A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(44)

The bell was ringing for curfew, but I kept going. Thanks to my long nap earlier, I could afford to stay up late. After another hour I finally let myself stop and put my hook away—I really wanted to hurl it violently into the dark, but if I did that, I’d never get it back, so instead I gritted my teeth and strapped it carefully back to the lid of my chest—and then I rewarded myself by sitting down on my bed with the one actual good thing that had happened to me all day: the book I’d got in the library off the Sanskrit shelf.

I’d been sure it was something special when I grabbed it, but I braced myself taking it out of my bag, just because the way my day—my week, my year, my life—was going, it would have really been more on brand for the book to turn out to have its contents swapped with a mundane cookbook or for the pages to be glued together with water damage or eaten by worms or something. But the cover was in beautiful shape, handmade of dark-green leather, beautifully stamped with intricate patterns in gold, even over the long flap that folded over to protect the outer side of the pages. I held it on my lap and opened it up slowly. The first page—the last page from my perspective, it was bound right to left—was written in what looked like Arabic, and my heart started pounding.

    A lot of the very oldest and most powerful Sanskrit incantations in circulation, ones whose original manuscripts have been lost for ages, come from copies that were made in the Baghdad enclave a thousand years ago. The book didn’t look or feel a thousand years old, but that didn’t mean anything. Spellbooks wander off the shelves even in enclaves if you don’t have a really good catalog and a powerful librarian keeping track of them. I don’t know where they go when they’re disappeared, if it’s the same as the void outside our rooms or someplace different, but they don’t age while they’re gone. The more valuable they are, the more likely they are to slip away: they get imbued with the desire to protect themselves. This one looked so new that it had probably vanished out of the Baghdad library barely a couple of years after it had been written.

I held my breath turning the pages, and then I was looking at the first page of copied Sanskrit—annotated heavily in the margins; I was probably going to be forced to start learning Arabic, and it was going to be worth it, because the title page more or less said Behold the Masterwork of the Wise One of Gandhara, and when I saw it, I actually made a horrible squawking noise out loud and clutched the whole thing to my chest as if it was about to fly off on its own.

The Golden Stone sutras are famous because they’re the first known enclave-builder spells. Before them, the only way that enclaves happened was by accident. If a community of wizards live and work together in the same place for long enough, about ten generations or so, the place starts to slip away from the world and expand in odd ways. If the wizards become systematic about going in and out from only a few places, those turn into the enclave gates, and the rest of it can be coaxed loose from the world and into the void, the same way the Scholomance is floating around in it. At which point, mals can’t get at you except by finding a way through the entrances, which makes life much safer, and magic also becomes loads easier to do, which makes life much more pleasant.

    There haven’t been a lot of natural enclaves, though. Good luck getting ten generations with enough stability in history to let you make one. Just because you’re a wizard doesn’t save you from dying when your city burns down or someone sticks a sword into you. In fact, even an enclave doesn’t. If you’re hiding inside and your entrances get bombed, your enclave goes, too. I don’t think anyone knows if you actually get blown up or if the whole thing just drops off into the void with you in it, but that’s a rather academic question.

On the other hand, you’d still rather have the enclave than just be huddled in a basement. The London enclave survived the Blitz because they opened a lot of entrances all over the city, and quickly replaced any of the ones that got destroyed. That’s now created a different issue for them; there’s a pack of indie punk wizards in London who survive by hunting out the old lost entrances. They pry them open enough to squirm into sort of the lining of the enclave—I don’t understand the technical details, and they don’t, either, but it works—and they set up shop in there for themselves until the enclave council finds them and chases them out and bricks the opening back up. I know a bunch of them because they all come to Mum whenever something’s wrong with them, which it often is because they’re shacking up in half-real spaces and siphoning off enclave mana through old murky channels, and mostly eating food and drink they’ve magicked for themselves out of it.

    Mum sets them right and doesn’t charge them, unless you count forcing them to sit through lots of meditation and her lecturing them about how they shouldn’t be hanging round the enclave and ought to go live in the woods and be spirit-whole like her. Sometimes they even listen.

But London’s not a natural enclave, of course; none of the big enclaves are. They’re constructed. And as far as we know, the very first enclaves anyone ever built, about five thousand years ago, were the Golden Stone enclaves. There were ten of them built within a century across Pakistan and Northern India; three of them are still around even after all this time. They all claim to have been built by the author of the Golden Stone sutras, this guy named Purochana who some wizard historians believe was the guy of that name who also shows up in the Mahabharata, more or less working for the prince of Gandhara. The wise one of Gandhara is how he’s often referred to in medieval sources. In the Mahabharata, he’s more or less a villain who builds a house out of wax to try and burn his prince’s enemies alive, so I’m not entirely sure how that squares with him being a heroic enclave-builder, but mundane sources aren’t always very kind to wizards. Or maybe he was trying to build his very flammable house and accidentally stumbled over some way to pop open an enclave instead.