It hadn’t occurred to me before how odd it was to have a maw-mouth from Bangkok squeezing through the Scholomance gates in Portugal, a maw-mouth from Beijing gnawing at London’s gate. But as soon as he said it, with emphasis, I understood at once.
Shanfeng nodded, seeing it in my face. “After the Scholomance was built, more wizard children began to survive. And so more enclaves began to be built. After the Second World War, there was a new one going up in America every five years, sometimes every three years. Their neighbors helped them—for a price. But of course they didn’t want those new maw-mouths lurking nearby. So they opened great portals and sent them far away. To countries with few enclaves, or where the old enclaves had been ruined and destroyed, or made weak, and there was no one who had the power to object. Like China.”
I didn’t demand any proof. It was perfectly obvious. “So you built enclaves enough to even the score, and sent your maw-mouths back the other way.”
“I’ve tried to negotiate agreements with other major enclaves to slow down the pace of enclave creation,” Shanfeng said. “But it doesn’t work. Why would a circle of wizards in Dublin, with enough mana saved, agree to wait and die so that a circle in Guangzhou could have an enclave and live? And though London enclave could have agreed to open their doors to the wizards of the Dublin circle, to give them a home, instead they sold them the enclave spells to build a new one of their own, in exchange for years of mana. Which London needed to pay off their war debts, because they had built five new entrances to protect themselves, and sent the maw-mouths all to India.”
“Wait,” I said, appalled. “Each entrance—”
“Yes. For each opening to the void, there must be a foundation. And a maw-mouth beneath it.”
That was why Yancy and her crew could wriggle through the old, closed-off doors, I realized. Not just because of mana and memory. Because the maw-mouths beneath London’s gates were still out there, devouring wizards, all to save London’s fairy gardens from going down under Nazi bombs.
“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.”