The Scholomance had been really constructed, too, but that was why the iron skeleton of the structure had been built in tidy individual sections in the factories of Manchester, each one quietly shipped to the final destination under cover of night, popped in through the doors—wherever those were, which hopefully I’d be told soon enough—and bolted on to the rest of the growing structure from inside. There had also been a lot of elaborate spells that had encouraged those sections to stretch out along the way. The largest classrooms and the cafeteria had all been built out of negative space, and the outer walls had all been at least halfway fictional.
No one had built this marble hall in sections, and it hadn’t been inflated, either. Every last square inch of the ground was so perfectly solid that probably you could have brought a mundane into the place without so much as a ripple. “How did you get this place in here?” Aadhya was hissing to Chloe as we hurried after Orion’s dad.
“What?” Chloe jerked to glance around: couldn’t even be bothered to notice the everyday local miracle. “It’s just the old Penn Station. The enclave bid on the demolition, and then brought it inside while they pretended they were knocking it down.”
“What vandal would demolish this place to build that rat’s-nest we just came out of?” I said, in flat disbelief. Chloe just shrugged, but as soon as I’d asked, I had the strong suspicion that the enclave had made it very much in the private interests of whatever marauder or twenty had made it possible for them to snaffle the place right out of the city. Using a building made for transport, with probably a million mundane people gone through each of those archways, going somewhere different, full of purpose and bent on journeying—that was the kind of psychic foundation you couldn’t make or buy, no matter how rich an enclave you were, and undoubtedly it had made it significantly easier to build all these gateways.
The place was full of wizards rushing through at almost exactly the same pace as the mundanes in the station outside, with the same sense of urgency. There were small guard stations flanking each archway, charming brass-and-iron follies with a single seat inside, clearly intended for some bored guard to spend the day sitting in. Only at the moment, there were ten grim-faced and heavily armed wizards stationed next to each one of them instead. The gateway going to Tokyo—that was the one they reckoned Shanghai was most likely to hit, presumably—had at least thirty guards, and they’d installed a huge spiky steel wall in front of it that looked more suited to a medieval siege than its surroundings. It was even decorated with scowling brass heads of eagles, and enormous talons protruding from the bottom edge.
Despite the elevated security, no one stopped Balthasar bringing us through. The guards were easy to pick out in their uniform of thick tufted armor—undoubtedly highly practical, meant to muffle and absorb all sorts of magical attacks, although it did make them look vaguely like angry sofas. They were all carrying the same weapons as well, long metal poles with a thin slice of an axe blade and a focusing crystal mounted on the top, again sensible; if you can jab a physical object right up close at an enemy wizard, you can often get a spell off past their defenses.
They were only the cannon fodder, though: hired wizards working for the enclave. The real powers in the room weren’t wearing uniforms. I picked out half a dozen of them along the way without half trying, as if some instinct of mine was sniffing them out as potential threats. There was a really beautiful and really dangerous man in red leather pants and a long-sleeved turtleneck of iridescent black snakeskin that almost seemed to melt into his actual skin at the hard-to-see edges, who wore a single short blade at his side roughly the length of my forearm. He was standing talking quietly with a fat grey-haired woman in a flowing kaftan of embroidered silk who was slumped on one of the benches and radiating the impression of having undergone great trials just to get herself there, only when she answered him, I could literally feel her voice through the floor, wordless, as if she had the whole room under her hand, like that volcanic spell I’d used to smash the Scholomance off the world.
A tall man was leaning against one of the columns and reading a paper copy of The New York Times, wearing an elegant old-fashioned suit and hat and leather shoes, with a heavy antique gold watch on his wrist and a wolf-headed cane under his arm; he looked so much as though he could have been moved into the enclave along with the train station itself that he had to have been doing it on purpose. To move around through time, maybe? It’s a brilliant fighting technique, although most people can’t stand it any more than they can stand the unreal places. As much as I understand it, you can’t go back in time and change things; what you can do is essentially haul yourself towards the past so vigorously that you stop being here for just long enough that you can then pop yourself back into the present moment in a different spot, without any bother about physically moving there, or inconveniences like shields that might be between your two locations.