Enclave's Origin (I)
— Taylor, at Enclave —
Before the Firsts' scheduled meeting with their puppet Guardians, while Thalia's cadre observed servants preparing the Pinnacle for the day's events, unaware it would be that grand and ancient edifice's final day of service, and the autumn-frosted ground began to thaw under an early morning sun, Taylor sat atop Enclave's wall with his feet dangling over the edge. Several meters high and made of hardened stone, it seemed too thin to stand up on its own. The top was wide enough for one person to walk on comfortably or two people if they linked arms and trusted each other.
The city side of the wall was an almost-white surface, devoid of cracks or mortar, while the Enclave side was lined with flying buttresses to support the structure, forming a pleasant colonnade around the campus rim. Each pier was shaped to resemble a figure from scripture, and it was common practice to name the locations accordingly. A discretely passed note might say, "Meet at midnight by Yannis the Carpenter," and parties planning trysts or mischief would know the place. Some were better known and more accessible than others, like The Chosen and Saint Bahram standing by the main gate, larger than life, attracting visitors with their lofty fame. Others, like poor life-sized Yannis, were tucked behind neglected parkland and hidden from view, where they observed the congress of lovers and ner-do-wells.
A mist of spirit lingered over Enclave. Taylor had spent a week in Enclave the previous year, and he never noticed from ground level. Even from his elevated perch, he might not have seen it if he hadn't been watching the grounds so carefully for hours on end. With a little tuning, Nexus goggles could pick it up enough for bulwarks to see it, too. The mist wasn't evenly distributed but gathered in patches wherever healers were. Tendrils reached toward the center of Enclave, where Bahram's Basilica sipped at the ambient energy like a slow-moving drain. There was a separate patch of spirit around the Residence, probably from the Hierarch and her Voice, and that too was being pulled by the basilica's gravity.
"What do you figure?" asked Darius, who had come up with Hypha to see the phenomenon.
"Their origin isn't just an origin. I think it's also some kind of institutional magic," Taylor told them. "See how the wall is a perfect circle, and no ambient spirit escapes the grounds? Enclave sits inside a magic circle, like a basic inscription. Keep your spirit close when you're not using it, or you'll end up feeding Enclave."
Taylor pointed at the basilica. "There will be a foundation in the center that defines rules and powers for the territory. With enough spirit, you could probably raze a building and rebuild it in a day. Bahram probably set the foundation first and then used it to create the wall and the four central buildings. Whoever wields the foundation could have all kinds of powers within the circle. Powered-up offense and defense, scrying, magical traps, personnel tracking … practically anything you can think of, as long as the effects are within the circle. It takes a ton of power, but when you have a school full of practitioners or a castle full of magically strong nobles, something like this is possible. Large buildings can have foundations too, especially if they have specific needs. I think that's what some of the mandates are for: filling up the foundations. When we were in the library last year, I noticed there wasn't any dust on the stacks. That's probably a function of the building itself.
"Inez, when you were here with Joaquim did you ever see any maintenance being done on the walls?" She had guarded the former king when he was a prince, rotating through the Lavradian embassy in Unity City and attending classes in Enclave's school.
"Never." She said instantly. "And not on the main buildings, either. There was one repair after Joaquim and some of his friends bet a student practitioner they couldn't break through a wall in Lecture Hall One. That man was always more interested in punching holes in things than understanding them, even when he was young. Someone came along with a bucket of white clay, filled in the hole, and left it looking like a mess. The next day, it was perfect. Like the incident never happened. The servitors are always cleaning, but I never saw them fix anything in the main structures except that one time, and I was here for two years. Two, very long, aggravating years." After all the time that had passed, she still sounded aggrieved.
"The Voice said something about Enclave taking more from the Hierarch than it used to," Darius recalled from the transcripts. "Do you think it needs more now because there aren't enough practitioners living here?"
"It might. And it might explain why Dean Katerina tried to keep all her disciples at home. If she found out about the foundation and wanted to use its power, she'd have to fill it up with spirit. Bahram had one hundred and sixty disciples when he founded Enclave. I seriously doubt Katerina could revive all the foundation's abilities with the tiny number she had."
"But she was also killing talented children," said Hypha. "Wouldn't she want to keep them around to use as a source, even if they weren't trained?"
"Maybe she was working from partial information." Taylor thought while watching the slow crawl of spirit across Enclave and decided to take a gamble. "If she knew something, she would hoard it for herself. Hypha, take your team to Katerina's residence. When the operation starts here, look for an area protected by Sanctuary and break it by force if you have to. Search for any books that are old or strange or belong in the library. You'll probably run into domestics, so use your judgment before killing anyone."
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Taylor's Enclave-ending cadre all sat in a row on the boundary wall, a dozen people made invisible by Overlook. They watched the sun climb and Enclave's people stir, until Maia and Phrenos boarded a carriage for the Pinnacle. Taylor blessed his cadre with Benediction, and they parted ways.
The train was parked in a nearby warehouse rented and stocked by a Nexus informant. It was a semi-deserted section of the city, used by second- and third-string merchants for storing goods and little else. The gurantors were having a good long rest before their return run to Kashmar. Brother Darius, a man old enough to be Taylor's father yet one of his original students, would guard the train with his team. Should Noora receive their message and decide to escape, he would call her with the summoning circle.
Hypha took her team to where Deans and Guardians lived in detached houses and took a post near Katerina's. Taylor's group ghosted across gardens and parkland to the rear of the basilica. Neither incursion prompted a response from Enclave. All three teams paused, waiting long enough for Leadership's carriage to be farther than halfway to their destination. If Taylor's cadre tripped some kind of alarm or their activities were discovered, they didn't want the Guardians diverted from their meeting.
"Begin," Taylor said into his link and passed through a rear door the priests always left unlocked. There was little theft among priests and practitioners, and no one would dare deface one of the public spaces. The temple's reading room and scriptorium were a different matter. The two hundred or so volumes were very valuable, and the records were confidential. Taylor had to locate the head priest, a kindly-looking man sipping tea in his favorite sunny spot, and close in suddenly to grab his head in both hands. The man looked terrified for an instant. It was understandable, given how a stranger appeared out of nowhere and grabbed his head.
"Sorry," Taylor told him. The man went unconscious and would have fallen if the disciple hadn't caught him. Taylor laid him gently on the floor as if he'd decided to take a nap. Then they found his two assistants, kissing in the sanctuary, and put them to sleep as well. They put the lovers next to the head priest, splashed them with a little wine as if they'd been drinking, and went looking for the secret room. No one else was likely to be around on a mid-day morning, but if a servitor found the priests sleeping there would be a ready explanation.
With the priest's keys in hand, Taylor and his bulwarks gained entry to his office. It was typical for a high-ranked cleric, with a heavy wooden desk, a luxury setee and chairs in one corner, windows facing the rear gardens, cabinets of records written on wood slats to the right, and religiously-themed artwork on the left. According to their map, the mystery room was behind the right-side wall. The Sanctuary effect was obvious to anyone Nexus-trained or with enchanted goggles, but breaking it would take time. He didn't want to crash through it by force, not while he was standing in the heart of Enclave's defenses.
"Lock the door and give me room." Inez, Mila, Milo, and the Tabuas spread themselves around the office, well away from Taylor. The foundation's spirit-sucking effect was invisible from ground level, but he could feel a slight pull when he bloomed out. As his senses surrounded the Sanctuary's protected space, he had to hold his spirit firmly in place. Something greedy was awake in the ground beneath them. They had the right place. Enclave's origin would be part of their foundation, and the foundation was here.
Instead of surrounding the space like a cloud, Taylor changed tactics and probed the barrier with needle-thin tendrils of spirit that crept over it like mycelium. The spirit-thirsty foundation couldn't drink from the more focused constructs, and with time, he found the cracks of uncertainty and poor comprehension in the art. He worked his will into it like a thousand tiny crowbars. The Sanctuary was the product of someone with significant power but not the depth of skill to match. If any student of his made a barrier like it, he would have called it insufficient.
He pulled. In that moment, as the Sanctuary barrier peeled from the secret room like skin from an orange, he felt for his counterpart's wasted abilities and all the time she'd lost to Enclave's neglect. She could have been so much more. What they'd done to her was criminal.
"Sorry, Noora," he whispered.
To everyone's surprise, no door appeared. Mila had the idea it might also be hidden by conventional means (that's how Taylor managed his secret vault) and a search began for discrete buttons and levers. The search dragged on for several minutes. Taylor was ready to give up and start punching holes in walls when Inez laughed.
"We should look in the library."
Of course! There was more than one space adjacent to the mystery room. They passed out of the head priest's office, down the hall, and into the library without being seen and locked the door behind them.
"Good call," said Otavio.
There was a door on the left-side wall, built in a more ancient style than the basilica. The lintel was a rough-hewn stone laid square across two similar posts. The three blocks were massive, easily more than five tons each. Taylor couldn't guess Bahram's intent behind the neolithic doorway. Why would he make something so primitive? Maybe it was a warning: Here lies a power more ancient than men. Tread with care. The air within the doorway was so thick with spirit that whatever lay beyond was blurred into shifting patches of ivory, blue, and green.
"I don't like this," Inez said. "Young Master stays here. I'll go in as a shield, with Otavio on my back. If we don't come out in two minutes, use maximum violence on this place." Taylor still had one fuel-air bomb stowed on the train. It was too small for the battlefield, not anywhere near as large as what he'd used at Laggard's Shaft, but it would turn a medium-sized room into a blast furnace and bring down part of the basilica.
Taylor handed flash-bang devices to Mila and Milo to toss in ahead of Inez's advance. He checked everyone's enhancements. Inez took the point position with shield and sword. Otavio lined up behind her, one hand on her collar and the other holding his spear so it extended past her head. Whatever was on the other side would have to face two weapons instead of one. The cousins took positions beside the doorway.
The team confirmed their readiness by hand signs. The cousins tossed the fist-sized artifacts through the doorway with timers set to half a second. Twin shockwaves broke through the doorway's weird atmosphere to crash over Inez's shield and were washed aside. The tandem team of Inez and Otavio surged forward.