Page 37 of The Golden Enclaves
And that didn’t mean they wouldn’t still do the wrong thing if they had the chance. They could tell themselves, after all, that everyone else in the world had done the same wrong thing. But I made myself look up at their faces, and look at the tears and the horror, and believe in it enough to give them a choice, the only choice I could think of.
“I’m not letting you do it,” I said. “Not if I have to bring the rest of this enclave down with all of us in it. I did it to the Scholomance and I’ll do it here. And you can’t stop me.” My voice echoed off the walls and around the massive space, ringing through the enforced silence. Nothing else broke it. I gestured to the circle of bricks, that horrible weight. “Or you can take these off her, and I’ll try to save this enclave for you. I don’t know if it’ll work. But if you’ll give the mana to me instead of using it for this, I’ll try.”
The compulsion faded, and a low murmur started, rising louder all around the chamber as people turned to their neighbors:Did you know, I didn’t, I didn’t know,all of them telling each other that half lie. I was disgusted with it and hoping for it all at once. I needed them to want that lie enough to agree, to try another way.
But one of the council members abruptly said to me, “We’ll let Guo Yi Liu out, and you can go—”
“No,” I said, in a howling that echoed off the walls of the little room, like a pack of wolves ringed round him. He shut up. “Those are your choices. Don’t bother looking for a third. I’m not letting you do it to Liu, and I’m not leaving you with this tidy pile of bricks to do it to someone else. If you don’t want me to try saving the place, you can dump them down that sewer and evacuate for all I care.”
“Most of the stored mana isours,” a different council member said—a middle-aged woman, young relative to the others. “We chose to use it to help Beijing and not just to make our own enclave, but we are not going to give them the work of our entire family for generations—”
“You took the work of your entire family for generations and chose to use it tomake a maw-mouth,so shut it!” I said, but that was only a seething of outrage bubbling up and over from the simmering pot; I knew there had to be a realanswer. “And fine, if it’s not Beijing’s to give, then I suppose if they want me to have a go, they’d better make you a decent offer.”
It was still mostly an explosion, but a useful one; I imagine they’d spent most of the last week, with Liu sitting locked alone in that room waiting for this to happen to her, negotiating urgent points like how many council seats went to the original Beijing team versus the newcomers, who got to live in the fanciest bits of the joint enclave, how many places they’d make for new wizards and who would get to hand them out. So now I’d put them on comfortably familiar territory, even if I’d also taken away half the spoils they had to haggle over.
They started to discuss hurriedly amongst themselves, huddled in low voices, but then someone stood up abruptly in the amphitheater: a boy I recognized from the Chinese obstacle-course runs, Jiangyu, one of the Beijing enclave seniors. He’d been one of the very last kids to join up, less because he’d thought I was secretly trying to kill everyone than because things werenotgoing according to the rules, about which he had extremely passionate feelings. Even after he’d finally come round and done a first run in our chummy little group of five hundred, he’d come up to me and Liu afterwards to complain that our tactics went against the advice in the graduation handbook—which had been completely useless for several months by then. We’d eyed him sidelong and another of the Beijing enclavers had shown up and towed him away with an air of weariness, but now he got up and said stolidly, “I wish to say that if there is not enough room for all of us, then if Xi’an will agree to save Beijing, I am willing to give up my own place.”
His mum, sitting next to him, was grabbing for him with an alarmed expression, but nine other kids stood up withhim, all the rest of the senior Beijing enclavers, and started declaring the same offer, and as if they were a cork popping out of a bottle, all of a sudden the room dissolved into a quiet but general pandemonium. Beijing enclavers were standing up, looking round for anyone from Liu’s clan and talking to them directly—they outnumbered them, nearly three to one, and therecouldbe enough room for all of them, surely.
Assuming the enclave didn’t just come down in a heap when I tried. But I couldn’t be fussed about the possibility if they gave me the chance to try it. It was the only way out of here for me at all. Because I meant it; I couldn’t walk out of here knowing they’d do this to someone else, but I also couldn’t walk out of here and become a destroyer of worlds. Iwasn’tgoing to. If I had to bring this enclave down, if I had to fulfill that much of the prophecy to stop this from happening on my watch—my watch was going to have to end here, too. And maybe that wasn’t any real solution; Liesel would tell me I was being an idiot, and if I was going to let all the other enclaves in the world off, I could simply choose to do that instead of throwing myself into a pit. But fine, I’d have to be an idiot, because I couldn’t do anything else. I’ve spent my whole life fighting as hard as I could not to fulfill the prophecy, not to turn into a monster, and I wasn’t going to give up now.
The council members had all stopped negotiating amongst themselves and were staring out at the rest of the wizards in dismay, the reins slipped out of their hands. Which meant there wasn’t anyone who could turn to me and sayall right, we agree, go ahead,but there was a faint grinding noise from the pit: the disk had risen a bit. I tried one of the bricks again, and I managed to pick it up: not easily, not like a simple ordinary brick, but at least like a brick made out of lead instead of a brick made out of black hole, and I gave a heave and let itgo flying off, then went for another. The crash made everyone jump and look, and as I kept going, hurling bricks out, the remaining ones got lighter and lighter, everyone coming round, until Liu’s mom could take one off too, and then Jiangyu and some of the other Beijing seniors came in to help, with the rest of Liu’s family, and we got the last one off and I put my hands on the disk, risen back to the top—
I didn’t really pause, but there was a moment inside my head when I wanted to. I couldn’t read the inscriptions without a better light, but I felt them under my fingers, and if they’d gone too far—if they’d already hurt Liu badly enough—then when I took this thing off her, she’d die. And I’d promised them, so even if I took it off and she was in there crushed and bleeding and I had to watch her die, I was going to have to help the people who had done this to her. I was going to have to save their enclave anyway.
Then I finished taking it off and threw it violently aside like a discus to smash into the wall, and Liu’s mum and dad screamed and were reaching down for her: she was in the bottom, naked and strapped tightly into a curled fetal position with leather bands marked up with runes. I remembered with lurching nausea the shape I’d seen inside the maw-mouths I’d killed, the crushed body at the very center. I’d vaguely thought it was the remains of some maleficer—someone like Jack, only more successful, who’d just kept sucking people dry until they finally collapsed in on themselves to keep on devouring endlessly. I’d been afraid of becoming one of those people.
Instead it would have been Liu, kind quiet Liu, who’d only ever touched malia to save her little cousins and had sworn off it as soon as she’d had the chance, bound inside there forever. Her arms had been wrapped around her, and the poor hand on top, the one she’d used for fingering on the lute, hadbeen crushed bloody against her shoulder where it had been strapped down, and along her side there were horrible purpled stripes where her skin had been ground against her ribs, raw in places and starting to rub off. When her parents got the hood off her head, there was blood on her mouth; her shoulders and hips looked all wrong. Her eyes didn’t open.
But she was breathing, and she kept on breathing. She moaned faintly when they cut the straps loose to move her, but a couple of healers were dashing in from the amphitheater room; they cast half a dozen quick healing spells on her, the equivalent of giving her some morphine and an oxygen mask, and under their direction, together all of us reached down and lifted her out with many hands. Some other people had transmuted one of the amphitheater chairs into a waiting stretcher. As they got her on it, Xiao Xing squirmed out of the hollow of her throat and reached up to me with his little paws. I picked him up and cuddled him against my cheek, tears dripping. “She would’ve wanted you to get away,” I told him, but he just squeaked at me and wriggled out of my hands again, and jumped back to curl up under her ear as they lifted the stretcher.
Her mum was by her side, but her dad turned back to me for a moment. His eyes were wet and his mouth was hesitant, as if he didn’t know what to say, and then he gave it up for a bad lot and just put his hands together and bowed to me, a thank-you, and I did it back, which probably wasn’t the proper thing, but it didn’t matter. Liu mattered, and she was alive and out, but even as her dad straightened back up, the room swayed a little around us, with the heaving of a large ship in choppy waters.
“Get her out of here!” I said to him, and then I turned back to the pile of bricks scattered all over the floor, and stared down at them a moment. I wasn’t wholly at sea. The first halfof the Golden Stone sutras, taken all together, were an instruction manual for creating the equivalent of those bricks, only the ones you made with the sutras were pebbles, and each one was only a year’s work by a single wizard, instead. But it was the same idea: they werebuilding materials.Of course, I didn’t need that part of the sutras here. Just as well, really, since apart from the year-of-work required, even the process of compressing the pebbles was the undertaking of a week we didn’t have.
The second half of the sutras—which I knew much less well than the first—explained in detail how you very carefully opened yourself a White-Rabbit hole out of the world and into the void over the course of three days. Again, that part was already done, since we were standing inside it. And then the last three pages—which I’d given a few brief skimmings—were about that great final casting, where you took all your pebbles and used them in a grand working uniting all the rest of the spells to build the foundation of the enclave.
The original Sanskrit text had mostly treated this final casting as something quite obvious, which I suspect it might have been after you’d gone slowly and laboriously through parts one and two. The medieval Arabic commentary had treated it as an outdated and quaint little process, included only for historical interest, more or less the way some manual of modern architecture might describe putting up a one-room mud hut: not anything anyone would actually want to do themselves, of course. Obviously they’d already advanced to the much more convenient technique of infinite torture by then.
So I wasn’t at sea, but Iwason a random uncharted island with a broken compass and a fragmentary map, and good luck getting to my destination. I didn’t think I’d share thatwith everyone looking anxiously at me, though; I didn’t needtheirdoubts making the job harder along with my own. “All of you had better clear out before I try this,” I did say to Jiangyu. “If this doesn’t work, you won’t want to be in here. Get Liu out, and—”
Jiangyu was already shaking his head. “No one can leave. The enclave is being braced from the outside by a circle of wizards. That is why we could come back inside to fix it, after we had evacuated. But we were warned that if any of us tried to go out again, before we finished the new enclave, we would push in the opposite direction, and the bracing would collapse. Then the whole enclave would fall.” Wonderful.
“I have confidence that you will succeed,” he added, with apparent sincerity. How very nice for him. I would have preferred if he’d told me sneeringly that I was a fool and I wasn’t going to get on at all; I always do my best work angry.
“Thanks,” I said sourly, and shut my eyes and took a few deep breaths, trying to clear the decks for the casting, to imagine my way into it. But I still had a strong impulse to get out of this room, and after a moment, I realized it wasn’t just revulsion: this was the wrong place for me to be. The council had been about to build anewenclave, and then attach the old one on to hold it up. That wasn’t what I was going to do. The Golden Stone sutras couldn’t build a gigantic modern enclave. My only chance was to try to fix the old one. I opened my eyes and looked at Jiangyu. “Where’s the foundation of the old enclave? The one that’s broken.”
Even Jiangyu had a hard time prying the information out of the council members: they certainly weren’t nearly as sold on my prospects of success as he was. But they didn’t have much of a choice either, which was emphasized by another barrel-roll of unease that went swelling through the floor andwalls around us. When it subsided, the council finally stopped arguing amongst themselves and led me back out into the alleyway.
I could still see Orion and the others down at the far end, still caught out of time: it looked like he hadn’t even moved, his knee still hanging midair. “Let them out of whatever that is,” I said to the councilwoman, but she was staring out at it with real alarm of her own.
“That isn’t a spell,” she said. “The connection to the original enclave is breaking. They are on the other side.”
It hadn’t been a spell of speed after all; the sage’s scroll must have heaved me over into Beijing enclave, straight through what was clearly a disjunction in the void. And if it opened up the rest of the way—down we’d all go.
There wasn’t any more hesitation on their parts. Across the alleyway, next to the metro entrance, stood two imposing townhouses, and between them was a small gap, just barely noticeable if you looked up above the shared front wall that ran across their ground levels. Two of the council members went to it and put their hands on either side of the gap and pulled, and the wall split open and revealed a short narrow passageway running between them that opened into a small chamber on the other side.
I went in with my stomach turning. They’d got away with it, in here. Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a group of wizards had got together in this room and had put someone like Liu in a tin and crushed them into an endless hell, because they needed the grotesque power of that act to make not even an enclave but just abiggerenclave. I had to force myself to go inside, braced to feel it in the walls, in the ground under my feet, the monstrosity that had been made in that room. But when I stepped over the threshold with my fistsclenched tight—it was only an empty room after all, bare and dull.
