I meant it with total sincerity, and since they didn’t want me to kill them all either, that had the extremely helpful quality of aligning their self-interest with my compulsion. A total silence descended as everyone stopped; even the ordinary background rustling of clothing and faint coughs went still.
I dragged in a deep breath and gestured to the cylinder pit. “This is what you’re doing. You’ve put a living girl inside that thing, someone who trusted you, someone who wanted to help you, and you’re crushing her slowly. You’re all doing it. All of you. That’s what you’re doing to make your enclave. That’s what you’re putting at the very heart of it. Torture, and pain, and betrayal, and—”
I stopped. I’d been going to say murder, only I understood, suddenly, with a terrible nauseating clarity, that murder was the one thing that wasn’t on the agenda at all. Of course it wasn’t. Deathlessness, eternal life, longevity.
“A maw-mouth,” I said. The words came out of my mouth small and quiet, and they dropped into the silence of the room like stones going into a deep well. “You’re making a maw-mouth.”
It was obvious once I knew. The tiny slots cut in the bottom of the cylinder, for something to come oozing out. The sewer grating where they’d tied up four people, bound and gagged so they couldn’t shield themselves against the hungry newborn monster looking for its first meal. And then it would drop through the grate while it digested. Tidy. You wouldn’t have wanted it to turn round and have a go at the council members, after all. Surely the sewer dumped out somewhere into the real world, maybe into the streets of Beijing, where it would go creeping away to hunt amongst the independent wizards of the city, all those poor bastards hovering round the enclave hoping for work.
And as soon as I knew what they were doing, I also knew why. A maw-mouth took everything. It extracted all the mana you could make, everything that came from your desperate failing struggle to keep it out of you, and it kept squeezing you forever. It didn’t just get you and your agony, it got all the mana your agony could ever build, borrowed in advance. And they needed that to build an enclave…because the final working had to be done all in one go, by a single wizard.
I’d noticed that bit ages ago in the Golden Stone sutras: one voice calling to the void, in a single breath. A circle of wizards wouldn’t do. One caster only, convincing the void that no, really, this one part of it was fixed and permanent, even though the void was the exact opposite, and wanted to be nothing and everything all at once. Channeling a vast torrent of mana into that persuasion.
I simply hadn’t paid that particular constraint much attention, because it wasn’t going to be my problem. My problem was going to be making certain I didn’t get anything wrong out of the twenty-six different incantations that had to be combined into the casting. That was what I’d been working on, trying to learn. As soon as I’d got that nailed down, just hand me a truckload of mana and let me go, and I’d knock you up an enclave quick as you like.
But of course it would have been a problem for any other wizard in the entire world. It made sense, after all, of why the sutras had been lost. That ancient long-ago wizard who’d written the sutras, who’d gone round India knocking up the first-ever constructed enclaves for other wizards—he’d been like me, a tertiary-order entity, or at any rate someone who could cast that great final working. So even though he’d written it down for others, it had been useless, because no one else could make it work.
Those other wizards still desperately wanted to build enclaves of their own, though. Purochana had shown them it could be done, you could make an enclave, so once they’d understood the general idea, they’d tried and tried and eventually some sufficiently clever and vicious bastard had found a solution. A way to get that much mana through a single wizard, to narrow the power down to that one singular point. Alas, the process produced a very unfortunate side effect, but oh well. You could shoo that nasty maw-mouth right out to fend for itself. And if it fended for itself by eating other wizards’ children, well, from inside your tidy new enclave you’d never have to hear them screaming.
There were tears running down my face. I wasn’t the only one. No one else was saying a word, but there was an amphitheater of faces staring down at me full of horror, refusal, recoiling. I could hear my own ragged choked breathing rasping back at me off the walls, mingled with theirs. The way you heard a maw-mouth coming from a distance, full of strangled human voices.