Only that wasn’t just darkness. It was the void, ready to start swallowing the whole place up. A bit more of the disk crumbled away into it, and thin fracture lines of void began to spread out, following the cracked lines of the disk. I just turned back and grabbed the next brick and put it down as fast as I could, and the one after that, trying to catch the sinking brick just a bit before it went down, as if I could give the next one someplace to stand.
It was easy at the start, but that was only, as it happens, because I was dropping the bricks straight into the void. The first time I actually managed to put two bricks together, I felt it at once. I put down a brick, the ninth or tenth one, and a jarring shock came ringing back up my arms and through my body, and out from there into the whole enclave, a shivering ripple of—it wasn’t power; the only word for it was solidity.
You might think that would have been encouraging. The trouble was, as it came through, you really couldn’t help noticing the contrast between that and everything else round you, because the totality of the enclave was in fact being held up by pixie dust and good thoughts, or rather selfishly greedy ones, and as powerful as those are, they don’t actually have anything to do with material reality. And that’s what was coming for us: reality, with the pointed message that this whole enclave was a sack of made-up nonsense and what had ever given us the idea we could exist inside it?
So at the same moment, all the thin fracture lines of void ran away with it, spreading out of the small chamber like growing trees, and not like cracks in an earthquake, either. They went as though the enclave were a really magnificent painting by an old master, full of the illusion of richness and depth, but cracking all over its flat surface. Lines went crawling in nonsensical directions, one going along the ground of the narrow passage and then straight up the wall of the alleyway that was visible behind it; others, even more alarmingly, were putting partial outlines round some of the people in the brick-ferrying line as though they were characters in a comic book instead of people in the world.
I stopped looking at them and just focused on the bricks, but those were getting heavier again, heavier with each one, and my shoulders and back were already strained and tired. I had to start swinging, taking each brick from Jiangyu at the top of an arc and carrying it in the same movement over and letting it drop onto the pile I was making in the center, which wasn’t nearly as tidy as the beautifully manicured circle the council had been building on top of Liu. I was trying to land the bricks in some connected way, getting at least one end onto some of the others. It was working in one sense, and in another I was thoroughly smashing up the disk that had been carrying the entire weight of the expanded enclave, all these years, and my replacement wasn’t to the proper building standards.
Jiangyu was having trouble with the bricks himself, but despite that he crept a bit closer to help shorten the distance for me, although he was clenching his jaw and trembling all over with it. Then one of our classmates behind him, I thought her name was Xiaojiao, said in Chinese, “Double up! We need to double up!” and when he passed me the next brick, she didn’t give him the next one, she just stepped forward, in a staggering waddle the way you’d carry a loaded bucket, and got him to take the other end without letting it go.
The two of them together got it closer to me still, and that gave me much better control: I was able to place the brick into an empty gap between two others, and firm up a space between them. The line of the brigade rippled forward slowly, compressing as everyone moved up the next brick and more people joined the line at the end, and even before the whole line had shrunk, Xiaojiao was beckoning urgently to the person behind her, and all three of them passed the next brick to me.
Everyone was in the line by the end of it. The later bricks didn’t get passed along so much as they surfed over the crowd, hands beneath hands beneath hands holding them up. They were getting bottled up in the narrow entryway: there were thirty people crammed into the tiny chamber with me by then, and even the council members had joined in the work, but not enough people could get a hand on the bricks to support them properly. A man in the entryway gasped as the next one came in, and he and two other people went to their knees and the brick slid out of their hands and smashed down through one of the fracture lines and was just gone, sending spiderwebbing cracks everywhere. One of them went straight over the man’s leg, horribly, and when he screamed and tried to grab at it, the rest of him moved and the part that had been cut off didn’t; it was just standing there, disconnected, and then just stopped being there as he fell over.
I had to keep chanting the incantation, so I couldn’t say anything, but I grabbed at Xiaojiao and pointed at the walls of the chamber, urgently, and she got the idea and called out, “Open up the wall! Break it open!”
Some people either misunderstood or overachieved, and in moments all the walls around us came down: people had dashed into the two townhouses on either side of the secret little chamber and torn apart the side walls. The whole crowd pressed in around me with the remaining bricks, so close that I scarcely needed to take them at all. Which was just as well, because within another three, they had become nearly impossible even for me. I didn’t really place the next one; I just barely got it over an empty spot and it went slipping out of my hands the last inch to thump into place, marked damp with my sweaty handprints, and then Xiaojiao put out a hand and stopped me reaching the next one. She turned and waved her arms wildly to get everyone to come in closer, gathering round the solid circle I’d laid down with the last bricks. “All together, all the rest!” she said, and of course she was right: if I took those bricks one after another, the ones left would just get heavier and heavier, and I wouldn’t be able to do the rest. This was why the golden enclaves hadn’t been very big: not even a tertiary-order entity could build a foundation this big on their own, something that could take the weight of modern towers and underground lines.
So instead I took a step onto the center of the bricks, getting out of the way. The sutras came hovering along with me, and I kept the incantation going while all round me everyone chanted together: sān, èr, yī, and put the bricks down at the same time, finishing off a single bordering ring around the rest, smashing the last chunks of the old disk beneath them as I sang out the last words.
The whole enclave shook, and the fissures began to widen, a deep groaning all round. I didn’t know what else to do; I was on the final part of the incantation, the last page with a golden border, the last one with any commentary. The remaining pages of the book were only an afterword where the scribe thanked his patrons effusively for the honor of deeming him worthy of a place in Baghdad enclave after his entire family had been killed by maleficaria, and it had made me angry enough that I’d only looked at it once.
But as soon as I finished the incantation, the last few pages of the book were turning: they whiffled to the back of the very last page, and there was one final line of Sanskrit written there in plain black ink, as if the scribe had copied it down and then hadn’t bothered to illuminate it, because he hadn’t thought it was part of the working. I’d never read or translated it, but it was so simple I could do it out of my head, and even at a glance it wasn’t remotely like the inscriptions on the disk. Nothing about deathlessness or permanence, nothing forced; it was only a request, a cry of longing: stay here, please stay, be our shelter, be our home, be loved, and after I’d sung it out in the Sanskrit, I translated it off the cuff into Chinese, as best I could, and called it out urgently.