The Story of the Stone mlanto-2

by Barry Hughart

  I was in no position to argue with him. The next statues were Egyptian underworld deities, and there were an extraordinary number of them. I nearly jumped out of my sandals when the torchlight picked up a huge threatening mummy holding some kind of hideous creature, but Master Li said it wasn't intended to represent the Laughing Prince, but Osiris and the monster Amemait. He identified a god with the head of a jackal as Anubis and a lady with a feather as Ament, but he seemed to be looking for something else. Finally he stopped and pointed.

  “Toth,” he said. “Grief of Dawn, in your delirium you said, ‘There's the ibis statue,’ and here he is. What we're looking for, incidentally, is a statue with the head of a raven.”

  The only sounds were the lapping of water and the slapping of sandals and the hiss of torches. The shadowed emptiness seemed infinite. I felt the cold chill of eternity pressing down on me and I clutched my axe tighter; statue after statue, secretive, monstrous, eternally guarding the mummy of a laughing madman whose coffin was empty; I would not have been surprised to hear deadly shrieking squeals and see seven black bats flapping overhead.

  Master Li grunted with satisfaction. Moon Boy had bounced torchlight across the water to another statue. It was a woman whose head was that of a raven. “I have no idea what she represents, but Grief of Dawn said, ‘There's the raven and the river,” and just before that she said, ‘There's the goat statue.’ We can assume that she had just come in sight of the river, so start looking for a side passage. If we don't find one here, we'll try the other bank.”

  We were on the right side. Sixty feet farther on we found a side passage with steps leading up, and on the first landing was a statue of a deity with a goat's head and horns. We reached countless landings, and I was willing to bet that we had climbed far above the level of the valley and were inside one of the hills. Finally the steps came to an end. We had reached a semicircular marble floor like that of an anteroom. Four iron doors were set into the stone wall, and beside each one was a stone statue with a porcelain jar in its hands.

  “Back to Egypt,” said Master Li. “These represent the four sons of Horus, whose jars hold organs removed during embalming. The one with the human head is Imstey, who protects the liver. Dog-head Hapi protects the lungs, jackal-head Duamure protects the stomach, and hawk-head Quebhsnuf protects the intestines.” He scratched his nose thoughtfully. “The style isn't Egyptian but Chinese, and I wonder if the Laughing Prince had a different symbolism in mind. Hapi's head resembles that of the Celestial Dog, and perhaps the Laughing Prince felt he deserved a bodyguard equal to that of the Emperor of Heaven.”

  Not everything was stone and rigid, so Master Li reached out and lifted the jar from the statue's hands. The rest of us jumped backward as the door beside the statue slid open. The prince jammed his spear in the frame to keep the door from accidentally closing. We lifted our torches and stepped inside, and Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy cried out in wonder.

  They hadn't seen it before, but we had. We were back inside the formal tomb, and the door was so neatly hidden in the wall that we would never have found it. Now we knew how fresh air could get in and a mummy in a jade suit could be carried out. There was no sign or sound of merry fellows dressed up in motley.

  Nothing had been taken since we had been there. When we looked into the room where the skeletons of poisoned concubines lay in their beds I saw tears trickle down the cheeks of Grief of Dawn. Once she had laughed and cried with these girls, and one terrible day she had run away with one of them. What must it have been like to live in the shadow of Tou Wan, and to be at the command of a lunatic torturer and murderer like the Laughing Prince? Looming over all of them had been the strange power of a mysterious stone, and Master Li had the stone in mind as he led the way to the burial chamber and the exposed mummy of Tou Wan.

  “Ox, see if you can get the jade plates away from the skull,” he said.

  It was a slow process, but finally I managed to break the gold wire at the corners of one of the plates, and after that it went more quickly. White bones appeared, and then I let out a howl of terror and jumped four feet backward. I know nothing of embalming, but somehow the hair had survived. I thought it was a living creature as it bulged out between cracks. I got hold of myself and removed the last plates. Master Li reached out and withdrew the hairpin, and a lustrous black lock, shocking against the bare white bone, slid over my hand like a snake. Master Li swore. The tip of the hairpin had been snapped clean off.

  “The sliver is gone, the piece of stone from the sacristy is gone, and if the Laughing Prince used the third piece for an amulet—hell, he's gone,” Master Li snarled. He scratched his head and frowned. “Odd. Something deep inside my mind had expected this,” he muttered. “In Hell I had Tou Wan say that the stone from her pin had been stolen, possibly by her maid. Why did I suspect the sliver was gone?”

  We had no answer, of course, and Master Li finally shrugged and started back to the exit. “At any rate, we know for certain that the stone was taken before she was encased in jade, which leads us back to the Monks of Mirth who very probably provided perverted prayers at her deathbed. If the order has continued to this day, hidden down here in a cavern, they've had all three pieces of the stone for more than seven hundred fifty years. What in the name of Buddha have they been doing with it?”

  It was another unanswerable question. We went back out to the semi-circular anteroom, and Master Li replaced the jar in the hands of the statue and the door slid shut. The next statue was the one with the head of a jackal. Master Li said that jackals meant many things to ancient Egyptians but that the symbolism here was probably Chinese and we should keep tight hold on our stomachs. He lifted the second jar and the second door slid open, and when we walked inside his warning wasn't good enough. Both Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn threw up, and the prince and I were close to it.

  It was another medical research center, but even worse than the grotto. The dry air had better preserved the graphically illustrated experiments painted on the walls, and it was harder than ever to believe that any man could do such things to human beings. Prince Liu Pao couldn't take his eyes from the iron cages. Skeletons of peasants lay there, patiently awaiting their turn to entertain the Laughing Prince. Master Li's attention was drawn to the charts and formulas that annotated the experiments.

  “Ch'i and shih, the life and motion forces that animate the universe,” he said matter-of-factly. “He was using an extraordinary stone to chart the energy patterns of life as it slowly drained from the bodies of dying peasants. The man who could master the flow of energy would become a god, of course, and if he had also used Ideal Breathing to create the Embryonic Pearl, he would be immortal. Show me a quest for personal immortality and I'll show you a path through a slaughterhouse, and the incense of personal divinity is the stench of other people's corpses. Ox, when I decay to the point where I start dabbling with potency potions and the Elixir of Life, lead me to the Eye of Tranquility and hand me a fishing pole and a jar of worms.”

  He led the way back out and closed the door behind us. The third door was guarded by Quebhsnuf the hawk-headed, and the hawk is the hunter. The Monks of Mirth would have to go out to grab more peasants, and Master Li said it would be a good idea to see if there were other exits in case we had to get out fast. The door slid open and we walked into a long tunnel, lined with side passages.

  Master Li ignored the side passages and continued down the tunnel until we reached a dead end. Then he started back to check the passages one by one. When we turned around, Prince Liu Pao took the lead and confidently stepped into the first dark opening. He disappeared.

  “Aaaarrrrgghh…”

  The scream of terror dropped down and down, echoing ever deeper in the depths of the earth, and then it faded away. The silence was more frightening than the scream.

  I forced my feet to move. Apparently the prince hadn't been paying attention to his sandals, because a black pit opened in the floor just inside the entrance. I knelt and thrust m
y torch down. The drop wasn't vertical. A smooth stone chimney sloped down through solid rock, as slick and even as packed snow. I remembered how the prince had nursed Grief of Dawn, and I saw his warm glorious paintings glowing before my eyes. I sat down and slid my legs over the edge.

  “Can you see him?” Master Li asked.

  “No, sir, but I will,” I said grimly.

  I pushed off before anyone could stop me. Moon Boy yelled, and then all I heard was the air whistling past my ears as I picked up speed. The slick stone was faster than the ice on Boar's Head Hill behind my village. The flame of my torch was streaking behind me like the flags on racing boats during the Dragon Boat Festival, and I shot around another curve, sailed up the smooth wall almost to the ceiling, and skidded back to the center groove at ninety miles an hour. Even in my terror I felt the thrill of excitement. I shot around another curve and sailed up the smooth bank and back down to the center again, and the wild exhilaration of the ride was furthered by the fact that I was racing into pitch blackness, and for all I knew, the chimney was going to branch into a pair of six-inch holes with a jagged fanged rock in the center. The speed was incredible. I careened like a comet around three more curves, and then the slope leveled and lifted, and I was shooting upward when the chimney came to an abrupt end. The next thing I knew I was flying out into the air, and water was rushing beneath me, and I just had the wit to hurl my torch ahead before I plunged down and splashed into a river.

  I came to the surface spouting water, and paddled to the bank. Pitch is hard to put out, and my torch lay there still burning. I had come back to the central cavern and the black river, and I lifted the torch and jumped back in and paddled to the other bank. I walked up and down peering upward, and finally I saw the black hole I had come flying out of.

  “I'm all right!” I yelled. “I don't see the prince, but I'll find him!”

  I began slowly walking along the bank looking for wet marks where the prince had climbed out—or been carried out. I didn't want to think of him landing on the back of his neck of striking a submerged rock. A sound made me whirl around, raising my axe.

  I should have expected it. Master Li was flying through the air. He hit the water like a cormorant, and Grief of Dawn came flying after him and landed like a swan. Moon Boy couldn't do anything that wasn't graceful, and he reminded me of a great dancer at the opera as he turned a somersault, touched his toes, and split the water as cleanly as a knife blade. I helped drag them out, and collected their torches and relit them from mine.

  “Buddha, what a toy!” Master Li said, pounding the side of his head to force water from his ears. “The man who could duplicate that ride in the public parks would be a mandarin inside of a month.”

  “Mandarin? Emperor!” Moon Boy said enthusiastically.

  “I only hope the prince enjoyed it as much as I did,” Grief of Dawn said somberly.

  Master Li was looking for something, and he found it. Ancient iron brackets were set in the wall leading up to the hole of the chimney. “Nature rarely produces something that smooth, and I suspect that nature had some help,” he said. “The river was used to transport heavy objects to this point. They were hoisted to the hole, and windlasses hauled them on sleds up through the rock to the higher levels of the tomb. There should be a staircase very close.”

  We soon found it. Master Li wanted only to be sure there were steps if we needed them, and then we began to search for Prince Liu Pao. We walked up and down the bank, and were about to cross to the far bank when Grief of Dawn's sharp eyes found what we had missed. It was a small scarlet tassel.

  “The prince's tunic has scarlet tassels at the bottom,” she said excitedly.

  We widened the search, and sixty or seventy feet upstream we found another tassel.

  “They've got him,” Master Li said flatly. “If he were free, he would have yelled as Ox did, and he would have immediately looked for a way back up and found that staircase. We have to assume that he's been grabbed by our friends in the funny robes, but has enough movement to leave a trail.”

  At regular intervals we continued to find the tassels that the prince had surreptitiously torn off. Then they stopped. We doubled back, and finally found a side passage that was almost invisible behind a jutting shelf of rock. Another tassel lay just inside the entrance, but Master Li brought us to a halt. His eyes were bleak as he examined the tunnel. Ancient wooden supports and scaffolding were everywhere, and the floor was littered with rocks that had fallen from the ceiling. It was a death trap, and the prince wouldn't conceivably have entered it unless he was being carried. Master Li lowered his voice.

  “Moon Boy, this is your department,” he whispered. “Rather nasty gentlemen may be back in there, and I'd like them to hear us enter without us actually entering.”

  Moon Boy nodded. He sat down at the entrance and took off his sandals and placed his spear so he could scrape it against the wall with his shoulder.

  “Sssshh, quiet!” Master Li whispered—except it wasn't Master Li, but Moon Boy pitching his voice into the tunnel. The sandals in his hands moved rapidly and lightly, and four pairs of feet seemed to move into the tunnel.

  “I don't see anything,” my voice whispered.

  “I don't either,” Grief of Dawn's voice whispered.

  “All clear this way,” Moon Boy whispered in his own voice.

  The sandals were gradually hitting the floor harder, as though the people wearing them were coming closer. Moon Boy moved his shoulder and produced a metallic scrape from the spear, followed by a muffled curse in the voice of Master Li.

  “Is that another tassel?” my voice whispered, louder.

  Deep in the darkness of the tunnel was a sharp snapping sound, followed by the screech of splintering wood. We heard a great crash. The floor shook and waves rippled across the river, and dust and wood splinters billowed from the tunnel mouth. Crash followed crash as though the entire ceiling was collapsing, and it was a long time before the noise stopped and the echoes faded away.

  “Good,” Master Li said quietly. “Officially we're dead, pulverized like corn beneath a grindstone, and they won't be looking for us when we pay them a call. Fortunately, they shouldn't be hard to find.”

  23

  Master Li rode on my back. The staircase was very steep, with innumerable landings, and I was ready to stop and catch my breath when we reached a large cave that had other side passages branching from it. Master Li climbed off and wandered around the cave while Moon Boy and Grief of Dawn and I sat down and rested. Suddenly he made a sharp exclamation, and we got up and ran over to him.

  He had accidentally pushed against a part of the wall that moved. A doorway had opened into another room. All of us had been there before, and we walked inside and looked around at the paymaster's office and the pit where the two dead gardeners lay. The arrows were still stuck in every available piece of wood, and Grief of Dawn bent down and looked closely at one. Her eyes were puzzled when she lifted them.

  “I know, I saw it before,” Master Li said. “Those aren't ancient arrows but relatively modern ones, yet it would have been absolutely impossible for a local boy or girl to have found this place and played here without somebody finding, out about it. No youngster could keep such a secret, unless he had been born with the secret. Happy home life with the Monks of Mirth?”

  He walked over and looked gloomily down into the darkness of the pit in front of the paymaster's desk.

  “I wonder,” he said as though talking to himself. “Were you paid to carry a boy or a girl up steep steps as Ox just carried me? Did you stop at this level to rest, and did the boy or girl pause to play around with a bow and arrows? Did you then carry him up the rest of the way, and did he take another wonderful ride down that slide to the river? And then up for more archery, and up farther for another slide, and so forth? Did you hear or see more than you should, and then stand in front of the desk to receive your pay?”

  The pit was silent. Master Li shrugged and led the way bac
k to the cavern. He got on my back and I began to climb again, and the final steps up from the fourth landing brought us back into the tunnel where we had begun, right beside the passage with the pit and the marvelous stone slide. I had a sudden clear vision of a gardener setting down a laughing child, who ran to the slide and vanished down into darkness.

  Master Li walked rapidly back down the tunnel and out to the little anteroom. One more door remained, and beside it stood the last of the sons of Horus.

  “Imstey, who alone bears a human head,” Master Li said grimly. “We're looking for humans, very unpleasant ones, and we have to hope they didn't leave the prince tied up in that tunnel when they sprang the trap to crush us.”

  He lifted the last jar, and the door swung open. This time we didn't need torches, because a long row of them was already burning in brackets spaced along a tunnel wall. The air was fresh and foul at the same time, and Moon Boy grimaced disgustedly and said something about the virtues of bathing at least every seven years.

  The tunnel sloped sharply downward. Again I took the lead with my axe, and Master Li followed with his throwing knives, and Moon Boy held a spear in one hand and Grief of Dawn's belt with the other, and Grief of Dawn walked backward swinging her bow to cover our rear. We tried to be quieter than mice. The tunnel kept going downward, and gradually the air grew moister as though we were again approaching the river, and I saw two small rocks lying on the tunnel floor. I remembered the rock fall that had supposedly killed us, and glanced nervously at the ceiling. I couldn't see any serious cracks, but a few feet farther on there was a sign that this passage had at least shaken when the other one collapsed. Dust covered the floor, and Master Li grunted with satisfaction. Recent sandal prints were marked in the dust.

  We moved faster. I had to smother a yelp, and I grabbed Master Li's arm and pointed. A crimson tassel lay on the floor. Moon Boy whispered to Grief of Dawn, and she turned and looked and her eyes lit up.