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.”