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 little charm 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 nǎlǐ?”
“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 and over 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: mana and will.
On the other side of that wall, some wizard had just crammed thirty years or more of mana and work and longing into this brick. They’d built it out of their longing for an enclave, and it didn’t really matter that they didn’t know exactly what was happening in this room. Because they did know, they had to know, that something evil and horrible was going to happen in this room. They were only over there in the other room because they didn’t want to watch. They would surely have rather been somewhere even further away, but they couldn’t be; this spell needed both their power and their intent, so they had to be here, they had to be part of it.
But they had found this way to keep their eyes shut and their noses pinched. They just had to be willing to hand over their work to these eight people, the people who were so hungry for council seats and power that they were willing to get their hands really dirty. And everyone over in that room was willing to do that, just so long as they got to walk out of that other room as enclavers, with their futures of safety and luxury assured. So they wanted their brick to stay right where it was, and that was why I could barely move it.
Liu’s family had put themselves in front of me with their backs to the council members, except for her uncle, who had turned to face the other three. He began leading them in an intricate flowing pattern something like a group of people doing tai chi, but perfectly synchronized. It was a mana-building exercise that they’d clearly practiced together for years and years, slow and very deliberate, and as the council members struggled out of the stone one by one, it snagged them, and they had to join in.
I had to look away because I could feel it trying to nab me, too. I put my head down concentrating and kept dragging the brick up the side, millimeter by millimeter. It was going to take an agonizingly long time to get Liu out, if I could do it at all. They’d already filled the top of the disk almost halfway. The room was so dim I couldn’t be sure, but there might have been something wet trickling out of those slots at the bottom, those slots that hadn’t only been made to let out air. I wanted to burst into tears. “I’m coming, Liu, hold on,” I panted out, in case she could hear me. “I’m coming. Precious! Precious, can you see her?”
Precious put her head out of my pocket and jumped down to the disk, and then without even going down the side, she squeaked up at me urgently and put her paw down on the surface, and her white fur started glowing, literally. In the light, I could see the disk was engraved all over in Chinese characters.
I could make out enough of them to know that it wasn’t a single spell. It was like the gates of the Scholomance: a compilation of spells all doing the same thing, reinforcing one another, and even before Precious’s light faded out, I’d picked out the same phrases being repeated over and over in different ones: eternal life, longevity, deathlessness, and I understood in a mingling of relief and rage: Liu was alive in there. Because she wasn’t meant to get out of this too early. She was meant to die slowly. Even if her body was being shattered and her hips and shoulders had been crushed under the weight of all these bricks, these fucking bricks that wouldn’t move, and I gave a howl of rage and heaved the second brick up and over the edge. The disk even shifted slightly up, a millimeter maybe.
But that was only the second brick. My arms and back and legs were all shaking with effort, and my time was running out. Three of the council members had started chanting an incantation: they were still being forced to go along with the mana-building exercise, but it wasn’t going to stop them casting whatever they were doing, and from the words I could overhear, it wasn’t going to be very nice. These strangers who were trying to murder my friend, these strangers who agreed with Ophelia in New York, with Christopher Martel in London, with Sir Alfred Fucking Cooper Browning and the rulers and founders of every other enclave in the world, that it was worth doing this one horrible thing to someone else, to avoid all the other horrible things that might happen to them.