Kai, who’d been growing anxious, couldn’t contain himself anymore and snapped at Julie to skip the background and read ahead to the part that would help us escape.
“The last section,” Julie continued, “is addressed to the four people who would enter the seer’s tomb. His words say that four survivors will find their way here after the mountain splits apart, one of whom will be a descendant of the seer’s tribe.”
“Descendant?” I exclaimed. “Seeing as he doesn’t name names, I reckon it’s most likely to be you. After all, Kai and I never dreamed about the ghost-hole. Besides, you seem to have inherited some of the seer’s powers, having a vision of the place you’d end up before getting there.”
“That’s right,” Kai chimed in. “It could only be you, Miss Yang. I’ve only just noticed, but your nose is hooked, like an eagle’s beak, and your eyes are very slightly blue. At first I thought that was because you’d spent too long in America, but it makes more sense that you have this tribe’s blood in you, and you’re not fully Chinese.”
Afraid that Kai’s nonsense would annoy Julie, I quickly said, “This would be a wonderful tribe to descend from. But then your surname wouldn’t be Yang, would it?”
Julie seemed unable to absorb any of this. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Everyone in my family history is Chinese. Maybe it’s from my mother? My grandfather on her side has an eagle nose, curved even more than mine. Anyway, it doesn’t matter which person the seer was referring to. That’s not important at the moment. What’s most urgent is getting out of here. The next bit of the message says that the seer will point out an escape route for his descendant, but whatever happens, not to let the sheepskin book fall to the ground. If that happens, a sandstorm will be unleashed, swallowing Jingjue City and the Zaklaman Mountains all over again. And this time the spirit mountains will remain buried till the end of time.”
“Then you’d better hold on tight to that book!” I cried out. “If the sandstorm happens before we’ve figured a way out, we’ll be buried along with the mountain. What does it say next?”
“That was the last bit,” said Julie. “There’s nothing after that. The seer must have left a clue somewhere else. Maybe check his body?” As she spoke, she was opening her rucksack to put the book in, where it would hopefully be safe.
Just then, the professor lurched forward, taking me and Kai by surprise. Letting out a peculiar yelp, he shook us off with superhuman strength and lunged at Julie. “Don’t think you’re ever getting out of here!” he screamed.
The three of us froze, not only because his shrieks had reached earsplitting levels, but because it was now very clear that his voice sounded exactly like Little Ye’s.
In the couple of seconds before we could react, the professor reached Julie and knocked the book out of her hands.
There was nothing for it now—our doom was only seconds away. I did the only thing I could, and shot my leg forward, kicking the book into the air like a soccer ball.
Luckily, I managed to send it in Kai’s direction, but it was coming at too low an angle for him to reach. So he kicked it too.
The book was now rising in an arc back toward Julie. She stretched out her arms, but the professor leaped in front of her, caught hold of it, and raised it high to drop it onto the ground.
A huge figure sped in front of my eyes. It was Kai, who threw his bulky weight at Professor Chen. With a crash, he tackled the professor.
I sprinted over and grabbed what was now a ticking time bomb from the professor’s hands. This sheepskin book, which would decide all our fates, still hadn’t touched the ground once.
Julie shoved Kai roughly off the old man. “Are you trying to crush the poor guy? Think about his age. If anything happens to him, I’m holding you responsible.” She began massaging his acupuncture points, trying to revive him. Looking at his squashed face, I could see why she was concerned—Kai was very large, after all, for a frail bookworm to take his full weight.
Very carefully, I placed the book in the pouch that hung from my waist, then turned to the other two. “Did you notice that something really strange is going on with the professor? I could swear that a minute ago, he sounded like—”
“That’s right,” said Kai. “Could it be that Little Ye’s spirit entered him? She died horribly. Maybe she’s afraid we’ll all leave and she’ll be stuck here alone.”
“Stop talking rubbish,” I growled. “We’re human, and she’s a ghost. If she wants to keep us trapped here for company, that’s just selfish.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Julie said brusquely. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Obviously, the professor’s been through too much of a shock and isn’t right in his mind. That’s why he’s behaving oddly. Anyway, if you’re so sure it’s a spirit, why wouldn’t it have entered one of us instead?”
“That shows how much you know,” I retorted. “I’ve got a black donkey hoof on me, and so does Kai. Your ancestral mojin charm is hanging around your neck. Only the professor is completely unprotected, and he was already disoriented, therefore vulnerable to possession. It would have been easy for her to take him. If you don’t believe me, why not put this donkey hoof in his mouth? Then we’ll know for sure whether or not he’s possessed.”
Julie swiped my offer away. “And let him get food poisoning from that? No, thank you! Shove it in your own mouth!”
Thinking she probably didn’t intend to pay us at this point, I figured we had nothing to lose. The most important thing was to survive. A moment’s carelessness could put us in deep danger. I had to use the black donkey hoof to find out what was going on with the professor. His behavior a moment ago had been too bizarre to be explained away as simple confusion.
Ignoring Julie’s attempts to block me, I inserted the hoof between Professor Chen’s lips and pushed it in. His viciousness of a short while ago had slipped away, and he was back to a more placid madness. When the hoof touched his teeth, he opened them wide and gnawed, grinning away.
“Are you trying to torture him to death?” cried Julie. “Get that thing away from him!” I quickly retrieved the hoof. No reaction from the old man—it looked like I’d been wrong.
And then, in a moment of stillness, we all recovered from the adrenaline-filled few minutes we’d just been through. When we were calm enough to remember the seer’s indication that he’d left us clues to get out of this place, we gathered around his desiccated body, determined not to miss a single hint.
We searched for a long time, but there was no sign of anything helpful. The seer’s remains didn’t hold anything remotely like a symbol, a map, an image, even a word. Kai went so far as to run his hands over the corpse’s old bones, but there was nothing to be found.
The seer was sitting cross-legged on the ground, one hand resting on the side of the stone box, the other on his knee. We examined his fingers, but they weren’t pointing anywhere. Apart from his clothes, which crumbled to powder at the slightest touch, and the sheepskin draped over him, he had nothing.
I turned my attention to the rest of the room, hoping to stumble on some sort of mechanism or tunnel, but the chamber was carved out of the mountain itself and presented only solid rock in every direction. Here and there were tiny cracks, and when I put my hand up to them, I felt a cool breeze. So I figured we must be near the surface, but without tools or explosives, there was no way to break our way through to the outside.
The only visible exit was the narrow crack we’d squeezed through to get here. There’d once been a sort of stone door there. When we came in, we’d been rushing to get out of the way of falling stones and hadn’t taken the time to look at the passageway. The gap in the mountain we’d hurried through had merged with the tunnel, but both were now blocked by tons of rubble, so heading back the way we came wasn’t a possibility either.
We were spinning in circles, like trapped animals. Then, out of nowhere, the ground began shaking beneath our feet, and we heard a series of cracking noises that kept get
ting louder. The tremors grew more violent. These were shock waves from the mountain’s internal pressure. The earlier explosions had caused numerous fissures to form, compressing the rest of the rock, and now it looked like it was shifting once again. Was this what the seer meant?
After a bone-shattering bout of shaking, the chamber let out a sharp burst of sound and three large cracks opened up, one in the ground and two in the walls, directly opposite each other, on either side of the tomb. They were all exactly the same size, just large enough for a human body to pass through.
“What in the world is happening?” Kai yelped. “That kid’s playing games with us. Best out of three? All right, how about we take one each? Then at least one of us will get out of this place.”
“No, look!” Julie exclaimed, staring at the seer’s body. “He’s telling us the way out of here.” Her voice was trembling, as if the situation was finally getting to her.
Kai and I turned to look. The crack in the ground had caused the stone box to sink, and the corpse had tilted too. His right hand had flopped forward, and a finger was clearly pointing toward the opening on our left.
We quickly knelt and kowtowed to the seer, thanking him for his protection. Meanwhile, stones were falling from the ceiling, first tiny chips and then larger pieces, and a rumbling filled our ears. The chamber was falling apart.
I yelled at Kai to carry the professor while Julie and I picked up Little Ye’s body, and we hurried through the crack to our left. Just a few paces in, a dazzling beam blazed at us, and we looked up to see an opening in the rock: daylight. I could see the blue sky above us.
Freedom was only a few yards away, but the whole mountain was now shaking so hard we kept falling over, especially with so much loose rubble underfoot. We made very slow progress.
Finally, we got to the fissure. Kai knelt down, and Julie clambered onto his shoulders, hoisting the professor to safety. It reminded me of our hallucination in which an escape route suddenly unfolded before the captives.
I gave Kai a boost, but he struggled to get himself out, even with me pushing from below and Julie pulling from above. It took a great deal of effort to get him through the hole.
No sooner had his feet disappeared from view than there was a loud bang from the stone wall at my back. I turned around to see the rock face tumbling away. The entire Zaklaman Mountain was splitting in two; unable to take the strain, the vast dome over the ghost-hole had collapsed. All the rock thundered away, and far below I saw everything fall into that bottomless pit—the stone beam, the queen’s coffin, that demonic plant, all those countless valuables, the big-eyed statues. The ghost-hole was filling up with thick black liquid, and all the objects that touched it instantly sank into the darkness. Surrounded by all that black rock, the pitch-dark hole now looked like the mouth of a giant demon, yawning wide to swallow everything around it.
The sheer awesome power of a mountain tearing itself apart left me gaping, one hand tightly gripping the wall, the other holding on to Little Ye. I didn’t dare to move. One false step and I’d be plummeting too.
From above, Kai was shouting agitatedly, “Tianyi, get out of there! Forget Little Ye. We don’t have time to worry about dead people now.”
Kai was right. If I didn’t let go of Little Ye, I’d be dragged down with her. I had no choice—I pulled my arm aside and allowed her to fall. As her body tumbled, her arm caught at my pouch and tore it open, and before I knew what was happening, the seer’s sheepskin book was taking a dive too, soaring through the dark air.
I watched helplessly as the prophecies sailed away from me. It was a long way to the ground, but the seer had been very clear—the instant contact was made, a sandstorm would blanket the Zaklaman Mountains. Our worst fear was coming true.
It was all up to fate now. I scrabbled for footholds in the wall, hauling myself up as quickly as I could. Suddenly, behind me, there was an anguished sobbing. I could have sworn it was Little Ye. Then my body seemed to grow heavy, as if some tremendous force was tugging at me, trying to pull me down into that awful hole.
My hair stood on end.
I tried to block out the weeping, but the sobs only became clearer, each sob digging right into me. Just when I thought my heart might burst from sorrow, I felt my body weight inexorably increasing, so much so I thought I would have no choice but to let go.
Watching me from above, Julie and Kai noticed that I seemed unsteady, but I was still too far down for them to reach and pull up. They could only look on as the cracks widened and the mountain looked set to collapse in on itself. They had no rope, so Kai unbuckled his belt and lowered it to me.
Hearing them both shout at once was like a bucket of cold water splashing over me. My whole body twitched, and my mind cleared. The sobbing vanished, and I was abruptly free of the force pulling at me. Not a second to spare. I grabbed Kai’s belt and rose out of the gap in the rock, into the open air.
The setting sun was already blurry as gusts of wind brought fine sand drifting through the air. An inauspicious shadow was falling over the land. I remembered Asat Amat saying this was a sign that a black sandstorm was on its way. As foretold by the seer, the Zaklaman Mountains were about to be engulfed by the desert.
Kai and I scooped up Professor Chen, who was no more responsive than a puppet.
We had to half drag, half shove him down the slope, moving as quickly as we could. The side of the mountain closest to Jingjue City had already collapsed, sealing the ghost-hole shut forever. We were heading toward the entrance to the Zaklaman valley, thinking we could get through the gap and find Asat Amat. With the sandstorm already starting, it was crucial that we get back to our camels; there was no way we’d ever outrun it on foot.
As soon as our feet landed on solid ground, we heard shouts and frantic hoofbeats from the valley. It was old Asat Amat, his face panicky, screaming as he urged his camels into a gallop.
“You old traitor!” roared Kai. “You promised you’d wait for us!”
Asat Amat clearly hadn’t expected to run into us here. Hastily, he pasted a smile on his face. “What a wonderful miracle!” he said, out of breath. “We were destined to meet at this spot! Ah, this was all arranged by Allah.”
This wasn’t the moment for arguing, so we didn’t reply, but unceremoniously dumped Professor Chen onto a camel, then each picked one for ourselves. Asat Amat asked anxiously if the others were far behind.
“Forget it,” I said. “They’re gone. We’ll tell you the story later, but you need to get us out of here right now. Where can we shelter from this storm?”
The sky was black as night. Whirlwinds swooped around us. We were in the eye of the storm, a funnel like the ghost-hole, and as the gusts grew stronger, sand scraped painfully against our faces. Old Asat Amat hadn’t imagined the storm would be upon us so rapidly, without warning. There was nowhere to hide here, nothing but Jingjue City and the Zaklaman Mountains in the vastness of the open desert. Still, given that we were in the center of a whirlwind, running in any direction would be safer than staying put. Whether we’d actually get out of this with our lives, well, that was probably in Allah’s hands.
Asat Amat let out a long whistle, urged his mount to the front, and led our caravan toward the west.
As we started moving, freakish noises followed us, something between a ghost’s shriek and a wolf’s howl, but also like ocean waves. The impossibly mighty wind thrashed around us, holding countless grains of sand that filled the air, blocking out any light, bringing visibility down to almost zero. Even with scarves pulled across our mouths, grit found its way into our noses and ears.
After we’d galloped for a long while, the camels began to rebel, and Asat Amat had to let them stop. It was now impossible to hear anything but the wind. He gestured firmly with both arms, and the fearful camels gathered in a circle.
I understood his meaning—if we kept moving, the camels would scatter. Our only option was to create a fort of living flesh and take shelter within the encircled camels.
Then there would be nothing left to do but pray to Old Hu for rescue.
I nodded to him to show I understood the plan, and gestured for Julie to wrap Professor Chen in a blanket before bringing him into the circle.
Kai and I got out our shovels, and Asat Amat came over to help after he’d gotten the beasts settled. We raised a makeshift wall around us, then threw blankets over the camels’ heads to prevent them from seeing any more and getting spooked. Finally, we grabbed blankets for ourselves and huddled beneath them.
At least we were far enough from the eye that the wind was much less severe. If we’d remained where we were, the sand would probably have blasted us to smithereens.
Asat Amat’s camels had been through enough sandstorms that, once they were still, they no longer panicked. Whenever the sand threatened to bury any part of their bodies, they’d wriggle free and pull themselves upward, always keeping clear of the worst of it.
It wasn’t till the following morning that the storm finally petered out. We’d spent the entire night digging to reinforce the sand fort. Exhausted, we dared to stand still and look ahead only after the wind died down. All around us were dunes as high as ocean waves, carved into rippling shapes, a frozen sea.
The ancient city of Jingjue and the black Zaklaman Mountains were gone, and with them the queen’s coffin, the demon plant, the seer and his burial chamber, and all the countless secrets held between them. Hao Aiguo, Little Ye, Chu Jian, and Sa Dipeng were buried too. They would lie beneath the yellow sands for all eternity.
Professor Chen poked his head out from the blanket he was wrapped in, smiling blankly at the sky. Julie went over to brush the sand off his scalp. Asat Amat knelt on the ground, thanking Old Hu for his great kindness. And Kai was rummaging through all our bags, searching for water. Finally, he gave up and spread his arms in a sign of defeat, looking hopelessly at me.
The City of Sand Page 19