The future council members weren’t slouches. I had barely set foot in the place when they started throwing killing spells straight at me. They’d have done better lobbing nerf balls; I caught the spells more easily. I could have just slung them right back, but I deflected them over my shoulder into the alleyway instead and threw my own spell: a sprightly little charm I’ve got that turns people into stone. The only downside of it is that people really don’t enjoy being stone even if you turn them back after, as I’d discovered from using it to save people’s lives on the obstacle course last year. Under the circumstances, that was a price I was willing to have the council members pay.
Unfortunately, these wizards weren’t voluntarily running an obstacle course with me of their own free will, and they also weren’t terrified kids still in the Scholomance. Almost as soon as I’d cast it, all the statues were flexing and moving as if something inside was moving, working to get out. I’d never chipped away at the stone surface to find out how far down the transformation went, but it clearly wasn’t going to last long. I ran across the room to Liu’s mum and yanked her blindfold and her gag off. She shook her head, having to blink hard up at me to make her eyes come clear, and she flinched back, but I didn’t have the patience to even get upset; I didn’t care if it was because my eyes were glowing ominously or I was giving off my usual aura of dark-sorceress-in-training. “Liu!” I said, even while I flicked the ropes off her wrists. “Where is she? Liú zài nǎlǐ?”
“There,” her mum said, with a gulping ragged sob. “She’s in there.”
I turned to look round the room again, baffled, and then—there was a moment of blank horror, and then I was running to the metal ring, shoving my way through all the flexing and shuddering statues round it, to get the weight off that sinking disk.
The bricks didn’t want to come off. I grabbed the highest one on top, and it was like trying to lift a hundred-pound magnet off a floor made of iron. I had to drag it at a grotesquely slow pace all the way to the inner rim and then drag it up the side without dropping it until I could tip it up and over the edge to go crashing to the floor. By the time I was done with the first brick, the council wizards were already starting to break loose, stone chipping away from fingertips and noses and lips that were gasping for air.
I started in on a second one, my teeth gritted. Liu’s mum ran over and started trying to help me, but she couldn’t shift the bricks as much as a millimeter, no matter how she threw her back into it. She’d got her husband loose first; in a moment he was with us, and her uncle and aunt as well, but even pushing all together they couldn’t move a single one.
“Just keep those other wizards off as long as you can!” I said. Sweat was trickling down my face, dripping off my eyebrows, running down my arms and my back as I dragged the second brick up the rim, my fingers getting slippery. It wasn’t a physical weight. I could tell what the bricks were, as soon as my hands were on them: mana and will.
On the other side of that wall, some wizard had just crammed thirty years or more of mana and work and longing into this brick. They’d built it out of their longing for an enclave, and it didn’t really matter that they didn’t know exactly what was happening in this room. Because they did know, they had to know, that something evil and horrible was going to happen in this room. They were only over there in the other room because they didn’t want to watch. They would surely have rather been somewhere even further away, but they couldn’t be; this spell needed both their power and their intent, so they had to be here, they had to be part of it.
But they had found this way to keep their eyes shut and their noses pinched. They just had to be willing to hand over their work to these eight people, the people who were so hungry for council seats and power that they were willing to get their hands really dirty. And everyone over in that room was willing to do that, just so long as they got to walk out of that other room as enclavers, with their futures of safety and luxury assured. So they wanted their brick to stay right where it was, and that was why I could barely move it.
Liu’s family had put themselves in front of me with their backs to the council members, except for her uncle, who had turned to face the other three. He began leading them in an intricate flowing pattern something like a group of people doing tai chi, but perfectly synchronized. It was a mana-building exercise that they’d clearly practiced together for years and years, slow and very deliberate, and as the council members struggled out of the stone one by one, it snagged them, and they had to join in.