“Take a few breaths,” Ophelia advised, when I didn’t answer her. “I’m not looking to start a fight in my living room. In my worst-case scenario, you’d destroy my enclave. In the best case, you’d be dead. And I don’t want you dead. Why don’t you sit down? Would you like some tea?”
She delivered all of this with the air of a mildly beleaguered teacher in a junior school—not the slightest hitch when proposing either that I might destroy New York enclave, or that she might kill me. The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do. It was even reassuring, in an odd way. But not enough for me to want to sit down and have a cuppa, pretending there wasn’t something worse than a maw-mouth across from me.
“Have you been destroying the enclaves?” I blurted out, a brief shade away from panic.
She tilted her head. “You mean that, don’t you?” I just stared at her. “No, I haven’t been.” She didn’t even try to say it in any kind of convincing way—not indignant or even urgent. She simply said it, and left me with the dampening impression that I was being a silly goose: what use was it to make her say anything about it? If she had been, and she didn’t want me to know, she would just have lied without the slightest difficulty. For that matter, if she’d told me she had been doing it, that might have been a lie just as easily, for her own reasons. I wasn’t getting any information out of her; she was just making noises to be polite.
And what if she was the one smashing enclaves apart? I could certainly have believed it. She wouldn’t have batted an eye at ripping London open just to make it look less likely that New York was behind it when she went after Beijing. But so what? Was I going to loudly declare that I was going to stop her wicked plans? In my best case, if I managed to convince her that I meant it, she’d come at me immediately, of course, and I was standing in the middle of her enclave, in her very own house, with a significant fraction of all the people in the world I cared about—and bloody hell, Liesel had somehow joined that group, which would teach me to shag people I didn’t want to like—in range. I couldn’t come up with a single idea for how to get us out of here if Ophelia meant to stop us, at least not any idea that didn’t include my turning into her, or even worse.
She waited long enough to let all of that sink in, more or less forcing me to quell my own nascent panic, then added, “Balthasar tells me that you’d like to go back into the Scholomance.”
And I did still want that, but I wasn’t taking anything from this woman. “I’ll manage it on my own,” I said. “We’ll just be going.”
She gave a very faint sigh. “I don’t think you will. You don’t have much time, and you’re not getting the mana anywhere else.”
I would’ve told her I wasn’t taking a drop of anything she called mana, but Liesel broke in on us. “Why do we not have time?” she demanded, and that did stop me, because it was clearly something I needed to know.
Ophelia turned away and went to the nearest couch and sat down; she reached out a hand and a glass of water was waiting on the small table next to it for her, cold enough to dew the sides. “Keeping the Scholomance going takes about fifty lilims per day, per seat.”
The number sounded like nonsense. We don’t measure mana on an individual level; it’s too wobbly for that. The same thirty push-ups that build you a shield spell’s worth of mana one day won’t build you enough to light a candle the next. You just build as much as you can, and when you need to cast a spell, either you have enough mana or you don’t. But on the major enclave level, you can start to average it out over the two thousand wizards working for you, all day every day, and then make yourself a budget, and plans. And in that kind of a budget, fifty lilims is roughly equivalent to the mana you’d let a hired wizard take home in a year—the amount that’s twice what they could manage to raise on their own working outside an enclave. So she was talking about ludicrous amounts, vats of mana just pouring into the school, every single day.
“And your plan worked,” Ophelia went on. “Every maleficaria survey in the world is reporting a giant drop in sightings over the last week, since graduation. The big one in Tokyo just came out this morning, showing a drop of ninety-two percent from the week before graduation. With these enclave attacks happening, a lot of people want to ditch the school permanently and keep all their mana at home. We’ve already got fifteen minor enclaves who haven’t put in their contributions for the month.” She shook her head as if it disappointed her. “Fortunately, the major enclaves can’t pull out that easily. Anyone with more than five seats had to sign on to the long-term contracts, and they can’t stop the flow unless the Board of Governors votes to close down the school. But the way things are going right now, about half of the school’s mana supply will be gone by next week.”