I didn’t really pause, but there was a moment inside my head when I wanted to. I couldn’t read the inscriptions without a better light, but I felt them under my fingers, and if they’d gone too far—if they’d already hurt Liu badly enough—then when I took this thing off her, she’d die. And I’d promised them, so even if I took it off and she was in there crushed and bleeding and I had to watch her die, I was going to have to help the people who had done this to her. I was going to have to save their enclave anyway.
Then I finished taking it off and threw it violently aside like a discus to smash into the wall, and Liu’s mum and dad screamed and were reaching down for her: she was in the bottom, naked and strapped tightly into a curled fetal position with leather bands marked up with runes. I remembered with lurching nausea the shape I’d seen inside the maw-mouths I’d killed, the crushed body at the very center. I’d vaguely thought it was the remains of some maleficer—someone like Jack, only more successful, who’d just kept sucking people dry until they finally collapsed in on themselves to keep on devouring endlessly. I’d been afraid of becoming one of those people.
Instead it would have been Liu, kind quiet Liu, who’d only ever touched malia to save her little cousins and had sworn off it as soon as she’d had the chance, bound inside there forever. Her arms had been wrapped around her, and the poor hand on top, the one she’d used for fingering on the lute, had been crushed bloody against her shoulder where it had been strapped down, and along her side there were horrible purpled stripes where her skin had been ground against her ribs, raw in places and starting to rub off. When her parents got the hood off her head, there was blood on her mouth; her shoulders and hips looked all wrong. Her eyes didn’t open.
But she was breathing, and she kept on breathing. She moaned faintly when they cut the straps loose to move her, but a couple of healers were dashing in from the amphitheater room; they cast half a dozen quick healing spells on her, the equivalent of giving her some morphine and an oxygen mask, and under their direction, together all of us reached down and lifted her out with many hands. Some other people had transmuted one of the amphitheater chairs into a waiting stretcher. As they got her on it, Xiao Xing squirmed out of the hollow of her throat and reached up to me with his little paws. I picked him up and cuddled him against my cheek, tears dripping. “She would’ve wanted you to get away,” I told him, but he just squeaked at me and wriggled out of my hands again, and jumped back to curl up under her ear as they lifted the stretcher.
Her mum was by her side, but her dad turned back to me for a moment. His eyes were wet and his mouth was hesitant, as if he didn’t know what to say, and then he gave it up for a bad lot and just put his hands together and bowed to me, a thank-you, and I did it back, which probably wasn’t the proper thing, but it didn’t matter. Liu mattered, and she was alive and out, but even as her dad straightened back up, the room swayed a little around us, with the heaving of a large ship in choppy waters.
“Get her out of here!” I said to him, and then I turned back to the pile of bricks scattered all over the floor, and stared down at them a moment. I wasn’t wholly at sea. The first half of the Golden Stone sutras, taken all together, were an instruction manual for creating the equivalent of those bricks, only the ones you made with the sutras were pebbles, and each one was only a year’s work by a single wizard, instead. But it was the same idea: they were building materials. Of course, I didn’t need that part of the sutras here. Just as well, really, since apart from the year-of-work required, even the process of compressing the pebbles was the undertaking of a week we didn’t have.
The second half of the sutras—which I knew much less well than the first—explained in detail how you very carefully opened yourself a White-Rabbit hole out of the world and into the void over the course of three days. Again, that part was already done, since we were standing inside it. And then the last three pages—which I’d given a few brief skimmings—were about that great final casting, where you took all your pebbles and used them in a grand working uniting all the rest of the spells to build the foundation of the enclave.
The original Sanskrit text had mostly treated this final casting as something quite obvious, which I suspect it might have been after you’d gone slowly and laboriously through parts one and two. The medieval Arabic commentary had treated it as an outdated and quaint little process, included only for historical interest, more or less the way some manual of modern architecture might describe putting up a one-room mud hut: not anything anyone would actually want to do themselves, of course. Obviously they’d already advanced to the much more convenient technique of infinite torture by then.