traced to its creator and corrected, or the creator punished.”
As they moved on, Molly could practically feel the weight of the names holding up the wall and declaring the inside from the outside. It was like an army of magical symbols, containing the citizens and repelling outsiders.
Where the hillside rose, the wall stepped higher. A deep streambed lined with bricks and bedrock served as drainage, or possibly a moat.
The moat ascended in stages, the stone edges polished and worn by centuries of runoff. From the windows of nearby buildings, the sound of water must have been, by turns, sweet or thunderous. She wanted to veer off into the city and look out through those windows. She wanted to wander among the spires and floating heads.
But Duncan stuck to the path beneath the wall, stopping repeatedly to examine flowers and insects or animal prints and scat. They heard dogs barking in the far distance, and Molly thought there must be a village nearby, even within the ruins. Duncan explained that they were rare barking deer. He could tell the difference between one invisible bird and another by its song or even the sound of its wings. They spent ten minutes studying a spiderweb pattern, and another half hour counting the growth rings on the shells of two different species of snails.
It was maddening, almost as if he were avoiding the city. She didn’t complain out loud as the wall went on and the minutes turned to hours. It took an effort not to direct his story. It would be a labyrinth in there. She had learned from the recovery team the primacy of the grid. The founding event of every dig is the driving of the first stake, traditionally at the southwest extremity. From that benchmark emanated all the squares spreading to the north and east. That had to explain Duncan’s uncertainty. He was hunting for an edge to dub southwest, a corner to the circle from which to begin.
Leaves stirred in the mist. They sounded almost like a child crying very softly. As the sound drew closer, the crying became a little singsong rhyme coming from the trees, and Molly decided it could only be the birds. The sound mushroomed, rushing between the buildings with a blizzard howl. The mist churned open. A great gust of wind broke against them, nearly toppling them into the dry moat. Molly heard shouts and the clash of metal, and screams, an entire battle, all within that blast of wind. Just as suddenly the air was still again.
Molly straightened. “What was that?”
Duncan chewed at his lip, staring at the mist-bound city. “The weather’s changing,” he said.
But there was no more wind, not even a breeze. They went on.
Molly kept looking for a breach in the wall. Surely the forest had broken it open somewhere, and they would be able to see the far side. But the wall loomed intact except along the very upper sections, where the masonry had come undone in fractions. The path and the wall went on twisting with the hill’s contours.
Eventually, a gateway surfaced in the mist ahead. Like the one they had entered through the night before, it had a multiheaded turret with eyes that seemed to watch their approach. In her mind, the shapeless citadel became symmetrical. They’d entered the front door, and here was the back, and this road logically pierced the city from side to side. On the other hand, there could be a dozen more gates, with roads leading into some center like spokes.
The tunnel mouth was guarded—or had been, once upon a time—by a host of terra-cotta statues. They were life-size replicas of ancient warriors, dozens of them. “They have to be based on the sculpture army at Xi’an, in China,” he said. “Or, what if the Xi’an army is based on this? Who knows how old it is?”
He kept a curious distance from the terra-cotta warriors, afraid, she thought, of disturbing the artifacts. That didn’t stop her. “I’ll be careful,” she assured him, and moved among them with her camera. “They’re so beautiful.”
Extraordinary, she meant. Exquisite. But not beautiful. Each had his own distinct face, round or lean, vicious or youthful, some with little shocks of beards or delicate Fu Manchu mustaches. But their eyes destroyed the realism. They were primitive round holes, sockets, some still holding bulging, round jade pebbles.
The crudeness of the stone eyes confused her. Every other detail was so refined and lifelike, and these eyes were horrible. Was that the intent, to cow the beholder? Some still had paint remaining on them. As if the bulbous pebbles weren’t frightening enough, the artists had added shocked black circles around each eye. It reminded her of war paint, or a child’s drawing of a nightmare.
“Are these supposed to be like glass eyes?” she asked Duncan. “Sight for clay men?”
“Maybe. Or reminders.”
“Yes?”
“That we come from the earth. I don’t know. Stones for eyes in a city of stone. They could symbolize the all- seeing city. Or the forest.”
Some still stood at attention, though these had all sunk to differing degrees into the earth. They looked like quicksand victims, dragged under to their knees or hips, some to their necks, but still vigilant. A few showed only the tops of their heads. Whatever siege—or exodus—they were designed to guard against, here they waited. They seemed ready to spring into action. Some even wore their original armor of jade plates stitched together with what looked like wire spun of gold. Gold, though? Surely thieves would have taken it long ago. Elsewhere, the wire had failed and jade plates lay scattered like pale green dragon scales. Their fists clenched empty holes where the wood shafts of spears or bows had rotted.
“There’s a fortune lying here,” she said.
“They came this way,” Duncan said. He had stopped and was staring at the tunnel.
“Kleat and the brothers?”
“No, our soldiers, Molly. They were here.”
“They went through the tunnel?”
“Not through,” he said. “But they were here.”
She looked into the dark maw. “How do you know?”
He opened and closed his mouth without a word. The answer man had no answer.
Molly stepped closer. The tunnel looked impassable, choked with vegetation. Ugly with it, to be honest. It disgusted her in a strange way, the messy, clenched chaos in there. She felt physically sick, and thought it might be that compressed cold egg she’d eaten for breakfast.
But as she went nearer, her uneasiness—her sense of outright disease—grew. The walls pressed down at her. The tunnel, this awful hole, made her dizzy. She remembered her repulsion as they’d entered last night, and this was worse. She was on foot. Dread and nausea shackled her. A sudden despair washed over her. What did it take to leave this place?
But she forced herself to the tunnel mouth. Vines and roots clotted its bowels. She reached to part the leaves and something bit her. She yanked her hand back, blood beading on her wrist.
“Molly,” said Duncan. “Leave it alone.”
Peering inside, she saw the culprit. She took a careful grip and tugged at it, dragging it into view.
“Is that barbed wire?”
“What do you think?” she snapped. Clearly this was what he’d seen.
“Molly?”
A wave of anger rocked her. “You could have warned me.”
“I didn’t see it.”
She yanked at the rusted coil. There was a whole Slinky of concertina wire inside, bound in place by years of undergrowth. “We’ll never get out,” she said. Fear seized her. Despair. They were prisoners.
“Come away from there,” Duncan said.
She let loose of the wire and it drew back into the tunnel like a snake. She stared into the devouring pit.
“Molly.” A command.
She turned from the tunnel.
“Come here.”
She started toward him, and with each step her terrible emotions faded.
“Are you all right?” He took her arm and drew her farther away from the tunnel.
“I must be hungry,” she said. “Or yesterday’s still catching up with me.” She sat down, emptied out.
