Which was probably what had happened, I realized, as we took a few more cautious steps forward, because there wasn’t any churning horror underfoot. This place didn’t have a whiff of malia to it. This place had never been pushed out into the void. Instead, wizards had built this house, somewhere on the temple grounds, and they’d lived in it, done magic in it, while the rest of the world went by outside, until finally the whole place had quietly slipped all the way out of the world: one of the vanishingly rare natural enclaves in the world.
But Beijing enclave hadn’t been satisfied to stop here. In fact, I doubted any Beijing enclavers still lived here, even the lowliest new recruits. The floor showed recent footprints disturbing thick layers of old dust, and the boxes and chests crammed into the side buildings and spilling out into the courtyard looked like recent additions: attempts to save something from the oncoming wreck. We followed the trail of footprints through the courtyard and into the main building, and they continued on—straight until they met the perfectly unbroken back wall. There was even a half footprint that intersected with it.
I was ready to have a go at bashing an opening, and then Precious gave a squeak, and I looked over to the side: the main hall was partitioned into three sections, and on the left there was an old, thoroughly whiskered man sitting quietly at a low table, in elaborate robes like a costume out of a historical film, doing calligraphy with an ink brush under a glowing orb of light.
He didn’t seem about to leap up and come at us or anything, but on the other hand, he could have been writing out the most massive curse ever known to man. “Wǒ cào,” Zheng said faintly behind my back.
“Do you know who he is?” I hissed at him.
“I, uh, I think that’s the Seventh Sage of Beijing,” Zheng said in barely more than a whisper, still staring. The old man was going serenely on with his brushstrokes as if our presence and time itself didn’t matter. “The one who founded the enclave.”
“This enclave is a thousand years old!” Aadhya said in protest.
“He was the seventh teacher, the one who was here when the house left the world,” Zheng said. “They say he never died. He kept teaching anyone who came here, until one day he just disappeared. There are stories that he comes back sometimes when the enclave is in a lot of trouble, but no one’s really seen him in hundreds of years.”
“Right,” I said, grimly. I hadn’t any idea how powerful you had to be to arrange all that, but it sounded impressive. “Is there anything in these stories about what he does when he turns up?”
Zheng just shrugged a bit helplessly, but the old man had finished the last brushstroke on his paper, and after he carefully set his brush aside, he turned and beckoned to us. None of us moved, not being idiots, but he just sat there waiting with the faintly familiar air of deliberate patience that Mum would occasionally get when I was small and screaming wildly at her about something. I liked it now about as much as I did then, but it was also a bit comforting to me, or at least as comforting as you could get when you’d just broken into the house of a thousand-year-old wizard who pops in and out of reality at will. Anyway, I could see we weren’t getting out of it. We needed to go through the door that should have been standing in this back wall, and I was willing to bet I wasn’t doing that without talking to him first.
So I went over, and he kept emitting patience until I grudgingly sat down on the floor in front of another side of the table, and also until I bowed, not very gracefully. But the attempt satisfied him enough that he said something to me, which I understood about as well as a student in their first year of English would have done with Chaucer. I looked over at Zheng; he looked hard-pressed but said, “I think he said—‘Don’t be afraid, daughter of the golden stones’; does that make sense?”
My arms went to clutch round the sutras, which were still slung across my chest. The sutras, which my dad had wanted, because his family had lived in and lost a Golden Stone enclave. An enclave like this one, an enclave made without malia. “Yes,” I said. It made sense, but it didn’t work; if anything I was more afraid. The old man was looking at me with a little too much gentleness, like he was sorry for me.
He told me something else, and I picked Liu’s name out of it before he held out the huge scroll he’d been painting on. Zheng caught his breath and then said, “He said, ‘This will bring you to Guo Yi Liu!’？”
I took the scroll: the characters were stylized and I wasn’t sure of them—the handful of Chinese spells I knew, Liu had taught me by ear—but I believed him anyway; looking at it felt like looking at a map, something meant to help you get somewhere. The old man nodded to me and said a phrase I did recognize: “Finish what you started.”