And if mundanes spotted a bunch of people queuing for entry to some bizarre obscure bit of urban decay, of course they’d join the queue, because they’d be curious, and as soon as they got up to the gates—expecting a dance party in a badly decorated basement and at most some minor sleight-of-hand—and slammed into the already wobbly artifice with all their rock-solid confidence in the laws of physics, down those gates would go.
“Right, because your father’s still trying to get me paid off,” I said. “Alfie, do me a solid and next time, keep the bloody dramatic oaths to yourself.”
He flushed. “The compulsion’s off. It lifted after the first visitors came in.”
So he’d come up to help me just to help me, and not because he’d had to. “Oh,” I muttered ungraciously.
“Ah, that is what Martel’s side are after,” Liesel said. “The compulsion has gone because your father truly intends to fulfill the request and has begun doing so, but El did not ask for the gardens to be opened only for an hour or two. If they force the garden gates to close again, the obligation would be restored. And if they get El into their power in the meantime, your father would have to negotiate with them to get it lifted again. Martel must have sent the word out himself. Of course everyone would believe it, coming from him.”
She almost sounded approving: yes, such a clever plan, what perfect sense it made, and so what if it meant turning Alfie into a weapon against his own dad, and ensorcelling me. All to claw back a bit more selfish control over the enclave that none of them would have anymore if it hadn’t been for my help, and Alfie putting himself on the line to make it happen. “And you wanted me to work with these people,” I said to Liesel. “Do you know where Yancy’s party is going?” I asked Alfie.
He looked out over the gardens, squinting, and then said, “Oh, those wankers, they’re at Memorial Green.”
Alfie threaded our way through a creaky maze of winding stairs up and down the garden, and along narrow inconvenient paths that hadn’t been trimmed lately and were clearly slated for renovation, presumably because all the rest of the paths were crammed with tourists. For the last bit, he had to take us into a residential section of the enclave, an odd stretch that was something halfway between a street full of listed buildings and a school diorama of Tudor architecture made by a thirteen-year-old kid who hadn’t done much research.
There was a narrow cobblestoned pavement just wide enough for the three of us to walk abreast, with half-timbered buildings on either side, each one only the width of its front doorway, with a single leaded window on each of four stories above, and a dormer at the very top. The roofs across the pavement from one another were connected with more timbers, and loose fabric like sailcloth was hung over them, with sunlamps on the other side: not nearly as extravagant as in the gardens, but if you were inside one of those rooms, you could probably convince yourself that the light coming in was daylight. But from the outside, it was dim and precarious, all those too-thin, too-tall buildings looming unpleasantly, and I was glad to hurry past them and towards the patch of green meadow I could just glimpse at the end of the lane.
I drew a deep breath as soon as we escaped into the open air, and got a faceful of the pungent stink of urine coming out of someone who’d been sucking down phantasmal vapors. A fellow in a tatty neon-blue dressing gown was pissing on a corner of the green, and the wafting smell of the vapors themselves was drifting our way, too. They probably weren’t unpleasant alone, but mixed with the other stench it took on the absolute foulness of someone trying to cover up cat piss by pouring on a bottle of cheap floral perfume.
Alfie sucked in a sharp breath. “That’s not on.” He snapped off a repelling-liquid incantation that he’d probably practiced backwards and forwards to deal with the fairly common category of acid-and poison-spitting mals. It made all the wee, including the healthy amount that had already soaked into the ground, leap up and spray right back all over the blue-robed wizard, who gave a howl of indignation and ripped off the soaked dressing gown and was improbably in a suit of scale armor underneath it.
“I’ll have your fucking bollocks on toast, you bloodless fuck,” the man yelled, fumbling after some kind of weapon he was expecting to be at his side. He was obviously two or three planes of reality off from this one, but in a moment he’d probably have persuaded it to show up, only Liesel heaved an annoyed breath and waved him clean—same spell she’d used on me, perfectly up to the much smaller job at hand—and then told him in the cutting tones of a tea lady on the train after pub day, “Go lie down and go to sleep, you are drunk,” with a quick twist and flick of her fingers by her side to throw just the least hint of compulsion behind it. He paused, registered that he wasn’t covered in stinking pee, then amiably agreed, “Right, yeah,” and rolled off a few steps to an empty plot of grass and fell over on the ground.