I nodded, and then I said, “Where am I going?” because I couldn’t come back unless I left, but before she answered, my mobile rang again: Liesel calling. I looked at Deepthi; she nodded a little. I picked up. “That was quick,” I said, slowly.
“The war has started,” Liesel said without preamble. “Alfie just called me. The Scholomance has been attacked.”
“I didn’t do anything!” I said.
“Not by you! Why would I be calling to tell you?” I could all but see her exasperated expression. “Singapore and Melaka sent in a team to demolish the doors completely, so they would be released from their mana commitments. New York sent in a team to stop them, but the attackers fortified a position and called in allies. And Shanghai has declared they are coming.”
Liesel didn’t need to spell things out any further: I could see everything spiraling from there. All the enclavers were terrified. None of them knew who was destroying the enclaves, they all thought they might be next, and they all suspected other enclavers. The enclaves of the world had been a massive powder keg even before we’d gone into the Scholomance. I’d lit the fuse the moment I’d taken out Bangkok, and now the explosion was here, the real fulfillment of the prophecy: the death and destruction I’d already brought to all the enclaves of the world, even if I never killed another maw-mouth at all.
There’re all sorts of formal rules for enclave wars, codified in an elaborate treaty to which virtually every enclave in the world is a signatory, all of which get ignored the instant that doing so nets someone a significant victory. But some of the rules are just practical.
You don’t fight to take territory. If you attack someone else’s enclave, you aren’t hoping to move in, even if you manage to kill all the inhabitants, because they’ll have left precautionary vengeance spells all over the place. So the only sensible goal of an attack on another enclave is to smash it up completely and send it careening off into the void.
Or, if you’re less vicious and more practical, you’re looking to establish a position where you could do that, and then you hold the enemy over a barrel and demand a ransom in mana, one so huge that paying it will seriously constrain their operations. You might have a team of seventeen artificers who arrange themselves in a particular pattern within the halls of the enclave; you might have a single incanter who manages to seize control of the mind of your Dominus and gets them to pull some sort of self-destructive maneuver; you might pour in a vat of unstoppable acid or send a small army of gnawing constructs, and some enclave at some point in time has done all of those things to another.
Those sorts of enclave wars are mostly carried on by small bands of wizards carefully maneuvering around each other, avoiding any mundanes in the area of the enclave under attack. The would-be invaders try to pry open the enclave and set some operation going, and the defenders try to stop them.
But there’s also a messier version of enclave war that can be summed up as now fight! The total combatants of any enclave usually number in the low hundreds at most, so you can undermine an enemy enclave very handily just by getting your fighters and their fighters together in one place and killing off a lot of the enemy, although of course they’re doing their best to kill off a lot of yours at the same time.
This was going to be a very messy war.
New York could have kept the conflict much more sedate by letting the tourist horde serve as a kind of dampening effect. You can’t have much of a sorcerous war when there’s a crowd of mundanes standing round, comfortably certain that your incendiary arcana is actually just fireworks. Instead, Liesel told me, New York had got Lisbon enclave to shut down the entire museum grounds and evacuate all the surrounding streets completely by putting out a spurious story of a gas leak, which further required a dozen fire trucks parked all round with their flashing lights going wild and occasionally bursting out the sirens: perfect cover for all sorts of mysterious noises.
Which meant that now almost anything could go. It was an invitation to haul out your biggest guns and all the troops and pile on in, and more or less a statement from New York that they were bringing their own biggest guns, too. And no one with any aspirations to power would want to be left out of the wrangling.
When my plane landed from Mumbai, I came out into the baggage claims area with wizards from seventeen different enclaves all staring at each other awkwardly while waiting for the cars that would take them to the battlefield where they’d start trying to kill each other. No one uses translocation spells in a war, at least not to transport the majority of their fighting crew. That’s not a rule, it’s just common sense: if you do, and the other side doesn’t, you can’t start fighting until the enemy turns up anyway, and then guess who has loads more mana when you finally all go at it?
I didn’t know any of these particular wizards, and none of them knew me; and unlike them, I wasn’t carrying any oddly shaped baggage to store my stacks of dangerous artifice. So I just went straight past them all to the bus. Liesel was on her way in, but she was meeting Alfie and a team from London somewhere in the middle. Dubai and Beijing had already announced they were sitting this one out, thanks to recent events. London had an equally good excuse, but apparently Martel had been officially clinging on to the Dominus position for a few more days, and he’d taken this as a chance to cling for longer. He’d declared London was coming to New York’s assistance without even convening the rest of his council: seizing the opportunity of the war to try to get Sir Richard or at least enough of his supporters killed off.
Aadhya and Liu had caught a flight, too, although they had five more hours in the air than I did. I’d tried to talk them out of coming: Liu had absolutely no business getting out of bed yet, mystical healing or not, and Aadhya wasn’t even in an enclave.
“We’re not coming to fight an enclave war,” Aadhya had said in exasperation; the two of them had already been in a taxi on the way to the airport. “We’re coming to help you stop one.”
“And what are you even planning to do?” I’d demanded.
“We’ll let you know soon as you tell us what you’re planning,” Aadhya retorted, and hung up on me, so I’d just settled for racing to the airport as fast as I could to get out ahead.
I didn’t in fact have much of a plan. If I tried to head off the fighting by telling everyone that I was the one heaving enclaves into the void, almost no one would believe me, unless of course I told them in a very convincing way, such as by summoning massive dark powers and thundering at them while I floated overhead wreathed in apocalyptic storm, but at best that would turn the war into all the assembled enclavers trying to destroy me, and I wasn’t really keen on the idea.
I did give some thought to doing it and then just running away to lead them all off after me, but that would have been a very temporary solution, if it even worked. This war had been coming even before enclaves had started tipping out of the world. I was only the proximate event. And in any case, that was nearly the opposite of what I wanted, because it would be effectively winning the war for New York.