Which I had the chance to admire over and over, because I couldn’t find the bloody well! It was even worse than the last time I’d been here going in circles under the blazing sun with hordes of tourists; at least then no one had been deliberately keeping me lost. And I didn’t understand the working well enough, so I couldn’t work out what it was meant to do. As I went round yet another time in rising fury, I began to give real thought to going back to the gates and taking that as a vantage point and just ripping the gardens entirely off the earth to expose the underground layers beneath, which was obviously a terrible idea, only it began to seem better than just going round and round and round, and then someone shouted out, “El! Galadriel!” into the dark—a man’s voice, familiar.
I was all but frothing by then, as you can probably gather from the brilliant idea I’d come up with, so I didn’t give a lot of thought to it before I veered off towards the call, into a little paved sculptural nook that had swelled open off one of the paths. Most of the enclave teams were ensconced in small hidey-holes of the sort, to one side or another, which they’d fortified with defensive spells and shield-generating artifice.
I hadn’t bothered trying to poke into any of them, because I could simply intercept the spells they flung out. But this one opened for me, thanks to the invitation, so I stepped in and found myself staring at Khamis Mwinyi, who was making one of a team of four—currently two other people and one charming piece of statuary, which was slowly but surely cracking over the surface and emitting a steady stream of muffled noises that I suspect were curses in Swahili. I’ve never studied Swahili, but the emotion was fully recognizable.
“What are you doing, you crazy woman?” Khamis demanded of me, as charming as ever. “Why are you turning everyone to stone?”
“It’s better than everyone killing each other,” I snapped at him. “Why are you here? Zanzibar’s not got more than five seats, you can’t be on the hook for massive amounts of mana. What do you care if the Scholomance stays up or not? You’re not even allied with New York or Shanghai!”
He made a gesture of exasperation at my stupidity, made more alarming because he was holding a massive ancient spear incongruous with his gorgeous red suit; it trailed faint shimmering sparkles with every movement, as if there were a second spear made out of light just barely out of alignment with the solid one. The point of it was made of old pitted iron that looked ready to crumble, so it wasn’t the literal weapon it looked like at first glance. He was an alchemist, so I had a strong suspicion it worked on metaphor, and let him pierce an enemy’s shielding so he could hit them with some compound from afar. “That’s why we are here! That’s why all of us are here!”
“What, you’re trying to get on someone’s good side?” I said sarcastically, and then realized that was exactly it. They were one of those minor enclaves that Ophelia had talked about who hadn’t been bound by mystical long-term contracts. They’d been able to withhold their own mana contributions to the Scholomance, and now they had a temporary advantage over the intermediate enclaves that was out of proportion to their size. Which they were trying to parlay into a longer advantage, by using it in this one critical fight. They were trying to establish an early position on the battlefield, something valuable they’d have to offer when New York and Shanghai started going at it properly. “And that’s why you’ve come out to kill people?”
“What should we do?” he snapped. “You’re the one who wanted to destroy the Scholomance, change the world! Now everything will be different. So should we keep out of it, wait until the fighting is over and whoever wins decides to tell us what we must do? At least we will have something to say about it, if we can.”
He wasn’t wrong. He was ready to make a sack of termites out of himself as usual, but he wasn’t wrong. The Scholomance had been the major point of contention among the enclaves, the source of wrestling and arguments for a century and change. But it had also been the major point of cooperation. Everything would be different, now that it wasn’t the one resource every enclaver needed and wanted, worth swallowing almost anything to get a piece of it. And for some people, different would be better, and for others, it would be worse. Zanzibar wasn’t stupid for recognizing that this was their best chance to buy themselves some room to maneuver.
And it wasn’t just them, of course—that was why the violence was looking so indiscriminate from the outside. Every single enclave was in it for themselves, and all the little ones were fighting it out here in the gardens while the bigger powers hung back, waiting to decide which of the surviving pieces they’d pick up. We weren’t trapped in the gardens. Anyone could pick up and go home, anytime they liked. But you weren’t getting further in unless you demonstrated your ability and your willingness to do whatever it took to get an invitation to the special VIP party. Just like the enclavers in the Scholomance, picking and choosing their graduation allies from among the losers left standing.
“Right,” I said grimly, understanding. “So you’re out here wrangling for scraps at the table. I don’t suppose you know what’s happening on the inside? You do know there’s an inside?”
He scowled at me—my tone might have been just the least bit snide—and then grudgingly said, “We know New York has set up a defense at the doors of the school. Shanghai and Jaipur are preparing an offensive.”
“Which they won’t launch until things have been sorted out here and they decide who’s to be let into the clubhouse,” I finished. “Well, I’m crashing the party instead, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it won’t be tidy. You should pack up your statuary and go home.”
An older man, who had a handful of scars he had deliberately left on—public notice that he was a significant fighter—said something to Khamis in what sounded like incredulous tones, jerking his chin towards me and then the statue, and without waiting for an answer slapped a lancing whip of sharp red light at me, which I expect would have done a great deal of damage to someone else. The basic idea of it resembled a lovely spell that I got my freshman year, which was intended for decapitating a hundred enemies at a go. I caught his line in my hand and let it wrap round twice, and turned it into that other spell, sending the cold blue-white fire searing back towards him. Wisely, he cut loose just before it would have reached him, and I snapped the line back into a tight coil around my hand and tossed it away. I followed that up by throwing another layer of stone on top of the wizard who had nearly broken out one of his arms; it silenced the cursing.
“If you want to stay here killing other people in the dark and letting them have at you back, I suppose you can suit yourself,” I snapped. “But come at me again, and you too can spend the rest of the night chipping your way out of a slab of granite.”
Khamis said something to the other two I didn’t understand, with a gesture towards me that made clear he wasn’t being complimentary. However, my demonstration had made an impression, especially on the third member of the party, an older woman, who argued with the other guy a bit and evidently carried the point; she brought a small flat black sack out from under her aba and tossed it over the statue—the sack remained the size of a small handbag, but the statue vanished into it completely—and then gave one of the handles to the fighter.
She meant to give the other to Khamis, but he said something in a surly way, and she nodded; then the two of them set off with the bag, and he turned back to me and said ungraciously, “All right, I’m coming with you.”
“You’re never,” I said, incredulous. “Why would you come with me?”
“Because you’re a stupid madwoman who can’t be trusted,” he snapped: just the reason to hang about someone, why couldn’t I see that? Then he added, deeply grudging, “Nkoyo asked me to!”
“What?”