Page 33 of The Golden Enclaves
I was almost sure that Liu wanted to cry harder, but the compulsion was tidy and proper: she couldn’t even do that. She just kept looking at us and the tears and snot kept coming exactly as before. It didn’t matter, though; I knew I was right. The problem was that I didn’t see what to do about it. I could get on a plane to Beijing and sail into the midst of theceremonies and disrupt things, me with my handy New York power-sharer, but then what? Beijing would collapse, we’d have an enclave war for sure, and someone else would start some other enclave somewhere else. I couldn’t stop anyone from ever building another enclave.
Then I looked down at the sutras in my arms, and I said slowly, “Liu, you can’t talk to us—but can you talk to your family? I’ve got another way to build an enclave. Maybe I can use it to save Beijing. If they’re willing, I’ll come and give it a go. And if it works, I’ll make you an enclave, too. It won’t be a skyscraper or anything, but it won’t take malia, either. Will you tell them?”
“She can’t tell you if she agrees or not!” Liesel said. “She would be confirming your guess. It would be too easy to get information out of someone if the compulsion was so incomplete.” She looked at me, frowning, and then added with decision, “We will go to Beijing and go to a hotel in the city, and text her from there. If they have agreed, she’ll be able to talk to us then.”
I didn’t like ending the call with Liu still sitting there looking at us, still in tears, but we weren’t doing her any good by staring at her and running out the battery on her mobile. So I told her, “Just hang on, we’re coming,” and Aadhya hung up.
My bag was already packed behind me, and when I turned round to get it, Orion was standing there, holding it: he’d been listening. “We’re going to help Liu,” I said, even though he’d just heard me.
But it was a question, and he swallowed and answered it. “I’ll come with you,” he said—but for just a moment, he looked afraid again: the same fear he’d had on the threshold of the hut, before he’d gone inside.
Iwas a lot more functionalon this journey, more amazing jet lag notwithstanding, so I balked at yet another luxury hotel, much to Liesel’s annoyance and even Aadhya’s muted protests. “Someone’s paying for it, if it isn’t us,” I said. I wasn’t really inclined to take anything from any enclave right now. It was one thing to know in a more or less academic way that enclaves were built with malia, feeling it churning under my feet as I walked through their halls, and another to know that all of them were built on something horrible enough to put that misery in Liu’s face.
Obviously I was still wearing that power-sharer from New York, but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, so I dragged them all to a hostel, which was the only kind of hotel Mum ever booked us into, although we almost never stayed in one for more than a day before we were being invited to stay at someone’s house. I suppose, technically speaking, that was more or less what happened to me as well, only with appropriate differences.
We got ourselves a room and texted Liu’s phone and thensat exhausted in the courtyard drinking lemonade and didn’t discuss the excellent question of what we’d do if no one came to get us. None of us knew where the entrance to Beijing enclave was, and my one year of Chinese was distinctly inadequate for getting round. I was absolutely fluent in at least thirty different ways to tell someone to dodge something that was about to kill them, so I’d be ace if I happened to spot someone walking out in front of a lorry, but the only reason I’d managed to successfully get directions to the aforementioned hostel was because we were in a tourist zone, and everyone I’d spoken to had answered me in English.
Fortunately, I suppose, the question didn’t arise. A woman set up a stringed board instrument in a corner under the gate and began playing soft harmonious music, and it was hot and muggy, and we had just been on an aeroplane for eleven hours—not in business class either, this time—and we all started drifting off until Precious squirmed out and bit my ear, and I lurched back up to my feet wide awake with eighteen wizards making a circle round us, armed with long tubes the shape of plumbing pipes.
The instant they saw me move, they all activated them, and each one linked up with the ones on either side, split open, and started launching a massive net of interlaced beams of light. I was trying to fight off the groggy heaviness of the music well enough to work out the best way not to kill them all when Orion glanced up—not jerking free of the spell, just lifting his head from the random tourist brochure he’d picked up, as if he hadn’t been caught by it at all. He reached up and grabbed the net with a hand, and the whole thing pulled loose from the tubes and wentintohim as if he’d sucked it up with a straw.
I gawked at him at least as much as our unwelcome visitors did. But then one of them dropped his tube and went foranother weapon. Orion got up and started to—moveat him, and everything went hideously wrong. It looked as though Orion was taking a step, but there was something off about it, the air distorting around him as if he wasn’treallytaking a step, he was just swimming through reality somehow and the step was only my own brain trying desperately to fill in with something that made sense.
It wasn’t only my reaction; the man went sickly greenish, and all the other wizards on that side lurched back away in unison, breaking the perfect curve of the circle. The other half of them were yelling panicky instructions that I understood no bother:hold the line, don’t let them break out, get up a shield,et cetera, only the people backing away were the smart ones, because nothing else was going to make this work out even decently for them.Orfor Orion. I knew if he touched them something unbearable was going to happen.
I planted one foot and called an old vicious spell that someone had meant to drown an entire fishing village, drag it down into an ocean maelstrom, only I threw it into the air instead and whirled round in a circle with my hand cupping the power, a scream of protesting wind following me round. It started grabbing at all of them, whipping their clothes like snapping flags, sending the tubes flying out of their hands. I turned round once more, and it was dragging them off their feet, the air starting to churn into visible streams as it picked up dust and leaves from the ground, then a couple of stray chairs in the way, and the third time round it took them all off their feet in a howling vortex, and I shoved the whole thing up and away onto the roof.
Our visitors must have herded the hostel staff and all the other guests well away from the courtyard before making their approach, but launching a tornado and dumping eighteen people onto the roof was still a bridge too far. Mundanesstarted to stick their heads out of the windows and doors to see what on earth was going on, which meant that none of the wizards I’d just flung onto the charming slanted roof could cast anything to stop themselves rolling straight off and plunging the two stories straight down to earth. But that was a good bit better than whatever else had been about to happen to them, even if they landed on concrete, so I wasn’t fussed.
“Come on!” Aadhya yelled. She was hauling up Liesel, who hadn’t had a mouse to wake her up and was still fighting off the grogginess of the musical enchantment. Orion was just standing there, and I ran over and shoved him until he started moving in the right direction with his legs like a human being again. We went past the one wizard left standing—the woman with the instrument, who hadn’t processed the sudden change of situation well enough to panic yet—and we ran through the hostel and into the street, my bag with the sutras in their case thumping against my chest.
I don’t know where we were going, we barely knew where the nearest metro station was, but we didn’t have to work it out. By the time Orion and I got out into the street, Aadhya and Liesel were beckoning us wildly into a waiting minivan taxi, and when we jumped in, Liu’s cousin Zheng was in there, huddling back into a corner so he couldn’t be seen from outside and visibly scared to bits.
The driver had already been told where to go, apparently with some urgency; the instant we had the door slammed behind us, we took off careening into the streets at the top speed the traffic allowed and somewhat beyond it. “Where’s Liu?” I demanded. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Zheng said. He started crying as though he’d been crying very recently and had only briefly had it on pause; he wiped his face. “We haven’t seen her for five days.”
“Are you under the compulsion?” Liesel said sharply. “The enclave spells—”
He shook his head. “Me and Min aren’t old enough, and Nienie is too old. We didn’t go to the exchange ceremony. And nobody from our house came back. One of our other cousins came to our hotel room and told us we only had to be patient and everything would be okay, but we knew it wasn’t true. He looked really upset.” His voice was breaking. “And Liu’s myna keeps coming to the balcony and telling us to help her.”
“Wait, what do you mean, nobody from your house?” Aadhya said. “It’s not just Liu missing?”
“Liu and her parents, and Ma and Baba, none of them came back,” he said. “Everyone else from Xi’an, the rest of our family, they all came back to the hotel. But not them. And nobody will tell us what’s going on.”
His brother Min and Liu’s grandmother were waiting for us in a little park a few blocks away from their hotel, and the myna was perched on the branch of the tree above them. It hopped to a higher branch as we came close and tipped its head, a bright black eye fixed on Orion, even though he was behind the rest of us.
Liu’s grandmother was tiny as a doll, frail and grey-haired: she’d sent six children to the Scholomance and got two back—beating the odds, but they’d been her two youngest. She’d started late, after a long run of working flat-out for her family, and then she’d run into the one-child policy, which meant she’d had to wait until each child had gone off to the Scholomance and effectively vanished off the face of the earth to have the next one without attracting too much attention. So she’d been in her fifties when she’d had Zheng and Min’s father, and in her sixties when she’d had Liu’s; if you’re thinking there was magic involved there, you’re right, andundoubtedly it was why she looked so fragile now, part of the price she’d paid. But there wasn’t any shortage of fire in her eyes, and she reached out her gnarled hands to me and Aadhya and gripped ours. “Tongzhimen,” she said. She didn’t speak English, but she didn’t need to; all of us knew the word for allies in almost every language spoken in the Scholomance.
“We’re going to get Liu out,” Aadhya told her. She nodded when Zheng translated.
“Can you ask her if she’s got any idea where they’re keeping Liu?” I asked, urgently, but she slowly shook her head and told us, low, that the rest of the family had all been summoned back to Beijing enclave a few hours ago, which wasn’t a good sign. By now, whoever had Liu penned up knew that their ambush hadn’t worked. If we were unlucky, they were going to rush into whatever sickening plan they had. And it had to be something really monstrous, because it wasn’tjustLiu objecting. Liu’s mum and dad had deliberately sent her off to the Scholomance with a cageful of mice to become a tidy small-scale maleficer;theyweren’t going to be turning up their noses at some modest use of malia.
Liesel made a grimace when I said as much, and when Aadhya and I both immediately gave her narrow looks, she said sourly, as if she didn’t like admitting it, “The process of building an enclave must need asacrifice.They are going to do somethingtoLiu, or perhaps one of the others, and the rest of the immediate family objected. That is why they all had to be restrained.”
My gorge rose, but I was instantly bog-certain that she was right. That was what I’d felt, the horrible nauseating squish of malia underneath my feet, in the beautiful gardens of London, in the shining vast halls of New York: asacrifice.And of course they’d do it, they’d all do it. What was one life, afterall, compared with all the lives that an enclave would save? Ophelia wouldn’t have batted an eye.Enclaves have their own unique costs.
“But why one ofthem?” Aadhya said. “It doesn’t make sense. Liu’s parents are high-octane in the family, and her uncle’s in the running for council. Even Liu—maybe she didn’t tell them she’s seeing Yuyan, but they must know she’s made friends in Shanghai! Not to mentionyou.If therewassome kind of human sacrifice involved, why would the family pick any of them?”
