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 the difference between putting together a log cabin and building the Burj Khalifa.

But despite five thousand years of refining, some of the Golden Stone building-block spells are still widely known, because they’re such good building-block spells, especially for manipulating elements and, most famously, the phase of matter, which is a lot more important than that might sound. If you want steam, you can get some by pouring enough heat into a pot of water. But that’s pretty wasteful, mana-wise. Like nine-year-old me wiping out an entire crystal to vaporize a scratcher. But if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on Purochana’s phase-control spell, you don’t have to take the intermediate step of generating the heat and warming up all the surrounding water and the pot and the air around it and so forth. You just take the pot of liquid water and turn exactly the amount of water you want into water vapor, and you spend only exactly the amount of mana required. That kind of mana control is huge; it’s what made enclave-building feasible.

And now I had got my hands on his phase-control spell. It was on page sixteen of the book. When I found it, my hands shaking as I turned the first pages, I had to stop reading and hold the book against my chest again, trying not to cry, because it meant I was probably going to make it out of here alive after all, which I’d been starting to doubt after seeing how badly my mana store had been wiped out. Aside from using the spell myself, I was going to be able to trade it for a lot.

Outside the Scholomance, buying the Golden Stone phase-control spell takes the equivalent of all the mana that a determined group of twenty wizards could put together over five years or so. And it’s even harder than that sounds. You can’t just store up mana for five years in a bank and then go buy the spell in a handy bookstore. The only way to get spells that valuable is to barter: find some enclave that’s willing to trade it to you, negotiate a deal for something that the enclave wants but can’t more easily make for themselves—generally that’s because it’s unpleasant or painful or dangerous—then spend five years of unpleasantness to make it and give it to them. And then hope they don’t go back on the deal or tack on a few more demands, which is far from unheard of.

I didn’t keep reading past the phase-control page. Instead I carefully dampened my cleanest rag and gently cleaned off every last speck of dust in every last crevice of every last pattern stamped into the cover. The whole time I talked to the book, telling it how happy I was to have it and how amazing it was and how I couldn’t wait to show it to everyone and one day soon take it home to my mum and use the special handmade leather oil that one of the people at the commune makes to properly clean it and so on. I didn’t even feel stupid. Mum cossets all seven of her spellbooks like that, and she’s never lost one, even though she’s an independent and they’re all really powerful. She keeps them together in a chest with a bit of room: if she ever finds a new one in there, which happens spontaneously sometimes—only to Mum—she says it means one of the others wants to go, and she lays them all out in a circle on a blanket spread under the hole in our yurt and does a blessing on them and thanks them all for their help and says whichever of them needs to leave can go, and sure enough when she’s done packing them back up, there are only seven left again.

“I’ll have to make a special book chest just for you,” I added, a promise. “I was planning to skive off shop class, I’ve finished for this term, but now I’ll keep going just to get your chest begun. It’s got to be perfect, so I expect it’ll take a while.” Then I slept with it cuddled in my arms. I wasn’t taking any chances.