I could pick out runes scratched into the old wood, hidden among the other scars and lines: Old English incantations for warding and protection. I’d read Old English for three years solid at school; I’d rarely ever turned up any really useful spells, but I did recognize the extremely useless one I’d been assigned in sophomore year: a protection ward against storms at sea. Most probably the planks had been reclaimed from some ancient enchanted ship. Artifice wears out over time like anything, but if you start with something incredibly sound that’s been well maintained, put a lot of effort into restoring it, and then build on the original magic with new layers of incantations going in roughly the same direction, you can end up with something far more powerful than if you started from scratch. Almost certainly no one with hostile intentions towards the enclave could even make it through this door.
The lock clicked at the first touch of Alfie’s fingers, but the door didn’t want to open; he had to put his shoulder to it and push, and then it gave way all at once—too quickly, which meant it was being helped along from the other side—and as he stumbled forward, Liesel instantly fired off one of her snappy lancing spells over his head, which sliced the lurking grom on the other side into two neat halves, top and bottom.
“Your wards really have gone down,” I said, contemplating the perfect cross section through the middle of the grom. It had already done some successful hunting. There were several unfortunately identifiable remains still in the process of digestion, including a few fingers with the nails still on. Sarah was making retching noises. I’d like to say I became inured by being on my own in the Scholomance, but I was born inured, at least to ordinary levels of death and slaughter.
Then I looked up from the still-twitching body. While we’d all been so usefully distracted, the artifice of the doorway had seized the opportunity to work its way around us. Without any warning or even having taken a final step, I was suddenly inside London enclave, and I wasn’t inured to that at all.
I’ve read about London enclave; I’ve even seen pictures in a few of the Scholomance library books, over the years. But that’s like seeing a picture of a tree, and then actually climbing up in the tree with the branches going every way, the rustle of leaves and the smell and the bark under your fingers scraping and the wind going, and a thousand trees all round your tree, none of them being special and dramatic, just trees, and your tree was also just a tree being a tree, and the picture you’d looked at might be perfectly nice as its own flat thing, interesting and pretty and well composed, but it didn’t have much to do with the reality of the tree.
We—and what was left of the grom—were on a rocky outcrop jutting from the face of a cliff like a terrace, looking down over a vast undulating garden. We were within some sort of huge greenhouse structure, but I barely noticed the shell. It didn’t feel like being in a greenhouse or a garden, and it also didn’t feel like being out in the woods. It was like old fairy-tale illustrations of gardens, where the flowers and vines and trees just pile up improbably on top of one another, everything blooming at once and forever in blithe disregard of the laws of nature.
A small gurgling waterfall was coming down the rock face beside us, continuing on underneath our outcrop and coming out the other side to go leaping down towards another landing, a bit bigger, just visible through nodding branches. I caught a glimpse of a table there, holding an empty silver carafe and narrow glasses and a domed serving tray: the suggestion that you could just turn a corner and be there, and anything you wanted would be waiting for you to eat or drink. We might have been completely alone, or in a small nook with a party in full swing round the corner; you could hear a bit of music over the waterfall if you made an effort.
Our landing had a lacy canopy of white-painted ironwork, overgrown with vines dangling yellow flowers and lamps of stained glass shaped like gramophones sprouting from the columns that held up the corners. There were two stairways going down in different directions: a narrow one of worn-down limestone going between two large boulders and another spiral one of iron descending out of the middle of the landing, along with two paths curving away to either side, each of them a promise of other spaces just out of sight, hidden away behind a curtain of willow and vines and the undulating hillside. Overhead the cliff cantilevered itself out, and vines and trees hung green, and far beyond them glimpses of the glasshouse roof, clearly designed by someone who’d visited Kew and thought how small: millions of triangles of stained glass set in thin iron, lightly frosted, giving the illusion of an open sky somewhere on the other side.