A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,63

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.

Anyway, it’s almost certain the ten enclaves weren’t actually all founded by the same person. Once you’ve made yourself a tidy enclave to live in, you wouldn’t really move and do it again, would you? But there was one distinct set of spells. And they’ve been lost for ages.

That hasn’t stopped enclaves being built, obviously. Once wizards realized you could build enclaves, it became a subject of enormous and sustained interest, and artificers came up with methods that let you make better and bigger ones, and the Golden Stone spells got lost over time through disuse. I don’t know much about modern enclave-building, those spells are a very closely guarded secret, but I do know for definite you can’t fit the process into a single book less than an inch thick, even with margin notes. It’s