“What are you doing here anyway?” I added. “There’s not a single child in the school to guard yet, you don’t have to lurk in here like a goblin.”
He said mildly, “I like it here. Anyway, it’s too hot outside,” which was absolute nonsense. It was indeed too hot outside, because it was a sunny day in the middle of August in Portugal and I’d nearly had heatstroke just getting from the palace to the well, but that wasn’t the shadow of an excuse for preferring the gym, even if at the moment it was full of huge old trees rustling softly in a faint breeze, and a wide stream running the whole length of the chamber, up and down a hill and gurgling over grey rocks, with a perfect little red arch of a bridge leading to the pavilion.
We went and sat on the steps together. There was a jug on the table inside with cool water, and one bowl full of fruit, a second one full of edamame.
“How many maw-mouths do you think there are, out there?” Orion said.
I half shrugged one shoulder. I didn’t really want to think about the numbers. When the maw-mouth was killed, the enclave came down in a crash, but it didn’t happen the other way round. Enclaves could be lost from the world, forgotten, their entrances blocked up, their wizards killed or tumbled away in the void. The maw-mouth they’d made didn’t vanish at the same time. It kept creeping on round the world, still endlessly hungry. And how many enclaves had been made in the last five thousand years, all of them set atop lives crushed down into the void? Hundreds at least. And the maw-mouths would all be hiding from me as hard as they could.
But I’d have help, at least. Aadhya had taken Liu home to her place in New Jersey, to get a bit more rest—and an enormous amount of feeding-up—before we started, but the plan was, once the school was well on its way, we were going to meet in Cape Town. There had been seventeen sightings of maw-mouths in South Africa in the last month. Jowani was waiting there for us.
Liesel would be sorting us out a network from London, or rather two of them. The first one was officially a public maw-mouth survey meant to help people avoid them, now that they were attacking wizards more aggressively: people all over the world would be sending reports of maw-mouth sightings to her. The second network was going to be a small and carefully handpicked group of our schoolmates scattered round the world, and they would all be in on the actual project. They’d help get our little hunting party quietly in and out again, ideally no one else the wiser, and also file false sightings of the late unlamented maw-mouths afterwards, just in case we’d been spotted, and in various other ways throw a veil of confusion over my activities.
All very clever, but I was fairly sure that people were still going to work it out sooner or later. Later, most likely, because we’d just packed a decade of upheaval into a single fortnight, and everyone was still reeling. Even most of the people who’d joined the chain of mana down in the cavern didn’t fully understand what exactly we’d done. They’d come into the working because they’d seen Shanfeng helping us, or Ophelia, or because they’d been terrified of having the roof fall in on their heads, and mostly they’d come away with the idea that Shanghai and New York had made peace, and as part of the terms, they’d saved the Scholomance together.
But a fair few people had seen me kill a maw-mouth by now, or knew that I could do it, and every council member knew what was holding their enclaves up, after all. Eventually, someone hostile would put those two things together, and I hadn’t the shadow of an idea for what I’d do then. Shanfeng and Ophelia might be all for my crusade, but it was easy to feel that way when you were at the top of the world’s most powerful enclaves. Other enclavers would be more than a bit put out.
I’d suggested to Aad and Liu that maybe they ought to just go home and not get too involved, but Liu had said, “No,” firmly and immediately. Which would have been understandable if home had been Beijing enclave, but it wasn’t anymore. Shanfeng had made a quiet arrangement with the new council they’d elected: Beijing had taken in seven of Shanghai’s own long-term hirelings—still several years away from earning places and fully willing to settle for a bit less room—and Liu and her immediate family had been given places in Shanghai enclave instead.
“What about Yuyan?” I tried—Liu had already put her on the list for Liesel’s second network—but Liu had just smiled at me a little watery and said, “Maybe after Shanghai replaces their foundation.” I couldn’t exactly argue that, could I.