Which might sound stupid and old-fashioned, but wasn’t in the least. My word and my mana on it is a perfectly valid incantation, when you do it properly and mean it. It’s as valid as, for instance, an open-ended summoning, where you put everything you possibly have on the line to get what you want, only in this case what Alfie wanted was me, helping him, and to get it, he’d just offered to meet whatever the market rate for killing a maw-mouth would be.
I eyed him in enormous irritation. If London enclave didn’t pay me back adequately—which was going to be hard since I couldn’t actually think of anything I wanted on that scale, apart from things I couldn’t get, such as bringing Orion back to life—it was entirely possible he’d have to literally follow me around trying to pay me back for the rest of his life. It’s a very bad idea to promise an evil witch that you’ll do anything in exchange for her help: that’s how some maleficers end up with loyal Igor-like minions slavishly in their train. It’d look really marvelous, Alfie of London trailing around behind me on a string. Whether I wanted him to or not.
“Don’t make idiotic promises,” I said cuttingly. “I’ll see what I think of when I have a look at the thing. It can’t be much further, can it?” I folded my arms and sulked back into my seat with furious determination to just get this over with.
“It’ll be another—” Sarah began, but my intent won out: the car lurched to a halt and was standing in the vast circular drive of a crumbling monstrosity of a house. We climbed out. It was a giant ugly box of a mansion that wouldn’t have looked out of place as an Asda, if one of the builders involved had stuck a portico of faux Greek columns on the front under the impression that actually they were rebuilding the Parthenon.
Another different builder, without communicating with the first, had been badly misinformed that there was a nice house here and had built an imposing outer wall around the property to safeguard it, festooned with spikes and topped off with a charming froth of barbed wire and security cameras. There was a choked fountain, and the drive was overgrown with moss and weeds gone everywhere, scattered broken bottles and crumpled plastic, with a thick pungent stink of rot and urine lying over everything as if an army of rats inhabited the place.
Absolutely magnificent, by enclave standards. London enclave probably owned six or seven like this in just this postcode, not to mention hundreds of massive flats throughout the city, perhaps whole condemned buildings and crumbling warehouses, all buried beneath layers of bureaucracy and paperwork. No one would ever come near, except the kind of person that the neighbors would call the mundane police to chase off on your behalf.
Meaning they could use all this space, the wasteland of empty rooms and abandoned grounds. They could slip it inside the enclave, and thanks to the flexibility of the void around them, reorganize it there to suit themselves, as if you could look over your flat and decide you’d like thirty square meters moved from the living room to the kitchen that afternoon while you made dinner.
If a mundane ever did poke their nose into the dilapidated wreck of the place, they’d be given just enough of that space back to keep them from noticing while they were here, and if they were mad enough to want to linger for any length of time, with the whine and creak of a rotting house and the mysterious whooshes of air as space moved in and out of reality around them, it was entirely likely that one of the hungry mals lurking round the fringes of the enclave would manage to get them during the witching hours of the night, when mundanes do, briefly, believe in magic.
Alfie led us round the house to the back, and then through the garden along a path of hexagonal stepping-stones. I didn’t take the time to inspect them closely, but they had some sort of runes etched into them. A tiny stone building, rather like a mausoleum for a single occupant, sat far back in the corner of the property, deep in shadow. As we got close, the paving stones started to give a bit underfoot, as if the ground had gone soft and boggy beneath them: the same queasy sensation I’d felt through the power-sharer, something gone wrong. Alfie hesitated a moment with his foot on the next one, feeling it too, then doggedly kept onward.
The doorway of the stone building was empty, with dangling hinges, exposing an empty narrow room beyond with a single broken window and more smashed bottles all over the floor, an invitation to slice your feet to ribbons. “Look away,” he said, and after we turned away and then looked back, the door was in place waiting for us: made of thick planks of stained and dark ancient wood, with a boar-faced knocker holding a ring in its snout and a massive doorknob in the middle, both cast in solid bronze.