The Emperor's Code

by Gordon Korman

  The beep cut right to Dan’s heart. He slumped against the glass of the pay phone booth, hoping against hope that the cell phone problem had been fixed — that the message was a mistake, and the au pair’s familiar voice would cut in.

  “It’s me — Dan,” he stammered. “Sorry I haven’t called sooner. I thought Jonah’s dad was leaving messages for me. It’s a long story. I’m in—well, I guess that doesn’t matter because I have to find you guys now. Uh … see you later — I hope.”

  He hung up and immediately wrenched the receiver from its cradle and added, “I miss you!” But it was too late. The connection was already broken.

  The streets of downtown Xian had been deserted when Dan had stormed out of the Bell Tower Hotel. They were crowded now, like Boston at the height of rush hour. Peddlers clogged the sidewalks; bizarre food smells issued from every storefront; plucked chickens hung next to state-of-the-art cell phones in display windows. The sounds were loud and discordant. Bicycles and motor scooters battled buses for road space.

  Being alone, a foreign kid amid all this chaos, should have been frightening to Dan. Instead, all he felt was anger, most of it directed at himself.

  What have I done?

  He had trusted Jonah, who had always proved to be untrustworthy. And he had run away from Amy when he should have stuck by her. Standing alone on this street, it seemed like the ultimate no-brainer — she was all he had in the world, and he was the same for her.

  Now it was too late. He had no way of finding Amy, no way to know what leads they were following, no way even to surrender to Social Services — or worse, Aunt Beatrice. Possibly the most dangerous of all, he had spilled the beans about their deepest, darkest secret. Now the word was out that he and Amy were Madrigals. And for what? The pleasure of seeing the Wizards look shocked for two or three seconds?

  He grinned in spite of himself. It was a pretty great two or three seconds.

  But stupid. He was a target now. Amy, too.

  I should have warned her.

  Of course, who knew if Nellie was even checking her cell phone if it didn’t work in China?

  The cloudburst was sudden — sheets of rain pelting the Xian streets. Peddlers scrambled to protect their wares; pedestrians ran for cover. Dan wound up at the bottom of a half flight of stairs in a grungy basement-level video arcade. Okay — maybe this was just what he needed. Blasting a few spaceships might settle his nerves. And a little breakfast wouldn’t hurt. His Chinese money would go at least that far.

  As he examined the selection of candy bars on the rack by the cash register, his eyes focused on a large TV monitor tuned to CNN International.

  What he saw very nearly stopped his heart.

  This time Saladin did not complain about being carried around the Great Wall. The safety of Nellie’s arms seemed like a pretty good place to the Egyptian Mau.

  The crowds were just as dense as yesterday. It put Amy on edge, but not nearly as much as the fact that there was no Jonah and no indication that he would ever be coming. Somehow, the star’s schedule must have changed. He was off in a different direction, dragging Dan with him. Or, even scarier, abandoning Dan, leaving him on his own in this strange country. Not for the first time, she thought of the US Embassy in Beijing. Yes, it would mean a one-way trip to Social Services in Massachusetts. Yet if she was unable to scour the most populous nation in the world for a single lost eleven-year-old, she had to appeal to somebody who could.

  The question was when. When was it time to turn this over to the professionals, people with the power to stage a major manhunt? It had been four full days since she’d last laid eyes on Dan.

  They walked for miles, never stopping, always searching. The crowds thinned as they moved farther from the main tourist area of the Badaling section.

  Amy’s feet felt like blocks of granite and her spirits were even heavier. Giving up was unthinkable, but the Wall went on for thousands of miles.

  A passing couple asked her to take their picture.

  “Sure.” She peered through the viewfinder of their expensive-looking camera and began to adjust the long telephoto lens. As she centered the frame around the posing subjects, the tower behind them came into sharp focus. She frowned at the Chinese character painted on the wooden door.

  Why is that so familiar? I can’t read Chinese.

  As she snapped a couple of pictures and handed back the camera, it came to her.

  “Nellie, isn’t that the symbol that Alistair was doodling on his place mat yesterday?”

  Nellie squinted at it. “I think you’re right. But why would anybody write charm on an old door in the middle of the Great Wall?”

  The lady tourist spoke up. “Charm? That’s not the best translation. A better word might be — grace.”

  At first glance this tower seemed no different from the dozens of others they had passed through — the stone husk of what had once been a guard station on the Mongolian frontier. The windows were small openings designed more for archers than for light. An ancient staircase led down into the base of the structure, which had probably once served as barracks and armory.

  Nellie pointed. “Look.” She indicated another flight of stairs heading to the top of the tower. That was unusual. They started up. At the landing, they came upon another door with the same grace symbol. Locked.

  “Hold the cat.” Nellie thrust Saladin into Amy’s arms. From the pocket of her jeans, she pulled two bobby pins and began to work them into the skeleton-key lock. Amy was just reflecting that the au pair seemed awfully skilled at lock picking — and besides, Nellie didn’t wear bobby pins — when there was a click, and the door swung open.

  They found themselves in a square room, window-less except for a round skylight directly overhead. There were six wooden tables of varying heights, and a clutter of clocks, crystal vases, tiny framed mirrors, figurines in glass boxes, and tall champagne flutes.

  “Oh, God,” groaned Nellie. “We’ve broken into somebody’s garage sale.”

  Amy’s brow furrowed. “It can’t be a coincidence. Grace’s name on the door and all this stuff up here. But what does it mean?”

  “It’s just a bunch of knickknacks — the kind of junk you find in an old lady’s attic. I mean, you’d think that in the country that invented feng shui—”

  “That’s it!” Amy almost screamed. “Grace was totally into feng shui! She was constantly talking about how important it was to arrange your stuff to allow for positive energy flow.”

  “Her house always looked pretty good,” Nellie admitted. “Until your nut-loaf relatives burned it down.”

  “It’s way more than that!” Amy insisted, her excitement level rising. “Grace spent hours teaching me about feng shui. I think she knew that the clue hunt might bring me to this room one day.”

  Nellie was thunderstruck. “Are you saying that your grandmother put together a feng shui puzzle for you ten thousand miles from Massachusetts?”

  Amy shook her head. “No, I think Grace found the puzzle on her travels through China and marked the spot by painting her name on the doors.”

  “But if she didn’t set this up, who did?”

  Amy scoured the featureless walls, looking for some sort of hint as to who might have created this bizarre brainteaser. When she saw the faint letters scratched into the stone just about eye level, she laughed out loud. A name was spelled out in block capitals: HENRY.

  Nellie was bewildered. “Who’s Henry?”

  “We just read about him, remember?” Amy explained breathlessly. “Henry is the English name Puyi adopted! This is the work of the last emperor himself! And the stuff looks modern, so he must have done all this near the end of his life, after he was released from prison!”

  The au pair rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that just like a Cahill? Why say something when you can turn it into a feng shui puzzle at the Great Wall of China?”

  Amy handed Saladin back to her and pushed up her sleeves.

  “Wait,” said Nellie. “
You’re not going to try to rearrange this whole mess.”

  “Oh, yes I am. Grace made me an expert for a reason. There’s only one problem. She had this special Chinese compass — a luopan, she called it. I don’t have anything like that.”

  “How about that?” Nellie pointed straight down.

  Tiled into the floor was an elaborate design of concentric circles, with hundreds of Chinese markings.

  “That’s it!” Amy breathed, eyes alight. “Grace’s luopan had moving parts, so you could take it from house to house. This one’s fixed, permanently aligned to magnetic north.”

  “I guess nobody’s moving the Great Wall after two thousand years,” Nellie conceded.

  Amy set up the tables first, consulting the luopan constantly in order to get the corners in harmony with the Earth Plate and Heaven Dial. Then came the painstaking placement of the smaller pieces according to the feng shui principles of the flow of qi — energy.

  She knew this wasn’t a puzzle in the usual sense. There was no single solution. Many different arrangements would be correct and acceptable. But would all of them produce the result that Puyi had intended?

  She was on to the figurines now, carefully turning them so that their faces were pointed in accordance with the twenty-four directions on the luopan’s dial.

  At last, she stepped back and surveyed her handiwork.

  “Now what?” asked Nellie.

  Amy had no answer. Had she messed up the feng shui? Or was the whole idea wrong to begin with?

  Nellie gave her a sympathetic smile. “Well, you may not win the clue hunt. But if I ever need an interior decorator, you’ve got the job.”

  Amy was bewildered. How could she have been mistaken about this? She’d been so sure.

  She scrutinized the setup and leaned forward to straighten a mirror that might have been tilted ever so slightly off the Red Cross Grid line. She stepped back and watched it happen.

  A beam came straight down from the skylight, struck the mirror, and ricocheted around the array of objects. In an instant, the dim room was crisscrossed with brilliant rays.

  “Whoa!” exclaimed Nellie.

  Amy stared. The product of this symphony of refraction was an image projected on the gray wall at the luopan’s magnetic north. It was an inverted V, with one slope much steeper than the other.

  “What is it?” Nellie asked.

  To Amy, the silhouette was unmistakable.

  “I know where the next clue is!” she breathed. From beneath her shirt, Amy drew out the folded silk message from the Forbidden City. Here, in the guts of the Great Wall, she had unlocked Puyi’s explanation of the poem he had written as a much younger man.

  “It’s where the Earth meets the sky.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The screen at the video arcade showed a tilted landscape of pure white. A howling blizzard was in progress, roaring in the parka-clad CNN reporter’s microphone so that he had to shout to be understood.

  “The fall climbing season here on Mount Everest is almost over, and it looks like winter is well underway. In the ongoing battle of man versus mountain, score this round for mountain. Not a single climber has reached the summit, and the teams are heading home in defeat — all but a few diehards, who are hunkered down, sheltering from the storm….”

  As the man spoke, a huge burly form powered by, bent into the wind, carrying full gear — ice ax and heavy pack, spiked crampons on his feet. Despite the cumbersome load and terrible conditions, the climber moved with athletic ease. Just before he pulled his goggles over his eyes, his full face came into view.

  Dan emitted a wheeze that matched the worst asthma attack of his life.

  Hamilton Holt.

  The Holts — the family of Cahills who had gotten a jump on the next Clue — those Tomas muscleheads were climbing Mount Everest!

  The frustration nearly dropped him where he stood in the video arcade. Now he knew where the next Clue was. And so what? He couldn’t get in touch with Amy!

  The sensation began at the base of his spine and expanded outward until it flooded his entire body. It was the feeling he’d had after Grace’s funeral, when William McIntyre had told them all about the 39 Clues — urgent purpose, infinite possibility. A chance to become the most powerful person on earth, to shape human history! An opportunity so incredible that a pair of Boston orphans had turned down two million dollars for a place on the hunt.

  Back then, it had been mostly Amy’s call to chuck everything and join the contest. It was only a few weeks ago, but Dan had been through a lot since then. He’d traveled the world, experiencing thrills most people could only dream about. He’d nearly gotten killed at least a dozen times. That changed a guy. Life felt different after you’d looked death in the face.

  He was not the same Dan Cahill — the one who’d wanted to take the money and buy baseball cards. He was now a full partner in the destiny Grace had set for them. How could he have been fool enough to let go of it? He could never quit the Clue hunt. He’d been born into it! Amy, too. And although there was no telling how many miles lay between them right now, as long as they were both on the trail of the 39 Clues, they were not truly separated.

  The likes of Cora Wizard or Isabel Kabra could not be offered a chance at world domination.

  I have to get to Mount Everest!

  The arcade had a bank of computer workstations. Dan raced to an unoccupied one and opened the Internet browser. The manager rushed over and began yelling at him in Mandarin. Dan tossed a ball of crumpled Chinese bills onto the counter, hoping it would be enough to buy him some computer time.

  Mount Everest … Mount Everest … there it was, on the border between Nepal and Tibet. And — okay, Tibet was in the southwest corner of China. Not close exactly, but at least he was in the same part of the world.

  He Googled further. It was good to be back online. Amy felt comfortable surrounded by a stack of dusty books, but Dan was most at home surfing the web.

  A railroad timetable came up on the screen. There it was — a train from Beijing, China, all the way to Lhasa, Tibet. One of the stops, about halfway along, was Xian. He grimaced at the schedule. Thirty hours?!

  I’ll go nuts!

  Travel by air would be a lot faster, he reflected. But he had no passport and very little money.

  And you can’t stow away on a plane.

  “… I’m in — well, I guess that doesn’t matter, because I have to find you guys now. Uh … see you later — I hope.”

  Nellie stepped back from the pay phone at the Beijing airport, exhaling in sheer relief. The message was ten hours old, but Dan was alive! A little shaken up but okay. She couldn’t wait to tell Amy.

  The marathon that had brought them to this spot had been dizzying. A seven-mile sprint along the Great Wall to the bus staging area; an hour bus trip, which took three hours thanks to Beijing traffic; and a taxi ride out to the airport. All this carrying one very ticked-off cat.

  Amy stepped out of the ladies’ room and began to make her way through the crowded concourse. “Did you get the tickets?”

  Nellie nodded grimly. “Brace yourself, kiddo. We can’t get there till tomorrow.”

  “Huh? Why not?”

  “You need a special travel permit for Tibet,” the au pair explained. “They’re letting us fly as far as Chengdu tonight. We can pick up the permits there tomorrow morning and grab the next plane to Lhasa. But there’s bigger news. We got a message from Dan.”

  Amy’s whoop echoed throughout the soaring curves of the terminal building. Heads turned their way. A security officer craned his neck to investigate the source of the disturbance.

  Quickly, Nellie put an arm around Amy’s shoulder and marched her to the pay phone so she could listen to the recording herself. She replayed the message four times before finally hanging up, trembling with emotion. “He sounds scared.”

  “Hey,” Nellie’s voice was kind but firm, “this is good news, remember? Of course he’s scared. It looks like he’s s
plit with the Wizards. That’s not so bad, either. Did you trust those sideshow freaks?”

  “But he’s all alone,” Amy lamented. “Why didn’t he tell us where to come and get him?”

  “He had no way to be sure we’d get the message. For all he knew, he’d be waiting around for people who weren’t going to show. We have to take him at his word that he’s trying to find us.” She shook her head helplessly. “God only knows how he’s going to do that.”

  “By following the clue hunt,” Amy said positively. The process of forcing herself to think logically was helping her control her emotions and focus her mind.

  “Yeah, but you’re talking about going to Mount Everest!”

  Amy nodded grimly. “The mountain shape from the feng shui room — that’s Everest — steep on one slope, more gradual on the other! Remember the list of headlines from the early twenties? George Mallory died high on Everest’s north ridge in 1924! A lot of people believe he actually got to the top — that he was killed on the way down, not the way up.”

  “I’ve read about him,” Nellie told her. “He was the guy who said he was climbing Everest ‘because it is there.’”

  Amy nodded. “I think he was climbing for another reason, too. What if he was a Cahill, just like Puyi? In 1924, Puyi made some kind of breakthrough in the clue hunt. But he knew his days in the Forbidden City were numbered. So he arranged to have another Cahill hide the clue for him ‘where the Earth meets the sky.’ In other words, on top of the highest mountain in the world. Is that so impossible?”

  “It’s totally impossible!” Nellie raved. “It’s the flimsiest, most insane fairy tale I’ve ever heard!” An odd expression came over her face. “In fact, it’s just crazy enough to be the kind of thing that actually happens in your family. A regular hiding place isn’t good enough for you Froot Loops; you have to use Mount Everest!”

  “There could have been other factors,” Amy suggested. “Everest is very cold; the air is thin; the atmospheric pressure is low. Puyi might have needed safe long-term storage.”