“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 was Zheng; 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 worn walls 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 something had climbed 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 he wasn’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 thing here: 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 there wasn’t any 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.
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 or anything, but on the other hand, he could have been writing out the most massive curse ever known to man. “Wǒ cào,” 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.”