someone doped on this potion had evidently figured out a way to actually do artifice with what they could perceive. I have no idea what the stuff would have looked like in the real world. Probably it couldn’t exist in the real world; it would just have fallen apart instantly as soon as you got it too close to physics or even a sober pair of eyes.
Once we were inside and we’d sunk down into the impossible nest, I didn’t have to keep pretending the void wasn’t right there, right over there, and we’re about to fall into it. Yancy’s crew had done it up in a really clever way—the drapes didn’t completely hide the outside, which would have made you think about it more and implied that there was something outside that needed hiding, but enough of it that you’d have had to make an effort to look. And even if the cushions and rugs weren’t very real, they were still artifice, and their purpose was to make you comfortable. If you’ve ever imagined lying down on a cloud and having it hold you up, that’s more or less what it was like. It didn’t make any sense and you knew better, but at the same time, you also secretly really believed that it would work, and were delighted to go along with it when improbably it did.
The section of the stands immediately around us was more solid, and under the layers of cushioning they felt more plausibly like wood. There were gilt and paint and carvings everywhere, some of them magical runes. This surely had been an old and well-loved part of the enclave, the site of parties and ceremonial events back when wizards still rode things that looked like horses instead of cars. Maybe Yancy’s story was part of an old tradition; maybe the enclavers had told their own children stories about royal visits, and Queen Bess was a bit more plausible than King Arthur, at least. Enough belief and memory poured into this space so that even after the enclave had more or less given it the boot, this one part had lingered on?