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?”