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.
Everyone was sagging, panting for breath, many of them clinging to each other with eyes closed or staring fixedly at the ground, all of them trying not to look at the terrible fissures opening up round us. But back in the other room across the passageway, the room where they’d tried to crush her, Liu had heard me. Very faintly I heard her voice, thready and fragile, calling it back to me.
Other people joined in, voices picking it up all round—the words changing a little as it was passed along, like a children’s game, but that didn’t matter: the meaning was the same, and everyone was saying it together. As it swept through the crowd, all the people round me taking up the chant, I called it out again with them, and golden light came welling up through the loose bricks like mortar, joining them into a single round mosaic. It reached the final border and suddenly shot out at high speed, filling into all the cracks of void and patching them up, the red lanterns coming alight all along the alleyway, revealing second and third stories on all the buildings, and a neon sign above the metro suddenly blinked into improbable existence as lights came on in the stairway going down.
The sutras slammed shut, and I just barely caught them out of the air and then went the rest of the way down with them, not because they had gone heavy but because my legs had simply stopped working without notice. All round us, everyone was crying and laughing and embracing in the drunken relief of knowing they weren’t all going to die and their home hadn’t fallen in on itself. They went pouring back out into the alleyway to find their friends and family, dancing and rejoicing like a massive party-going; some of them even began flinging up fireworks into the void.
Sitting in a cross-legged heap on the solid bricks, I wrapped my arms round the sutras and bent my head over them, hugging them against me, and whispered, “Thank you,” to the book, to the scribe, to Purochana, to the universe; for the gift of being allowed to do this, this, instead of the destruction and the slaughter I’d been destined for.
And then Precious squeaked shrilly, and I jerked my head up. The council members hadn’t gone anywhere. Five of them had now stepped between me and the rest of the crowd, blocking their view, and the other three, their hands joined, were about to hit me with a killing spell.
Unfortunately, the warning wasn’t any help. I hadn’t anything left. I couldn’t even kill them. I could only just watch it coming, my arms tightening round my book, and then they were all screaming, screaming horribly, so horribly I almost could have killed them after all, just to save them from whatever it was that was happening to them, but before I could even move, there was a sort of yanking motion, and all of them were just—gone. Gone as if they’d never been there at all.
Orion was in their place, just behind them. For one moment, his face was blank and utterly unmoving, and then he looked at me, and I should have said, Fine, fourteen for you; I suppose we’re tied again, but I couldn’t say that; I couldn’t say anything like it, and he turned without a word and left, and everyone shocked and staring outside jerked back from him, pushing and shoving at everyone who’d wanted to see what was going on, a wave of empty space rolling with him through the crowd.