shadow. “Here, there’s something nasty waiting for us.”
“What?”
“Huge metal spikes. As far as I could tell, they blast out from either side.”
“How do we avoid them?” Orlando asked.
“There’s a trail I saw, highlighted in green, something about the stones which make up that section. I think we’ll see it when we get past this door.”
“And how,” Renee said, flashing her light back to the Temujin’s haughty face, “do we do that?”
Phoebe sighed, then turned to Qara. “On this part, I’m sorry to say, I’m blind. I saw them build it, set it in place. It’s seriously thick, but I couldn’t see how it opens.”
“That’s unacceptable,” Renee said.
Caleb turned to Qara. “You want to help?”
The Darkhad grinned through her pain. Shook her head.
Renee raised her. 45, pointed it at Qara’s leg. “Oh, she’ll help.”
“Wait!” Orlando shouted. “Hold on, I’m not bad at these things, either. After all, I did see you.”
Renee lowered the gun. “Very well. Go on.”
Orlando studied the door, narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath. He took a few steps forward, palms out. Phoebe experienced a moment of dread, fearing that to touch the door would release some kind of horrific trap to bury them all. She really hadn’t seen anything about this door, and that alone surprised her. Had no one been through here since they set the door in place? She had concentrated on seeing the door open, had asked that question, but nothing came of it, just a humming and the consistent view of the mural-covered wall.
“Try remote viewing the unlocking mechanism,” Caleb suggested. “They must have built one, although my guess is that no one has ever used it.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying, boss.”
“Wait,” Renee said. “I thought Kublai and his other sons were buried here too. Wouldn’t they have had to open the door?”
Phoebe shrugged. “That’s what I thought too, but I’m not getting anything.”
Qara had overheard and when Caleb glanced in her direction, she gave a grudging nod. “Temujin alone lies here. His descendents, like the rest of Mongolia, feared to trespass upon his necropolis.”
“But Kublai had no problem building his own city above it?”
“That was part of Temujin’s will,” she said. “We never knew why. It made the sacred mission of the early Darkhad difficult, since it brought undue attention to the very area we wished to conceal.”
“I can think of two reasons,” Caleb said, raising his hand with two fingers out. “One is that Kublai would have subscribed to the same tenets as his grandfather. He knew the value in hiding secrets in plain view. And the second reason has to deal with symmetry and the mystical precept of ‘as Above, so Below.”
“That never gets old,” Orlando says. “Kind of like Twinkies.”
“So where are they? His sons?” Caleb asked. “Back on the Sacred Mountain?”
Qara’s expression never wavered. “Perhaps.”
“Hang on,” Orlando said, brushing off more dirt from his face. He lurched toward the door, shook his head to clear a vision, then headed right. Three soldiers moved out of his way, keeping their lights on him as he moved along the wall, past the script and to the corner. He pointed. “Up there.”
The lights followed his outstretched hand and index finger indicating the broken section Caleb had noticed before, the area he thought had crumbled through, pierced by a tree root.
“That would have to be some seriously deep root.”
“Not a root,” Orlando replied. “Although designed to look the part. Get two of your men, Agent Wagner. One boost the other. Grab hold and pull.”
Renee snapped her fingers, then brought her flashlight to the scene as two commandos rushed around Orlando. One knelt and made a step out of his hands to lift the other, then pushed him up on his shoulders. The top man gripped the root-like thing.
“It is tough rope,” he shouted back in accented English. “I-”
“Wait!” Orlando shouted. “I didn’t finish. You have to pull it, hand over hand, like you’re opening a set of curtains. And you pull from left to right. If you go the other way…”
Phoebe gasped, holding her head. A flash revealed…
… a scene where dozens of men with helmets and torches stand back on the stairs, bows drawn, arrows aimed at a man on a ladder in the same corner. With a sheepish look, the prisoner grasps the rope and pulls right to left as he was told. And something shiny, flickering with all the torchlight, rips across the room, at about neck- height. It is secured by three iron bars from the ceiling, running on embedded tracks. The ladder is severed at the eighth rung, just below the man’s feet, as the room-width blade whisks past. He falls, rolls and is about to get up when he sees it coming back, hauling across again to its starting position. So he ducks, hugging his knees — which leaves him in the perfect position to be sliced in half by the second blade, which rips from the right to left, two feet off the ground.
Phoebe staggered back, fighting the bile rising in her throat, still blinking away the sight of the prisoner’s two halves flopping and unraveling on this very floor, while the Khan’s men admired the effectiveness of their trap.
She grabbed a flashlight from one of the men and directed it to the side wall. “There. See the three vertical tracks? And it’s probably imperceptible, but there should be two horizontal ones too, for the blades. The first one decapitates a normal-sized man, the second, coming from the other side, ensures that at the least, they aren’t walking forward.”
“Jeez,” Orlando said to Qara. “You guys aren’t very hospitable to visitors.”
Renee started backing up, heading to the stairs. “Okay, left to right then, but just to be sure…” She took a few steps up, then nodded to Chang, who remained in the middle of the room, his face cloaked in fear. “Now, do it.”
The man took a deep breath, closed his eyes, then pulled. Once, twice. Something made a grinding noise, the room shook, and the great stone door trembled. He kept pulling, and then a crack released from the left-most edge. He pulled, as the man holding him strained to keep his balance. The crack grew. Two feet. Four. Five. Six.
“Enough,” said Renee.
The man released his hold on the rope. But then the door started to close. He grabbed it and kept pulling. “Get it open all the way!” Orlando shouted. “Otherwise it slams shut, and I think that just might set off that trap.”
“Pull!” Chang ordered, and eight flashlight beams, including Caleb’s, stabbed at the blackness through the gap as the door continued sliding open.
Qara inched closer to Caleb, watching as the portal that hadn’t been opened in almost eight hundred years moved to one side. She held her ribs, wheezing. “That,” she said, “was the easy part. I hope you’ve got a lot more in your bag of tricks, because once we walk through there, I’m not going to be much help.”
“Don’t let Renee hear that,” Caleb whispered.
“I don’t care. I’ve failed my master. Brought you right to his doorstep.”
Caleb touched her elbow, leading her ahead. “I thought that only death released a Darkhad from her sacred obligation.”
She nodded grimly. “Then my release, which will come at the same time as yours, is imminent.”
Just past the door, Chang set up the generator and hooked up the portable floodlights. Soon, all the soldiers had gathered inside the first area before the intersection, and the passageway was bathed in light. What stopped them, piled high in a heap against the left wall, were skeletons. The laborers, killed and left here to ensure their silence.
“Hey there,” Orlando said reverently, meeting the hollow stares of bleak eye sockets set in a dozen cracked skulls. “Should’ve unionized.”
“Shh,” Phoebe scolded. “And don’t move any closer.”
The walls were bare, white and sturdy. But the floor, revealed in the brilliant light, was smooth up until the “T” twenty yards ahead, where they could see the large square about forty feet to a side set in the floor between the east and west passages. It was set with a mosaic-tiled surface. Beyond this square and the intersection, the passage continued on into the regrouping darkness.
