“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 he does when 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 have been 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’s city 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 the lantern 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.