Master Li grunted and flicked a finger downward, and I saw why he was following the girl wherever she led. One more scarlet tassel lay on the tunnel floor. She might be crazy, but she was leading us in the right direction.
The sweet notes echoed away into the distance, and the girl's voice spoke from the darkness ahead. “I don't remember what that means, but Wolf will tell me when he comes,” she said trustingly.
We turned and twisted through tunnels, all braced with rickety old wood. Four more scarlet tassels told us we were going in the right direction, and finally the small dim figure ahead of us turned into one more entrance, and her voice drifted back: “They took him in here.”
When we reached the opening and stepped inside to a small cave, the girl was gone, but I saw another passageway in the far wall. The cave had once been a storeroom, and old metal tool racks lined a wall. Ancient posts lifted to crossbeams that held up the shaky ceiling. One of the posts had cracked, and somebody had tied coils of rope around the split.
Something was wrong. My gut told me that, not my mind, and I forced my eyes to move slowly around the cave. Suddenly they jerked back. A rope? A rope that had survived seven centuries and wasn't even frayed? I strode forward so I could see the other side of the thick post. The rope extended to a hole in the wall, and it was lifting and tightening. I swore and swung with my axe, but I was too late. Just before the blade reached it, the rope jerked taut and the flimsy old post snapped right in half.
Other posts groaned in protest. They bent, and the entire ceiling suddenly dropped two feet. The tortured posts screamed, and then they snapped with deafening sharp cracking sounds. Splinters of wood shot around the cave like vicious spears, and rocks tumbled down, and the entire framework supporting the ceiling began to bulge in the center. I dove forward as the bulge bent toward the floor and got beneath the center beam and heaved upward with all my might. I couldn't lift it, of course, but it temporarily stayed where it was.
“Get out!” I yelled.
I glanced back. My mind refused to believe what my eyes were telling me. It couldn't be. It couldn't be. Surely a shack in Peking would echo with happy laughter, and an old sage would whistle “Hot Ashes” and open another wine jar when his young wife slipped into the shed in back to visit Number Ten Ox, and Moon Boy and the prince would come every few months, and…
And my heart believed what my eyes said, and turned to ice. Moon Boy was cradling Grief of Dawn in his arms, and this time no medicine on earth would help her. A shaft of splintered wood at least three inches thick had struck her square in the chest like a bolt from a catapult, and she was as dead as Tou Wan. Moon Boy was not going to leave her body to be crushed. He picked her up and carried her back toward the tunnel, and then I saw no more as my eyes blurred with tears. The ceiling sounded as though it was groaning with grief as it pressed down upon me. I couldn't move or the whole works would collapse.
Master Li's hand was on my shoulder. “Is the weight distributed evenly?” he asked.
“No,” I panted. “It's tilted forward.”
Master Li scuttled to the old iron tool racks. Some were very thick and strong, and he began walking one toward me. He got it beneath the beam, and then he wrestled with another one. When they were placed on both sides of me I bent my knees, lowering the center beam as slowly as possible. It was shuddering like a living thing, and it wouldn't remain in one piece much longer. It touched the tool racks.
Master Li had moved back to the tunnel opening. I let go, dropped to the floor, pushed back, and did a back flip to the opening. I just made it to the tunnel before the beam snapped in half, and Master Li hopped up on my back and I began to run. The crash of the falling ceiling nearly deafened us. The whole tunnel was shaking and dust billowed and rocks and wood splinters flew. I was running blind, but then I saw a glow of light through the darkness and dust. Moon Boy had the body of Grief of Dawn over his shoulder, and he was waving his torch.
Once before I had seen Master Li use his incredible memory to find the way back through a labyrinth, and now he did it again. He took the second opening on the right, then the third on the left, then the first on the left, and kept it up without hesitation even though rocks were falling and stones were screaming like tigers as they scraped together. We ran through one more opening and found we were back at the pool. In a minute we were back at the tunnel we had taken before, and then we carne to a halt.
The vibration had shuddered through the entire cavern, and some ceilings were weaker than others. The tunnel that would have taken us back to the Monks of Mirth was completely blocked by a rockslide.
“Master Li, I can hear water that way!” Moon Boy shouted. “It sounds like the river!”
Now Moon Boy took the lead, groping through passage after passage, moving ever closer to the sound. At last Master Li and I could hear it too, and we stumbled from a hole to the bank of the black river in the huge central cavern. Moon Boy's torchlight bounced across the water and revealed the features of the first statue we had seen: Yen-wang-yeh, the former First Lord of Hell. We were only a few feet from the stairs that led up to Princes’ Path and safety.
Master Li hopped down from my back and trotted back into the tunnel we had come from. He told Moon Boy to raise his torch, and he studied the vast structure of scaffolding with the eyes of an engineer. He walked over to the central supporting post near the left-hand wall There was a crack in the center of it.
“Ox, can you break this thing?” he asked.
“It's old and fragile,” I said. “Sir, it might break, but if a tunnel collapsed here, after the collapse back there, wouldn't that put a tremendous strain on the entire structure? That crazy girl is still in there, and the prince may still be alive.”
“Do it,” Master Li commanded.
“Venerable Sir—”
I shut my mouth. Master Li was glaring at me, and it was not for Number Ten Ox to contradict the great man. I put my shoulder to the post, but I had underestimated how rotten it was. It snapped at the first pressure, and I very nearly fell and impaled myself on the stump. Master Li hopped up on my back and Moon Boy lifted the body of Grief of Dawn and we began to run. We could hear nothing but the scream of splintering wood and the thunder of falling rocks, but I saw Moon Boy's lips opening and closing and his finger frantically pointing up.
Just ahead of us a huge crack was spreading across the ceiling of the cavern. With an enormous roar, about a hundred tons of rock crashed down and blocked all possible paths to the staircase. The river heaved, and a tidal wave raced back against the current. Master Li was pounding my shoulder and pointing, and I realized our only hope was to get back to the staircase that led up to the formal tomb. Moon Boy was very strong, and he would rather have died than leave Grief of Dawn's body down there, and he carried her while I carried Master Li as we ran for our lives. The face of the cavern ceiling was spreading into a succession of wide smiles. Rocks fell like hailstones and the black river turned white with foam. The walls shuddered and the floor bucked like a wild horse, and chunks of shattered wood and clouds of dust burst from every side passage.
I climbed into an enormous extended hand, and then up and over the torso of the fallen Japanese King of the Dead. We raced on past fallen statues. Gilgamesh still stood in his pride, holding the lion, but Anubis had fallen. Screeching grinding sounds hurt our ears. A huge crack opened in the floor, and Toth and Ament dropped into the pit and disappeared. We just made it past the enormous mummy of Osiris before it toppled over and smashed, and inside my head and heart I was listening to a beloved voice:
“Faster… faster… There's the raven and the river…”
There was the raven. We panted past it and lunged into the side passageway. The stairs were still intact.
