The driver rounded a sharp bend in the hillside, and stopped.
The mist had closed in as they climbed, and through the gloom Menchú could only see the trucks parked beside them, their canvas-covered beds painted military drab. Those thick tires matched the grooves in the road. Beyond and ahead, vague shapes moved over gravel and scrub grass: round human figures, the jut of guns. A small army waited on the slope.
Grace closed her book, and slid it into her jacket pocket. “I told you we weren’t lost.”
“No chance to turn back now,” he said, eyeing the guns. “I suppose.”
“We shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
The driver opened Menchú’s door, then circled around to open Grace’s, only to find she had opened it herself already and stood in the mist, arms crossed, watching for the world’s next betrayal. “Wait here,” the driver said, and jogged off into the camp.
“What do you mean?” Menchú asked when he was out of earshot. “We shouldn’t be in China? I know we don’t usually get our jobs from the Chinese ambassador, but you seemed to think this was a good idea back in Rome.”
Grace brooded on the front of the car, feet on the bumper, like a gargoyle or an impractical hood ornament. “We need to be in China,” she said. “They don’t know what they’re doing. But we shouldn’t be here.”
Before he could ask her to clarify, three shapes emerged from the haze.
The man and the woman to either side had the build, uniforms, and brittle calm of soldiers. That didn’t bother him. What did bother him was that the woman in the middle reminded him of Hilary Sansone.
No physical detail connected the two: This woman had a round face with a tight, sharp mouth, close-cut dark hair, and favored black (turtleneck, trousers, blazer, shoes), while Sansone was … Sansone. But physical similarities mattered little, in Menchú’s experience. More important, and more worrying, were their similarities of gaze: how their eyes moved. How this woman saw herself, and how she saw them. Cold. Practical. Instrumental. Vicious.
“Father Menchú,” she said, to him, and, then, to Grace: “Grace.”
Menchú saw the tension leave his old friend’s shoulders—not all of it, but most, as if she had feared the woman would call her by another name. “Arturo,” Grace said. “This is Wang Jianguo. Arcane Security Bureau.”
Wang Jianguo filled the ensuing pause: “We deal with magic.” Her English was clipped and careful. She had studied well, but did not speak it often. He watched the soldiers flanking her, but saw no twitch when she said the m-word. Well-trained, or else they didn’t understand English. “Thank you, and the Vatican, for responding to our request.” She offered him her hand—her shake was firm and formal, withdrawn as quickly as it was offered. “You are late.”
“So was our flight.”
In Menchú’s experience, body language varied almost as much between countries as the verbal sort, but the angle of Wang Jianguo’s head conveyed a message: And that’s my problem how? “Follow me.”
In the mist, Menchú could not judge the size of the camp, how many canvas tents loomed beside the path down which Wang Jianguo led them, how many soldiers and civilians all together. Lacking evidence, his mind built both extremes. This handful of tents, these few figures, composed the limits of the camp, and at the same time the camp extended endless to all sides in his mind, covering the hill, filling the valley. Flying, he liked to sit by the window: You could see the sun. The sun felt very far away down here.
Even the mist did not feel like the mist of his youth.
Grace walked beside him, and kept her thoughts to herself.
He looked down at the earth between his boots, and stroked his mustache. “Your ambassador didn’t explain circumstances. He only asked us for help.”
“Your consultation,” Wang Jianguo said.
“Yes. But he didn’t explain. He just gave us plane tickets.”
“Visas,” Grace said.
“Visas, plane tickets. A driver. We need information.”
Wang Jianguo glanced back over her shoulder, and her voice took on a solicitous tone Menchú would have found shocking if it had been directed at him. “I know we’ve had our differences,” Wang told Grace. Grace’s return glance hovered just on the pleasant side of murderous. Grace had told Menchú all about Shanghai, about how Wang Jianguo’s people made the slaughter there even worse. “I hope you can overcome them. I appreciate your presence. Your country needs your help.”
Grace’s mouth tightened at your country. She walked on, projecting less interest in Wang Jianguo’s needs, or China’s, than in the layout of the camp. In the last few months, Menchú had enough experience of Grace, furious, to have learned the signs.
They reached a checkpoint: two more guards, facing out. “Here we are,” Wang Jianguo said, and vanished into the thick mist.
Menchú glanced at Grace, and thought he saw her gaze flick away from him. As a sign of common cause, he’d have to take it. He prayed for guidance and strength, and kept walking.
The mist shut him in, stifled all light and sound. Then it broke.
One step they walked in darkness, the next they stood in light, at a cliff’s edge. A boiling wall of mist towered behind them, reaching toward a sliver of clear blue sky above that tracked the cliff’s edge precisely. A different man with a different life might have tried to explain the mist wall’s sharp edge with a superstitious scientism, invoking microclimates, wind currents, least-energy paths, and other spirits that belonged to his small picture of the world. Menchú knew magic when he saw it.
They stood at a crack in the earth, a hundred feet wide and a few hundred yards long. It must have opened recently, as rocks and soil judged recent: grass grew right up to the edge. Green-gold blades glimmered in sunshine, and bobbed in the light wind. The mist started again on the other side of the crack, and the two walls of mist met at the crack’s edges, as if the mist were a part of the ground, and whatever made the crack had opened a gap in the mist as well.
Grace’s knuckles popped. Her hands had balled into fists.
Wang Jianguo stepped to the edge. Menchú followed her, and looked down.
Vaults and arches of carved rock emerged from the cliff face. Dragons and cranes peeked from the stonework; whatever made this crack had uncovered a porch or portico, with a flagstone courtyard improbably (again, if one had no experience with magic) intact. A carved turtle with a lion’s head crouched opposite the portico, facing in, teeth bared, and the portico itself was sculpted as a larger lion’s head, emerging from the earth. From this angle, he could not see a door, but blue light flickered on the stones between the turtle and the building, as if shed from the great lion’s mouth.
He turned to Wang Jianguo for an answer.
“An earthquake uncovered the structure years ago,” she said. “Obviously supernatural, under the circumstances. Not even the ancient Chinese could have built something that would remain whole underground after an earthquake. But the door was sealed. We tried to open it, and could not. We put it under watch, pending further developments, assuming the quake was magical in nature. None came. Our watch lasted years—until three days ago.” She took a picture from her pocket, and passed it to Menchú: an enormous bearded man in climbing gear, in the courtyard below, disconnecting from a rappel line. “A foreign national infiltrated the structure.”
Menchú passed the picture to Grace. Her eyes didn’t exactly widen—she was never that obvious—but he could read her well. She glanced from Wang Jianguo to Menchú, then to the picture again. “I know him.”
“Yes,” Wang Jianguo said.
“From Shanghai. Tom. He was with the Network. He helped Christina escape, but then he disappeared, and we didn’t see him again.” She stopped, he noted, before she mentioned Belfast. They’d discussed this back in Rome: They did not know how much the Chinese government understood Vatican operations, and, while any opening into China gave the Society more resources to stem the rising tide, without further e
vidence of Wang Jianguo’s intentions there was no sense feeding them anything they didn’t already know, especially about Belfast, and the Network. “I wonder how he found this place. I wonder what he’s after.”
The weight she placed on those last words made Menchú nervous. “What do you mean? What are we looking at down there?”
“We don’t know,” Wang Jianguo said, though he hadn’t addressed her. But in that moment, and in the direction of her gaze, the hunting dog fixedness she turned on Grace, he realized why they had been called.
The Chinese government did not know anything about this buried palace. So they needed someone older than the government.
“It’s my old team’s library,” Grace said.
• • •
In the tent she’d been given to change her clothes, Grace prepared for her descent. She adjusted her tactical vest, tested her arms’ travel with the vest buckled, frowned, and adjusted it again. Armor slowed you down, bound you up. If you didn’t trust it, you’d flinch when attacked—but if you did trust it, it let you down. Sal, who actually liked the stuff no matter how much Liam teased her about looking “tacticool,” whatever that meant, argued that Grace felt this way because she could—her curse did not make her bulletproof, only quick, strong, and fast-healing—but still, in her experience injuries tended to be something that happened to other people. But she didn’t know how much Wang Jianguo knew. She didn’t seem to know Grace’s Chinese name—at least, she hadn’t used her Chinese name—but Wang was playing her cards close to the vest, like Team Three was. Wang Jianguo knew Grace could move fast when she wanted to, but there was no sense telling her everything. Don’t offer the enemy an opening without need. Protect yourself.
Arturo knocked on the tent’s wooden frame before he entered. Grace made herself relax, and turn.
He carried a vest, boots, a climbing harness, shin guards, and a backpack, and looked as confused as she would expect a priest with an armful of military gear to be. In his youth he had been sheepish when out of his depth, testy when teased, but now he seemed only humble. “Can you give me a hand?”
She wanted to unfeel everything she’d felt in the last six months. No. Not everything. “Sit down.”
He held his thighs as he lowered himself to the seat. His knees popped. He smiled at himself, at his body, and she looked away. She settled the vest on his shoulders, cinched the straps he could not reach. “Just like old times,” he said. “Feels quiet without Sal and Liam around.”
“Swing your arms.” He did. She loosened one strap. “Breathe deeply.” She tightened another.
“I thought your old team stored its library at the Forbidden City.”
“The parts we used,” she said, “yes.” Damn. He knew as well as she did that these tents would be bugged. Switching languages wouldn’t help. They could always find someone who spoke French, or Polish. “Some we kept here, after we studied them. The dangerous ones.” She met his eyes, and willed him to change the subject. “I still don’t think you should have come.”
He nodded, slowly. They’d discussed this back in Rome—what they would have to tell the Chinese. “This is important. The tide of magic is rising. The Church has managed it throughout Christendom for the last two thousand years; our partners to the east cover the Dar al-Islam. The subcontinent has its own policies. Africa is … complicated, but the system works. North and South America are heterogeneous as ever. But esoteric religious orders didn’t do well here, during the Revolution. Wang Jianguo’s people have good intentions, but if they don’t know what they’re doing, one and a half billion people—and the whole world—are in danger.”
“Breathe again. Good.”
“I know there’s a big gap between us.” He was playing into the role now, speaking to be overheard. “But I want to reach out. I want to build a bridge. If we can work together.”
That last hadn’t been part of the speech they practiced. Improvisation?
He was looking at her. Nothing wrong with that. He had looked at her before. Thirty years ago for him, and five for her, in a rusted shipping container in Guatemala, parted by a candle flame.
She said: “You’re done.”
Outside, a soldier ran past, harness jangling, footsteps heavy. She waited for word of an attack, but none came. Menchú braced himself against his legs once more, and stood. He breathed out as he found his footing. She remembered him leading her down the long stairs into the Archives, as a young man, arms spread, grinning to share his secret.
“Arturo.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just old. My knees hurt when I stand, or when I sit. That’s why the Good Lord gave us aspirin.”
Even she heard her laugh as forced.
“Grace.” His pain seemed to linger more in her mind than in his; standing, he looked easy and settled, though still not young. “Grace, how do you feel?”
“Fine.” Her voice sounded clipped even to her. “Nervous. There’s power in that library. You could stay behind.” You should stay behind. But she could not bear to tell him that.
He turned toward the tent flap. “I want to go.” He hooked the shoulder strap of his pack and lifted with his legs, managing the weight into its proper place. When it was settled, with the hip belt buckled, he nodded, content. “I’m ready.”
Grace hoisted her own pack in a single sharp motion. “Then let’s go.”
2.
They met on the cliff between empty space and the wall of mist. “Only three of us?” Menchú asked, looking down.
Wang Jianguo, like Menchú and Grace, had changed into tactical gear; she clipped her harness into the rappelling lines, and tugged to test their strength. “He is only one man.”
“A big man, though.”
“I doubt that will bother Grace.”
Grace kicked a stone over the edge, and watched it fall. “You’ve learned, since Shanghai. Firepower isn’t always the answer.”
“I know,” Wang Jianguo said. “Or else the first two teams we sent would have fixed this before you got here.” Before Menchú could ask her any questions, she went over the side.
He rappelled down last, trusting the rope, the harness, and God in case the first two failed. His boots scraped gravel from the cliff face, and the rocks fell down, down to clatter against the roof of the improbable building buried below. He landed on the high gable, kicked off a dragon’s snarl, and settled in the courtyard. Grace steadied him as he neared the ground, then stepped back to let him unclip. The rope zipped back up, carabiner skittering off rock as it rose, and they stood alone. The blue light he’d seen from above shone through a gap in what had once been a stone door caught in the lion’s mouth. The stone had been—not broken, but somehow twisted, pulled like taffy to form a jagged opening just large enough for a big man to squeeze through. Menchú could not see the source of the blue light, which flickered and snapped deep in the library’s throat. “You sent two teams?” he asked, as he peered into the light and into the dark that remained after the light had gone.
Wang Jianguo tested her flashlight.
He stepped away from the opening. “What did they find?”
“They never came back,” Grace said. “If they had, she wouldn’t have called us.”
Wang Jianguo led them down.
Menchú had expected a cave, he realized as he ducked through the gap into the library’s front hall. Something rough, wet, and natural. Instead, dark stone walls rose on either side, and met the ceilings and floors at square angles. Geometric carvings, once painted, caught their flashlights’ glow. He could not make them out: People? Animals? Old buildings in Guatemala, pyramids and temples and tombs, felt like this.
Torches stood in sconces on the walls, lit, though they shed no light. Fire rose like blown glass from their heads. He reached for one flame, and as his hand neared he felt no heat. He touched it, as if he’d never dealt with magic before, but nothing happened. He didn’t burn. The flame rose solid and smooth, and its soft warmth soothed him—a dream o
f heat.
“This isn’t normal,” Grace said. “The torches should be burning. They never burn out.”
Menchú drew back his hand. “Who built this place?”
“If they knew,” she said, “they didn’t tell me. The best theory I heard was that Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, about twenty-five hundred years ago, built a palace to hold his treasures, then commanded wizards to cover it in stone so no one could find them.”
“The first Qin emperor had wizards?”
She shrugged. “Saying the Qin Emperor did it is about as good as saying no one knows.” Grace started walking again, and he kept up. “Qin Shi Huang did a lot of things, and destroyed a lot of records, and after his empire fell the Han destroyed the records that were left, and painted him as a mad conqueror. Which he was, so they didn’t have to work that hard. But who knows? The Bureau—my old team—had been using this place for a long time before I joined up. I don’t know how long. Probably not two and a half thousand years, but they didn’t say. There used to be a special cart they kept in Chengdu, and if you took that special cart on a special road into the hills, you’d reach a building, this building, where it was always night. I thought it was underground, but I didn’t know. It was magic.”
Something brittle snapped under Menchú’s foot, and he swept his flashlight down, expecting a massive bug. Large insects tended to go hand in hand with sorcery. But instead of a beetle, he found a four-rotor drone, plastic tines bent at horrible angles. He swept his light ahead, and saw another, and another. Dead glass lenses reflected his light. “Camera drones?”
Wang Jianguo prodded one with her toe. “We sent them down before the first team. Their last transmissions came from around this point. This is a good sign, I think—at least for my teams.”
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