The Dragon's Gate

by Barry Wolverton

  When his body hit the floor and broke, the sound that followed was like a building collapsing. Every clay warrior in the room toppled to the ground, until Bren and the rest were standing in a garbage heap of red clay. For a moment Bren thought he heard someone just behind him, but then he realized he was just hearing his own panting breath. He tried to calm himself, but his nerves had run away from him, and when another piece of clay slipped from the pile and crashed onto the floor, Bren nearly jumped out of his skin.

  For a moment there was nothing in the room but a haunting silence, just before Barrett, Sean, and Yaozu began trudging through the shards of clay toward Bren and Mouse.

  Mouse reached down into the broken head of the warrior she had targeted and pulled out a small gold worm, slowly wriggling in her grasp.

  “What is that?” said Bren.

  “A silkworm?” said Barrett, taking the live thing in her hand. “Is it real, or enchanted, like the cranes?”

  “Ingenious,” said Yaozu, taking the worm from Barrett and holding it up, so that they all could see that its surface was metallic. “A mechanical brain, controlling the others.”

  Barrett looked around at the wreckage. “Mouse, how did you know?”

  “It was the headdress, wasn’t it?” said Bren. “This one was different.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure. He seemed more alive than the others.”

  “Unreal,” said Sean. “And you can take that any way you like.”

  “Now what?” said Bren. “We still don’t know how to reach the tomb.”

  Barrett grabbed one of the bronze crossbow bolts and began drawing a crude map of the tomb in the dirt. “We came in here,” she began, indicating the underground park and the tunnel to the outer wall. “We then chose this door, which we now know dead-ends to the south, but has a door toward the east, here.” She looked toward the door, where clay warriors had fallen higgledy-piggledy when their thread of life was snapped. “Probably pointless trying that direction . . . could be thousands more choking the way.”

  “There is supposedly a western gate, here,” said Yaozu. “We just need to go back into the outer city and walk around.”

  “And hope the worm of life or whatever you call it was animating those big birds,” said Sean.

  “Indeed,” said Yaozu, “but just in case . . .” He chose a weapon from the pile—a scimitar—and silently encouraged the rest of them to do the same.

  When they reentered the outer city, they could see the aftermath of the battle they had left behind. There was nothing left of the Paper Men save for scraps of paper and feathers. The cranes were all toppled, and there were piles of clay warriors here, too. Bren realized they must have been waiting outside in case the group had tried to retreat—there truly would have been no escape if Mouse hadn’t saved them.

  Barrett picked her way among the pile until she found what she was looking for: the sword the crane had snatched from her hand. Then she led them to the gate, some two hundred yards south along the inner wall, passing more construction relics, bronze tools, and other devices Bren had never seen before. And near these craftsman’s tools were more skeletons of the men who had been buried alive to protect the tomb’s secrets.

  They passed a burial pit full of chariots and horses, and a massive kiln where the clay figures must’ve been fired. The gate itself was nothing special, at least on the surface. Just a pair of wide, wooden doors, unpainted and unadorned. Bren knew it had to be a trap.

  But it wasn’t. The doors were locked, but Mouse quickly fixed that, and then Barrett and Sean pushed open the heavy doors to reveal what at first seemed to be a vast, open space with a twinkling night sky. Even the air was cooler, as if they had entered a different realm altogether.

  “We’re in,” said Barrett, struggling to control her enthusiasm.

  “It can’t be this easy,” said Bren.

  “Maybe they never expected anyone to get this far,” said Sean. “We certainly wouldn’t have . . . not without Yaozu’s Paper Men, and of course, our Mouse.”

  For his part, Yaozu was saying nothing, which wasn’t unusual, but in this case it made Bren a little nervous. Part of that, however, was all that Bren had seen since they entered the burial complex. The Paper Men, being the mere illusion of men . . . was Yaozu like them? Bren tried to suppress the same feeling of fear and mistrust that had infected him after what had happened with Mouse back on the Vanishing Island. The feeling that someone you had grown close to was something else entirely.

  As they went deeper into the chamber, they began to see the stunning level of detail inside. Just as the Records of the Grand Historian had promised, there were mercury rivers coursing through the ground, and above them was a constellation-filled sky, as vast and brilliant as if they were standing atop a lonely mountain in the dead of night.

  “Look at that sky,” said Bren.

  The rest looked up. “I wonder if those really are pearls, like the Grand Historian claimed,” said Barrett.

  “Figure out a way to boost me up there and I’ll tell you,” said Sean. “Might as well come out of all this with my pockets full.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” said Bren. “Look—the position of those two constellations, and what must be the planet Venus.”

  “What are you getting at?” said Barrett.

  “They are almost identical to the sky I saw the last night we were aboveground, just before I fell asleep,” said Bren.

  “I still don’t get it, little brother,” said Sean.

  “Either the ceiling of Qin’s tomb was built around the exact date, two thousand years ago, that we happen to be here . . .”

  “Or the sky is moving,” said Barrett.

  Bren nodded. There was a wealthy earl back in Britannia who had taken a fancy to astronomy and hired an Italian named Galileo to build him a mechanical model of the solar system, one that reflected the notion that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. The model, which operated on some principle Bren couldn’t fathom, supposedly took up a whole room in the earl’s castle and never needed winding. But this was something else entirely.

  “Impressive,” said Yaozu.

  Bren found himself moving away from the mercury rivers. “This way?”

  “Lead on,” said Barrett.

  They crossed the cavernous room, which was like a miniature landscape—rivers, sand, hills, trees, and even pools of mercury that Bren assumed might be oceans. It was as if the entire tomb were a topographical map, and at the far end sat an enormous step-sided pyramid. Qin’s tomb.

  On their meandering path to the pyramid they saw nothing that looked like any of the Eight Immortals, no fan or flute or gourd, but those could be inside Qin’s coffin. They circled the base of the pyramid, which Bren guessed must’ve been an acre, based on the time he had had to walk Old Man Spenser’s farm picking up acorns. All that space to bury one man.

  “Where would they have put the entrance, Yaozu?” said Barrett, her eyes darting all around the stepped face of the pyramid. They had seen nothing resembling a door around the base.

  Yaozu tilted his head for a better look at the top. “Probably higher up. One reason the sides are stepped.”

  Barrett nodded and began to climb. The steps themselves were as tall as Mouse, so she had to boost herself up and onto each one as if she were climbing a fence. Bren was about to hoist himself up when he noticed that Mouse was a ways behind them, standing over one of the pools of mercury. He went to her and noticed that it wasn’t mercury at all, but water. Actual water.

  “Must be groundwater,” said Bren. He tasted it. “It’s clean. Cold. Come on, now, we could use your help to find out how to get into this bloody thing.”

  She just stood there, saying nothing. Bren went over and stood next to her, trying to see what she was looking at. All he saw was the watery reflection of a tall, still-thin boy, now looking much older than thirteen, his brown hair long and dirty, his eyes marred with dark circles,
his face smudged. But more than that, he looked weary, and sad.

  He looked at Mouse’s reflection. He had been with her every day for a year now, and what struck him was how much she hadn’t changed. A girl of eight, or however old she was, should have grown over the past months. Her hair should have been much longer, her face aged with struggle, like Bren’s. Like all of them. But the other thing he noticed looking at her reflection was her eyes, still large and black and fathomless, and yet alive with intelligence . . . searching.

  “Mouse, Bren! We need you up here!” It was Barrett, shouting down at them from halfway up the side of the pyramid. Sean and Yaozu were close behind.

  “Come on,” said Bren, grabbing Mouse by the hand and pulling her away from the pool. She didn’t want to come away, but she did, and together they slowly scaled the stone tower until they reached the others.

  Barrett pointed to the outline of a small door—more of a hatch, really—in the horizontal part of one of the steps, and nodded at Mouse. But after looking it over, she turned back to them and said, “It’s not locked. It’s not really a door.”

  “Clever,” said Yaozu. “When you want no one to enter, don’t leave a door.”

  “Meaning what?” said Sean.

  “When the workers finished with the inner tomb,” said Barrett, “they just came out of this hole and dropped this one last stone in place, to rest here forever.”

  “And then discovered they had been buried alive for all their hard work,” said Bren.

  Barrett laughed. “Rather cruel, isn’t it? But what’s holding this piece in place?”

  Yaozu was stroking his beard. “Must be braced from behind, probably wood or leather straps.”

  “Which have been exposed to moisture for two millennia,” said Sean.

  They all looked at each other, and then Sean delivered the first blow, stomping down on the hatch with all his might. The others joined in.

  “Careful,” said Barrett. “We don’t want one of us following this block to the bottom.”

  They applied their collective force around the edges, which they reasoned would be the weak point anyway, and after perhaps half an hour of exhausting effort, they heard a crack, followed by a snap, and finally, slowly, the stone began to fall inward.

  “Back up, everyone, back up!” said Barrett. “Mouse, come here.”

  Barrett grabbed Mouse by the arms and dangled her over the now-crooked block. “Kick the living daylights out of it, Mouse.” She did, slamming both her feet down, over and over, while Barrett held her from above, until with a final cracking and snapping and grinding the square of stone fell away into the tomb, Mouse’s legs dangling over the dark hole left behind before Barrett snatched her back.

  “Well done, little one,” said Sean, giving her a hug. “You can kick like my granny’s mule.”

  “So how do we get down there?” said Bren, peering into the black hole.

  “Take the stairs,” said Yaozu, and he fetched one of the whale-fat lamps and used it to show them a zigzagging wooden stair the workers must’ve built to get themselves into and out of the pyramid. The only problem was, Bren and company had broken off the end of it when they kicked the stone through.

  “Yikes. How sturdy do you think that is?” said Bren.

  “Sturdier than jumping,” said Barrett, and she took the lead, dropping herself legs first through the hole and then grabbing one of the leather straps Yaozu correctly predicted had been bracing the stone, hanging just for a moment before swinging herself over to the top of the stair. “Easy as English,” she said.

  Bren and Mouse went next, and Bren was relieved that it was too dark to see how far up they were. Sean and Yaozu also made it with no complications.

  The staircase itself wobbled and creaked beneath them, but it seemed sturdy enough after all these hundreds of years.

  “Greenheart wood,” said Yaozu, as if reading Bren’s mind. “Impervious to weather; immortal as the gods.”

  If he ever returned to Map, thought Bren, what wonders he would have to tell of the Far East at the Gooey Duck. The sailors he had eavesdropped on over the years didn’t know the half of it.

  If he ever returned to Map.

  Bren had to remind himself he was on the other side of the world, inside a two-thousand-year-old booby-trapped tomb.

  As they got near the bottom, the burial chamber grew brighter, lit by hundreds more of the mysterious lamps. In the center of the floor was a raised stone platform, and atop that was a gold coffin, rectangular in shape but curved along the top. Barrett and Yaozu reverently walked around the coffin, running their hands over the surface.

  “Can you believe we’re standing next to the tomb of China’s first emperor,” said Barrett to no one in particular. “People have searched for this, wondered about the legends, for almost two thousand years.”

  “The coffin alone must be worth a fortune,” said Bren. “Though I suppose you’d have a hard time getting it out of here.”

  “What about all this?” said Sean, who was walking around the main floor of the tomb, picking up treasures made of gold, silver, bronze, jade, and lacquer as if he were rummaging through an old curiosity shop. The others joined him and found everything from carved animals to kitchen utensils like cauldrons, wine vessels, cups, and pitchers. More decorative pottery and lacquer boxes were everywhere as well.

  “There must be thousands of items in here,” said Bren. “Tens of thousands! The other six Immortals could be buried under any of these piles.”

  “Let’s check the coffin before we rummage through all this,” said Barrett. “Many a king, pharaoh, and emperor has been buried with his goodies within arm’s reach.”

  They all ascended the stone platform again and surrounded the emperor’s coffin—large enough from the outside to hold a giant, which gave them some hope the emperor might have been buried with artifacts.

  “Is there some Chinese phrase we can say, for good luck?” said Barrett.

  “No luck needed,” said Yaozu. “At this point the magic objects are either inside here or they are not.”

  Barrett nodded and all five of them pushed on the coffin lid from the same side, barely budging it at first, but finally getting it to slide away from its base.

  “Not too far, if we can help it,” said Barrett. “I’d hate for the lid to crash to the floor and become damaged.”

  “Says the grave robber,” said Sean, straining to help move the lid.

  They didn’t move it far, but they did move it enough to see what was inside. Bren had been expecting a skeleton, or at least a mummy, but instead there was a life-size suit of armor made of green tiles.

  “A jade burial suit!” said Yaozu, growing excited. “Another rumor that had not, before now, been proven true.”

  They slid the coffin lid away just enough so that they could lift the body out and set it on the stone platform. It was lighter than Bren expected. Then again, there were three adults and Mouse helping lift it.

  Yaozu and Barrett both turned back to the coffin, hoping to find more, but there was nothing else. They could see that the inside of the coffin was lacquered and exquisitely made, but that didn’t change the fact that it was empty. There were no magic artifacts.

  “I don’t understand,” said Yaozu. “I was so sure . . .”

  “Maybe someone else beat us to them,” said Sean.

  Barrett shook her head. “It’s obvious no one’s been in here.”

  Yaozu was already off the stone pedestal, going through the mounds of treasure on the floor of the pyramid.

  “You and Yaozu said that might be the case,” Bren reminded her. “You may just have to keep looking.”

  “There may not be time!” Barrett said, more loudly than she’d intended. “I just mean, we don’t want them to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Are the wrong hands anyone’s but yours?” said Sean.

  Barrett turned on him like she was ready to strike, but Sean threw up his hands and said, “Sorry, L
ady Barrett. My apologies. But honestly, have you not looked around you? At the wealth of treasure in here? You’re an antiquary who’s just unearthed one of the most sought-after tombs in history! Bloody hell, I bet this jade suit alone would set you up for life. . . .”

  Sean kicked at the suit, not hard, but harder than he’d intended. His boot hit the right shoulder, caving in several of the jade tiles and leaving a gaping hole.

  “Oops.”

  “You idiot!” said Barrett, but when she knelt down to examine the damage, her jaw dropped.

  “What is it?” said Bren.

  “The suit,” said Barrett. “It’s empty.”

  “What?” said Yaozu, coming over to kneel next to her, examining the hole Sean had made. They all took a turn looking, and finally took the suit apart entirely, still not believing their eyes.

  “Could the body have disintegrated after all this time?” said Sean.

  “Not without a trace, I don’t believe,” said Barrett.

  “So someone took the trouble to pretend to bury Emperor Qin inside the biggest, most expensive funeral complex ever?” said Bren.

  “It would appear so,” said Barrett.

  “Unless . . . ,” said Yaozu, stroking his straggle of a beard.

  “Unless he found the secret to becoming immortal?” said Mouse.

  “That is what I was thinking,” said Yaozu. “Qin’s obsession with eternal life was well known.”

  That’s when Bren noticed that the wall directly behind the coffin had begun to sweat. Little beads of perspiration, as if the chamber had suddenly become as humid as a greenhouse. Except it hadn’t. If anything, Bren felt cold, probably from fear but also from being so far underground. And it was only that one wall.

  The beads became bigger, and to Bren’s horror, they weren’t beads of water at all. A minute later the wall began to weep metallic tears, heavy globes of quicksilver that poured down from cracks in the pyramid steps, puddling on the ground, then gradually rolling together in wobbly silver balls.