Alfie and Sarah were all the way down by the main buildings of the commune, doing their best to charm the locals. It was really odd to see them, in their own impractically glamourous outfits which should’ve got dirty just walking in from the caravan pitch. They were even standing wrong, holding themselves unnaturally straight with their faces in stiff smiles. I thought at first they were simply overdoing it, trying to put their best foot forward for the mundanes; Alfie and Sarah had probably barely ever come out into the real world in their whole childhood. Being around mundanes made it hard to cast spells and use artifice, and I imagine that was especially uncomfortable for enclavers, since they had so much mana to spare that they used magic to keep off the rain when an umbrella would really do perfectly well if you even needed one.
But when we came into view, Alfie’s head jerked round towards me so hard that I realized he was just desperately holding the line and actually he was all but vibrating with tension. “El, so good to see you,” he said, with what could have passed for an air of experiencing a mildly pleasant surprise, unless you knew him, and then by his standards, he sounded two steps short of complete hysteria, too loud and frayed at the edges. “Liesel’s told you? Sorry to poach her like this,” he said smilingly to Philippa, who was one of the mundanes being charmed, exactly as if he were swooping past a lunch table at the Scholomance full of loser kids to carry me off to his own. Which he’d tried to do with me in the past without success, but it’s a fairly reliable method for enclavers usually, so he hadn’t lost the habit of trying.
And in this case, Philippa was there and ready to help him. She darted a look at me that was faintly incredulous—what were these ludicrously posh people after me for?—and said only, “I’m sure it’s nothing to us,” a bit disdainfully, as if she didn’t think much of his taste. I imagine she would have been perfectly happy for him to drop me in an unmarked ditch when he was done.
Alfie didn’t want any more permission, and not inaccurately assumed I couldn’t much want to stay anywhere in Philippa’s vicinity. He was instantly turning towards me with his arm outstretched to gather me up. I eyed him resentfully, but inertia was on his side, now. I’d come down the hill, after all. Why had I bothered, if I wasn’t going? So I went.
Their transport was waiting on the hardstanding, looking exactly as weird as they did. Actual posh mundanes—who do visit fairly regularly—would’ve come with a Land Rover or a massive camper van, wearing raw denim and clean trainers. Their car was pretending really hard to be something between an Edwardian racing car and a 1930s American gangster car, with a ridiculously long bulbous nose and a cab that looked exactly big enough for one person to sit in comfortably.
But the racing car opened a door and let us inside, with no difficulty about room, even though there were now four of us to cram into it. I don’t mean we were suddenly in Narnia or the TARDIS or anything. You can’t actually create real space, no matter how much mana you have, and even if you’ve got some way into the void—limitless as far as anyone’s ever found out—that’s very much not a pleasant place to try to exist as a real person. Enclaves generally resort to buying up large luxury apartments in the vicinity anytime they want to expand, and borrowing that space to use internally, but the further away the real space is, the more expensive the borrowing gets. Not even London enclave would waste the gobs of mana it would take to build and use a car that would hop you into some massive physical space regardless of how far away you were from it.
The car had to make do with space borrowed from its own oversized bonnet, which wasn’t actually housing an engine, and a bit of psychic misdirection. When I got in, I was still just in a car, if an especially tidy one with polished brass fixtures and unnaturally pristine white leather seats: one of which was wide open for me, and came with the vague impression that everyone else was fairly crammed in. Likely we were all fairly crammed in, and just being given the space in turn, whenever our brains started to notice.
Alfie got in last and pulled the door shut after him, and instantly we roared off like a cavalcade of jets. Clearly the equivalent of the car yelling, “Yes, here’s my engine, you can tell I’ve got a real engine driving me along,” at anyone who cared enough to notice. As soon as we had gone into the trees and out of sight, the sound died completely, and then we were zipping along in perfect quiet, the countryside smearing past in my peripheral vision. I glanced out the window once, not a minute after we’d left, and we were already on a road I didn’t know; the car was clearly sneaking through the world at unreasonable speeds. Probably that was why the antique design: the windows were minuscule and you couldn’t see in or out very easily.
“Is there enough time for you to tell me what’s going on?” I said, looking away to let the car get on with it.
“If we knew,” Sarah muttered. She’d also upgraded since school, her hair in a mass of coiled braids woven through with a golden chain, and a dress of woven gold straps and flowing green chiffon embroidered with subtly disguised gold runes; it had resolutely refused to tangle up her legs or get muddy or wet in the least. She was almost as tense as Alfie, although she was eyeing me in a way that suggested she wasn’t convinced they hadn’t just graduated from the frying pan to the fire.
But Alfie had jumped ahead and was already taking out one of my least or rather most favorite things: a power-sharer. It was notably nicer than any of the ones I’d seen at school: the band was woven silk bound every few centimeters with thin strips of platinum that had been coated with some kind of iridescent layer, with tiny raw opal chunks embedded in the center of each one. It was designed like most of them to pass for a watch in public; this one even had a round inky glass plate for a face, like some sleek digital thing set into an elaborate antique frame, only Apple hasn’t managed the trick of accessing the void yet, and that’s what was under the glass. I wasn’t sure what I thought of carrying a nice little hole in reality around with me, but I took it anyway, trying not to want it. Without much success. My fingers curled round it like claws the instant Alfie handed it over to me. I could feel the power on the other side: all the power in London’s vast and ancient mana store, without a single barrier in the way.
“And they give new graduates unlimited lines now?” I said, with a fa?ade of coolness, while I put it round my wrist and let it fasten itself up. It made the torrent of power I’d had in the Scholomance feel like a narrow creek.
Alfie was still staring at it himself, even as I put it on. “My father gave it to me,” he said, low and tight. Usually the first thing you do when you get out of school is to start eating like a team of horses, but his face hadn’t had time to fill in yet; his cheekbones were thin sharp lines under his skin. “It’s a family heirloom…” He stopped and looked up at me desperately. “Liesel told you there’s a maw-mouth?”
“What I’m not clear on is why your council’s not taken care of it themselves,” I said. “There have been maw-mouths killed by a circle before. London must be able to do it if anyone can.” All right, so the only recorded case in modern history was the one in Shanghai, and several wizards died in the process, but given the alternatives, you’d think it would have been worth a try.
“They’re trying! Do you think we’re stupid?” Sarah said to me angrily. “We aren’t looking to be told what any idiot can look up in the Journal of Maleficaria Studies.”