Hunt Among the Killers of Men (9 page)

Here, on one face of the pedestal, were ideograms. Spackled with the “alpha decay” common to archeological bronze, the writing was invisible until Gabriel was able to sculpt out the calcareous accretions. Perhaps here were instructions, clues, leads; unfortunately, the language variant was one Gabriel did not recognize. And on the other faces of the pedestal—nothing. No marks at all.

The dry environment of the room and mountainside had helped retard corrosion, but nothing could stop the process. Using an improvised potter’s cut-off tool he fabricated from a nail and a paintbrush handle, Gabriel was able to scrape the patina of ages from a small seam about two inches down from the top of the base. Following it, he was able to describe a small, rough rectangle about a foot high. It did not appear to want to travel anywhere laterally, so Gabriel struck
it with a hammer. The metal made a loud clang like a muffled bell, but Qi did not come running.

Decay and flakes of oxidized metal sifted floorward. Gabriel hit it again.

The rectangle had sunk into the pedestal about an eighth of an inch. Maybe the pedestal was hollow. Rough acoustics indicated it might be.

Bang
, again. And again.

Whatever this little component did, it had not done it for nearly a century, and it resisted easy cooperation. But every time Gabriel struck it, it retreated into the base a bit farther until it was sunk nearly half a foot…

…revealing a small inset on the right-hand side, like the dado joint on a drawer. Gabriel could just curl his fingers around it. It was meant to be pulled out, like a lever.

Using all of his strength and most of his weight, Gabriel was able to budge it about half an inch. He then lost another half hour devising a rudimentary block-and-tackle system to loop around the exposed end and leverage it.

He had to have more than one warm body on this line. He took a break to wash down some caffeine pills he found in one of Qi’s bags with a draught of strong (though cold) coffee, and went to seek his mysterious partner.

He found her asleep on a pallet on the third level of the pagoda, still naked though tightly bound up inside the punctured sheet of tin, which she’d wrapped around her torso and secured with wet leather thongs that constricted as they dried. It was like a penitent’s scourging corset and looked intensely painful, but Qi seemed sound asleep.

Then Gabriel caught the flickering residual tang in the air and realized that among the other provisions Tuan had supplied Qi, besides food, weapons and equipment, there had been a dose of opium. The long pipe was still at her side like a snoozing demon lover.

The workings of the pedestal proved more frustrating to operate than a public telephone in Beijing.

The hidden lever freed itself by degrees, measured in Gabriel’s sweat. At full cock it released a panel on the far side of the iron base. The panel was heavier than the door in a Swiss bank vault and meant to be slid horizontally backward into a recess in the wall that was clotted with decades—perhaps more than a century—of mulch, roots and earth. Gabriel spent the better part of an hour scraping dirt before he realized the sheer weight of the door would prevent him from moving it; it wasn’t as though it was on ball bearings or a hydraulic arm or something.

He hit upon using Qi’s motorcycle as a conscripted assistant, since Qi was definitively out of the action.

The revving four-stroke engine raised a hellacious chain-saw racket and the spinning high-treads kicked back a tsunami of dust from the floor. In the lantern light it looked as though the shrine room was on fire. Russet clouds rolled and settled on everything, including Gabriel, who had begun to look a bit like a terra-cotta warrior himself.

The iron panel, nearly a foot thick, was gradually
inched backward until there was a gap into which Gabriel could shove a lantern. He saw the boundaries of a twelve-by-twelve cobwebbed room—beneath the base of the statue—and the edge of a stoneworked archway that indicated the passage went deeper.

After more revving and straining, the space became big enough for Gabriel to wriggle through. He was parched from his exertions, though he had already drunk at least two quarts of water, and his shoulders pulsated with fatigue. He grabbed some road flares from Qi’s stores along with a flashlight and an extra lantern. He’d figured he’d need all the light he could get.

The interior directly beneath the statue’s base, sheeted in iron, was disappointingly vacant. It bore the musty mothball smell of old, dead air.

Past the archway was another room lined with wooden shelves, many of which had dried out, become porous, and collapsed over time. Arrayed upon the shelves that remained were hundreds of miniature warriors, each about nine inches in height and made of fired porcelain. Many of them had been unceremoniously dumped by time and the crumbling shelves; they lay in shards on the floor, which also appeared to be metal, judging by how his footsteps rang against it whenever they weren’t squashing something underfoot. He was within what amounted to a big iron box, Gabriel concluded, one that could only be accessed via the statue’s base—metal above, below, and except for the archway he’d entered through and another on the far wall, all around, so no one could dig their way in.

Gabriel recalled Emperor Qin’s city-sized necropolis, which had been constructed in relative secrecy and then hidden away underground. Logistically
speaking, it would have been much more difficult for Favored Son Kangxi Shih-k’ai to pull off such a feat at the beginning of the 20
^th
Century, when labor was more dear and secrecy harder to come by. Perhaps he had rendered his vaunting self-tribute only in miniature, except for the handful of life-size guardians Qi had found in the room outside. Enough niches spun off from this chamber to suggest there might be several thousand doll-soldiers here.

Was this Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s grand joke on history?

Was
this
the great prize Cheung sought?

From what Mitch Quantrill had told Gabriel, the would-be warlord thought he was going to claim his putative ancestor’s skeleton—which the great man would’ve been hard-pressed to have inserted into something the size of an action figure.

Gabriel popped a flare and dropped it on the floor. That was when he first saw that the metal surface he was standing on was writhing with worms and salamanders. He examined a nightcrawler under his flashlight. It looked like some sort of troglobitic millipede with a nasty oval mouth. Some were as much as a foot long.

That meant…

Then he noticed the heavily ammoniac, compost stench wafting toward him from the far archway. Opening the portal had caused a tiny bit of air movement, and the flow was eye-watering.

That also meant…

…that there had to be another way in.

Quickly he drew a small automatic pistol—also procured from Qi’s stores—and advanced behind his upheld light toward the second archway.

Stone stairs wound down into blackness. The stench
was already a physical thing as oppressive as wrapping your head in a piece of rotting cloth.

The stairs were long disused, crumbling, slicked with a gray organic fluid that glistened with phosphorescent mold spores. It was like walking on treacherous ice, the kind that could upend you and send you sprawling.

He was traversing downward at about a thirtydegree angle. He could hear trickling water now. He had to duck; the headroom was low.

The stairs broadened into a tiny pavilion with carved rails, all of it indistinguishable beneath caked, stinking muck.

Twin terra-cotta sentries stood mute guard over the pavilion with long-corroded weapons of bronze that had rotted away to stubs and flakes. The standing soldiers appeared to have been dunked in cake batter and left to decay for a century. Their features were not apparent. They were clotted and bloblike, runny pseudohuman monstrosities, more manlike in size and general outline than in any internal detail.

The pavilion faced a grand chamber at least the size of a football field. The distant sound of a small stream or other subterranean waterway was louder here, joining with the other ambient noises and echoing slightly, indicating that this was a
very
big room.

The whole place was a hibernaculum.

The concave dome of the ceiling was wall-to-wall with thousands of nesting bats. He could identify at least three species at this distance—the horseshoe bat, the long-fingered bat and the roundleaf bat. There were also lizards and annelids and other scavenger-parasites that fed on bat guano, which would be abundant indeed here.

Gabriel stepped forward very cautiously.

To either side of the pavilion he could now make out two large, hinged wooden constructions like catapults or small cranes. A shaft held an ironbound basket the size of a bale of hay aloft over a reservoir, which Gabriel presumed had once been filled with water, long-since evaporated.

And below, massed on the floor of the huge chamber, standing in a foot-deep tar pit of urine and guano, was Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s army of life-sized figures.

Then Gabriel heard Qi calling out to him from above, as loudly as she could, and thousands of bats took wing, flying straight for him.

Gabriel smashed the only fuel lantern he had to make a pool of fire near the archway during his hasty retreat, but the bats’ sonar had unerringly informed them of a new way out of the cave. Some of them sported a wingspan of two feet or more.

From Qi’s point of view it was as though Gabriel was propelled out of the base of the idol by an unbroken thunderhead of swarming bats.

They were not vampires or the dreadnaught-sized killers of the Amazon, but this many airborne teeth and claws could make life terribly inconvenient, especially if the horde was hungry.

Gabriel struck Qi like a linebacker, sprawling them both onto the floor, shielding her face and burying his own into her shoulder in a duck-and-cover as the black beehive madness of the bats filled the shrine room. Eventually they would peter out and find their way into the night. They were just bats. But Gabriel did not know if Qi harbored any phobias or other reactive behaviors that might complicate their survival right now.

When the first wave ebbed, they worked together
to seal the sliding iron portal. With two pairs of shoulders and thighs heaving and amped up on adrenaline, they no longer required the motorcycle to move the door.

Stragglers winged wildly about the upper reaches of the room. Gabriel looked as though he had lost a paintball fight, and this time Qi’s reaction could not be dammed back. She found his appearance hilarious.

“Very funny,” said Gabriel.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting to use the bath again?” she said.

“Briefly,” he said.

“Bats are good luck all over Asia.”

“But not all over my head.” Gabriel made his way to the other shrine, stripping off his shirt as he went.

“My mother used to tell me,” Qi said, following, “if a bat lands on your head, you should hope the cricket sees rain coming because the bat won’t get off your head until it hears thunder.”

He ducked his head under the now cool water, ran his fingers through his hair. He finally came up for air again.

Qi was still beset with mirth over Gabriel’s condition. It buoyed him to see that Qi
could
laugh.

He described for her what he’d found in the giant chamber below the statue.

“It’s almost worth telling Cheung,” Qi said. “The thought of him rooting like a pig through tons and tons of dung, looking for his precious skeleton. On his knees. Slowly being driven mad by the smell.”

“Except that he’d send lackeys to do the digging while he watched from a safe distance,” Gabriel said.

“Yes, and then shoot them when they finished.” Qi wasn’t laughing anymore. “I want to see this room for myself.”

“Then why’d I bother getting cleaned up?” Gabriel said. But the truth was, he wanted to see it again, too. His explorer glands were firing hotly already, reinvigorating him; he could feel the gnawing need to
find out
burning in his brain afresh. Was one of the figures Kangxi Shih-k’ai? If so, which one? You’d think a man with an ego like that would put himself at the head of his army, leading it—but in the quick glance he’d gotten, there hadn’t seemed to be such a “leader” figure. And to find any one figure hidden among the lot of them, one would have to spend hours digging through calcified strata of crap.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Before the lucky wildlife returns.”

Gabriel’s second descent yielded three bits of information.

One: That the bats obviously had some other way in and out of the mountainside, some path yet undiscovered, since a good portion of them had returned by the time he and Qi went down, and more filtered in every minute. Qi and Gabriel moved slowly and quietly, to avoid triggering another mad onrush.

Two: That the catapult/crane devices were some ancient form of automated defense against intrusion into the chamber, though fortunately they had long since rotted into inutility. Peering at them more closely, Gabriel saw they were still loaded up with fist-sized iron spheres protruding with spikes on all sides. He lifted one, hefted it briefly and dropped it back into place, then wiped his hand on the seat of his pants. He
wouldn’t have wanted to see even one of those flying his way, never mind the hundred or so piled up here.

And three: That Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s lost terra-cotta army…wasn’t.

“These aren’t statues,” Gabriel whispered, after examining one from close up. “They’re bodies. Skeletons now, but bodies when they were planted here.” He pointed at the metal shaft sticking up from the ground and continuing into the seat of the figure’s rotting armor. “He dressed them up in battle gear and rammed them upright onto spiked poles. I’m guessing they were alive at the time.”

Qi’s expression darkened at the revelation.

“I can’t imagine even the most devoted warrior army submitting to that sort of death,” Gabriel said. “He must have conscripted a special group of victims for the purpose.”

“Peasants,” she muttered. “Slaves.”

“I thought it was just hyperbole when they called Kangxi Shih-k’ai the ‘Vlad of China,’” Gabriel said. “But this…There must be more than a thousand people here, all murdered at his hand. And for what? To provide him with…human mannequins for this display?”

They made their way carefully back up to the shrine and forced the doorway shut.

“So these are not the Killers of Men we have found,” said Qi. “They are not the members of his army.” She took a mouthful of water from a dipper and spat it out on the ground. Gabriel understood the impulse.

“Well, there’s no way to know, but I doubt it,” Gabriel said. “More likely they’re people his army rounded up as a sort of mass sacrifice when Kangxi Shih-k’ai died.”

Qi bowed her head. She spoke quietly. “One of the reasons this area has been abandoned as far back as anyone can remember was a belief that the area was full of ghosts. People said it was haunted by spirits in pain. My mother said people were telling stories like that when she was a girl.”

“That would have been, what, in the sixties? Back then there might still have been people alive who had been children when the slaughter took place. Maybe even some who’d been adults.”

“Maybe even one or two who’d participated in it,” said Qi darkly, “and wanted the traces never to be uncovered.”

“Maybe.”

“In any event,” Qi said, “it’s been a no-man’s-land for most of the past century. No one comes here. Except ghosts like me.”

Her gaze was abstracted into the small fire they’d built.

“Qi,” Gabriel said. “I know your priority is Cheung—”

“My
life
is Cheung. My death, too.”

“—but there’s something bigger here. The world should know about this discovery.”

“So let them know. When Cheung and I are dead.”

“There’s no reason you have to die.” Gabriel tried to take her hand, but she harshly jerked it away.

“Share this discovery with me,” he said. “Let me get you safely out of China. The Hunt Foundation has influence, and once we reveal this to the world…we can take action against Cheung in other ways. And we can keep you safe.”

“Can you? Can you really? Cheung’s men came all the way to New York to murder your friend’s sister.
They would not hesitate to find me, track me like an animal, and kill me like less than an animal.” She fixed Gabriel with a hooded gaze. “You’re going to say I could change my identity perhaps. Maybe I could get surgery to alter my appearance, the way Cheung did. No. None of it will matter, in the end. You have not accepted the inevitability of this.”

“I don’t believe in inevitability,” said Gabriel.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Qi said, shaking her head.

Gabriel was not accustomed to feeling impotent. The Foundation, the specialists he knew, the money he could wield—none of it mattered here in a part of China where it might as well have been hundreds of years ago, where a flock of bats had the power to defeat him and a young woman could embrace a suicide mission because she saw her own death as inevitable.

“If you wish to help me,” Qi said, “you can. But there is only one way. By coming with me to the Night Market.”

“And doing what?”

“You can get close to Cheung. He doesn’t know what you look like. I doubt his men do either—at most they have a blurry image from the cameras on the ship, probably not even that.”

“You’re forgetting they found us after we left the Night Market, when they ambushed us in the pedicab.”

“They were following me, not you. You could have been anyone. And no one who got a good look at your face that night lived to tell.”

Gabriel thought back to the brutal firefight in the street. It was true enough. “So what, exactly, do you have in mind?”

“We can both return to the Night Market, Gabriel Hunt. I as a vengeful ghost. You—you as a bidder.”

“A bidder,” Gabriel said.

“A wealthy foreign guest,” Qi said, reaching out with one hand to stroke along his cheek, “with a taste for young Chinese flesh. Cheung will probably pour you a drink himself.”