So I wasn’t at sea, but I was on a random uncharted island with a broken compass and a fragmentary map, and good luck getting to my destination. I didn’t think I’d share that with everyone looking anxiously at me, though; I didn’t need their doubts making the job harder along with my own. “All of you had better clear out before I try this,” I did say to Jiangyu. “If this doesn’t work, you won’t want to be in here. Get Liu out, and—”
Jiangyu was already shaking his head. “No one can leave. The enclave is being braced from the outside by a circle of wizards. That is why we could come back inside to fix it, after we had evacuated. But we were warned that if any of us tried to go out again, before we finished the new enclave, we would push in the opposite direction, and the bracing would collapse. Then the whole enclave would fall.” Wonderful.
“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.