It must have been a massive mana drain. Alfie might claim that Yancy’s people had it in for the enclavers; it seemed much more likely to me that it was the other way round. I could just imagine Martel and the rest of that council totting up the mana that was being siphoned off for these disreputable revels and gnashing their teeth. London wouldn’t have deliberately kept this ghostly place hanging round for anyone to crawl into; they’d have carefully and thoroughly shoved this bit off into the void.
Just like we’d done, with the Scholomance.
I’ve laid it out tidily here, but at the time it took my muddled brain a good ten minutes to gnaw through the confusion to that point. We weren’t walking the whole time: Yancy took us to the most central part of the stands, festooned with massive swoops of glittery bunting that were clearly a more recent addition, which mostly hid away the translucent world outside. Her crew had heaped up glorious mountains of cushions around a scattering of low tables, piles of blankets and soft rugs woven out of things like the flavor of freshly picked strawberries and poems and golden-green—not me being poetic; someone doped on this potion had evidently figured out a way to actually do artifice with what they could perceive. I have no idea what the stuff would have looked like in the real world. Probably it couldn’t exist in the real world; it would just have fallen apart instantly as soon as you got it too close to physics or even a sober pair of eyes.
Once we were inside and we’d sunk down into the impossible nest, I didn’t have to keep pretending the void wasn’t right there, right over there, and we’re about to fall into it. Yancy’s crew had done it up in a really clever way—the drapes didn’t completely hide the outside, which would have made you think about it more and implied that there was something outside that needed hiding, but enough of it that you’d have had to make an effort to look. And even if the cushions and rugs weren’t very real, they were still artifice, and their purpose was to make you comfortable. If you’ve ever imagined lying down on a cloud and having it hold you up, that’s more or less what it was like. It didn’t make any sense and you knew better, but at the same time, you also secretly really believed that it would work, and were delighted to go along with it when improbably it did.
The section of the stands immediately around us was more solid, and under the layers of cushioning they felt more plausibly like wood. There were gilt and paint and carvings everywhere, some of them magical runes. This surely had been an old and well-loved part of the enclave, the site of parties and ceremonial events back when wizards still rode things that looked like horses instead of cars. Maybe Yancy’s story was part of an old tradition; maybe the enclavers had told their own children stories about royal visits, and Queen Bess was a bit more plausible than King Arthur, at least. Enough belief and memory poured into this space so that even after the enclave had more or less given it the boot, this one part had lingered on?
“How did you get into this place?” I demanded urgently, when my brain had finally lurched that far. I knew it wasn’t safe to ask the more accurate question—they must have shoved this place off into the void, how did you get it back?—but I thought I could get away with asking that much.
Yancy had sprawled out over a heap of pillows and got hold of a silver jug so much like the ones in the garden above that I was sure it had been pilfered. She was pouring herself a drink into an old-fashioned champagne cup made of elaborate green glass, and the liquid foamed and bubbled and settled down into a froth of pink mousse.
“Give us a spoon, love,” she said, in answer. I looked down at the table: at my place I had a gilt-edged teacup, slightly faded, on a glass plate, and something like a sugar bowl which had been crammed with a tiny forest of tarnished silver spoons, with delicate handles made to look like narrow branches. I slid one over to her, and she passed me the jug in return.
When I poured the liquid into my teacup, I got what looked like a crème br?lée, only when I broke the crust, underneath there wasn’t custard but the blue-violet flames you get from setting brandy on fire. I spooned a bit of them into my mouth gingerly, and then the cup and spoon tumbled down in a smash from my hands while I covered my face, trying to breathe, moans breaking out of me.
It was the taste of summer rain mixed with faint hisses: the taste of being in the gym with Orion, that last day, the very last day before graduation, stupidly kissing him in the pavilion with the amphisbaena falling from the ceiling pipes all around us. It was the taste of everything I’d been thinking in that passionate, greedy moment: that it would be better to have had him just the once, in case we died, only I’d really been thinking about in case I died, and how stupid I’d feel to have refused myself this one-last-only-real pleasure I could dig out of the Scholomance.