An open sky, just starting to go on towards night, even though it was full day outside. There must have been massive sunlamps above there to grow all the plants, but they were all turned down to twilight, or off completely. A couple of the nearby smaller lanterns had come on, evidently for our benefit, but even they were dim and struggling. It felt late. Not just the light, but the hour: the longer I stood there, the more I felt, palpable and certain, that the whole place was starting to fail. Liesel was right, you could feel it; something had gone wrong deep underneath. Whatever anchored this place in the void, it was crumbling like that hideous wreck of a mansion out on the other side.
And I did want to save it. I couldn’t help that, even though I looked over the whole gorgeous sprawling wonder of it and knew instantly that Mum was right. I couldn’t feel it right now, the malia she’d said was part of every enclave; the seasick crumbling sensation was too strong, overpowering everything else. But I didn’t need to feel it myself to be certain that it was there. I had my sutras, and I already had some idea what I could build with them, my own magical doorway to a place of shelter. It wouldn’t be anything like this. You could do a lot with a group of determined wizards working together and the greater-than-magic power of the assembly line, but you couldn’t build a fairy city into the void, a stately pleasure-dome decree, and light up a new sun just for you and yours. There were a few thousand wizards in London enclave, but it would have taken ten times as many to build this place and keep it together. Of course they’d needed malia.
And they kept it running with malia, too, surely; the kind of malia that wouldn’t look like malia. Most of the wizards who worked on this enclave probably lived an hour from the nearest entrance, to avoid the maleficaria that would constantly be hanging round to get at all this bounty of mana. They spent their days and strength to build mana and beauty for the enclave, and slogged home afterwards, and got paid cheap in mundane money and magical supplies and the hope, the tantalizing dangled hope, that one day, they’d get to stay. That their kids would get to stay. That wasn’t the kind of malia that would make you sick; the enclavers weren’t forcibly sucking mana out of those wizards and being fought off violently. They’d found a much safer way of extracting what they needed. Just like their kids did inside the Scholomance, leeching off the strength and work of all the loser kids, so they could make it out again to come home.
I wanted to punch Alfie in his sad anxious face for being part of it, him and Sarah and Liesel—who’d been a loser once herself and had chosen to jump on board with it anyway, as though it became all right, what they were doing to all the rest of us, because she’d been able to fight her way inside the garden walls.
And also I wanted to wander around these magical gardens for a month, a year; I wanted to go down every single path and find every hidden perfect nook. I wanted to go and taste whatever was in that silver jug, surely something indescribably wonderful. I wanted to climb to the top of this overgrown cliff and follow the path of that jumping waterfall stream all the way through this hidden world.
It wasn’t anything like being inside the Scholomance gym. That place had been a lie: an imitation of the real world we couldn’t get to and most likely would never see again. This wasn’t a lie. This was a story, a fairy tale: it wasn’t pretending to be real, it was just a place that couldn’t be and hadn’t been, a place of perfect beauty. And I could tell that if it sank beneath the wave, I’d lie down by the waters of Babylon and weep as much as any of the enclavers who lived here. I’d never quite be able to remember it properly. It would just be stuck in my head forever as a blurry image, something I kept trying to make come clear and couldn’t.
I was angry at them for everything they’d done to build it, and I also couldn’t stand to just turn my back and let it all come tumbling down. It wouldn’t have fixed anything they’d done. It would only have made an even worse waste of it all. Or maybe that was just an excuse I was giving myself for wanting to save the place; maybe it was just my own greed talking. After all, they weren’t going to tell me I couldn’t come back for a pleasure stroll after I’d saved it. They’d be afraid to.
Alfie and Sarah and Liesel were all standing there watching me: hopefully, I thought. Like they’d seen me caught by the place. It had to be one of their most powerful recruiting tools, after all. It was only more irritating because it had worked. “Which way?” I said shortly.