Then he added something a bit more dry, and reached up and touched the glowing golden ball of light with a finger. It went out instantly; by the time my eyes had adjusted, he wasn’t there anymore; only the table, thick with untroubled dust, and the scroll hanging between my hands.
“Uh, I think he said—‘I’m tired of demons in my house’？” Zheng said, doubtfully.
“Who wouldn’t be,” I muttered, as I scrambled up. I ran back to the blank wall and put the scroll up against it. As soon as I did, the letters glowed with the golden light, and then the whole paper illuminated round the border and burnt up in a single rush, leaving a tidy narrow rectangle opening out to a tidy narrow alleyway—and it was an alleyway, not a corridor; the top of it was open to the void—with the walls on either side broken up with doorways that were standing in shadow. All the lanterns hanging next to them were dark, except a single gleaming of red outside one door at the very end.
I stepped through the opening while the edges were still glowing with embers, and as I did the whole alleyway blurred towards me, or I blurred through it, and I staggered a bit as my foot came down right in front of the door with the lit lantern. I waved my arms wildly to get my balance and keep from tumbling down: just past the door, the alleyway plunged down an ink-dark stairway that looked a great deal like the Beijing metro.
A low uneasy rumbling was coming up out of it, and underneath me the floor felt as though it was all bending away, a deep creaking. Like in the Scholomance: a giant just barely holding on by its fingers, on to the deep-rooted strength of the one small house back there. But the weight was too unbalanced. I didn’t know how much of Beijing enclave was down there, but it was clearly the vast majority of the place. A thousand years ago, the sage’s house had slipped out of the world all on its own, and become the first foothold in the void. Other wizards had slowly expanded it little by little, adding on this long alleyway full of houses, building a community. Then—a few decades ago, they’d built themselves a major expansion based in the bustle of modern-day Beijing’s city center, just barely linked back here by a metro line of their very own. There on the other end would be the laboratories, the libraries, the massive blocks of flats. All of them now on the verge of toppling away into the void.
And on the other side of the door in front of me, I could hear heavy rhythmic thumps coming at regular intervals, each one sending trembling waves through the ground: some kind of major arcana going. Whatever spell they were working on to try to save the enclave. The spell that was going to hurt Liu.
I looked towards the sage’s house: everyone else was still in there, Orion framed inside the singed rectangle looking out at me. His knee was suspended in midair, caught in the motion of taking a step, frozen. Whatever magic the sage had put on the scroll, apparently it had only been good for one, and there must have been some sort of delaying spell on the alleyway.
I had the strong suspicion that the sage had only shown up to offer his help because he’d known we wouldn’t be in time without it. Anyway, I wasn’t going to wait around and make certain. The door was locked, but I put my hands on the framing posts on either side of the doorway and spoke an incantation that a Roman maleficer had used to rip open a mystically fortified Druidic site during Caesar’s wars, so he could get at the mana store they’d kept inside. Not at all the spell you wanted when the lock on your dormitory room had jammed and you were trying to get to the cafeteria for breakfast, which was when the Scholomance had handed me that one, but I was grateful for it now, because the wooden door instantly exploded before me, spraying splinters over the chamber at high velocity.
The room beyond wasn’t very impressive: round and small, and the one tiny spell-globe was so dim that the lantern outside the door was letting in more light, striping a bright-red-tinged rectangle into the space. It fell over Liu’s mum and dad, and her aunt and uncle with them. She’d shown me a tiny photo of them in the Scholomance, but even without that, they would have been easy to pick out, because they were all tied with their backs and elbows and wrists together, securely gagged and blindfolded, on top of a rough metal grating very precariously placed over what looked like a massive sewer opening plunging out of sight.
There were eight other wizards in the room—the council-to-be of the new enclave, I strongly presumed—all busily at work on a piece of artifice a short distance away from the sewer: a round metal cylinder the size of a small table. The outer shell of it was thin—it looked like a bigger version of the sort of ring mold you’d use to construct an elaborate dessert, made of glossy black metal with narrow slots punched through all the way round the bottom to let air out. Inside the ring, there was a disk made of blue-tinged metal that was being pressed down inside the ring underneath the weight of small bricks. One of the council wizards was taking bricks from a small stack and laying them on top one at a time, neatly, filling in the circle. The others were ferrying more of the bricks over from a hatch in the wall that flipped back and forth like a postbox. Even as I came bursting into the room, I saw it go over empty, and come back full, as if someone had popped a brick in on the other side, from a room where no one could see what was happening in this one.