“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.”
He seated himself; I stayed on my feet. “Did you have any improvements in mind for them?” I said caustically. “I’m sure they could do loads more if you just added a little mass slaughter here and there.”
“I can see you’re very angry,” he said, demonstrating he possessed all the observational abilities of a dead stick. “You have every right to be. But we don’t have much time. Once Ophelia knows that I am here, she will act. And then…you will have to choose.”