Shay threw open her door. “That’s promising.”
“Unless the magic turns people into iguanas,” James suggested with a grin. “Then it’d make sense it wouldn’t affect iguanas.”
“Hey, as long as I’m not dead I don’t care. I’ll pay you if you get me turned back.” Shay opened the back door of the Forerunner and pulled out a backpack and a utility belt. She already had a gun with several magazines. Unlike Brownstone, she didn’t expect that she’d be killing any armies anytime soon.
James opened his door. “Finally, something other than sitting around.”
“Stop,” Shay called.
The bounty hunter turned to look at her.
“From what I’ve read, this place might have a lot of traps and shit,” Shay explained with a sigh. “And I’m not worried about any bad guys inside, so you just stay here. You’re great at killing bad guys, Brownstone, I’ll give you that, but I think it’d be pretty embarrassing if you died in some six-hundred-year-old trap.”
“Seriously?” James grunted. He obviously didn’t like being on the bench, but Shay wasn’t about to budge on this.
She slipped on the belt. “I’ll deal with what’s inside. Just make sure that if I come running out, no one pulls a fucking Indiana Jones on me where I run into guns.”
“Carlos Rodriguez always uses drones to deal with that sort of thing,” James offered.
“Yeah, and I always wondered how he was getting such great signal to his drones when he’s deep in some cave.” Shay shook her head and finished adjusting her backpack.
“If you can use a movie example, so can I,” James told her. “Hey, I wonder if there really is some big warehouse where the government keeps ancient magical artifacts.”
“Probably.” Shay closed the back door and then leaned into the driver’s side. “Look, Brownstone, just so you know… This might not be the final site.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of the background research suggests this might only lead me to another place. Just saying there’s a good chance this might not end today. I wasn’t sure before, because I thought they might have just been speaking metaphorically. That’s why I didn’t mention it. But now that I see the magic around it, I’m guessing it’s a bigger chance.”
James shrugged. “Gotta raise the staff at the right time and see where it shines?”
Shay snickered. “Something like that.” She gestured behind them into the empty dry wilderness. “Just make sure no one sneaks up on us, Nazis or otherwise.”
“Go find your magic Chinese weapon or a map or whatever shit you need,” James suggested. “And I’ll deal with anyone else.”
“Don’t kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”
The bounty hunter’s only response was a grunt.
The field archaeologist slammed the driver door shut and took a deep breath, which she held until she passed through the magical field. There was no pain or discomfort, and best as she could tell she was still hot as ever and not an iguana.
Shay grinned and waved to Brownstone. He gave her a little salute, and she turned to hurry toward the caves.
They’d parked close enough that the initial hike only took ten minutes, though the vehicle and her backup were mere specks in the distance.
Three different caves confronted her now. If she’d had any doubts about being in the right spot, the faded classical Chinese characters carved above the caves erased them. Despite the dry climate, the centuries of wind and dust had taken their toll.
Shay reached into a pocket in her backpack and pulled out her augmented-reality interface goggles. Shay hated the things, since they were about as fashionable as Brownstone’s coat, but they were still useful. A few quick taps on her phone and they were ready to help earn their cost.
“Let’s see how well this translation program works.”
The tomb raider might lack Brownstone’s photographic memory, but she wasn’t a slouch in the foreign language department. Unfortunately, however, she’d never studied any Chinese dialect, let alone classical Chinese.
Words overlaid some of the ancient Chinese characters inside the goggles, though most remained unintelligible.
... blade… honorable and strong…
Pass… find… noble…
Stand… speak… Mandate of the Heavens.
“Seems like the right spot, at least,” Shay mumbled.
Now she just needed to figure out which cave contained either the treasure or the information she needed for the next leg of her journey.
Shay stepped closer to the caves’ mouths.
“Command: adjust lighting filter by ten percent. Command: add contrast overlay.”
The characters popped a bit more, but not enough to help with the translation. Something else caught her eye, though; something much smaller.
Shay closed on the first cave mouth and looked up. There were light scratches next to each character; intricate series of lines.
“Command: heighten contrast by ten percent.” She waited. “Command: heighten contrast by thirty percent.”
They weren’t just lines. She recognized the patterns. They were from the I Ching. Every Taoist priest worth a damn would have been familiar with the ancient book. The lines formed patterns called hexagrams that were used for divination.
“These have to be here for a reason,” Shay murmured, tapping her lips. She tried to think like an ancient Chinese priest, then laughed. “I can barely figure out what modern men are thinking.”
The admiral’s fleet would have contained both Buddhist and Taoist priests, but all her information suggested the Taoist priests had been responsible for the Green Dragon Crescent Blade.
Shay sucked in a breath. The men had landed in a strange and foreign land, an area they were sure that no one like them had ever visited. They’d gone through the trouble of erecting a powerful concealment barrier, but they couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t stop locals from stumbling upon the caves if they already knew about them. The priests would have wanted to make sure that they could recover the ancient relic, though…or at least that someone else could. Burying the entire complex would have made that impossible, since they wouldn’t have been so deluded as to think a huge imperial force could be sent across the ocean. That suggested traps and magical means of hiding the artifact.
Knowledge. They knew no one native to this part of the world would understand their culture or methods. They’d probably planned to recover it much sooner, not six hundred years later when we had the internet to make it easier.
Shay frowned slightly. The resurgence of magic on Earth meant their mystical defenses might even be stronger than when the priests set them up.
She shook her head. She didn’t have time to worry about that. First she had to figure out which cave contained her target.
A careful examination of the hexagrams revealed three sets of twenty-two, for a total of sixty-six. Shay frowned. Something was wrong. There should have been only sixty-four hexagrams. The I Ching was far older than the fifteenth century, so she was sure this wasn’t an issue of lost hexagrams.
The minutes passed as she painstakingly checked each hexagram with the help of an app on her phone. The hexagrams on the first two caves were normal, but over the right-hand cave, she found duplicates of the patterns for radiance and force.
Either the priests had gotten sloppy, or they had been trying to leave a clue that they thought only an educated Taoist priest could decipher.
Good enough for me, Shay thought, stepping toward the cave on the right. She pulled out a small flashlight and strapped it to her arm.
The tomb raider spared one last glance at the characters above the cave before entering. Her light caught site of a skeleton about thirty feet in, an iron spearhead embedded deep in its skull and a rib. The clothes had long ago rotted, but the poor bastard provided proof that she wasn’t the first person to try and recover the treasure.
She grabbed a handful of small but dense weights from her utilit
y belt. Unlike her recent trip to Peru, several of her preliminary readings had suggested the place was likely trapped, meaning she needed to exercise far more caution than she had when collecting the Rod of Supay.
Shay tossed the weights in a wide arc. One landed with a soft clunk, as if metal met metal.
Sighing, the archaeologist knelt and pulled off her backpack, then rummaged around before pulling out a tiny drone. A few quick taps sent her drone aloft and interfaced it with her goggles.
“Command: filter one.” Shay took a step forward. The drone moved behind her, its buzz sounding like the world’s largest mosquito. It transmitted its feed to the corner of her goggles. “Command: filter two.”
Not exactly X-ray vision, but the new filter did let her detect density differentials on the ground’s surface. There were some sort of metal plates underneath the dirt, and a series of them continued deeper into the cave. Not stepping on them would probably help keep her alive.
“Jeeze, guys, it’s like you moldy old assholes were trying to hide some powerful ancient magical weapon or something.” She grinned as she made her way deeper into the cave. “Too bad technology is its own kind of magic.”
Father O’Banion sighed. The drinks he’d pounded had filled him with whimsy and happiness…and then two assholes had strolled back into his bar and ruined everything. It was the same slick-suit-and-hair crew from before. He’d hoped his earlier warnings would have frightened them off, but some people obviously needed to be reminded.
He rose from his table and headed to the bar.
“Give me two Irish Stouts.”
Toby, the bartender, laughed. “Now you’re going to start double-fisting it? That’s a lot, even for you.”
Father O’Banion chuckled. “That’s a good idea, lad, but these aren’t for me.”
“Okay, one second.” The bartender poured the beers and set them on the bar.
The older man picked them up and headed straight toward the two men at the table, not even bothering to try and navigate through the dense crowd. In the Leanan Sídhe, no regular customer would be party to spilling one of Father O’Banion’s drinks. In a carefully choreographed dance people cleared out of his way at the last moment, until finally he arrived at the spies’ table with a broad smile on his face.
The men looked up. Irritation and recognition spread on their faces.
“What do you want, old man?”
Father O’Banion put the drinks down. “These are for you, and might I suggest a little reading material?”
“Reading material?”
“Aye, lad. Just look up the local news. King Pyro and James Brownstone. I think you’ll find it most enlightening.”
Without another word, Father O’Banion sauntered toward his own table, not looking back at the men. When he finally took his seat and looked back the men were gone, their beers untouched.
“They didn’t drink their beers? Now that was just wasteful.” He stood again. No reason to let them go to waste.
James slumped against the passenger door, trying to convince himself not to call Alison. Now that they were out of cell range he’d have to use his satellite backup, and he idly wondered how expensive an international satellite call would be.
“I have the money,” he mumbled to himself. “And it’s not that overprotective. It’s a weird-ass magic school. It’d be strange not to be overprotective. What does she know? Shay doesn’t have a kid.”
Not that James technically did either, but he was responsible for one.
A flash in the side mirror caught his attention, and when he glanced at the rearview mirror there was plume of dust in the distance. Getting caught in a dust storm wouldn’t be great for the vehicle, but it’d survive.
James narrowed his eyes. The plume was far too narrow to be a storm.
The bounty hunter hurried out of the car and pulled out a small pair of binoculars. The people with their fancy AR goggles and drones didn’t accept how easily those things could break. A good pair of binoculars would go a lot farther, and couldn’t be taken out by a jammer or EMP.
James lifted the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted them. Two vehicles barreled toward his location, old open-bed trucks filled with men. The angry-looking bandana-wearing men with their AKs and pistols obviously weren’t there for sightseeing. One bastard even held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
“These guys came to play.” James grinned. “And here I thought I was going to be bored.”
The bounty hunter hopped in the Forerunner and quickly drove behind a nearby rocky outcrop. Leaving it out in the open to get blown to bits was a bad idea. For one thing, Shay would lose her deposit, and he’d probably have to listen to her bitch about it for days.
The dust plume grew closer, and James gave himself a quick pat-down.
“See, Shay?” James mumbled. “You can never be too prepared.”
15
Shay managed to finish her game of ancient deathtrap hopscotch far quicker than she would have ever guessed. Her tech helped; she couldn’t see how someone without her equipment would have been able to avoid the traps. A couple more skeletons entangled with spearheads provided proof of her hypothesis.
Poor sonsabitches. Wonder if they were locals, or some other guys from the admiral’s fleet.
The cave narrowed and split off in two directions. No skeletons or traps were obvious in either, so Shay held her breath and listened. A quiet hum and the faint sound of running water reached her ears from one of the paths and she stalked that way slowly, searching for any sign of traps or angry-Taoist-priest ghosts.
The real trouble was finding the place. I’m already ninety percent to my prize just by being in here and not getting killed by the first trap. I mean, how well could they have fortified this place so far from home?
Shay’s smug satisfaction vanished as her path opened into a large cavern with a huge drop into an inky darkness. The sound of running water had increased, swallowing the earlier hum, so she suspected an underground river lay at the bottom of the cavern.
The barest hints of rotted rope and wood suggested there’d once been a bridge stretching across the cavern to a stalagmite-covered ledge on other side. Maybe if she’d shown up a few centuries earlier, the bridge might have still been around.
How the hell did they even build a bridge in here? It’s not like there were a bunch of trees outside to harvest wood from. Some sort of magic?
Worrying about mysterious feats of construction would have to wait, since the answer wouldn’t help her get to the other side of the cavern. It was too far to risk jumping.
Shay peered into the darkness as her flashlight beam pierced it. “Dammit, why can’t there be a convenient mine cart or giant eagles or something?”
The obstacle was annoying, but not insurmountable.
The field archaeologist sighed and unzipped her backpack. A little feeling around inside netted her a coil of kernmantle rope with a hook already attached. The next couple of minutes passed as she searched for a good place to anchor her hook. Jumping from a ledge without careful planning would just end up with her taking a swim in some pitch-black underground river.
She preferred to aim high rather than going low and climbing up. There was more margin for error with the former than the latter.
Shay considered and discarded the idea that she might be going the wrong way. She saw no reason that someone would build a bridge in a cavern if it led to a dead end, especially when they were not planning for long-term storage of the artifact.
Unless they were trying to trick people like me? Then again, they had the magic and the traps. A misleading bridge seems kind of boring.
Fortune favored Shay, and she selected a good place to aim her hook. Hanging onto one end, she started twirling the rope and attached hook to build up speed, and after a quick release the rope and hook sailed through the air and landed on her rock of choice. The tomb raider pulled on the rope to make sure the hook was secure.
“Nice throw, if I d
o say so myself.”
A big disadvantage of exploring the cave by herself was that Brownstone wasn’t there to observe her field archaeology excellence or listen to her loudly extol it. He was probably sitting in the car feeling sad about Alison.
For a tough guy, he sure was a softie inside.
Shay tugged on the rope a few more times and then backed up, the other end of the rope securely clutched in her hands. She darted forward and leapt from her side of the precipice, her momentum carrying her forward and her rope preventing gravity from sending her to her death.
Panic replaced the exhilaration of leaping through the darkened cavern when she spotted a thin, almost invisible line stretched across the space in front of her only a second before she hit it. The line snapped with no effort, and she wasn’t surprised when a loud boom shook the cavern a moment later.
“Not good. So not good.”
Shay glanced behind her, her stomach tightening. Only her years of training as a killer before being a tomb raider helped her maintain her calm.
A slender gold and red dragon with fire and smoke shooting behind it zipped past. The creature slammed into the wall on the other side and exploded, and debris showered Shay as she landed on a ledge under her target rock. She clutched the rope tighter, worried that the hook had been knocked loose by the explosion. She really didn’t want to lose the rope.
Her face stinging, Shay blinked as she stared into the darkness. A strangely familiar acrid smell hung in the air.
“What. The. Fuck?”
She stood there for a good thirty seconds trying to process what had just happened, because it looked like she’d hit a tripwire and a small dragon had tried to ambush her, only to explode.
You mad, bro? Just because you didn’t kill me?
Her abrupt laugh echoed through the cavern.
No, not a dragon, but an ancient rocket. She wasn’t sure if the trap had still worked because of luck, good design, magic, or some combination of all three. She kind of doubted gunpowder and explosives would have lasted that long without a little magic, but she wasn’t a chemist. Her expertise with weapons was limited to the pointing, shooting, and stabbing parts.
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