I’d just made up my mind to head to New York’s side and try to find Liesel among the throng when a spell unexpectedly came flying right at me out of one of Shanghai’s pavilions. I reached out to snag it like the other spells I’d been plucking like ripe fruit, and I failed completely: the thing slid through my grip like trying to grab hold of a water balloon covered in oil. I flinched automatically from the hit before I registered that it hadn’t done me any harm at all; there wasn’t an ounce of malice in the thing. It was only someone taking a polite grip on my arm, conveying the intention to save me from stepping into something really unpleasant like dog poo, and to tug me invitingly another way: please won’t you come.
Which was quite alarming really: whoever had tossed that spell had already worked out, presumably based on gossip and my performance in the gardens above, that you couldn’t use malicious spells on me, but neutral spells would hit just fine. They could easily work out some way to use that against me. The politeness wasn’t a comfort either, more the opposite; if they’d decided I was someone worth being polite to under these circumstances, then they’d decided I was someone really dangerous.
But on the other hand—at least they were willing to talk to me. And I couldn’t actually see Liesel anywhere over on the American side, or even Alfie or Sir Richard for that matter. The only person I did know over there was Christopher Martel, who certainly didn’t feel any affection for me and might not feel he’d exhausted the options for trying to use me for his own stupid selfish purposes. He’d already dragged his entire enclave into this mess, for no reason other than to keep clinging to his own power.
“All right,” I said grimly, “I’ll come—” which turned into a loud squawking yelp: as soon as I’d said “all right,” the polite spell snatched me up and thwoomped me like a yanker spell straight across the field and into the pavilion it had come from in the first place. I wasn’t even left to catch my own balance; the spell stopped me and braced me on all sides at the same time, so it felt almost as though actually I hadn’t moved and the rest of the world had just been neatly rolled over a little bit beneath my feet to put me in the proper spot.
There was a chair right behind my knees, a beautiful one carved of wood with the legs made of storks, and another one directly across from me. They’d both clearly been placed deliberately, waiting, but no one was sitting in there. The only people inside with me were two fighting wizards, wearing quilted silk clothes and holding what really looked a lot like machine guns. They didn’t flinch at my appearance, but I reckon that was because they both seemed to already be as tense as any human being could manage. An odd brazier-looking thing was sitting in the middle of the tent right between the chairs—a spell holder, I realized after a moment. Only normally a spell holder is a pendant-sized thing, and this was the size of a very large charcoal grill and holding a bed of glowing fist-sized coals, each one of them a different spell, primed to go off under different appropriate circumstances.
One of them—that tidy yanking spell—was just fading away, crumbling into pale ash. Someone had prepared that spell, in advance. It hadn’t been based on my rampage through the gardens at all. Whoever had cast it had already somehow worked out that malicious spells weren’t any use on me, even before I’d understood it myself.
I had a bad moment staring at the heap of spells, wondering which of them were about to go off in my face, and then the curtains at the back of the pavilion opened and a short Chinese man came in, wearing a Mao suit made out of some kind of fabric that looked almost like denim, with the buttons made of metal. The guards looked at me with expressions that successfully conveyed both a passionate desire to riddle me with bullets and also the anguished terror of knowing it wouldn’t do the slightest good. The carved phoenix at the back of the chair uncurled its head to peer at me with similar anxiety.
“Ms. Higgins,” the man said, then seeing my ugh no added, with a faint smile, “or may I call you El? I am Li Shanfeng.”
The Dominus of Shanghai.
“El’s fine,” I said, flatly.
It was no wonder the guards were ready to have at me instantly. Every Dominus was a powerful wizard, the valedictorians of their enclaves and not just of a single year at school; the Dominus of any major enclave was on another level. But Li Shanfeng was just as far beyond them.
All of us at school knew his life story; aside from being excellently dramatic, it was a fairly critical part of recent wizard history. As a boy, he’d survived a maw-mouth attack on Shanghai enclave that had forced them to abandon the place. He’d come out of the Scholomance as the most brilliant artificer graduate in living memory, with offers from every major enclave in the world. Instead, he’d gone home and done what everyone thought couldn’t be done: with a circle of wizards behind him, he’d gone into the maw-mouth and destroyed it, so they could take back the enclave.
And then he’d rebuilt his home from an abandoned half ruin into one of the most powerful enclaves in the world. He’d developed new construction techniques that allowed modern enclaves to build vastly larger and more elaborate structures. That mana-brick stamping machine in Beijing had almost certainly been one of his designs. So had those elaborate new foundation disks. Every powerful Western enclave had paid enormously in mana and treasure to get hold of them, and he’d taken that wealth and used it not just to rebuild Shanghai, but to support the other major Chinese enclaves, too, and sponsor dozens more beyond, and ultimately to force a reallocation of Scholomance seats, so they could save more of the independent wizards living near their own enclaves.
It had been a story not just of improbable success but of even more improbable generosity. Big enclaves often supported smaller ones in return for various kinds of tribute and fealty, but he had given away more power than he’d kept, helped other enclaves become so large they could rival his own. It wasn’t the sort of thing enclavers did; it wasn’t the sort of thing any wizards did.
Except of course—now I knew how he’d been doing it. He’d saved his own enclave from a maw-mouth, and then he’d gone off and made more of them. For every enclave he’d helped put up, he’d unleashed another maw-mouth on the helpless, unprotected wizards of the world who didn’t have enclaves to shelter in, and he’d known, he’d known what he was doing, in a way that even the worst council member couldn’t know. He’d stood inside a maw-mouth and felt that devouring limitless hunger trying to get at him.
Something of that must have shown on my face, because the guards twitched—they didn’t quite raise their guns, but they wanted to. Because they wanted to protect him: their hero. I looked at them and said to him savagely, “I’m guessing they don’t know, do they.”
Shanfeng spoke to the two guards; they looked horribly miserable but after a moment they went out of the pavilion and left us alone. “No,” he said. “It’s very difficult to tell anyone who doesn’t already know. The compulsion of secrecy is very powerful. It has been attached to the foundation spells for a very long time—from the very beginning, I suspect.”
I suspected, too: it wasn’t the sort of secret you could hope to keep without magic, after all. Whoever had come up with this lovely way of building enclave foundations back in the distant mists of time had wanted to sell their spell to all the top bidders—but they’d probably been a bit anxious about what other people would think of their clever solution. So they’d worked up a spell to make sure you couldn’t tell anyone until they first accepted the compulsion to keep it quiet themselves. “Can’t have anyone seeing the dirty washing,” I said.
Shanfeng nodded as if it wasn’t anything to do with him. “The compulsion also requires you to charge fair market value for the spell before you can share it. And the restrictions even carry over onto any improvements or modifications you make to the spells yourself. They were designed to be controlled. Unlike those.” He indicated the sutras strapped across my chest in their protective case. “Please, sit.”