So finally they led me inside, through a blazing-hot server room full of flat narrow computers stacked up in metal racks and the uncomfortable blasting of fans, and into a small back door marked Electrical in English and Arabic. It opened to reveal a long panel covered with rainbows of thin wires, and that pulled open to reveal a small opening in the wall, just barely the height of my shoulder. I had to duck my head down to get through, and I straightened up a hundred years in the past, or at least it felt that way.
Jamaal’s grandfather took us through a narrow lane between the smooth unbroken golden-brown walls of houses rising up on either side. Sail-like shades hung overhead between the buildings, high enough and overlapped so you couldn’t see between to whatever artifice they were using to bring in the sunlight. You couldn’t see into any of the houses: the dark wooden doors were all shut up tight, the windows shuttered; the few courtyards we passed were curtained off with heavy opaque hangings.
This place wasn’t tipping off into the void, like Beijing had been, but I almost would have preferred it otherwise. Instead I felt it under the soles of my thin sandals, the grotesquely soft support beneath, yielding and fleshy. Enclaves are built with malia. You can feel it when you’re there, if you let yourself. And now I knew what I was feeling, what I’d felt in New York, in London. I had to feel nauseatingly sorry now about having howled at Mum, when I’d been a kid, begging her to take me to the safety that any enclave would have given her for the asking, to have her healing inside their walls. Once she’d even gone to visit an old enclave, famous for their own healers, and she’d come back before the end of the day and told me she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t give me what I’d asked her for. And I’d raged and screamed at her for weeks, because she hadn’t been willing to live on top of a putrefying heap of murdered corpses.
All the while, a cool pleasant breeze came steadily in my face with a faint hint of dampness. It wasn’t like London’s magical sunlamps, either; the sun and the wind were real sun and real wind, the same color and flavor as the outside. We reached the end of the alleyway and I saw the sun and air were coming into the enclave through wind towers—square hollow towers built outside a century ago or more, meant to catch and funnel breezes into the walled streets. When they’d brought the old buildings in, they’d left the tops of them outside, sitting on some skyscraper roof I suppose, and added small enchanted mirrors to coax the sunshine in along with the wind.
I knew it even as Jamaal’s grandfather led us towards the middle one and unlocked a massive iron-banded door: the foundation stone was inside. Some sort of twisted irony, having the lovely comfortable breeze blowing at you, the sunlight glowing above, all of it flowing to you over that piece of hideous work. Of course it wasn’t just irony at work. These towers weren’t magical buildings on their own, like the sage’s house in Beijing; they hadn’t been imbued with power by seven generations of wizards. But someone, some mundanes, had built them with the right passionate intent, with care and love: trying to make shelter, a place of coolness and relief in the desert. The founding enclavers had probably done a mystical survey and settled on them as the perfect spot, just the right place to punch a hole through into the void. Just like finding someone strict mana to put under their stone.
I didn’t go inside. “You’ll have to tear the walls down round it,” I said.
The work went a little slowly at first; not because they weren’t desperate to save their enclave, but because they couldn’t quite believe in the oncoming attack. The enclave was still there, still solid all around them. It was a warning of hurricanes with a clear blue sky above stretching for miles in every direction. Even the senior wizards, who’d already agreed with their own mouths, had a hard time putting their metaphysical pickaxes to the tower and opening it up.
Or maybe they just didn’t want to open the tower up, so they wouldn’t have to see what they’d done. Because once they had fairly started, the first large chunk taken out of the doorway and their borrowed sunlight hitting the smooth round disk of iron set there in the floor, so all of them could see it, the pace began to quicken. And by the time they’d got the last bits down, they were all going full-tilt, pulling it down in massive chunks, leaving them in a great massed heap, dust rising in a cloud all round us. But none of the dust clung to the iron disk. It stood stark and heavy against the warm golden stones, and no one went near it.
The rest of the enclavers had already begun making their building-blocks. They didn’t need me to bring out the sutras for that, though, since they had a piece of artifice to do the job. It wasn’t the same as the massive stamping machine in Beijing—that one had been very expensive, I imagine—and looked more like a small oven. But they had a dozen of them lined up: each wizard stepped up to it and put in a double-handful of the dust and broken chunks from the shattered tower, and they put their hands on the oven and sent the mana in, and when the light faded, they reached in and brought out a single flat stone, all of them in different colors, some smaller and some larger, polished and rough.