“What do you think?” She sounded testy. “London is in trouble. We need you.”
I didn’t actually respond, but I suppose my expression conveyed several of my thoughts, primary among them the strong feeling that she should fuck right off, but also wondering how London was in trouble and what they needed me for—I’m powerful, but I’m not more powerful than one of the most powerful enclaves in the world—and why she imagined that I cared.
Liesel scowled a bit and deigned to explain. “Whoever took out Bangkok, they did it again. They hit both Salta and London, on graduation day, while we were in the middle of coming out. Salta’s been completely destroyed—two hundred wizards dead. And half the wards on London have come down. And here you sit in the rain,” she added, in deep disgust.
She really did an excellent job of making it seem perfectly ludicrous for me to be living quietly in my own home instead of keeping close tabs on the latest news from international wizarding circles. In case you were wondering if you’d missed something of significance yourself, the actual cities of Bangkok and Salta were both perfectly fine, and if I’d had a telly to turn on, there wouldn’t have been a word about any disaster in London. Enclaves generally go up and down without mundanes being any the wiser. Separating yourself from the mundane world is the point of building an enclave in the first place: opening up a nice safe sheltered space into the void makes it harder for reality to get at you, which means it’s easier to build artifice like spectacular armor-gowns and to avoid unpleasant things like mals that want to eat your children.
In justice to Liesel, however, enclaves getting attacked and destroyed left and right was highly significant news from the perspective of most wizards, even me. I had substantial objections to the whole enclave system, and I’d opted firmly out of joining one myself, but that didn’t mean I approved of some psychotic maleficer deliberately ripping them open all over the world and dumping a lot of otherwise innocent people into flaming ruin or out into the void.
However, that was some distance from trying to do something about it. Staying here in a nice quiet yurt in the woods seemed like a much better option than getting involved, even with the leaky roof. “Sorry, but London will have to look after itself,” I said.
“Why, so you can grow moss along with your house?” Liesel said, cuttingly. “This is no place for you.”
“Who asked you, exactly?” I said.
“Liu did, of course,” Liesel said, taking the question literally, and then waved her hand over me and my patently absurd existence. “How would I know, otherwise? We all thought you were dead along with Lake.”
I stared at her, feeling mildly betrayed; although to be fair, if Liu’s goal had been to find someone to forcibly drag me out of a hole who wasn’t a continent away, Liesel wasn’t a bad choice. “She didn’t tell you to recruit me to help London.”
“No,” she said. “She told me you were alive and sitting in a commune with no electricity and no plumbing. I didn’t need to be told this was stupid.”
“Does this sort of thing usually work for you, insulting people you’re asking for favors?” I said, although it wasn’t very heated; it came out more as a fascinated inquiry. She’d got lucky with the timing of her approach: I still wasn’t able to generate anger, so what I felt mostly was impressed by her chutzpah. I couldn’t even imagine what Liesel had in mind for me to do, unless it was along the lines of set a thief to catch a thief.
“I am not asking you for a favor,” Liesel said. “A maw-mouth broke through the wards this morning. A big one. They’re holding it off from the council room, but not for much longer. Once it gets in there, that will be the end of London. No one’s willing to send help. They’re all afraid for themselves. Well?” She finished on a belligerent note, while my whole stomach turned over and wrapped itself into a small lump like bread dough being punched down.
That would be a true disaster, no matter your feelings on enclaves: London enclave, one of the biggest and most powerful in the world, and all its vast stockpile of mana, going into the belly of a maw-mouth. The thing might get nearly as big as Patience in that one gigantic meal. And in the meantime whoever this maleficer was, ripping apart enclave wards, they would be out there, too, presumably getting ready to have another go. What a spectacular team they could become. It wouldn’t much matter if I refused to fulfill my own prophesied destiny of spreading death and disaster if instead I stood back and let the two of them sort it out for me.