“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 a new enclave, 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 and walls 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 a bigger enclave. 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 fists clenched tight—it was only an empty room after all, bare and dull.
There was a single round disk on the floor, like a manhole cover with a square hole cut out of the middle and a four-character phrase carved out that I recognized from the lists of proverbs I’d had to memorize at school: escape from certain death. Much less complex than the one they’d been using today; it’s always nice to see modern advancements in artifice and incantation at work. But the disk had cracked apart into four chunks, separating the characters, as if some giant had slammed a fist right down into the middle and smashed it. The only thing left here now was a hollow space where the foundation had been, where the unleashed void was doing its best to go back to formless chaos. The enclave was only hanging on because of all these wizards still believing in it, and that wasn’t enough to keep up an entire magical city.
That’s how the maleficer was bringing down the enclaves, I realized abruptly. They’d learned the secret of enclave-building and found out that this central point of weakness existed in every single one. Presumably they wriggled into the enclave and hit it, and while the enclave went reeling with all the wards coming apart, they sucked all the mana out of the place that they could, and left the rest of it to go tumbling down Humpty-Dumpty.
And in the end, I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want to rip Beijing off its foundation and push it off into the void. Jiangyu was out there organizing a bucket brigade of people to ferry the bricks in to me; he didn’t deserve that. None of our schoolmates, who’d risked their almost certain escape back in the Scholomance just to help make the world safer for everyone, deserved it. Even the rest of the people in that amphitheater, who in the end had collectively let me take those bricks off Liu, didn’t quite deserve it. Or even if they did, still it wouldn’t have done any living person any good to smash all the towers and burn the metro line, bring down those libraries and laboratories. I did have to stop it happening ever again; and after I got done here, I’d have to think about what it would take to stop it, to make everyone in the world stop putting up new enclaves. But I didn’t want to let the place collapse, any more than I’d wanted to send London’s fairy gardens sinking into the void.
So I unslung the sutras from my back and took them out, and opened them to the first page marked with the illuminated border filled with gold leaf, the beautiful calligraphic heading that marked it as one of the Golden Stone castings, the ones that you had to use in the final working, and I took a deep breath and dived into the spell.
I’d cast bits and pieces of the sutras before, but never any of the major workings. But I’d spent so much time looking at them, dreaming of them, about all the things I’d do with them. The ancient Sanskrit came flowing through my mouth like a drink of cool water, a breath of sun-warmed air, the taste of honey and roses, and my eyes were prickling with tears, because it didn’t feel like any of my spells at all. It felt like one of Mum’s spells, something beautiful and full of clean light.
In that moment, I knew with clear glad certainty that it didn’t matter to me how the sutras had come to me or what I’d paid for them. I couldn’t get that price back, any more than I could undo what had been done to make the enclave around me. This was still the life’s work I wanted to belong to. And I felt also, for the first time, that it wanted to belong to me; that the sutras really were mine, in a way I hadn’t quite believed in before, despite all the time carefully polishing them and cuddling them and tucking them safely in at night.
As if to agree with me, the pages began to glow with soft golden light, illuminating themselves in the dim close room. A moment later, the book tugged gently, and when I uncurled my fingers, it rose up into the air and hovered just before my eyes, freeing my hands just as the page turned and I needed them for the next part of the work. The incantations kept flowing out of me, almost a song, and I turned and took the first brick from Jiangyu, at the end of the bucket-brigade line. I knelt down still chanting, and with both hands I pushed the brick down into the very center of the broken disk. The sharp points of the triangular pieces crumbled away. I felt the brick stick for a moment, and then almost as if I’d pushed it straight into a bog, it was sucked out of my fingers and sank away into the dark underneath the disk.