Unless…”
His voice trailed off. We knew what he was thinking, and our faces were white and strained as we methodically moved among the Monks of Mirth. We pulled back cowl after cowl. All we found were white skulls, or recent ones with patches of skin and hair still clinging to them. Moon Boy nearly had a heart attack when both empty eye sockets of a skull suddenly winked at him, but then a frightened bat flew from the hollow skull. Something terrible might have happened to the prince, but at least he wasn't one of the monks.
We took torches and bent close to the floor. It took nearly an hour to find it, but Moon Boy suddenly whooped happily. A scarlet tassel lay at the entrance of one of the side passages. Again we clutched our weapons and started off, with me in front and Grief of Dawn covering the rear.
If the prince hadn't managed to leave that trail we would have been hopelessly lost in a matter of minutes. It was a maze inside a labyrinth that was inside another maze, and tunnels branched off in all directions. Everywhere we saw heavy wooden braces holding the ceilings together. We had to move carefully to avoid touching scaffolding, and we found ourselves whispering, as though a loud word could bring the tomb down on our heads. Tomb it was: room after room, some finished and some incomplete, designed for every conceivable function and pleasure. The Laughing Prince had decided to take his whole world with him, and I even expected a polo field until I realized that in his day we had imported the marvelous horses from India (left by the mad Greek invader) but not the game that went with them.
The scarlet tassels continued to show us the way. Moon Boy whispered that he could hear water, and a few minutes later we stepped into a beautiful cave. From what we could see in torchlight, the stone was blue and green and very beautiful, and a marble floor led to a pool fed by a small trickle of water falling from a ledge nearly forty feet above it. Marble steps led up to jutting rock shelves, and I had a weird vision of a parade of skeletons and mummies climbing up to dive.
Moon Boy held up a hand. “Something moving,” he whispered. “It's coming this way. Up there,” he whispered, pointing to one of the rock shelves above the pool. Then we all froze like statues, because a high screeching voice began to shriek.
“Master, O Master, the game nears your bow!
An old stag, two young bucks, and a lovely young doe”
The echoes bounced back and forth between the walls and vibrated into endless passageways. Something moved. A small graceful figure wrapped in a robe of motley was standing on the shelf looking down at us. I stopped breathing when I saw the cowl was pulled back just far enough for the top of the head to be seen above dark shadows. The hair was the color of fire. I heard a clear lilting laugh, and then the pure lovely voice of a girl.
“I hope I didn't frighten anybody. Who are you?”
Master Li's eyes were slits so narrow I wondered how he could see anything, and his cool voice was sardonic.
“Tourists,” he said. “Who are you?”
The girl shyly plucked at her robe. “My friend calls me Fire Girl,” she said. “Have you seen him?”
“Possibly,” Master Li said. “Is your friend the happy fellow who cavorts with monks who wear robes like yours?”
“Yes. He's my friend until my real friend comes, but I haven't seen him for the longest time.” Her pure voice was puzzled. “He promised to come back, I know he did, but I can't remember when it was.”
Master Li heaved a sigh and reached for his wine flask.
“His name, no doubt, is Wolf.”
“Yes!” the girl cried delightedly. “Have you seen him? I've been waiting and waiting and I know we have something important to do, but my head isn't very clear and I can't remember what it is.”
She had the most beautiful young voice I had ever heard, but there was a strange discordant note behind it. Something was off center, and it came not from the vocal chords but the mind.
Master Li swallowed some wine, and for once he didn't seem to enjoy the taste. “We also have a friend,” he said. “He has funny hair that sticks out all over, and ink stains on his nose. He may have gone with your other friend, the one with the monks.”
“Yes, I saw him.” She gestured vaguely behind her. “Back there. Maybe he's sick, because they were carrying him.”
“Then we'd better go to him with some medicine,” Master Li said reasonably. “Do the monks call your friend the Lord of Laughter?”
“Yes, but I don't like it when he laughs,” she said gravely. “He smells bad too, but when I woke up I was all alone, and I was alone for the longest time, and I was glad when I found him.”
“That was when you learned how to open the doors and get into the burial chamber,” Master Li said matter- of-factly. “Was he out of his coffin when you found him?”
She plucked her robe nervously and was silent for a long time.
“Yes,” she whispered. “But he wasn't really awake, and it took me the longest time to learn how to wake him up.”
“With the stone from the sacristy?”
“Yes, but then he wasn't any fun,” the girl said petulantly. “He wasn't any good at games, and he got nasty unless I made the stone sing and calm him down, and when I asked him to find more friends, he came back with those monks, and they weren't any fun either.”
“Aren't you forgetting something?” Master Li said coaxingly. “You had two other friends, didn't you? Two men who came down from outside? They carried you up the steps so you could slide, and then you shot a few arrows, and then you went back to the slide, and one day you found out how to get into the burial chamber.”
She plucked her robe more nervously. “Yes,” she whispered.
“And your other friend wasn't out of his coffin then, remember?” Master Li said gently. “You had the men lift the lid, didn't you? And you'd already found out about that iron plate in front of the desk, and the men stood there so you could pay them. It must have been hard to pull the lever.”
Tears were trickling through her lovely voice, pearls slowly drifting down through nectar.
“I didn't want to do it, but they would have told everybody about the room of gold and the suit of jade, and I knew I had to keep it secret. I have to keep everything secret. I can't remember why, but I know it's important, and one day Wolf will come back and remind me of the reason.”
“Secrets can be very hard to keep,” Master Li said sympathetically. “At night you went into the world above and listened at windows and heard things, and one night you came back to the cavern and told your friend who smells so bad that a monk from the monastery had a manuscript by somebody named Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and your friend told you that Ssu-ma had found an entrance to the tomb. Isn't that how it happened?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And after that you listened at another window and learned that the monk had made a copy, and your friend who smells so bad had to deal with that too.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “You were there! You and your friend with the hair and ink spots.” She threw back her head and laughed like a peal of lovely bells. “Your friend's hair is really very funny. Do you want to see where they carried him?”
Master Li swallowed more wine and put his flask away. “That might be a nice idea,” he said dryly. “Lead on, Girl of Fire.”
My head was hurting, and words slipped like sly lizards through cracks in my solid granite brain, darting, stopping motionless, creeping cautiously toward meanings: “You told your friend who smells so bad that a monk from the monastery had a manuscript by somebody named Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and your friend told you…” The girl had said yes, and that her smelly friend had also planned the second burglary and murder, but how could the Laughing Prince have planned anything? He hadn't been rational! Suddenly I realized that Master Li had led the girl to confirm that the only two people who could have been responsible for the murders of the monks were the Laughing Prince and the girl herself, and the girl had certainly killed the two gardeners.
But was she rational? She kept her distance as we climbed to the rock shelf, moving like a timid fawn as she turned into one of the side tunnels. Her beautiful voice reached back through the darkness, singing.
