“Three types of livestock, three types of fowl,” repeated Gold Tooth. “And geese are the most powerful species of fowl—according to legend, they’re able to see spirits. Maybe we summoned the tomb faster because we happened to bring geese with us.”
Grabbing one of the birds, I got out my pocketknife and held it to the creature’s throat. The only way to be sure was to slaughter it and see if that made the walls disappear.
“No!” Gold Tooth yelled, grabbing my hand. “Tianyi, don’t!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Now what?” said Kai. “What’s the problem?”
Gold Tooth motioned for me to put down the knife. “Tianyi, Kai, don’t get upset, but something seems wrong to me.”
“I’m not upset,” I said. “You know me. When I have an idea, I want to act on it right away. But if you think something’s wrong, feel free to tell us.”
“It’s like this,” said Gold Tooth. “The way I see it, if we’re right about the Western Zhou spirit grave appearing because we brought the geese…”
“Yes? What are you getting at?” Kai snapped.
“Give Gold Tooth a chance,” I said.
Gold Tooth cleared his throat. “As I was saying, if we kill these two geese, there’ll be no more fowl, and the Western Zhou tomb might vanish. But have you thought about where we’re standing right now? This endless staircase is part of the old tomb—it wasn’t there originally but materialized after we’d been here awhile. So we might actually be in a natural cave, or else deep in the mountain itself.”
I understood his point. “You mean if the ghost grave suddenly disappeared, then we’d end up outside the Tang tomb, which means we might still be trapped, or even buried alive.”
“Yes, and what’s more, the ghost grave doesn’t seem to be the whole of the Western Zhou tomb, only part of it. These steps were at the boundary of the ghost grave, but there’s no clear division. Or maybe this whole place is in a state of flux, but we don’t know if it’s expanding or contracting. If we kill the geese…”
He was right—this was a riskier position than we wanted to be in. “So we need to get back to the Tang dynasty tomb, into the burial chamber or the tunnel,” I said. “We can kill the geese there, once we’re in a safe place.”
This was easier said than done. It didn’t matter whether we went up or down; on every twenty-third step we encountered the crescent notch, with no end in sight. No matter how hard we tried, we were stumped. We couldn’t just shut our eyes and jump—as Kai said, we’d keep falling until the end of time.
Then Gold Tooth thought of something, and we tried his plan for lack of a better one. I lit a candle and stayed put at the damaged step, while Gold Tooth and Kai went on. When Gold Tooth was no longer able to see the light from my candle, he stopped moving and lit his own, while Kai went on alone. The hope was that by creating a visual link, we’d prevent the stairs from looping and come back out into the Tang tomb.
Unfortunately, the candlelight wasn’t able to reach more than five or six steps before getting swallowed. There was something unnaturally dense about this darkness—it reminded me of what we’d experienced in the cave in Xinjiang, the stuff of nightmares. As the memory came back to me, I started trembling all over, as if our companions who’d died in Xinjiang were lurking in the dark, watching my every move.
Even the powerful flashlight beam could extend a distance of only six steps before fading. So the three of us could visually cover only twelve steps, about half as far as we’d need to break out. Gold Tooth’s idea had failed.
Giving up, we huddled together around a candle, turning off the flashlight. “Why don’t we try that again, but this time I won’t stop when I can’t see the light anymore,” Kai said. “I’ll just keep running till I get out.”
“No way!” I shouted. “Don’t try to be a hero. There’s no point—you’d just die. If we get separated, there’s no chance any of us will get out of here alive.”
“What choice do we have? We’re not going to get out just by standing around.”
“We need to think of a solution! This is just like you, Kai, wanting to use brute force instead—”
Seeing that we were starting to quarrel, Gold Tooth cut in. “Guys, we don’t have time for this. Tianyi’s right. We can’t let ourselves get separated.”
Sighing, I sank down onto a step. Something poked at me—the coil of rope I was wearing at my waist. “That’s it!” I yelled. “Why didn’t I think of this before? We’ve all got rope on us, at least a hundred meters altogether. That’s how we’ll stay connected to each other.”
We quickly tied our ropes together, and then Kai stood on the damaged step, a candle in his hand and the rope firmly looped around his waist. Would this work? I had no idea, but we had no other options. Before I could set off, Kai grabbed my arm.
“What if the rope breaks? Tianyi, be careful.”
“You be careful too. If the rope breaks, don’t panic and pull at it. As long as you let it lie there, I’ll be able to find the end. And whatever happens, don’t move. If Gold Tooth and I get out into the Tang tomb, we’ll pull on the rope and get you out too.”
“Sure, and if you get into trouble, just blow your whistle and I’ll pull you back.”
There was definitely enough rope to get us beyond twenty-three steps. Would this finally break us out of the trap? Trying not to get our hopes up, Gold Tooth and I set out.
With every step we took, I turned back to make sure I could still see Kai’s candle. At the sixth step, just before the light disappeared, I told Gold Tooth to stay put. He lit a candle, made sure the rope around his waist was secure, and handed me the slack.
“I’m going to keep walking now,” I said. “If I get past the twenty-third step, I’ll tug the rope three times, you do the same for Kai, and we’ll all walk out together.”
“Good luck,” Gold Tooth said gravely. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
Seeing that he seemed calm and steady, I nodded and set off, playing out a little rope for every step I took. At the twelfth step, I stopped and looked at the remaining rope. Even though there was enough, I couldn’t help quickly calculating in my head how much farther I could go. Then I kept moving. Was it really that simple? Get past the twenty-third step and end up back in the Tang dynasty tomb? There was nothing but endless dark ahead of me. My heart beat faster, but I could only keep going, counting every step.
Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Another stair with a crescent-shaped notch. This was spooky. I pressed on, determined to keep going until I ran out of rope.
As the coil of rope shrank in my hand, I felt my heart contract and prepared to turn back. Then I noticed a glimmer of light and cautiously took a few more steps. Someone was up ahead. The light I’d seen was the candle at his feet. As I drew closer, I recognized his broad back.
Kai ought to be behind me, yet there he was up ahead, rising on tiptoe, looking all around. So we’d failed once again. My hope turning to ashes, I tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s me. Again.”
Taken by surprise, Kai jumped away from my voice and pitched forward. I tried to catch him, but he was too large and I only managed to rip off a piece of his sleeve. Luckily, he was nimble enough to catch himself before tumbling more than a couple of steps. Looking back at me, he gibbered, “Tianyi, how did you get up there? And why didn’t you make a sound? You scared me to death, you really did.”
“Oh, don’t be a big baby. You can take a little scare, can’t you?” I sat down next to him and put down the rope. “But seriously, our hypothesis was right—we’re in the chaotic zone at the border of the ghost grave, and there’s no such thing as fixed space here. Call Gold Tooth back, and we’ll come up with another plan.”
Kai tugged the rope. Soon Gold Tooth stumbled up to us, and we explained what had happened. He sighed. “Well, let’s come up with something els
e while we still can. In a few hours, we’ll be too hungry to think straight, and then we really will be doomed.”
At the thought of hunger, Kai’s eyes grew wide and he grabbed one of the geese by the neck. “Now, hang on. If all else fails, we have two plump birds here. I know you said not to kill them, but it should be all right if we just eat one for now and leave the other alive till we get out of this maze.”
“We don’t have any firewood,” I said, “so how are you going to cook it? Or were you planning to eat raw goose meat?”
“Didn’t people eat raw meat in olden times?” Kai retorted. “When I get hungry enough, I won’t care if it’s raw or cooked.”
“If you mean cavemen, sure, they ate raw meat and drank blood, but I think you’d better hang on a little longer. If we really can’t get out, then you go ahead and enjoy your uncooked goose. Our last meal was at Fish Bone Temple, only six or seven hours ago.”
Meanwhile, Gold Tooth had started sobbing. “Tianyi, are we really done for? We’ve thought of every possible plan, but we can’t get past these steps. What terrible luck!”
I started to comfort him, but I couldn’t get the words out. My mind was all jumbled too. These wretched steps. The number twenty-three kept floating in my mind. It was significant somehow. I touched the crescent-shaped notch, feeling as if I were struggling in the middle of a vast ocean. Suddenly, a piece of driftwood appeared.
Kai started to say something else about the geese, but I shushed him ferociously, afraid he’d break my train of thought. It was on the tip of my tongue—where had I heard it…?
When it came to me, I slapped my thigh hard, startling the other two. “We’ve been tricked by these stairs! This isn’t a ghost-wall or ghost-grave border zone or whatever; it’s a regular trap. Just an ordinary cunning trap.”
One of the chapters in The Sixteen Mysteries of Yin-Yang Feng Shui describes the various traps in ancient tombs, and I’d finally remembered that one of them involved a sequence of twenty-three steps. This was known as the “floating stair,” and its design had been lost for a thousand years, though many mathematicians and scientists were absorbed in studying it. Some thought it was a form of hypnosis, which worked by placing some sort of marker or number on a stair and, through a complicated mathematical model, laying out a network of branching and combining staircases that appear, by an optical illusion, to be a single set of steps. The crescent-shaped notches were actually a trap, leading us farther and farther into the maze. The walls and ground were quite possibly coated with some sort of light-absorbing pigment, making it abnormally dark, which also diminished our sense of direction. By paying too much attention to those marked steps, we’d been fooled into thinking we were traveling in a straight line, whereas we’d actually been lured into turning here and there, going in a big circle around the many branching paths. That’s probably why the stairs were so shallow, so it was easy for us to be confused about where we were going.
The floating stair was already in use during the Western Zhou period, and it made sense that it would be among the defenses of a royal tomb. Not every set was exactly twenty-three steps, but we could use that number to find our way out. Luckily, I’d remembered this in time. Not bothering to explain this to the other two, I told them to follow me, then quickly constructed an octagonal bagua symbol with pebbles on the ground, using what I remembered of the formula from the book to calculate our way out.
I went around and around a few times in my head but felt my brain turning to mush. No point asking the other two—Kai was only good at counting money, and Gold Tooth’s math expertise was restricted to business.
“The main thing you need to understand is that this trap relies on optical illusions based on the slightly different heights of the stairs. I think brute force might be the answer after all. Let’s just roll our way out.”
“I said we should roll down earlier,” Kai said, “but what if we never get to the end? Can you guarantee this will work?”
“Just do as I say—start rolling.”
The candle winked out at that moment. Gold Tooth was afraid of the dark and quickly got another one out, but he hesitated before lighting it. “Tianyi, I’ve just thought of something.”
“Not again,” Kai said. “Out with it, then.”
“My brain’s working slowly because I’m scared, but my grandpa used to talk about a trap that went in straight lines, like a maze. When you stood inside, you only ever saw a single passageway, but it was actually dozens of twisting paths. I once saw a copy of the Heavenly Manual from the Sui dynasty. It mentioned these sorts of mazes, and there was a picture of staircases going around each other like the number eight. Is that where we are?”
“That’s the basic idea. But every trap is going to have a different design, and you have to calculate your path according to a formula—but I can’t make it work.”
“I’ve heard of the floating stair too,” said Gold Tooth. “But not many people used that trick after the Zhou dynasty because it was too easy to break out of.”
Kai and I gaped at him. “Too easy?” we both said.
“Seriously, it’s simple,” Gold Tooth went on. “These traps all rely on some sort of misleading marker, and once you start paying attention to it, you’ll never make your way out. So the answer is to walk with your eyes shut.”
“That’s right!” Kai shouted. “If we just stopped looking at that mark, and stopped counting stairs, we could just walk right out of here.”
I didn’t think it could be that simple. We’d spent so much time on this staircase already, who knew how far we’d traveled from our starting point? If we just started walking blindly, where would we end up? I struck my fist against the wall in frustration, and then it hit me. This trap was designed with solo reverse dippers in mind. There were three of us, and while we hadn’t been able to stretch ourselves out over the length of the staircase, we could use width to our advantage.
When the other two heard my plan, they nodded excitedly. The stairs were more than ten meters wide, and one person, walking down the center of the stairs and looking out for crescent-shaped marks, wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on the walls on either side and therefore wouldn’t notice subtle shifts in direction. Hugging the wall wouldn’t do any good either—you’d just move in a figure eight.
Instead, the three of us each held a candle and walked side by side, checking in with one another at every stair. After a few steps, we noticed a second staircase branching off to one side, and made a mark there, as well as on a piece of paper. Soon, our map showed a tangle of pathways, shaped like an enormous pair of butterfly wings.
This floating stair made use of the natural shape of the cavern, and it actually wasn’t all that large. It wouldn’t have fooled a big group of people, but just one or two would be bamboozled by the width of these stairs if they didn’t check the sides closely for deviations—unless they lit a candle on every single step. By the time we’d mapped out about two-thirds of the maze, we finally stepped onto level ground. We were back in the burial chamber, and the stone sarcophagus with its five faces glowered at us from the southeast corner.
I glanced at my watch—we’d spent four and a half hours on the floating stair, and it was now three in the afternoon. Our last meal had been at nine in the morning. So much for grabbing a few treasures and leaving. Instead we were trapped in a ghost grave.
I had promised myself we’d never venture into a situation unprepared again. Reverse dipping doesn’t suit improvisation, but rather requires clear minds, plentiful experience, virtuoso techniques, well-chosen equipment, and meticulous preparation—not one element of which can be missing.
There was still a pile of floor tiles in the center of the room, revealing the hole that we’d climbed through—but it now led to the Western Zhou passageway, not our tunnel out.
The chamber was completely dark. Out of habit, I lit a candle in the
southeast corner, though this was our final one. The little flame rose straight up, adding a faint glimmer of light to the otherwise eerie room. This tiny amount of illumination was all it took to make us feel a lot better.
Looking at the flame, we let out deep breaths. We were finally out of that deadly trap, and couldn’t help laughing at the sheer relief of it. “You see?” I said to Gold Tooth. “In the end it was still up to Hu Tianyi to save the day. This place couldn’t keep us down.”
“Gold Tooth and I helped too,” Kai said. “You’d never have gotten out on your own.”
“I’m a vine winding itself round a tree, and you two are melons on the vine. The vine holds up the melons, and they rely on it for sustenance.”
“What kind of gibberish is that?” Gold Tooth said, laughing.
I chuckled too, but a sudden thought sobered me up quickly.
Where were the geese? In our hurry to get out of the floating stair, I hadn’t thought about them in a while. Turning to Kai, I asked, “Weren’t you leading the birds? Where did they go? You didn’t leave them on the staircase, did you?”
Kai raised his hand. “I swear, I brought them down to the burial chamber with us. I let go of them when we were celebrating.” He looked one way, then the other. “I just turned around for a minute. They must be nearby. Quick, let’s go search for them before they have a chance to get too far away.”
Two loose geese wouldn’t be easy to find in a vast darkened chamber. And if we couldn’t find them, we wouldn’t be able to break the spell. Where could they have gotten to? Just as we were about to split up and search for them, a terrifying screech pierced the silence. It was coming from the stone sarcophagus.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Our hair stood on end.
The three of us had thought we were almost done with this place, and now our geese were gone and this strange sound chilled our hearts. I held my pocketknife, Gold Tooth another of his golden Buddhas and a black donkey hoof, which was a potent charm against the undead. Kai had a big shovel. Step by step, we slowly approached the sarcophagus.
The Dragon Ridge Tombs Page 9
