“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’t just Liu 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; they weren’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 a sacrifice. They are going to do something to Liu, 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: a sacrifice. And of course they’d do it, they’d all do it. What was one life, after all, 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 of them?” 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 mention you. If there was some kind of human sacrifice involved, why would the family pick any of them?”
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 that something bad 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 say no, I won’t do it. I couldn’t say that, not when Liu was locked up in a room somewhere with a knife 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 been our place 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’t in Beijing 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 was somewhere round 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 stone pagoda 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!”
“It wasn’t!” I snapped back, with grace and maturity.
“Is it too much to ask that we now try to get in?” 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.