I hadn’t been able to say no, I won’t do it. I couldn’t say that, not when Liu was locked up in a room somewhere with a knife at her throat and I had no other way to save her. But I felt the prophecy closing in round me like a physical thing, a thin clammy layer over my skin. She will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world, and what if it started here, with all the best reasons in the world, all the justification I could possibly have needed, and never stopped again?
The taxi dropped us out in front of the elaborate gate, and we went in past the scattering of tourists; we were far enough from the city center that they were relatively thin on the ground. The place was in beautiful repair—fresh paint in vivid colors, golden Buddhas, gilt everywhere—and it was the opposite of that pagan playground in Sintra: people still worshipped here, true believers and not just playing at it, all of them reaching out for something past the limits of reality. The structures were all nestled among old, old trees, and when we got out past the biggest buildings, the more recent ones, we found a whole garden full of stone pagodas, silent among trees and flowering shrubs.
It wasn’t like trying to find the Scholomance doors. There we’d been given the coordinates and sent by a person with authority, and in some sense, it had been our place to begin with, Scholomance graduates one and all. Here, the enclave didn’t want us to find it. We were exactly what the wards were there to guard against, the enemies at the gates. Zheng tried his best, but he wasn’t going to be able to get past the wards easily himself. He wasn’t in Beijing enclave, not yet, and enclave wards are just as keen on keeping out local wizards as distant enemies, if not more so.
His grandmother had told us this gate wasn’t used much anymore. But it was still standing after the attack, because this was the way into the most ancient part of the enclave, the one that had been here for a thousand years. The enclave’s center of gravity had shifted along with the city itself, leaving this part to become the equivalent of London’s upper reaches. Probably only wizards far down in the rankings had still lived in the poky older section, and even they had probably used the main entrance most of the time instead of coming out back here.
We could tell that the entrance was somewhere round here, but we could also have walked round in circles for weeks without actually finding it. The wards were running through the ground beneath our feet, pulsing a bit; I could have started ripping them up wholesale, but if I did that, there seemed reasonable odds I’d send the remaining chunk of Beijing enclave sailing off into the void by accident, with Liu and her family still in it.
But I was running out of other options, as far as I could tell, and then finally Liesel turned round to Orion, who’d been slouching along behind us the whole time, head bowed and silent; he hadn’t said a word since we’d run away from the hostel. If I hadn’t been frantic with worry about Liu and about me, I’d have looked up a stick to hit him with; he was looking as though he could have used it. “Any mals near here will be trying to break through the wards and get in, while the enclave is weakened. Can you try to hunt them?” Liesel asked him.
He lifted his head and blinked at her as if he were vaguely surprised to see her, and then he said, “What?”
“The enclave entrance we are trying to find,” Liesel said pointedly. “Could you follow some mal to find it?”
He stared at her, his brow furrowing a bit, and then he said, “Uh, the entrance over there?” We all stared at him, and then he went past us and out of sight behind one of the pagodas, round a curve of the path that we’d tried at least twice, and when we followed him, he was standing in front of a narrow mostly overgrown footpath leading to a worn old stone pagoda that very much hadn’t been there before. He looked at us with a quality of doubting both our sanity and our general competence.
“Yes,” I said through my teeth. “This entrance over here, which we’ve been trying to find for half an hour. Lake, is it too much to ask you to pay the least bit of attention while we’re doing our best to barge into an enclave uninvited?”
He glared at me. “It’s right there!”
“It wasn’t!” I snapped back, with grace and maturity.
“Is it too much to ask that we now try to get in?” Liesel said pointedly.
The first hitch: our newly discovered pagoda was built of solid stone, and there wasn’t a door to go through at all. There was only a small carved stone opening like a window, and it was a dozen feet off the ground. “Can we pry it open?” I asked Aadhya.