Page 35 of The Golden Enclaves
But Beijing enclave hadn’t been satisfied to stop here. In fact, I doubted any Beijing enclavers still lived here, even the lowliest new recruits. The floor showed recent footprints disturbing thick layers of old dust, and the boxes and chests crammed into the side buildings and spilling out into the courtyard looked like recent additions: attempts to save something from the oncoming wreck. We followed the trail of footprints through the courtyard and into the main building, and they continued on—straight until they met the perfectly unbroken back wall. There was even a half footprint that intersected with it.
I was ready to have a go at bashing an opening, and then Precious gave a squeak, and I looked over to the side: the main hall was partitioned into three sections, and on the left there was an old, thoroughly whiskered man sitting quietly at a low table, in elaborate robes like a costume out of a historical film, doing calligraphy with an ink brush under a glowing orb of light.
He didn’t seem about to leap up and come at us oranything, but on the other hand, he could have been writing out the most massive curse ever known to man. “Wocào,” Zheng said faintly behind my back.
“Do you know who he is?” I hissed at him.
“I, uh, I think that’s the Seventh Sage of Beijing,” Zheng said in barely more than a whisper, still staring. The old man was going serenely on with his brushstrokes as if our presence and time itself didn’t matter. “The one who founded the enclave.”
“This enclave is a thousand years old!” Aadhya said in protest.
“He was the seventh teacher, the one who was here when the house left the world,” Zheng said. “They say he never died. He kept teaching anyone who came here, until one day he just disappeared. There are stories that he comes back sometimes when the enclave is in a lot of trouble, but no one’s really seen him in hundreds of years.”
“Right,” I said, grimly. I hadn’t any idea how powerful you had to be to arrange all that, but it sounded impressive. “Is there anything in these stories about what hedoeswhen he turns up?”
Zheng just shrugged a bit helplessly, but the old man had finished the last brushstroke on his paper, and after he carefully set his brush aside, he turned and beckoned to us. None of us moved, not being idiots, but he just sat there waiting with the faintly familiar air of deliberate patience that Mum would occasionally get when I was small and screaming wildly at her about something. I liked it now about as much as I did then, but it was also a bit comforting to me, or at least as comforting as you could get when you’d just broken into the house of a thousand-year-old wizard who pops in and out of reality at will. Anyway, I could see we weren’t getting out of it. We needed to go through the door that should havebeen standing in this back wall, and I was willing to bet I wasn’t doing that without talking to him first.
So I went over, and he kept emitting patience until I grudgingly sat down on the floor in front of another side of the table, and also until I bowed, not very gracefully. But the attempt satisfied him enough that he said something to me, which I understood about as well as a student in their first year of English would have done with Chaucer. I looked over at Zheng; he looked hard-pressed but said, “I think he said—‘Don’t be afraid, daughter of the golden stones’; does that make sense?”
My arms went to clutch round the sutras, which were still slung across my chest. The sutras, which my dad had wanted, because his family had lived in and lost a Golden Stone enclave. An enclave like this one, an enclave made without malia. “Yes,” I said. It made sense, but it didn’t work; if anything I was more afraid. The old man was looking at me with a little too much gentleness, like he was sorry for me.
He told me something else, and I picked Liu’s name out of it before he held out the huge scroll he’d been painting on. Zheng caught his breath and then said, “He said, ‘This will bring you to Guo Yi Liu!’ ”
I took the scroll: the characters were stylized and I wasn’t sure of them—the handful of Chinese spells I knew, Liu had taught me by ear—but I believed him anyway; looking at it felt like looking at a map, something meant to help you get somewhere. The old man nodded to me and said a phrase I did recognize: “Finish what you started.”
Then he added something a bit more dry, and reached up and touched the glowing golden ball of light with a finger. It went out instantly; by the time my eyes had adjusted, he wasn’t there anymore; only the table, thick with untroubled dust, and the scroll hanging between my hands.
“Uh, I think he said—‘I’m tired of demons in my house’?” Zheng said, doubtfully.
“Who wouldn’t be,” I muttered, as I scrambled up. I ran back to the blank wall and put the scroll up against it. As soon as I did, the letters glowed with the golden light, and then the whole paper illuminated round the border and burnt up in a single rush, leaving a tidy narrow rectangle opening out to a tidy narrow alleyway—and it was an alleyway, not a corridor; the top of it was open to the void—with the walls on either side broken up with doorways that were standing in shadow. All the lanterns hanging next to them were dark, except a single gleaming of red outside one door at the very end.
I stepped through the opening while the edges were still glowing with embers, and as I did the whole alleyway blurred towards me, or I blurred through it, and I staggered a bit as my foot came down right in front of the door with the lit lantern. I waved my arms wildly to get my balance and keep from tumbling down: just past the door, the alleyway plunged down an ink-dark stairway that looked a great deal like the Beijing metro.
A low uneasy rumbling was coming up out of it, and underneath me the floor felt as though it was all bending away, a deep creaking. Like in the Scholomance: a giant just barely holding on by its fingers, on to the deep-rooted strength of the one small house back there. But the weight was too unbalanced. I didn’t know how much of Beijing enclave was down there, but it was clearly the vast majority of the place. A thousand years ago, the sage’s house had slipped out of the world all on its own, and become the first foothold in the void. Other wizards had slowly expanded it little by little, adding on this long alleyway full of houses, building a community. Then—a few decades ago, they’d built themselves a major expansion based in the bustle of modern-day Beijing’scity center, just barely linked back here by a metro line of their very own. There on the other end would be the laboratories, the libraries, the massive blocks of flats. All of them now on the verge of toppling away into the void.
And on the other side of the door in front of me, I could hear heavy rhythmic thumps coming at regular intervals, each one sending trembling waves through the ground: some kind of major arcana going. Whatever spell they were working on to try to save the enclave. The spell that was going to hurt Liu.
I looked towards the sage’s house: everyone else was still in there, Orion framed inside the singed rectangle looking out at me. His knee was suspended in midair, caught in the motion of taking a step, frozen. Whatever magic the sage had put on the scroll, apparently it had only been good for one, and there must have been some sort of delaying spell on the alleyway.
I had the strong suspicion that the sage had only shown up to offer his help because he’d known we wouldn’t be in time without it. Anyway, I wasn’t going to wait around and make certain. The door was locked, but I put my hands on the framing posts on either side of the doorway and spoke an incantation that a Roman maleficer had used to rip open a mystically fortified Druidic site during Caesar’s wars, so he could get at the mana store they’d kept inside. Not at all the spell you wanted when the lock on your dormitory room had jammed and you were trying to get to the cafeteria for breakfast, which was when the Scholomance had handed me that one, but I was grateful for it now, because the wooden door instantly exploded before me, spraying splinters over the chamber at high velocity.
The room beyond wasn’t very impressive: round and small, and the one tiny spell-globe was so dim that thelantern outside the door was letting in more light, striping a bright-red-tinged rectangle into the space. It fell over Liu’s mum and dad, and her aunt and uncle with them. She’d shown me a tiny photo of them in the Scholomance, but even without that, they would have been easy to pick out, because they were all tied with their backs and elbows and wrists together, securely gagged and blindfolded, on top of a rough metal grating very precariously placed over what looked like a massive sewer opening plunging out of sight.
There were eight other wizards in the room—the council-to-be of the new enclave, I strongly presumed—all busily at work on a piece of artifice a short distance away from the sewer: a round metal cylinder the size of a small table. The outer shell of it was thin—it looked like a bigger version of the sort of ring mold you’d use to construct an elaborate dessert, made of glossy black metal with narrow slots punched through all the way round the bottom to let air out. Inside the ring, there was a disk made of blue-tinged metal that was being pressed down inside the ring underneath the weight of small bricks. One of the council wizards was taking bricks from a small stack and laying them on top one at a time, neatly, filling in the circle. The others were ferrying more of the bricks over from a hatch in the wall that flipped back and forth like a postbox. Even as I came bursting into the room, I saw it go over empty, and come back full, as if someone had popped a brick in on the other side, from a room where no one could see what was happening in this one.
The future council members weren’t slouches. I had barely set foot in the place when they started throwing killing spells straight at me. They’d have done better lobbing nerf balls; I caught the spells more easily. I could have just slung them right back, but I deflected them over my shoulder into the alleyway instead and threw my own spell: a sprightly littlecharm I’ve got that turns people into stone. The only downside of it is that people really don’t enjoy being stone even if you turn them back after, as I’d discovered from using it to save people’s lives on the obstacle course last year. Under the circumstances, that was a price I was willing to have the council members pay.
Unfortunately, these wizards weren’t voluntarily running an obstacle course with me of their own free will, and they also weren’t terrified kids still in the Scholomance. Almost as soon as I’d cast it, all the statues were flexing and moving as if something inside was moving, working to get out. I’d never chipped away at the stone surface to find out how far down the transformation went, but it clearly wasn’t going to last long. I ran across the room to Liu’s mum and yanked her blindfold and her gag off. She shook her head, having to blink hard up at me to make her eyes come clear, and she flinched back, but I didn’t have the patience to even get upset; I didn’t care if it was because my eyes were glowing ominously or I was giving off my usual aura of dark-sorceress-in-training. “Liu!” I said, even while I flicked the ropes off her wrists. “Where is she? Liú zài nali?”
“There,” her mum said, with a gulping ragged sob. “She’s in there.”
I turned to look round the room again, baffled, and then—there was a moment of blank horror, and then I was running to the metal ring, shoving my way through all the flexing and shuddering statues round it, to get the weight off that sinking disk.
The bricks didn’t want to come off. I grabbed the highest one on top, and it was like trying to lift a hundred-pound magnet off a floor made of iron. I had to drag it at a grotesquely slow pace all the way to the inner rim and then drag it up the side without dropping it until I could tip it up andover the edge to go crashing to the floor. By the time I was done with the first brick, the council wizards were already starting to break loose, stone chipping away from fingertips and noses and lips that were gasping for air.
I started in on a second one, my teeth gritted. Liu’s mum ran over and started trying to help me, but she couldn’t shift the bricks as much as a millimeter, no matter how she threw her back into it. She’d got her husband loose first; in a moment he was with us, and her uncle and aunt as well, but even pushing all together they couldn’t move a single one.
“Just keep those other wizards off as long as you can!” I said. Sweat was trickling down my face, dripping off my eyebrows, running down my arms and my back as I dragged the second brick up the rim, my fingers getting slippery. It wasn’t a physical weight. I could tell what the bricks were, as soon as my hands were on them:manaandwill.
