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.
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?