Page 38 of The Golden Enclaves
There was a single round disk on the floor, like a manhole cover with a square hole cut out of the middle and a four-character phrase carved out that I recognized from the lists of proverbs I’d had to memorize at school:escape from certain death. Much less complex than the one they’d been using today; it’s always nice to see modern advancements in artifice and incantation at work. But the disk had cracked apart into four chunks, separating the characters, as if some giant had slammed a fist right down into the middle and smashed it. The only thing left here now was a hollow space where the foundation had been, where the unleashed void was doing its best to go back to formless chaos. The enclave was only hanging on because of all these wizards still believing in it, and that wasn’t enough to keep up an entire magical city.
That’s how the maleficer was bringing down the enclaves, I realized abruptly. They’d learned the secret of enclave-building and found out that this central point of weakness existed in every single one. Presumably they wriggled into the enclave and hit it, and while the enclave went reeling with all the wards coming apart, they sucked all the mana out of the place that they could, and left the rest of it to go tumbling down Humpty-Dumpty.
And in the end, I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want to rip Beijing off its foundation and push it off into the void. Jiangyu was out there organizing a bucket brigade of people to ferry the bricks in to me; he didn’t deserve that. None of our schoolmates, who’d risked their almost certain escape back in the Scholomance just to help make the world safer for everyone, deserved it. Even the rest of the people in that amphitheater, who in the end had collectively let me take thosebricks off Liu, didn’t quite deserve it. Or even if they did, still it wouldn’t have done any living person any good to smash all the towers and burn the metro line, bring down those libraries and laboratories. I did have to stop it happeningever again;and after I got done here, I’d have to think about what it would take to stop it, to make everyone in the world stop putting up new enclaves. But I didn’t want to let the place collapse, any more than I’d wanted to send London’s fairy gardens sinking into the void.
So I unslung the sutras from my back and took them out, and opened them to the first page marked with the illuminated border filled with gold leaf, the beautiful calligraphic heading that marked it as one of theGolden Stonecastings, the ones that you had to use in the final working, and I took a deep breath and dived into the spell.
I’d cast bits and pieces of the sutras before, but never any of the major workings. But I’d spent so much time looking at them, dreaming of them, about all the things I’d do with them. The ancient Sanskrit came flowing through my mouth like a drink of cool water, a breath of sun-warmed air, the taste of honey and roses, and my eyes were prickling with tears, because it didn’t feel like any of my spells at all. It felt like one of Mum’s spells, something beautiful and full of clean light.
In that moment, I knew with clear glad certainty that it didn’t matter to me how the sutras had come to me or what I’d paid for them. I couldn’t get that price back, any more than I could undo what had been done to make the enclave around me. This was still the life’s work I wanted to belong to. And I felt also, for the first time, that it wanted to belong to me; that the sutras really weremine,in a way I hadn’t quite believed in before, despite all the time carefully polishing them and cuddling them and tucking them safely in at night.
As if to agree with me, the pages began to glow with soft golden light, illuminating themselves in the dim close room. A moment later, the book tugged gently, and when I uncurled my fingers, it rose up into the air and hovered just before my eyes, freeing my hands just as the page turned and I needed them for the next part of the work. The incantations kept flowing out of me, almost a song, and I turned and took the first brick from Jiangyu, at the end of the bucket-brigade line. I knelt down still chanting, and with both hands I pushed the brick down into the very center of the broken disk. The sharp points of the triangular pieces crumbled away. I felt the brick stick for a moment, and then almost as if I’d pushed it straight into a bog, it was sucked out of my fingers and sank away into the dark underneath the disk.
Only that wasn’t just darkness. It was the void, ready to start swallowing the whole place up. A bit more of the disk crumbled away into it, and thin fracture lines of void began to spread out, following the cracked lines of the disk. I just turned back and grabbed the next brick and put it down as fast as I could, and the one after that, trying to catch the sinking brick just a bit before it went down, as if I could give the next one someplace to stand.
It was easy at the start, but that was only, as it happens, because I was dropping the bricks straight into the void. The first time I actually managed to put two bricks together, I felt it at once. I put down a brick, the ninth or tenth one, and a jarring shock came ringing back up my arms and through my body, and out from there into the whole enclave, a shivering ripple of—it wasn’t power; the only word for it wassolidity.
You might think that would have been encouraging. The trouble was, as it came through, you really couldn’t help noticing the contrast between that andeverything else round you,because the totality of the enclave was in fact being held upby pixie dust and good thoughts, or rather selfishly greedy ones, and as powerful as those are, they don’t actually have anything to do with material reality. And that’s what was coming for us: reality, with the pointed message that this whole enclave was a sack of made-up nonsense and what had ever given us the idea we could exist inside it?
So at the same moment, all the thin fracture lines of void ran away with it, spreading out of the small chamber like growing trees, and not like cracks in an earthquake, either. They went as though the enclave were a really magnificent painting by an old master, full of the illusion of richness and depth, but cracking all over itsflat surface.Lines went crawling in nonsensical directions, one going along the ground of the narrow passage and then straight up the wall of the alleyway that was visible behind it; others, even more alarmingly, were putting partial outlines round some of the people in the brick-ferrying line as though they were characters in a comic book instead of people in the world.
I stopped looking at them and just focused on the bricks, but those were getting heavier again, heavier with each one, and my shoulders and back were already strained and tired. I had to start swinging, taking each brick from Jiangyu at the top of an arc and carrying it in the same movement over and letting it drop onto the pile I was making in the center, which wasn’t nearly as tidy as the beautifully manicured circle the council had been building on top of Liu. I was trying to land the bricks in some connected way, getting at least one end onto some of the others. It was working in one sense, and in another I was thoroughly smashing up the disk that had been carrying the entire weight of the expanded enclave, all these years, and my replacement wasn’t to the proper building standards.
Jiangyu was having trouble with the bricks himself, but despite that he crept a bit closer to help shorten the distance for me, although he was clenching his jaw and trembling all over with it. Then one of our classmates behind him, I thought her name was Xiaojiao, said in Chinese, “Double up! We need to double up!” and when he passed me the next brick, she didn’t give him the next one, she just stepped forward, in a staggering waddle the way you’d carry a loaded bucket, and got him to take the other end without letting itgo.
The two of them together got it closer to me still, and that gave me much better control: I was able to place the brick into an empty gap between two others, and firm up a space between them. The line of the brigade rippled forward slowly, compressing as everyone moved up the next brick and more people joined the line at the end, and even before the whole line had shrunk, Xiaojiao was beckoning urgently to the person behind her, and all three of them passed the next brick to me.
Everyone was in the line by the end of it. The later bricks didn’t get passed along so much as they surfed over the crowd, hands beneath hands beneath hands holding them up. They were getting bottled up in the narrow entryway: there were thirty people crammed into the tiny chamber with me by then, and even the council members had joined in the work, but not enough people could get a hand on the bricks to support them properly. A man in the entryway gasped as the next one came in, and he and two other people went to their knees and the brick slid out of their hands and smashed down through one of the fracture lines and was just gone, sending spiderwebbing cracks everywhere. One of them went straight over the man’s leg, horribly, and when he screamed and triedto grab at it, the rest of him moved and the part that had been cut off didn’t; it was just standing there, disconnected, and then just stopped being there as he fell over.
I had to keep chanting the incantation, so I couldn’t say anything, but I grabbed at Xiaojiao and pointed at the walls of the chamber, urgently, and she got the idea and called out, “Open up the wall! Break it open!”
Some people either misunderstood or overachieved, and in momentsallthe walls around us came down: people had dashed into the two townhouses on either side of the secret little chamber and torn apart the side walls. The whole crowd pressed in around me with the remaining bricks, so close that I scarcely needed to take them at all. Which was just as well, because within another three, they had become nearly impossible even for me. I didn’t reallyplacethe next one; I just barely got it over an empty spot and it went slipping out of my hands the last inch to thump into place, marked damp with my sweaty handprints, and then Xiaojiao put out a hand and stopped me reaching the next one. She turned and waved her arms wildly to get everyone to come in closer, gathering round the solid circle I’d laid down with the last bricks. “All together, all the rest!” she said, and of course she was right: if I took those bricks one after another, the ones left would just get heavier and heavier, and I wouldn’t be able to do the rest. This was why the golden enclaves hadn’t been very big: not evena tertiary-order entitycould build a foundation this big on their own, something that could take the weight of modern towers and underground lines.
So instead I took a step onto the center of the bricks, getting out of the way. The sutras came hovering along with me, and I kept the incantation going while all round me everyone chanted together:san, èr, yi,and put the bricks down at the same time, finishing off a single bordering ring around therest, smashing the last chunks of the old disk beneath them as I sang out the last words.
The whole enclave shook, and the fissures began to widen, a deep groaning all round. I didn’t know what else to do; I was on the final part of the incantation, the last page with a golden border, the last one with any commentary. The remaining pages of the book were only an afterword where the scribe thanked his patrons effusively for the honor of deeming him worthy of a place in Baghdad enclave after his entire family had been killed by maleficaria, and it had made me angry enough that I’d only looked at it once.
But as soon as I finished the incantation, the last few pages of the book were turning: they whiffled to the back of the very last page, and there was one final line of Sanskrit written there in plain black ink, as if the scribe had copied it down and then hadn’t bothered to illuminate it, because he hadn’t thought it was part of the working. I’d never read or translated it, but it was so simple I could do it out of my head, and even at a glance it wasn’t remotely like the inscriptions on the disk. Nothing about deathlessness or permanence, nothing forced; it was only a request, a cry of longing:stay here, please stay, be our shelter, be our home, be loved,and after I’d sung it out in the Sanskrit, I translated it off the cuff into Chinese, as best I could, and called it out urgently.
Everyone was sagging, panting for breath, many of them clinging to each other with eyes closed or staring fixedly at the ground, all of them trying not to look at the terrible fissures opening up round us. But back in the other room across the passageway, the room where they’d tried to crush her, Liu had heard me. Very faintly I heard her voice, thready and fragile, calling it back to me.
Other people joined in, voices picking it up all round—the words changing a little as it was passed along, like a children’sgame, but that didn’t matter: the meaning was the same, and everyone was saying it together. As it swept through the crowd, all the people round me taking up the chant, I called it out again with them, and golden light came welling up through the loose bricks like mortar, joining them into a single round mosaic. It reached the final border and suddenly shot out at high speed, filling into all the cracks of void and patching them up, the red lanterns coming alight all along the alleyway, revealing second and third stories on all the buildings, and a neon sign above the metro suddenly blinked into improbable existence as lights came on in the stairway going down.
The sutras slammed shut, and I just barely caught them out of the air and then went the rest of the way down with them, not because they had gone heavy but because my legs had simply stopped working without notice. All round us, everyone was crying and laughing and embracing in the drunken relief of knowing they weren’t all going to die and their home hadn’t fallen in on itself. They went pouring back out into the alleyway to find their friends and family, dancing and rejoicing like a massive party-going; some of them even began flinging up fireworks into the void.
Sitting in a cross-legged heap on the solid bricks, I wrapped my arms round the sutras and bent my head over them, hugging them against me, and whispered, “Thank you,” to the book, to the scribe, to Purochana, to the universe; for the gift of being allowed to do this,this,instead of the destruction and the slaughter I’d been destined for.
And then Precious squeaked shrilly, and I jerked my head up. The council membershadn’tgone anywhere. Five of them had now stepped between me and the rest of the crowd, blocking their view, and the other three, their hands joined, were about to hit me with a killing spell.
Unfortunately, the warning wasn’t any help. I hadn’t anything left. I couldn’t even kill them. I could only just watch it coming, my arms tightening round my book, and then they were all screaming, screaming horribly, so horribly I almost could have killed them after all, just to save them from whatever it was that was happening to them, but before I could even move, there was a sort ofyankingmotion, and all of them were just—gone. Gone as if they’d never been there at all.
Orion was in their place, just behind them. For one moment, his face was blank and utterly unmoving, and then he looked at me, and I should have said,Fine, fourteen for you; I suppose we’re tied again,but I couldn’t say that; I couldn’t say anything like it, and he turned without a word and left, and everyone shocked and staring outside jerked back from him, pushing and shoving at everyone who’d wanted to see what was going on, a wave of empty space rolling with him through the crowd.
Icaught himat the airport, thanks to Liesel, who’d grudgingly said, “He is going to New York, obviously!” after watching me all but crawl out of the enclave and start lurching round the temple grounds looking for him. She did first try to talk me into having a lie-down and not worrying about him, but gave in after it didn’t work.
“You’renotgoing to New York!” I snarled at him, standing between him and the security line. “I’ll start yelling you’re a terrorist and get us taken up, I swear I will. She’s not getting her hands on you again! Are you out of your bloody mind?”
He didn’t shout back. He just went on standing there in the middle of the concourse, looking far better than he had a right to in the still-pristine white T-shirt and jeans we’d got him at the commune, his silver hair artistically floppy; opposite him I looked like a ragged urchin, my clothes filthy with sweat and dust, stained all over with faint red marks from the bricks, torn in a few places. I wasn’t getting him taken up; if I started howling, any policeman would look at the two of us, and I’d only get myself taken up instead, and be locked upsomewhere for weeks until Liesel and Aadhya got me out somehow, assuming Liesel didn’t sabotage the process tokeepme locked up for her opinion of my own good. People were already giving me sidelong looks.
