The Spirit Banner (12 page)

Behind her, Annja could hear Mason and Davenport scrambling to catch up. Mason was shouting for her to wait, that she didn't know what was down there, but she ignored him. After all, she did know, didn't she? The dying lama had shown her—somehow.
The stairs became a narrow corridor running directly ahead for another twenty feet before opening into a small room at the end. It wasn't much, just a ten-by-ten-square-foot room hewn out of the rock beneath the temple. A table made from a huge slab of marble stood against the back wall, as far from the door as possible. On it rested an ornate chest covered with gold and precious jewels that reflected the light from Annja's candle back at her in a thousand refracted patterns.
"Is that what we're looking for?" Davenport asked, his voice a hushed awe in the near darkness, as he stepped up next to her.
Annja nodded, not trusting herself to speak. As certain as she'd been that Curran's journal had been authentic, she expected that her hunch as to the present location of the
sulde
would turn out to be, as well. She didn't have to look inside to know it was in there; she could almost feel it.
The chest was unlocked.
Inside was the object she'd seen in her vision; a long, slender package wrapped in red cloth and tied with strips of silk.
Annja lifted it out of the chest, laid it on the floor and carefully untied the silk strips that held the bundle closed. Silk was an amazing material, she thought. Even after all this time it was soft and supple, the way it was created to be, and Annja had no problem untying it.
The red wrapping turned out to be a gorgeous
tangka
, one of the traditional decorated banners that were so much a part of Mongol culture in the past. Its surface was covered with images of the gods and with the many symbols that stood for eternity, long life, good health and other positive omens. The vast majority of the
tangkas
had been destroyed by the Soviets in the 1930s when they had razed the Buddhist temples, Annja knew, and the archaeologist in her instantly noted that this was a magnificent specimen.
Inside the wrapping was a black
sulde
.
Annja felt the thrill of discovery course through her. She had been right! After being smuggled out of the monastery back in the 1930s, it must have been returned to its original hiding place once it had been deemed safe to do so. While the rest of the world was looking for it elsewhere, the
sulde
was right under their noses all along.
It was a brilliant strategy and it had worked like a charm. Apparently, no one else had suspected it until they had come along.
As she held the
sulde
up in the light, a slight breeze blew through the room, ruffling the long strands of horsehair that hung off the shaft of the spear just below the blade. For just a second she thought she heard the distant sounds of battle: the thunder of hooves on the plain, the clash of bodies, the shouts of the victors and the cries of the wounded. Then the room was still once more and all she heard was their breathing in the small chamber.
Apparently, Mason and Davenport hadn't noticed anything unusual, for they didn't react in any way other than with excitement over the find, and so Annja decided to keep what she had heard to herself. She'd become attuned to all sorts of strange things since taking up the sword and she'd learned that other people weren't always on the same wavelength. No sense in getting everyone worked up, she decided.
"I don't believe it! You did it, Annja!" Davenport cried.
"Okay," she said, grinning with excitement right along with Davenport. "We've found the
sulde.
Now what?"
The two men looked at her in surprise.
"What do you mean, now what?" Mason asked.
"What do we do with it now that we've got it?" she said.
"You don't know?"
Annja snorted. "It's not like it comes with instructions, Mason."
"'Beneath the watchful gaze of the eternal blue heaven, the spirit of the warrior points the way,'" Davenport said, repeating the first lines of the hidden message. "If the eternal blue heaven is the open sky above, and the spirit of the warrior is the
sulde
, as we've already decided, then according to Curran, the spear should point us toward the next clue, right?"
"Right," Annja agreed.
"So which direction was it facing when we took it out of the chest?"
Mason glanced at the chest, did some rough calculations based on where the room was situated with regard to the main hall above and then pointed off to one side, "East."
East? Annja thought. Back toward Ulaanbaatar? That didn't make sense.
She said so to the others. "Genghis was a nomad, through and through. The one city he did build, Karakorum, was built to house his overflowing treasury. His conquests had simply generated too much wealth for him to carry around. But he never spent time there to any great length and certainly didn't see it as vital to the running of his vast empire. Why would Ulaanbaatar, a city that didn't exist at all in his day, be any different? And why would his followers put his tomb in a place that was so far from what he considered home?"
It just didn't add up.
"What do you propose we do? Put the spear on the floor and spin it around, then head off in whatever direction it lands?" Mason asked.
Annja bit back the quick retort that sprang to her lips. "I just think we should look around a bit more. It has to be here somewhere. The lama wouldn't have sent us here if that wasn't case."
"Maybe he just wanted us to find and protect the
sulde
," Mason grumbled, but he started looking around like the other two, checking the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, for hiding places or secret passages.
When they struck out there, Davenport took the
sulde
and began going over it inch by inch, while the other two turned their attention to the platform itself and the chest the
sulde
had been stored in.
The two of them were searching the interior of the chest when Annja heard a soft click coming from Mason's end.
"Hold still!" she said sharply the second she heard it, and Mason, used to a lifetime of obeying urgent commands, froze immediately.
Annja had encountered quite a few booby traps while searching ancient ruins and the quiet snick she'd just heard sounded uncomfortably similar. She had a sudden vision of a blade flashing downward in the dark, of screams of pain echoing down the pitch-dark hallway through which they stumbled. She shook her head, dispatching the illusion. That had been another day, another time, and besides, she'd made it through. If she wanted to prevent something deadly from happening to Mason, she needed to focus on the here and now.
Mason's right hand was pressed against the inner surface of one end of the chest.
"What did you do?" she asked him.
Without moving his hands, he said, "Nothing. I just pushed against the interior wall, trying to see if it was solid."
Annja brought the candle closer and peered at the area behind Mason's hand. A small section of the chest wall had shifted backward the slightest bit, which must have been the sound she heard. With the candlelight, the outline of a small rectangular opening was revealed.
"Pull your hand away slowly," Annja said. She watched closely as he did so, ready to knock him out of the way if she saw any hint of movement from that section of the chest, but nothing shot out at them and Mason was able to remove his hand without incident.
Once he had, they could all see that he had inadvertently opened a small compartment built right into the side of the chest. Using the edge of his knife, Mason was able to slip the cover free, revealing the scrap of parchment that was hidden inside the cavity.
Very carefully, he fished it out and then handed it to Davenport.
"Why don't you do the honors," Mason said, and Annja nearly laughed aloud when she saw how excited the offer made their employer. He was like a giant kid turned loose in the candy store and, seeing his exuberant attitude, she understood what drove a man as wealthy as he to get his hands dirty, literally, on an expedition like this. She had to admit, that was one of the things she liked about him best, his desire to experience things for himself and not just through his employees.
Annja and Mason crowded around him so they could see as he unfolded the small piece of parchment.
The revelation, when it came, was a disappointment, however.
Annja had been hoping for another stanza or two in the puzzle, another set of clues that could help her narrow down the directions to bring them to the second destination necessary to find the tomb. Instead, all they got was a few wavy lines that looked like lightning falling from the sky; they started at the same point and then spread downward away from one another from there. Above them was a triangular shape that could have represented everything from the delta symbol to a visit by space aliens.
It looked pretty useless.

While Davenport puzzled over the meaning of the drawing, Annja and Mason finished searching the rest of the chest. That took another ten minutes and ultimately proved fruitless, so they turned their attention to the spear itself, looking for markings or any kind of writing that might help them.
They struck out there, as well, just as Davenport had moments before.
A glance at Mason's watch told them it would be dark soon, so they decided to wait until after their evening meal before making any decisions regarding what to do next. They placed the
sulde
back inside the
tangka
and wrapped it all up, then carried it with them back to the surface, closing the entrance to the secret chamber behind them and exiting the building.
Mason's men had managed to get the fire out and rescued what bodies they could while the others were underground. The heavy stench still hung over the area, as did a dark cloud of smoke, but there wasn't anything they could do about either, and so they did the best they could to ignore them.
There was considerable concern that whoever had done this might return and so the decision was made to continue up the road a bit before finding a place to camp for the night. Jeffries and his men hadn't found anyone else alive in the ruins and the boy had walked off in the wake of the old man's death.
Mason gave the orders and the teams quickly regrouped, loaded back into the vehicles and left the shattered remains of Shankh behind them as they drove toward the setting sun.
About ten miles farther up the road they found a nice spot in the lee of a small ridge to set up camp for the night. A cold wind was pushing down from the north at this point and the ridge would at least provide some shelter during the course of the night.
They had a quick dinner and then retired to their tents, one for each carload.
The excitement of the past few hours was still with them and so no one wanted to sleep. Davenport was making notes in his journal, chronicling the trip, while Annja stared absently at the map over Mason's shoulder as he tried to figure out their next course of action.
A sudden thought occurred to her. She stared at the map for a long moment, following the topographical lines to be certain, before turning to Davenport and asking him for the piece of parchment they'd found in the chest.
He saw the look in her eyes as he handed it over. "You've figured it out, haven't you?" he asked eagerly.
"Maybe. Not sure yet." She took the scrap of parchment from him and unfolded it, making sure she was remembering the design on it properly.
She was.
Mason was watching her now along with Davenport, so she reached out and took the topographical map he was holding. "May I?" she asked.
"Be my guest," he replied.
She laid it across her knee, then put the piece of parchment against it, comparing the two.
After a moment she looked up at her two companions and said, "I'm an idiot. It was right there in front of us the whole time." She pointed at the three wavy lines on the piece of parchment. "'To where the blood of the world intertwines, and the voice in the earth has its say.' Freakin' obvious," she said, grinning.
Apparently Mason didn't think so, for he stared at her as if she'd suddenly lost her mind.
"Obvious?" he said. "Riiiight."
She shook her head, frustrated with her slowness in not seeing it before. She hadn't expected Mason to catch it, but she should have seen it right away. "The Mongols were, at heart, animists. Everything had its own spirit, including the earth. Still with me?"
Mason nodded.
"A typical Mongol encampment stank to high heaven, which was one of the reasons the Europeans began calling them the Mongol horde, but that was because they didn't understand the cultural differences between the two societies.
"Unlike their European counterparts, Mongol warriors refused to bathe in rivers and streams. This wasn't because they liked being dirty, but because they considered such places to be holy. They saw the land beneath their feet as the body of the earth spirit, so to speak, which meant that the rivers and streams…"
"…would be the veins that carried its blood through its body," Mason finished for her. "So, if that's the case, what's with the triangle-looking thing?"
Davenport answered that one. "It's a mountain. Or, at least, I think it's a mountain."
Annja nodded encouragingly. "That would be my guess, too. A mountain. Which means that all we have to do is find one that stands near the convergence of three rivers and we've found where the blood of the earth intertwines."
"Should be easy enough," Mason said, and the three of them huddled around the map.
Fifteen minutes later, they'd found several different possibilities and had only covered half of the map. Clearly they were missing something.
"How do we know which one is more likely than another?" Davenport wanted to know.
Mason thought about it for a moment. "Well, it would probably be one that was important to the Khan, wouldn't it? Someplace that held special meaning for him?"
They sat in silence for a few moments, thinking, until Annja suddenly exclaimed, "Khokh Lake!" and grabbed the map, looking it over as she explained. "Genghis Khan was named clan chief on the shores of Khokh Lake at the foot of Khara Jirgun Mountain. The Mongol name for it was the Blue Lake by Back-Heart-Shaped Mountain. Just about every single historical account we have about Genghis's life notes this as significant. That's got to be the place!"
But it wasn't.
Khokh Lake was fed by two rivers, not three.
That started them down a list of major events in the Khan's life, and it wasn't long before they figured it out. The boy who would later become the Khan of khans had been born along the Onon River, near the spot where the Onon, the Tuul and the Kerulen all began. Looming over them was the tallest mountain in the Hentiyn Nuruu range, Burkhan Khaldun, or God Mountain, as it was called.
Annja pointed to the spot on the map about three or four days' hard drive from where they were. "That's it. That's the place. It's got to be. That's where we'll find the next clue."