I had to look away because I could feel it trying to nab me, too. I put my head down concentrating and kept dragging the brick up the side, millimeter by millimeter. It was going to take an agonizingly long time to get Liu out, if I could do it at all. They’d already filled the top of the disk almost halfway. The room was so dim I couldn’t be sure, but there might have been something wet trickling out of those slots at the bottom, those slots that hadn’t only been made to let out air. I wanted to burst into tears. “I’m coming, Liu, hold on,” I panted out, in case she could hear me. “I’m coming. Precious! Precious, can you see her?”
Precious put her head out of my pocket and jumped down to the disk, and then without even going down the side, she squeaked up at me urgently and put her paw down on the surface, and her white fur started glowing, literally. In the light, I could see the disk was engraved all over in Chinese characters.
I could make out enough of them to know that it wasn’t a single spell. It was like the gates of the Scholomance: a compilation of spells all doing the same thing, reinforcing one another, and even before Precious’s light faded out, I’d picked out the same phrases being repeated over and over in different ones: eternal life, longevity, deathlessness, and I understood in a mingling of relief and rage: Liu was alive in there. Because she wasn’t meant to get out of this too early. She was meant to die slowly. Even if her body was being shattered and her hips and shoulders had been crushed under the weight of all these bricks, these fucking bricks that wouldn’t move, and I gave a howl of rage and heaved the second brick up and over the edge. The disk even shifted slightly up, a millimeter maybe.
But that was only the second brick. My arms and back and legs were all shaking with effort, and my time was running out. Three of the council members had started chanting an incantation: they were still being forced to go along with the mana-building exercise, but it wasn’t going to stop them casting whatever they were doing, and from the words I could overhear, it wasn’t going to be very nice. These strangers who were trying to murder my friend, these strangers who agreed with Ophelia in New York, with Christopher Martel in London, with Sir Alfred Fucking Cooper Browning and the rulers and founders of every other enclave in the world, that it was worth doing this one horrible thing to someone else, to avoid all the other horrible things that might happen to them.
I didn’t know what to do and I knew exactly what to do. I could have pointed at any one of them and just whacked them off the face of the earth with a careless flick of my hand, the insignificant insects that they were, troubling me. I could have sludged the marrow of their bones and let it run out of their bodies while they collapsed, writhing and screaming, the way they’d been about to do to Liu. I could have clawed their brains out of their skulls and made them into the obedient minions they had made out of everyone in that other room who’d agreed to hand her over to be mangled in this ritual.
Instead I turned to the wall with the postbox hatch in it. It was made of stone, so my Roman spell wouldn’t do, but that was all right. We were inside an enclave, and that wall was barely even there; it was a polite fiction, a curtain for all of them to hide behind, in both directions, from each other and from what they were doing. “à la mort,” I said, and waved the whole thing out of existence.
Liu’s mum gave a squawk of protest. On the other side of the wall was a massive auditorium, nearly the size of the Maleficaria Studies room back at school, and it was full of wizards sitting in small orderly groups. The last few were waiting to come down to a stamping machine artifice that was making the bricks—which apparently weren’t the product of one wizard, but ten of them.
The council members had stopped chanting their spell, possibly out of bewilderment that I’d done anything this apparently stupid; the wizards on the other side were all still frozen in surprise and confusion. They were all laid out in the amphitheater as tidy as you like. For one instant I had a beautifully clear opening for anything I wanted to do, to any and all of them.
I clenched my hands into fists at my sides and used the stupid little compulsion spell I’d made up as a furious child, the one I’d eventually stopped using because every time I tried it, Mum gently untangled it before I could get anywhere with it, and then sat me down for a really long conversation about why we couldn’t force people to do what we wanted, which obviously every last one of these wankers had missed. “Do as I say, and not as I do, and what I want, I’ll make you,” I chanted, clearly a masterpiece of high arcana, only I pushed it out at all of them with a massive wall of New York’s mana behind it, and then I said in Chinese, “And what I want is for you to stop and listen to me, so I don’t have to kill you all!”