“We have all made as many enclaves as we could, as quickly as we could, even though we knew that in the end, we were building our own destruction together,” Shanfeng said. “And now the pace of that destruction will come more quickly. Because you have killed so many maleficaria, and the maw-mouths have less to eat. So they will have to hunt wizards instead.”
Like the maw-mouth attacking London’s damaged wards, and the one crawling over my family’s compound outside Mumbai. There’d been an arms race going among the enclaves of the world, a race heading to the bottom, and I’d come blundering in and pushed it along faster. I put my hands up, pushing my hair back from my face as if that would give me more air, let me breathe out against the squeezing pressure that was really coming from inside my skull, even if it felt like an external force.
“That isn’t your fault,” Shanfeng said. “It’s ours. None of us could find a way to stop. We debated and quarreled and cheated and made excuses—and the enclaves went up. And so Ophelia decided that she had to break the stalemate—to force us to stop.” He smiled wryly. “At least, to force enough of us to stop. That was what she sought to do.”
“With Orion,” I said, understanding instantly: this was the information he really wanted me to have. And I knew that I wasn’t going to want it at all, but I couldn’t walk away from it, either. “What did she do to him?”
“I must first explain the principle,” Shanfeng said. “Fundamentally, a maw-mouth is a method of establishing a point of harmony in the void—a place in the void that can support material reality. The foundation stone is the first core piece of reality that we ask the void to support. Then you can build out from there. But the foundation doesn’t need to be large. It could be as small as a single atom. You simply couldn’t build a very big enclave on it. But Ophelia didn’t wish to build an enclave.”
“She wanted a weapon,” I said.
“She wanted a child,” Shanfeng said, correcting me mildly but insistently, refusing to take the opening I’d handed him, the chance to make Ophelia out to be a monster, as if he didn’t want it made that easy for himself or me. “An heir, if you will. A conscious reasoning mind that would carry out her goal, with the almost limitless power required to achieve it.”
He paused—working out how he was going to hit me with it, I reckon, while I worked at not screaming at him. “She took a single embryo, and sacrificed it to create a very small maw-mouth,” he said. “But where enclave-builders use that power to establish a foundation, she fed it back into the child she had crushed. That was how she fused the two together to create the being of her vision: a wizard directly in contact with the void. A wizard who was also a maw-mouth.”
I swallowed bile and horror. “How do you know?” I managed, a pathetic desperate stab at fending it off. “Did she give you a rundown?”
“No,” he said. “But we have eyes in New York, as they surely have eyes on us. The year that all the children died at graduation, we realized that someone—either from New York enclave, or with their connivance—had done something. We didn’t know what at first. Then we heard of the child, Ophelia’s child, who could kill maleficaria at the age of three. After that, we spent a great deal of effort investigating.”
I didn’t want to believe him. “I’m surprised you didn’t hurry up and make a human maw-mouth of your own,” I said through my teeth. “Couldn’t find someone to stomach it?”
“I don’t have the moral high ground, and I won’t pretend to,” Shanfeng said, with horrible determined gentleness. “What I do have is an experience, a piece of information, that Ophelia did not have. Because I, like you, have stood inside a maw-mouth. And so as soon as I knew what Ophelia had done, I understood that she hadn’t found a solution at all. She had only hastened the end for us all. Because a maw-mouth can’t ever be satisfied. It can’t ever be controlled. As you yourself must know.”
He stood up and walked out of the pavilion opening, past me. I wanted to just curl up in a ball or even better run away somewhere to the other end of the earth. He was right. I did know. I followed him out, each step dragging.
We’d only been in the pavilion a few minutes, a few sentences, but outside, everything had changed. Aadhya and Liu and the rest of our small group were still in what I thought was the same place—peering anxiously in my direction—but the entrance to the well behind them had vanished. The cavern wall was smooth and unbroken. There wasn’t any way out.
And the two sides had almost completely swapped their positions. New York and their allies were swinging their fortifications aside, hauling up offensive weapons instead; on this side, all round me the siege engines were being pushed unceremoniously away and defensive walls were coming up. It was as though the whole thing had been a double bluff, on both sides, and now all the bets had been called and the real cards were coming out onto the table.
“This was a trap,” I said. “The whole thing’s a trap.”
“Yes. For all of us.” Shanfeng waved his hand in a sweep across the chamber, taking in all the assembled wizards, everyone in the place. “There are no real sides, for Ophelia. We all hunger, so we are all the enemy, in the end. She wants to intimidate and control her own allies as much as those of us who oppose her. But I knew she would spring the trap as soon as I came myself.”
“So why did you come?”
“Because you came,” he said, simple and dreadful. “El, when we realized what Ophelia had done—we had to make a choice. When we chose not to act, not to follow her path, we knew that we were giving up the power to stop her. But we also knew that she had created a vast and terrible imbalance in the world. So all these years since, we have been watching—and hoping—for the counterbalance. We were growing very worried,” he added, dryly.
“And now here I am?” I said through my teeth. “What do you think I’m going to do for you, exactly?” I didn’t need to ask. I already knew what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to do what I was made for, the thing I alone could do. He wanted me to kill Orion, and I was going to make him say it, I was going to make Shanfeng look me in the face and ask me to do it, to kill my friend, so I could tell him to go to hell.
“But it’s not just you,” Shanfeng said, gently.
I stared at him, taken aback, and for one incredibly stupid moment, I thought he was giving me some kind of hope, some chance of a reprieve. “There’s something else—”
But he wasn’t. “It’s both of you,” Shanfeng said. “You, and the child Ophelia made. The boy we heard about from our own children as they came out of the Scholomance each year of the last four. The boy who saved the lives of others, who took no payment, and paid no attention to which enclave they were from. Ophelia got—not the hero she wanted, but the hero she deserved.”
There was a sudden flaring of light on the other side that jerked my head round: a hideously expensive portal opening. Ophelia came out through it onto the big central platform among all the other leaders of the Western enclaves, perfect serenity in her body language. They all moved towards her with eager smiling welcome, ready to court the queen; Martel was in the lead, putting on that same avuncular face. And Ophelia was turning back, holding out an ushering hand, as Orion came through the portal right behind her.