Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Chapter 9

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.