The second man looked at the body of his dead colleague and swallowed hard. He was left with no choice but to make his way down to the shore and report back to his leader.
At the shore, he too began to swoon, and then he fell with a syrupy splash into the water. Luk turned to Sheng and spoke next: “It’s not water. It’s mercury. This is the test of metal.”
Sheng’s mind began to whir. Mercury was lethal, both to touch or to breathe, and the evidence of that was the three corpses on the shore a few hundred yards below him. He smiled in appreciation of Qin and his sadistic ingenuity when constructing the defenses of the tomb. He ordered Luk to confirm it was mercury and watched him make his way down to the lake.
All of this only strengthened his belief that the map must be hidden in the tomb — why else would the emperor go to such extraordinary and lethal lengths to protect the place? Now, he watched Luk trudge back up the path, holding a black cloth up to his mouth and nose.
“And?”
Luk removed the cloth. “Definitely mercury, and the men are terrified of going any further. They don’t want to end up like those three.” He flicked his hand behind himself for a moment in a dismissive and casual gesture to indicate the three dead men. “And to be honest, I can’t blame them. I’ve looked around and I can see no way across the lake at all.”
“Wrong — there is a way, look.” Sheng pointed at the far end of the cavern where a ledge of natural rock stuck out over the lake of shimmering mercury. On the far side of the cavern opposite it was another rock ledge, but much smaller. Once, a long time ago, a natural rock bridge must have connected the two sides.
“No man can jump that,” Luk said. “It must be twenty-five feet.”
Sheng nodded appreciatively at the distance and snapped his fingers. Two goons dragged Hawke over to him.
“What do you think, Mr Hawke? Twenty-five feet like my man here says, or perhaps even wider?”
“No,” Hawke said firmly. “I’d say your pet monkey has a good eye for distances.”
Luk moved forward aggressively, but Sheng stopped him with a raised hand and a few short words barked in Cantonese. Luk obeyed immediately and returned to his place behind Sheng.
“Always with the jokes. Perhaps a little mercury vapor will make you more serious. You will jump that gap and take with you a length of rope in order that we may all cross. If you miss and fall in the mercury, I will kill your three friends here by making them go for a swim in this delightful little lake, understand?”
Hawke nodded grimly and approached the ledge. Thanks to his parkour he knew Luk had been right in his estimation of twenty-five feet, the only problem was that his personal record at a running jump in parkour was twenty-three feet. He knew that two feet didn’t sound like much, but he also knew from his parkour how long two feet was if it was two feet further than you could jump.
Sheng pushed the gun into Lea’s neck. “Now, Mr Hawke.”
Hawke took a deep breath and then a long running jump, and leaped into the air using everything his parkour training could give. For a few seconds, he was mid-air, sailing above the terrifying mercury lake like a wingless bird. Now was too late to reconsider his actions — if he had misjudged the width of the gap he faced a desperate and toxic death.
He landed with a savage crunch in the loose gravel that was strewn over the far ledge. With no small measure of relief, he dusted himself down and returned his gaze to the others standing on the other side. Lea looked so small, standing in between Sheng’s goons.
“And now the rope, Mr Hawke,” Sheng said “Throw it back, if you please.” He raised his gun to Lea’s temple. She closed her eyes and muttered something under her breath.
He knew had no choice but to follow Sheng’s instructions. He secured the rope around one of the boulders on his side of the cave and tossed the other end back to Luk, who caught it in one hand and then lashed it around a boulder on their side. Moments later, Luk led the way by traversing the taut rope with what Hawke silently acknowledged was a pretty impressive commando rope crawl. Han, and Reaper followed, and then Lea. Hawke watched anxiously as she crawled along the rope, slipping only once, but it was a heart-stopping moment for the Englishman.
Sheng and the last of his goons followed up the rear, and then they were on their way again. Hawke and the others were forced to go in front of Sheng at gunpoint in case there were any other nasty little surprises in the emperor’s tomb.
They walked for several minutes until they finally reached an impressive arch carved out of the stone with Chinese dragons carved into each supporting column either side of it.
Sheng gasped when he saw them. “We are here! Behold the dragon — the symbol of the Thunder God. We have finally reached the real tomb, the sacred inner sanctum of the great Emperor Qin himself, and final resting place of the Map of Immortality, kept hidden from mankind until now and it’s all mine!”
“So, do we get the runner-up prize or what” Hawke said.
“Silence!” screamed Sheng, and Luk punched him to the ground. Reaper darted forward in his defense but he too was struck down by two of the men who had been holding him. “Any more heroics and Luk will start shooting people, understand?”
Hawke clambered to his feet, followed a second later by Reaper.
“It was only a question, Sheng…” Hawke mumbled.
“Wrong. It was an impertinent question, asked by a mortal man to a God.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Through the small arch was their final destination — a tomb of exquisite beauty carved out of the bedrock. All around them, more terracotta statues watched them in perfect silence, their faces dusty from thousands of years of relentless duty to their emperor, and in the center was the man himself — an enormous, intricate tomb of carved stone jutting out of the stone floor.
It loomed fifty feet high, and at its apex was a bridge that connected it to a ledge running high around the top of the cavern. Around its four sides was a series of stone steps carved into the edge of the tomb. At the base was a deep pit, its bottom lurking somewhere below in the darkness, and all around the outside of the tomb hundreds of tiny holes were drilled into the cave walls.
Sheng gasped. High on the upper ledge was the real sarcophagus of the Emperor Qin. They had come face to face with the real man after all this time. The stone face on the sarcophagus was silent, passive, imperious. Mocking.
Sheng pushed the others aside and raced up the steps toward the sarcophagus.
“I am the Thunder God!” Sheng screamed insanely. “This power is my destiny!”
Sheng would soon hold the map in his hands, the first mortal man to do so for thousands of years. Where Hugo Zaugg had failed, Sheng Fang had succeeded and in the most stark of ways. “This is my divine fate! It is my divine destiny to live forever and now I have the map that will lead me to the destiny of the gods.”
The Englishman called up to Sheng. “I think you need a cup of tea and a nice sit down, mate.”
“Silence, you fool!”
The self-styled Thunder God now reached the apex of the tomb, a full fifty feet above the main floor where the others stood. There, he was finally face to face with the great emperor himself as he stared into the stone statue of Qin’s upright sarcophagus.
Lea watched in disgust as he blew the dust from Qin’s carved face to reveal a small handle. “Just as the legend says!” He turned the handle on the front of the enormous structure and slowly pulled at the front of it.