The City of Sand

by Tianxia Bachang

  There were rumors that more than one team of explorers had found their way into this ancient city, but as none of them ever made it out again and the endlessly shifting sands quickly covered any traces they might have left, there was no way of knowing whether this was true, or what underground entrances they might have stumbled upon.

  We were now certain that the most important part of the kingdom lay beneath our feet, yet we couldn’t find a way in. Frustration blazed in our minds. Finally, by studying each street and building carefully, looking closely from our perch at every single structure, we noticed that one of the stone houses was slightly taller than the ones around it, a fact we could easily have missed because that house too had a layer of sand obscuring its outlines.

  That was the only clue we had, so we quickly clambered down and went over to the house. Close up, it appeared to be a temple, also carved of Zaklaman black stone, the entrance made to look like the mouth of some gigantic beast. There was so much sand that Kai and I had to dig a tunnel before we could enter. Everyone put on their gas masks, just in case, and with flares illuminating our path, we slowly made our way inside.

  Past the opening, we found ourselves in a vast cavern with eight stone columns to either side. The sand that completely blocked the entrance had also acted as a seal, so the interior was completely clear—not a grain to be seen.

  At the farthest end of the hall from us was a single eyeball, this time carved from jade. Unnervingly, the stone was naturally threaded with red, while the pupil was a clear, piercing blue, looking alarmingly realistic.

  I couldn’t find my tongue. Silently, I crept closer. Although my first thought had been how valuable this artifact might be, as I went up to it and touched it, I thought it was worth this whole cursed trip into the desert just to catch a glimpse of such a sacred object. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I’d never have dared imagine something so precious could exist.

  Untroubled by such thoughts, Kai stretched out a hand and made a grab for the jade eye, intending to stuff it into his backpack. He struggled with all his might, but the carving seemed rooted to the floor and didn’t shift even an inch.

  Afraid Kai would damage the item with his brute force, the professor hastily shoved him aside, and scolded him for even touching it. Meanwhile, Julie noticed an odd-shaped indentation in the statue. “Hang on,” she said. “Kai, it looks like your family heirloom medallion might fit in here. Give it a go. Maybe it’s some kind of key.”

  Kai was overjoyed. He pulled the jade piece from his pocket and held it over the aperture. “If this fits, then this eyeball belongs to me,” he declared. “If the rest of you want a piece, you’ll have to fight me for it. Look at it. All mine. Brother Hu, we’ve struck it rich this time.”

  Apart from me, everyone in the room was baffled by Kai’s words. What was wrong with him? you could see them thinking. How could this jade eyeball suddenly belong to him?

  I hurried over. “If we let this crowd discover we’re actually gold hunters, they might turn against us. Shush!” I whispered in Kai’s ear. Then I pretended to smack him on the head. “No need to make jokes like that. Why don’t you hurry up and try your medallion? Don’t keep us waiting.”

  Realizing he’d said the wrong thing, Kai obediently shut his mouth. Fortunately, he was still wearing his gas mask, so no one could see his facial expression, which at least made the whole situation a little less awkward.

  Professor Chen and his bookworm students seemed oblivious, so I was mainly worried about Julie realizing what we actually were. Her brain was sharp. The slightest slip and she’d be on to us. Or maybe she’d suspected all along that we were grave robbers. In any case, the moment had passed, and there was no need to stress out over it. I turned my attention to helping Kai fit his jade amulet into the indentation in the eyeball.

  The eyeball was swiveled upward, as if staring at the ceiling, and the gap was right on top of it. The jagged outline of the space did look like Kai’s jade piece would fit into it, and after a little maneuvering, we finally got it slotted into place with a satisfying click. The giant eye twitched, then ponderously rolled away. The floor where it had stood was perfectly smooth, with no indication of what mechanism had kept it so firmly fixed in place.

  Scooping up the artifact, I pressed it into the professor’s hands, asking him to examine it closely.

  Julie lit another flare to give him some light. Professor Chen got out his magnifying glass and turned the eyeball over and over in his hand, shaking his head the whole time. “I—I have no idea what its function is,” he said. “A jade eye the size of a human head. It looks completely natural, with no trace of human handiwork. In fact, I’m pretty certain that two thousand years ago, no technology on earth could have produced an object like this.”

  The Jingjue civilization really was shrouded in mystery. Even after devoting several decades of his life to deciphering it, Professor Chen was barely scratching the surface. At most, he had a beginner’s understanding of their language and history. He’d only just learned that this was a society that worshiped eyes, thanks to the black tower totem. It was impossible to know very much about this jade item we’d just come across.

  All we could say for certain was that this great stone hall with its sixteen vast columns must be a temple. And of course, if the Jingjue prized the eye above all things, they’d naturally have placed one at the center of their place of worship.

  But why was there an indentation that happened to fit Kai’s jade amulet exactly? And what mechanism allowed the eyeball to move only when that space was filled? These were mysteries we still had to solve.

  Looking stern, Professor Chen asked Kai if he would be so kind as to explain the origins of his jade piece. The complete truth, he urged, not some incredible exaggeration. Just the facts.

  This was astute. Obviously, not a soul had believed his story about acquiring the amulet while hunting bandits with his dad, but because it happened to have a few words of the Guidong language on it, they’d agreed to let him join the team and come with us to Xinjiang.

  Now that he was being questioned seriously and the eyes of the entire group were on him, Kai had no choice but to admit he didn’t know much about its origins. He would tell us what he could.

  It all started when Kai’s father was a teenager himself. He was in the army when one of his close friends was deployed as a battalion commander into Xinjiang, to take on the rebels on the southwestern border of the Taklimakan Desert. The friend led his troops to Niya, where they encountered more than a hundred bandits.

  The situation in Xinjiang at the time was chaotic, with marauding gangs of bandits and horse thieves everywhere. It was commonplace for the army to get caught up in local skirmishes, which were always short and intense, ending with most of the rebels either dead or fleeing. At Niya, Kai’s father’s friend found this jade amulet on the body of a bandit with a mighty black beard. There was no indication of the history or function of the artifact, but as it was an unusual color and there were strange symbols on it, he was captivated and decided to keep it.

  Many years later, when he heard that his old comrade in arms had a new baby boy, he thought this jade piece would make a good gift and sent it over.

  Kai’s father died when Kai was just a little boy, and didn’t have much to leave to him, so this jade amulet was one of the few family treasures left. The family friend had passed away too, so it was no good looking there. And that was all he knew about it, Kai said, concluding his account.

  Professor Chen sighed. “It’s a shame all these people are no longer with us,” he said. “After it’s passed through so many hands, it’s impossible to say where this jade piece first came from.” He continued muttering to himself, in real distress at being unable to pinpoint the origin of this mystical artifact.

  Julie took the jade eyeball from him and had a close look herself. Noticing how fully it absorbed her attention, I thought back to how she’d barely spoken a word since we’d entered Jingjue City, and
wondered if seeing these ruins was making her remember her father, and if she was sad at not having discovered a single trace of him yet. Mr. Yang and his team had disappeared more than a year ago, and we didn’t even know if they’d made it as far as we had. Besides, the winds whistling through the mountain pass were so strong that sand was constantly gusting over this city, burying and then uncovering it countless times each year. Anything we found on this trip we would find out of sheer luck. Looking for a small group of people in this vast desert was like trying to find a needle at the bottom of the ocean. Julie must have been clutching on to a whisper of hope that she’d finally discover her father’s fate. But the deeper we traveled into the ruins, the fainter the possibilities grew and the more disappointed she must have been.

  Julie had saved my life back in the valley, and I was determined to do something for her in return. Seeing how enraptured she was by this artifact, I wished the amulet belonged to me. If it had been mine, I’d have given it to her immediately.

  Before Julie had finished studying the eyeball, Kai grew anxious and reached out for it. Julie took a step back. “What’s your hurry?” she snapped at him. “I’ll return it when I’m done.”

  “Right,” he retorted. “This jade piece is a family heirloom. I think I’d better take it back now.” And with that, he reached out to snatch it.

  I quickly placed myself between them. “Please, both of you, there’s no need to fight. You’re making me look bad. As the leader of this expedition, I’ll make the decisions here. How about letting Miss Yang have another five minutes with the eyeball?”

  My biggest worry was that they would start tussling and end up dropping it. Instead, the opposite happened—seeing me intervene, they both pulled back their hands at the same time. I quickly reached out, but the thing was so smooth and round, I failed to get a grip on it and could only watch as it tumbled heavily to the ground, shattering into eight segments.

  “You clumsy fools!” Professor Chen exploded. He wagged a finger at all of us. “What have you done?”

  All at once, we were gabbling, gesturing wildly. “I didn’t…We didn’t mean…I only wanted to…We didn’t expect…How could this break so easily?” I bent down and picked up the fragments, praying that we’d be able to somehow glue them back together. But it became clear the eyeball was damaged beyond repair.

  “Forget it, Tianyi,” said Kai. “What’s done is done!” He took my arm and pulled me to my feet.

  Standing upright so suddenly made me dizzy, and I tumbled backward, landing on my back. As I struggled up, my head tilted and I saw something we’d all missed: on the ceiling of this temple was an eye about the size of a large basin, glistening as it stared down at us.

  I quickly pointed my flashlight upward. The ceiling was high here but should still have been within reach of my beam. Yet the darkness seemed to swallow every speck of light, so there was nothing to be seen but that enormous bloodshot eye, floating in a sea of blackness.

  Now that their attention was drawn to it, the others turned and ran for the entrance, afraid of what the eye might do now that it had seen us.

  In that instant, the giant eye rotated in midair, then swiftly plummeted to the ground. At closer range, it revealed itself to be a translucent, fleshy globe, a milky-white surface filled with a clump of some sort of dark material. No wonder it had looked like an eyeball from a distance.

  Seeing this strange object draw closer, Kai panicked and pulled out his rifle. I grabbed his arm. “Careful!” I shouted.

  Before I could say any more, the fleshy object burst apart with a ripping sound, revealing hundreds of those strange black snakes, miniature versions of the one we’d seen in the Zaklaman valley, all tangled together, inky scales covering their tiny bodies, tumorlike hoods over their heads.

  The snakes lay in little heaps, their writhing bodies still covered in translucent fluid from the egg they’d just hatched from. It was a revolting sight. All our stomachs turned, and we immediately took a few steps back.

  I suddenly remembered the half-man, half-snake statue we’d seen. Its head had been covered with a similar black sphere, which the professor had been certain was some sort of eye. No wonder Julie had been able to save my life in the valley by distracting the snake with a beam of light. Even if that fleshy hood wasn’t an eye, it was definitely extremely sensitive to light.

  There was no time to waste. While the snakes were still tangled up, Kai and I quickly jumped in front of the others and turned our guns on the creatures. Knowing how resilient they were, able to fatally wound a person even if only their heads were left, I shouted to Chu Jian as I fired to fling the solid fuel at them and burn their remains to ashes.

  The flames illuminated every corner of the vast stone hall. Hundreds of snakes sizzled before they’d even had a chance to bare their venomous fangs. As they were reduced to nothing, I let out a long breath. Luckily, we’d acted fast. But had the snakes appeared because we smashed the jade eyeball? Or had we unwittingly carried out a holy ritual by inserting the amulet into the eyeball, drawing the snakes here from some other dimension? Whatever the answer, we’d have to be very careful if any more of these eye totems showed up.

  I ordered the group to scan every inch of the floor, in case we’d missed any of the tiny snakes. Meanwhile, I studied the ceiling, which had now reverted to regular stone slabs. There was no indication of where the serpent egg might have come from.

  Our inspection reassured us that we were safe for now, but it did turn up one other discovery. Each of the sixteen stone columns had six carvings of eyes on it, and each had a hexagonal base, with a small insignia on each side: a hungry ghost, a herd animal, a plainsman, a giant-eyed figure, a guardian beast, and one blank side.

  Professor Chen carefully noted down the positions of these symbols, sketching them quickly in his notebook, then instructed us to try rotating the hexagonal base. We put our shoulders into it and realized that sure enough, these were actually rings around the main column, and with enough force, they could be moved.

  The professor said this made it clear we were in a temple, and what’s more, one with multiple functions—the symbols on the stone pillars could be swiveled, changing the purpose of the room.

  The pillars were in clumps of four, and the symbols were set so the guardians were at the fore. Even if the jade eye was a holy object and Kai’s amulet had started off some kind of mechanism, it didn’t mean other rituals couldn’t exist in this space. But as for how the jade eyeball had come to manifest itself, that might be a question we’d never be able to answer. Maybe previous grave robbers or archaeologists had somehow fumbled it from its hiding place, or maybe the slaves who rebelled against the Jingjue queen two thousand years ago had left it behind in their haste. We would never know.

  “Professor, this temple seems to be just as important a site as the palace,” Julie said. “What if there’s a tunnel leading to the palace itself here? Should we look for one? Little Ye still isn’t well. If we find one, we’ll be able to get her to the water source quickly.”

  Professor Chen nodded. “I’d wager that there is a tunnel, yes, but it’s surely a well-hidden one. Look how big this place is—how will we ever find it?”

  “That’s easy,” Kai chimed in. “You paid us to clear the way for you, remember? Tianyi and I got hold of all those explosives, so we can blast a new tunnel for you.”

  “Absolutely not!” exclaimed the professor, frantically waving the suggestion away. “You will do nothing of the sort. These are the last traces of an ancient civilization. It would be barbaric to harm even one brick of this place.”

  The shattered jade eye still on my mind, I thought this might be my opportunity to redeem myself. I remembered every single thing the manual said about the veins of the land and the paths of feng shui, and I was pretty sure I’d be able to find any secret tunnels that might be around.

  “The way I see it, the arrangement of these sixteen pillars exactly matches the positions of the sixteen un
derground dragons,” I said calmly. “This corresponds to the constellation of the Vast Door. Many tombs from the Han dynasty make use of such a device. And earlier, from the top of the black tower, we saw that the layout of this city is in keeping with the highest principles of geomancy, showing that the queen must have been very learned in metaphysics. So why don’t I try using the golden acupoints to find any hidden exits? I don’t have a lot of experience, but if I don’t succeed, we can always think of some other plan.”

  Everyone agreed that there was no harm in trying, and so the group stood by quietly, waiting to see what I would do. I walked into the middle of the temple and studied the space. With only sixteen columns, there weren’t too many possible permutations, and after walking around them several times, I thought I had the measure of the place.

  These sixteen dragons were actually snakes. The manual states that the flowing of snakes inevitably leads north to south. Of these sixteen pathways, only one was a true dragon. I’ve made it sound easy, but in practice it took a lot of calculation before I was able to find my target: a group of four stone slabs at the far end of the hall.

  Carefully tapping at them with an archaeologist’s chisel, I verified that three of these were the real thing, while the forth one gave out a hollow echo. The slab was about half a foot long, with no sign of any opening mechanism. It would seem this passageway hadn’t been used very often, and I didn’t see how we would gain access without using explosives. Unless…the closest pillar controlled it. But would it still work?

  I called Kai over to help turn the hexagonal base. We’d need to be very careful—one false move, and who knew what might be unleashed on us next. Just to be sure, I asked Professor Chen and the others to head back outside. Then, wiping away the sweat on my brow, I told Kai that we should very slowly swivel the blank side to face the slab that I suspected covered the tunnel. Next, we’d have to rotate it five spaces clockwise, back one, then another eleven spaces clockwise, and finally back two. Not one more or less.