Page 34 of The Golden Enclaves
Liesel shot me a glance that made me fairly certain that she had an idea why, but she only shrugged and wouldn’t speculate. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Are you questioning thatsomethingbad is going to happen?”
I didn’t question that at all. “Could you lead us to her?” I asked the myna, in Chinese, but it only cocked its head at me and said, “Liu! Liu! Liu!” in three different human voices that all sounded like cries of horror.
“We do not need to be led,” Liesel said. “We know what they are doing, and there is only one place they can do it.” She looked at Zheng. “Does your grandmother know where there is an entrance to Beijing enclave?”
It was a long ride to Tanzhe Temple, and every minute felt twice as long as it was, stretched out and cold and blank. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Liesel’s plan was tidy: just get through the gates of Beijing, and then tell them that if they didn’t hand Liu and her family over straightaway, I’d give the whole enclave a good whack and send it sliding the rest of the way into the void.
I hadn’t been able to sayno, I won’t do it.I couldn’t say that, not when Liu was locked up in a room somewhere with aknife at her throat and I had no other way to save her. But I felt the prophecy closing in round me like a physical thing, a thin clammy layer over my skin.She will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world,and what if it started here, with all the best reasons in the world, all the justification I could possibly have needed, and never stopped again?
The taxi dropped us out in front of the elaborate gate, and we went in past the scattering of tourists; we were far enough from the city center that they were relatively thin on the ground. The place was in beautiful repair—fresh paint in vivid colors, golden Buddhas, gilt everywhere—and it was the opposite of that pagan playground in Sintra: people still worshipped here, true believers and not just playing at it, all of them reaching out for something past the limits of reality. The structures were all nestled among old, old trees, and when we got out past the biggest buildings, the more recent ones, we found a whole garden full of stone pagodas, silent among trees and flowering shrubs.
It wasn’t like trying to find the Scholomance doors. There we’d been given the coordinates and sent by a person with authority, and in some sense, it had beenourplace to begin with, Scholomance graduates one and all. Here, the enclave didn’t want us to find it. We were exactly what the wards were there to guard against, the enemies at the gates. Zheng tried his best, but he wasn’t going to be able to get past the wards easily himself. He wasn’tinBeijing enclave, not yet, and enclave wards are just as keen on keeping out local wizards as distant enemies, if not more so.
His grandmother had told us this gate wasn’t used much anymore. But it was still standing after the attack, because this was the way into the most ancient part of the enclave, the one that had been here for a thousand years. The enclave’s center of gravity had shifted along with the city itself,leaving this part to become the equivalent of London’s upper reaches. Probably only wizards far down in the rankings had still lived in the poky older section, and even they had probably used the main entrance most of the time instead of coming out back here.
We could tell that the entrance wassomewhereround here, but we could also have walked round in circles for weeks without actually finding it. The wards were running through the ground beneath our feet, pulsing a bit; I could have started ripping them up wholesale, but if I did that, there seemed reasonable odds I’d send the remaining chunk of Beijing enclave sailing off into the void by accident, with Liu and her family still in it.
But I was running out of other options, as far as I could tell, and then finally Liesel turned round to Orion, who’d been slouching along behind us the whole time, head bowed and silent; he hadn’t said a word since we’d run away from the hostel. If I hadn’t been frantic with worry about Liu and about me, I’d have looked up a stick to hit him with; he was looking as though he could have used it. “Any mals near here will be trying to break through the wards and get in, while the enclave is weakened. Can you try to hunt them?” Liesel asked him.
He lifted his head and blinked at her as if he were vaguely surprised to see her, and then he said, “What?”
“The enclave entrance we are trying to find,” Liesel said pointedly. “Could you follow some mal to find it?”
He stared at her, his brow furrowing a bit, and then he said, “Uh, the entrance over there?” We all stared at him, and then he went past us and out of sight behind one of the pagodas, round a curve of the path that we’d tried at least twice, and when we followed him, he was standing in front of a narrow mostly overgrown footpath leading to a worn old stonepagoda that very much hadn’t been there before. He looked at us with a quality of doubting both our sanity and our general competence.
“Yes,” I said through my teeth. “This entrance over here, which we’ve been trying to find for half an hour. Lake, is it too much to ask you to pay the least bit of attention while we’re doing our best to barge into an enclave uninvited?”
He glared at me. “It’s right there!”
“Itwasn’t!” I snapped back, with grace and maturity.
“Is it too much to ask that we now try to getin?” Liesel said pointedly.
The first hitch: our newly discovered pagoda was built of solid stone, and there wasn’t a door to go through at all. There was only a small carved stone opening like a window, and it was a dozen feet off the ground. “Can we pry it open?” I asked Aadhya.
“No, that’s not even a real opening, it’s just carved to look like one,” she said. “I remember reading about this in school. Old Chinese enclave architecture used spiritual entrances, not physical ones. You don’t go through a door with your body, you go through it with your mind. I think we have to meditate our way through.”
I wasn’t in much of a frame of mind to meditate, but on the bright side, I almost never am, so it wasn’t as hard to force myself as it might have been. But we looked like right wankers, all of us sitting cross-legged round this one obscure pagoda, so every time a mundane tourist wandered along the path behind us, they stared at us—they weren’t having any trouble seeing the pagoda now that we were camped round it—meaning we couldn’t possibly get through until they’d gone. I wasn’t a fan of modern enclaves in almost any dimension, but I’ll say right now that physical doors were absolutely an upgrade.
And we didn’t really think it through; we just all sat down and started trying at the same time, because it was in front of us and we were all frustrated and jet-lagged and frantic to get inside, and so obviously what happened was that the first of us to make it through wasZheng;with my eyes closed, I felt him sigh out deeply next to me, and then he just got up and went and wasn’t next to me anymore, and for a moment I was massively relieved: he’d got through! And then I realized I’d just sent a twelve-year-old child alone into an enclave that was very likely going to try to kill him.
“Zheng!” I yelled, opening my eyes. “Wait! Zheng, come back!”
Which worked not at all, except to make a few mundanes just out of sight start coming towards us to find out what all the yelling was about, and then Orion said, “I’ll go after him,” and by the time I turned round to tell him off for not doing it sooner if he thought it was that easy, he was gone, too. I was left with Aadhya and Liesel, and four temple visitors frowning at me for disrupting the atmosphere. They didn’t leave again for several disapproving minutes of muttering amongst themselves, obviously trying to embarrass us into decamping, but when we stayed aggressively put, they finally gave up and left again, and I shut my eyes again and got back to trying to find my extremely elusive zen.
We were all just sitting there taking deep breaths, slightly furious ones in my case, and then Aadhya reached out and took my hand and said quietly, “Let’s go get Liu,” and gave me a comforting squeeze. I took another breath and let the anger all out: right, that’s what needed doing, no more faffing about, and I got Liesel’s hand on my other side without opening my eyes, and together we all stood up and stepped into the enclave.
The entryway was a short wide corridor, the old wornwalls plastered, leading to a doorway that faced onto a stone wall carved with an odd-looking dragon shape. Instead of being sculpted out, someone had carved it in reverse, the scaly indentation of its body set into the stone as if it had laid itself down in some wet concrete and then climbed out and gone away afterwards.
Then I looked over at Zheng, who was plastered with his back against the wall right near the doorway, panting, his face pale and stricken, and I realized somethinghadclimbed out of the carving: there were four parallel claw marks scored shallowly down the front of his shirt, a few drops of blood staining the edge of one of them. But that wasn’t the source of his fear. He was staring at Orion, who was all the way at the other end of the corridor with his back to us, facing the stone wall, his shoulders rigid.
I ground my jaw and went up to him. There were some claw marks dug into the floor, too, as though something long and snaky had been trying futilely to stop itself being dragged towards him. “Are you all right?” I said, reluctantly. I hated asking. What I wanted to do was punch him in the arm and tell him to stop being a lump, only I couldn’t, because hewasn’t okay,and I hadn’t any idea what to say or do to help it.
“Let’s just get going,” he said shortly.
We went cautiously round the stone wall and came out into the courtyard of the house. A rocky pool stood in one corner near us, with a streambed running through to the other side, a little bridge going across—very pretty, only they had all run dry—and a couple of old dead trees that had been reduced to nothing but bone-dry skeletal branches. There was nothing overhead but the empty void. We were all used to that, by which I mean, as used to it as you could get after spending your entire Scholomance career with a section of your dormitory cell gaping wide. That was the odd thinghere: the rest of this house had a grey roof made of clay tiles, and the inner walls of the pavilions around us were made of removable panels, the kind you’d pop out to let in the nonexistent light and air, as though someone had built this tidy little house outside.
Which was probably what had happened, I realized, as we took a few more cautious steps forward, because therewasn’tany churning horror underfoot. This place didn’t have a whiff of malia to it. This place had never been pushed out into the void. Instead, wizards had built this house, somewhere on the temple grounds, and they’d lived in it, done magic in it, while the rest of the world went by outside, until finally the whole place had quietly slipped all the way out of the world: one of the vanishingly rare natural enclaves in the world.
