by Alex Archer
The sound of approaching footsteps echoed from below.
"They're coming," Professor Hu whispered.
As a group, the other members of the archaeological party shrank back against the wall, acting as if they could pull the shadows over themselves and stay hidden.
Annja handed her flashlight to Kelly, then ran her hands along the wall. If it's a door, there has to be a means to open it.
Her questing fingers found a dust-covered rock that jutted out a little from the wall and felt too smooth to be natural.
Annja pulled and twisted, and finally pushed, on the rock. It slid a quarter-inch. Something clicked.
Abruptly, the rectangle set in the wall recessed, then swung inward.
Kelly shined the flashlight into the new hallway. It went on a short distance, then steps cut into the stone descended again.
"We want to go up, not down," Kelly whispered.
The footsteps had almost reached the chamber, growing louder and more threatening.
"We want to get out of here first." Annja took her flashlight, then took the lead.
When everyone was inside, she watched as Roux closed the door behind them. Light flared around the edges of the door.
"Lights off," she ordered. "They'll see us."
Reluctantly, everyone turned off their flashlights.
"Wait to move until I tell you to move. I'm going to explore ahead." Cautiously, Annja trailed a hand along the wall and crept forward, all her other senses alert.
One of the steps clicked underfoot. She threw herself backward as mechanical rumblings sounded ahead of her. Something whisked by overhead. She landed with bruising, bone-jarring force.
"Annja!" Roux cried.
"I'm okay." Annja breathed out, tasting the alkaline dust that caked the floor. She'd made that announcement to herself as much as to Roux. She wondered which of them was more surprised.
She risked a brief flicker of the flashlight and saw three sword blades that had arced overhead and bit into the wall above her. They'd probably only missed her by inches. She saw no rust on the blades, another indication of how the dry environment had preserved everything.
She went more slowly and finally reached the bottom of fourteen steps without further incident. "Fourteen steps," she called out to the others. "There are swords in the wall to your right, but the edges are turned in. You'll be all right."
Only a short distance ahead, the passageway turned to her left and went down again. Unwilling to venture forward without benefit of a light and trusting that the bends would mask her flashlight, Annja switched it on.
The yellow cone of illumination strobed the darkness, revealing a short flight of carved stone steps. Beyond the steps the mummified remains of several men hung in a variety of torture devices.
****
Garin led the way into the large chamber. Everyone, Ngai included, was willing to follow his lead now. The two rooms carved out of the walls interested him at once. Excitement thrummed within him. There was nothing like raiding someone else's treasure vaults.
"Where are they?" Ngai asked.
"Maybe in the rooms." Garin held his pistol. He wouldn't have minded if Annja and Roux had escaped. The old man had only tried to kill him because he knew Garin would have tried to do the same. It really wasn't anything personal.
Garin played his flashlight beam over the chamber, spotting the stairs carved into the chamber's side immediately.
"Get a team up there," he directed. Thoughts of the big hunting rifle in Roux's capable hands weren't pleasant. "Find out where that goes."
Three men split off and trotted up the steps.
Garin watched them.
A moment later they stopped. "The way is blocked," one of the men called back.
"Maintain your positions there," Garin ordered. "You've got a clear field of fire from there." That would help in case they needed to retreat or fall back. If Roux and Annja hadn't escaped, that meant they had to be close by. "The rest of you watch the entrances of those rooms."
Cautiously, Garin approached the first space, expecting to feel a bullet slap into him at any time.
The doorway to the first chamber was narrow and functional, not ornate like the second one. A quick inspection revealed that it was a barracks. Dead men filled the beds.
Garin played his light over the corpses and remembered the stories he'd heard of Sha Wu Ying's betrayal. A momentary fear trickled along his spine when he wondered if the sickness that had claimed so many lives might still be active in the room. Some illnesses hid as spores for years, waiting for the right moment to reactivate.
In five hundred years, Garin had never been sick. He'd convalesced from wounds, of course, and almost died from a few of them. But he'd never been sick. He'd been in London when the Black Death had broken out, had seen the carts roll by filled with corpses.
Now that Joan's sword was whole again, he didn't know how it would affect him. Would he be susceptible to disease?
"Mr. Braden."
The man's voice broke into Garin's reverie. He looked up to find one of Ngai's warriors standing in the doorway. "What?" he snapped.
"You must come to the other room. Quickly."
Cursing, Garin walked out of the barracks and over to the other room.
Ngai stood outside.
"I thought we'd agreed that you would let me lead this," Garin growled.
"We needed to secure this building," Ngai stated calmly. "If the archaeological crew was inside, if Annja Creed and the old man were inside, we needed to know. I acted in both our interests."
It made sense, and it was too late to do anything about it.
"There is a problem." Ngai pointed into the building.
Chapter 35
Garin shined his flashlight into the darkness. A short distance in, a ten-foot section of a corridor had turned sideways, revealing a gap in the floor.
"What happened?" Garin asked.
Ngai looked unhappy. "Two of the men went forward into the corridor. It twisted and turned before they got halfway. They fell."
It was, Garin thought, a well-devised trap.
"Where are those men now?" Garin asked.
Ngai shook his head. "I don't know."
"I'll check," one of the warriors said.
Garin glanced at the man and smiled. "You want to go in there?"
The warrior drew himself up belligerently. "I'm not afraid. Chan was my friend."
"Well, then, by all means go get him." Garin waved the man inside the corridor.
After a brief hesitation, the man walked in. "The trap has already been sprung. There's nothing to be afraid of."
Garin didn't say anything, knowing the man was suddenly more desirous of convincing himself than in convincing anyone else. Garin watched and waited.
The warrior reached the edge of the opening. In the next instant, iron spears spaced six inches apart rocketed from the ceiling along the edge. Three of the spears pierced the warrior. One slid neatly through his skull.
"The first trap set the second one." Garin spoke as calmly as though lecturing a class. "Whoever designed this spent considerable effort at it. Getting through it is going to take time." He looked at Ngai and the remaining members of the security force. "Anybody else in a hurry?"
****
Annja played her flashlight beam over the horrific scene before her.
Manacled to the wall, missing limbs, bound in iron cages, strung upside down from chains, strapped in impossible positions, the corpses were frozen in horror, pain, and despair.
Professor Hu gasped and spoke in Chinese. Several of the dig workers cursed and backed away.
Steeling herself, knowing they couldn't go back the way they'd come without risking discovery, Annja walked into the room. She'd seen things like this before, but they were usually in illustrations.
She took her digital camera from her pack and started taking pictures. Annja couldn't help thinking, Doug, I've got a story for you. The scene was something the
audience for Chasing History's Monsters would love.
"Looks like Sha Wu Ying built his own private chamber of horrors," Roux said solemnly. "He never did have much use for enemies." He paused, reaching out to touch the remains of a man who'd had both eyes pierced by long iron needles. "Except as diversions, of course."
Annja kept going forward, passing horror after gruesome horror, until she reached the other side of the big room. There were no doors, no way out.
"Well," Roux stated calmly, "I'd say it looks like we're at a dead end."
Annja looked at him in the reflection of the flashlight beams.
"I thought it was time for a little levity," Roux said.
"No," Annja told him. "I'll let you know when it's time."
Roux switched to Latin. "We can't leave this place until that item I've come for is secured. Or I know it's destroyed."
"I've got to get these people out of here. Before they get killed down here, either murdered by Ngai's people or some death trap," Annja replied.
Roux nodded, but he clearly wasn't happy about it.
Annja turned to the group. "We'll rest here. At the moment we're safe. Professor Hu, find out how much water we're carrying. We'll need to ration it out, but I want people to get a drink right now." It was important that they feel like they were in control of their situation instead of at its mercy.
Shrugging out of her backpack, Annja tried her phone but wasn't surprised when she couldn't get a signal. Placing her flashlight on the floor beside her, she took out the bone sphere Kelly had been carrying.
After inspecting it, she took it apart.
"What are you doing?" Kelly asked.
"This is a puzzle, right?"
"Yes. When my father left it for me, it was just a collection of loose bones. When I was a little girl, he used to have me put interlocking puzzles together. I figured out the secret of the bones."
"And learned what?"
Kelly looked at her, then sank to the ground opposite her with her legs crossed. She wore her pistols in a double shoulder holster now. "That they would fit together to make a ball."
"Maybe that's because you thought it should," Annja said. "It merely met your expectation." She dropped the freed pieces of shaped bone on the ground in front of her. "What I have found in my research is that often puzzles – truly complicated puzzles that are meant to stymie – have more than one solution. Sometimes they have several. But only one is correct."
Annja spread the pieces, turning them up so the Scythian tamgas stood revealed. She pushed the pieces around and tried to forget that their lives could depend on her ingenuity. I need to take at least long enough to figure out if there's anything here or if I'm wasting time, she thought.
Roux stood behind her, the hunting rifle resting on its butt plate. He peered over her shoulder. "What are you thinking?"
"That there's a reason Sha Wu Ying – Tochardis – hung on to his Scythian heritage."
"If the symbols are linked," Kelly said, "there has to be a progression. A key that unlocks the encryption system."
Annja looked at her.
Kelly shrugged. "I have a little experience with codes."
Excited, Annja brought out her computer and powered it up. She brought up the research she'd done and hoped that her batteries would last. She'd charged it before leaving camp. Then she also hoped the batteries in the flashlights held up.
When she had the page of the known tamgas, Annja read through them. The pile of bones before her had thirty different symbols. She smiled.
Roux looked at her and grinned a little. "What do you think you know?"
"The tamgas collected here cover a generational span. Each one came into being at a different time." Annja pointed to the list. "The research might not be exact, there may be some differences, but that has to be the answer."
Returning her attention to the piles, Annja found one of the oldest tamgas. Then she found one of the next tamgas in line. It didn't fit. Neither did the next three. But the one after that did. After years spent reassembling broken pottery, skeletons, and other artifacts that had almost been lost to hard use, ill care, and time, Annja's brain, eyes and hands moved quickly.
By the time she got the fourth piece locked into place, she knew the final design wasn't going to be a sphere.
****
Garin took the corridor inch by bloody inch. When he was halfway to the dead man transfixed by the spears, he found yet another pressure plate that triggered a third response.
He skirted it and moved on, arriving at the spears thrust down from the ceiling. With them every six inches apart, he couldn't squeeze through. He played his light into the hole under the trick corridor section and saw the rod in the left end that formed a hinge. Recessed areas on the right held spokes that had withdrawn and allowed the section to fall.
It was rather ingenious and Garin had never seen the like. But he couldn't get at a proper angle to see down into the hole.
"Are you down there?" he called out in Chinese. He repeated himself more loudly.
There was no response.
Moving carefully, he turned his attention to the spears that blocked forward passage. He pushed and pulled on them to no avail.
He'd come prepared for such an eventuality. This wasn't the first tomb he'd raided, and he was careful enough to plan that it wouldn't be the last.
He returned to the arched doorway. "I need the cutting torch from the equipment cases."
Most of the equipment had survived the destruction of the helicopter. The explosion had thrown the cargo free.
Ngai wasn't happy. "That will take time to retrieve."
"Then it will take time," Garin said. "If you rush now, you're going to die."
Cursing, Ngai ordered two of his men to get the torch.
****
Annja kept clicking bones together. Once it was big enough, Roux and Kelly helped her, sorting pieces for her and starting smaller sections that she clicked into the bigger one.
The finished piece was nearly three feet long and three-dimensional. It forked like a plant in a few areas, but stayed to a central stalk.
When Annja pieced the tallest bit together, one that had a circular assemblage of bones, she knew what the pieces made.
Everyone was quiet, looking at it.
"There must be some mistake," Roux said after a short time. "That isn't anything."
Annja grinned. "Actually, it is."
"What?"
Annja touched the tallest piece, the one with the circular assembly. "It's a map."
"Impossible," Roux said.
"Not impossible. Quite clever, actually. I don't know that I've ever seen anything like it." Annja tapped the circular assembly. "This is the spiral staircase we came down. The storeroom was atop it." She traced the hallway in the direction they hadn't taken. "There's an exit here, I would guess from the way it looks, but I doubt it's still functional. If I'm oriented right, this one probably came up in Loulan City."
"We've never found evidence of a tunnel like that," Professor Hu said.
"That's why I'm betting it's no longer functional." Annja traced the linked bones the other way, pointing out the large assembly that had to be the chamber they'd found. "This represents the staircase we followed to come up here, with another exit, also blocked. And this is the hallway that led us to this room."
Roux leaned in closer. "If that's right, then what's this?" He tapped a line of bones that led from the room on the opposite wall.
Those bones spiraled around, too, then led to a line that curved around and went to the bigger of the two spaces in the large chamber.
"That," Annja said, "should be another hidden door."
Chapter 36
Annja pushed herself up, put her computer away, and shrugged into her backpack. Excitement buzzed through her and wouldn't be denied despite the fact that they were in hostile surroundings.
Crossing to the back of the room, she felt along the wall. Roux and Kelly joined her, adding
their flashlights to hers.
"This passageway doesn't lead out." Professor Hu pointed at the bone assembly Annja had constructed. "According to this 'map,' it only leads into the center of that big building. We need a way to escape."
"We have a way." Annja continued feeling along the wall and thought she detected a crack. "We can go back out the way we came in."
"Except that Ngai will have posted guards," Kelly said. "Not to mention that we'd have to get through the large chamber unseen. And I don't hold out a lot of hope for that."
"Ngai isn't after us," Hu said. "He wants what's in the building out there. If he gets it, perhaps he'll leave."
"And perhaps he'll take time to kill witnesses," Roux pointed out.
Hu fell silent.
"Either way," Annja said, "it's in our best interest to cut down the odds some. You keep the others safe here, Professor. Roux and I will – "
"I'm not going to be left out of this," Kelly interrupted. "Ngai had my father killed."
"The three of us," Annja amended, "will do what we can to eliminate some of the risk." She took the flare gun and extra flares from the emergency kit. Roux and Kelly had the only firearms. Annja preferred her sword anyway, and she thought if there was any fighting in the large space it would all be up close and personal.
"I found the release." Roux pressed against a spot on the wall.
A section of the wall opened up, revealing a small corridor beyond.
"Stay here," Annja told the professor and the others. "Until we come for you – or you know we won't be coming."
Hu nodded and wished them well.
Stepping into the darkness, flashlight in one hand, Annja reached into the otherwhere and pulled out the sword. Reflected light gleamed along the blade.
"You've really got to show me how you do that," Kelly said quietly.
Annja smiled grimly and continued on.
****
Embers from the impurities in the iron flew in all directions as Garin cut through the spears. The metal glowed red-hot. He wore welder's goggles to protect his eyes and heavy gloves to protect his hands, but the embers burned his face and forearms. His clothing smoldered and he frequently had to stop cutting long enough to put out the biting fires.