so furious his torch was shaking like a lantern swinging in a high wind.
“Four years before my ancestor died there was a famine in this part of the empire,” he said in a high tight voice. “Two hundred thousand people died, but the Laughing Prince said he was unable to help because all his money was tied up in mining equipment and debts.”
The prince stalked on to the next room, which held huge jars that had probably contained rare oils and perfumes and spices. Other rooms contained weapons that were so covered with costly jewels they were quite useless for warfare, and we stopped and gaped at a huge room that contained the skeletons of forty horses. Apparently the Laughing Prince had intended to ride in style in his next life, and it wasn't only horses he rode. The prince almost approached Master Li's level of swearing as we entered the Hall of Concubines and found forty small skeletons neatly arranged on forty beds.
“No sign of panic or disarray. Poisoned,” Master Li said grimly. “Timed, no doubt, to breathe their last along with their master.”
After that we more or less expected to find what we did: skeletons of cooks, courtiers, dancers, actors, acrobats, eunuchs, clerks, accountants—the lunatic lord had taken his entire court with him, or so I assumed. Master Li had reservations.
“One element is noticeably missing. Where are his Monks of Mirth?” he wondered.
We had no answer to that. We entered banquet rooms and game rooms and elegant state bedrooms, and we found closets crammed with the remains of costly clothes and pantries stuffed with petrified piles of rich foods. It wasn't so much a tomb as a vast underground palace, and at the center was a huge throne room, which even had a chopping block as part of the entertainment. Behind the throne was a small door, and we entered a round room with a lapis lazuli floor, and walls and ceiling of solid gold. Two sarcophagi lay side by side. The one on the right bore the dragon symbols of an emperor, and the one on the left bore the phoenix symbols of an imperial consort.
Master Li strode between the coffins to the back wall. There in a niche was a sacristy. The two side panels of the niche were covered with the same mysterious charts and formulas we had seen in the grotto, and the center panel carried the same inscription.
The sacristy was empty. Master Li swore angrily and whirled around and gestured for me to open the coffins. I stepped up to the one on the left. The lid was hard to move, but at last it began to slide down the grooves, and the farther it slid, the wider our eyes grew. I stepped back, panting, and we stood in silence and gazed at the burial dress of Tou Wan, the bride of the Laughing Prince.
She wore a suit that could have fed a million people for a year. It was priceless jade cut into rectangular pieces that were tightly linked together by fine gold wire. There must have been two thousand jade pieces encasing the mummy, but Master Li wasn't interested in jade. He was interested in a stone, and he let loose another volley of oaths when no stone was revealed in the coffin.
An inscription had been chiseled on the front of Tou Wan's sarcophagus, and Prince Liu Pao translated the old script for me. Apparently it had been written by her grieving husband.
It seemed to me that there was real feeling in that, and the prince shook his head wonderingly. “My ancestor was quite unknowable,” he said. “He wrote this, and then he went out with his Monks of Mirth to capture and torture a few more children.”
Master Li nodded at the other sarcophagus, and I bent to the lid. As it slowly slid down, our eyes nearly bulged right out of our heads, and when it slid all the way down I stepped back and sat down heavily on the floor. The silence was broken only by the hiss of our torches.
The coffin was empty. Prince Liu Pao sat down in a heap beside me, and I supposed that both of us were seeing a mummy dressed in jade crawling from a coffin and creeping out to join his merry monks in motley. Master Li glared down at us.
“Oh, bat shit,” he snarled. “Stop trying to catch flies with your gaping mouths and start using your heads.”
He sat down on the rim of the coffin and glared around the golden room. He was furious.
“Ox, what happened to your torch when you punched through the iron and brick?” he asked.
“Wha… Why, nothing happened,” I said.
“Precisely. The flame didn't jump toward the hole because there already was fresh air in the tomb,” he said. “That means there's another entrance somewhere, and it's been used recently. We're too late. The thieves have already been here, and that means we have to change our minds about their being thieves.”
That was too slippery for me, but the prince looked up with sudden interest.
“They didn't take the gold and jewels, and not even Tou Wan's burial suit,” he said wonderingly.
“So what did they take?” Master Li asked.
We remained silent, so he answered his own question.
“They took a stone,” said Master Li. “All the inscriptions indicate that the Laughing Prince worshipped a stone. When he died he would certainly have arranged for it to be buried with him, so it was taken from the sacristy and—perhaps—placed in his hands, and then the jade suit was fashioned around him. Jade is among the hardest of materials. The stone might be damaged if somebody tried to crack the jade, so whoever it was who beat us to it simply carried the whole damn mummy away. What kind of people would pass up gold and jewels to get their hands on a sacred stone?”
“A religious order of some sort?” the prince guessed.
Master Li shrugged. “That's all I can think of at the moment,” he said. “Remember that the Laughing Prince created a quasi-religious order he called the Monks of Mirth, and notice that the Monks of Mirth, alone among his court, did not die along with the prince—at least we haven't seen their skeletons. Suppose he arranged for the order to be perpetuated through the centuries?”
I finally found my tongue. “Why?” I asked.
Master Li threw his hands wide apart in exasperation. “How would I know?” he said. “We can assume that he worshipped a stone, although we don't know why. The use of laughter and dancing in place of prayer is not unknown to ancient pre-shamanistic religions, and I can't help but wonder about the constant repetition of the number five in his peculiar formulas. Five is a sacred number to many weird cults, ancient and modern alike. The primitive Yu-Ch'ao, for example, who are said to live in five-sided tree houses and sacrifice to five-headed demons in five-celled temples.”
Master Li pulled out his wine flask and offered us some, but we declined. He swilled a pint or two and wiped his lips with his beard.
“Prince, for the moment I'm stymied,” he said frankly. “The idea that we may not be dealing with normal criminals throws everything out of balance. All I know for certain is that we have to get to the bottom of the strange compelling sound and the destruction of Princes’ Path, and that means Ox and I will have to go to Ch'ang-
