We are out of rock.
Together, my sister and I stand in a roaring mist, the clockwork flutter of our bodies drowned out by the chaos. Upriver, the silt-stained flow of the water sweeps forward lethargically. But it transforms at our feet, erupting into a raging mist that claws through the sky, thundering as it falls, shouting its power to the world.
Leizu calls a sharp command. My brother draws an arrow, nocks it, and takes aim. A small, cold hand closes tight over mine.
“Brother,” says Elena.
I hear nothing, only see her mouth make the shape of the word.
My sister’s shoulder is a hard weight against my thigh, both of us leaning against the ceaseless pull of the river. Our fingers clasp tight. I think we are but two small pieces of interlocking machinery in the great, faceless mechanism of the world.
The arrow whistles toward me and I turn my face to let it pass.
My sister is looking up at me, desperate, clinging to my legs. With the last of my strength, I reach for her, pull her out of the river and up into the safety of my arms. An arrow bites into my shoulder and I do not react.
Elena’s hands clasp around my neck and the weight of her is so familiar.
For a last time, I hold her. I close my eyes and pull her close and inhale her smell mingled with the spray of water. Her weight is delicate in my arms, like a leaf carried on the quaking back of this monstrous river. I chose to protect her and I failed. I do not know if the choices we make are ours or not; whether the planets hold any more agency in their orbits than we do in ours. But even if I am a prisoner to clockwork, I cannot imagine leaving her.
Another arrow bores into my thigh and I find I can no longer stand.
“This isn’t the end,” she says, face buried in my shoulder.
Her arms, tight around my neck, are the last thing I know.
53
CHINA, PRESENT
High up on his throne, the automaton called Huangdi remains perfectly still, eyes closed for a long moment as the thunder of an explosion rolls through the massive cave, dying in angry echoes. As quiet returns to the tomb, the emperor lifts his ancient ruyi, the scepter hooked and knobby on one end where the dark iron is carved into the shape of a blossoming flower.
The necropolis is silent for a few heartbeats.
I trot in a wide arc around the throne, headlamp off, hidden in the dark among looming figures of clay. With a running start, I vault over a placid stream of mercury. Faintly, I hear the grating of rock. High-pitched chipping sounds, metal on stone. Reaching the wall, I can see the throne in profile. I move closer and slide behind one of the tall stone pillars that circle the dais, each sprouting dozens of long-extinguished, rusted lanterns.
The sun disk is mounted behind Huangdi’s two-story throne, just across the empty space ahead of me. From this side, I don’t think he can see me down here.
But how am I supposed to reach it?
From my hiding spot, I notice the front row of statues. Staring at them, I convince myself of a horrible truth—they aren’t made of terra-cotta. Unlike the other figures in the room, these are lying in poses of agony. Around them, the floor is sprinkled with colored dust in the outline of fallen robes, a thick powder littered with fans, shells, and the leather remnants of hats.
These avtomat have been killed, left here to rot for eternity.
“Leizu!” shouts the emperor, long and low.
I can see the emperor in profile as he scans the statues, scepter in his hand.
Reverberations of his shout sweep down from the throne and out over the low room beyond. Without the headlamp, my eyes have readjusted to blue-tinged darkness. Streams of silver thread through ranks of warriors, still and sinister under the dots of bioluminescent light embedded in the black rock ceiling.
From the breach, the hunched silhouettes of armed men are flickering through, their flashlight beams raking the walls. Dozens of men are entering, running single file through the new hole in the wall. Wearing balaclavas and complicated helmets with insectile optics hanging off, they carry stubby rifles with flashlights mounted on them. The commandos are nearly silent as they spread out along the edges of the room, stopping every few meters and kneeling.
All of them save one.
“Huangdi!” calls a voice, high and sweet.
Whip thin, Leizu strides down an aisle of terra-cotta warriors. She wears a dark cloak and carries a long sword with a copper blade, glowing blue-gold in the twilight. Her eyes are leveled on Huangdi, teeth bared in a predatory smile as she marches right into the semicircle of empty space before the throne.
Peter has faded away into the rows of still soldiers.
Crouched, I’m scanning the throne, eyes running over carved ridges of talons and teeth, looking for a dark circle the size of my fist. I keep one hand pressed against the gritty stone of the pillar, hiding from Huangdi and Leizu as they reunite.
“Leizu,” says Huangdi. “Do not fear. We are equals—”
“Once we were equals,” she interrupts, moving to the foot of the throne. “While you slumbered, I made a new world in my own image. You brought the peace of the first dynasty, but it was war men needed. With whispers and violence, I set their minds to the task of killing, and never have the short-lived progressed with such ferocity.
“Not since the days of the First Men have we seen such an age of wonder.”
Huangdi considers her for a moment. In sheaths of hard ceramic, the emperor looks so primitive compared to the tigress standing before him. Finally, he speaks, his inhuman voice tinged with disbelief: “Our fathers were gods. And you, Daughter of Darkness…you dare insult them?”
Throwing her arms out, Leizu drops her cloak to the floor. The ceiling of false stars sends blue sparkles of light chasing one another over her armor. Each plate on the flexing mesh is made of the telltale crescent shape of a relic. I can make out the faint glow of each relic’s symbol, smoldering orange licks of a forgotten language.
“While you slept, Son of Light, I feasted on the weak,” says Leizu. “With their souls, I forged a mantle of the gods. I do not fear you.”
Huangdi is silent, then a low laugh builds in the automaton’s chest. The laugh grows, mechanical and grating, until it echoes from the ceiling.
“You are alone,” says Leizu, gesturing to her mercenaries. Even so, her voice is not as sure. “You are helpless against modern training and weaponry.”
“Ah,” says Huangdi, and now the old man seems sad. Some of the fire has gone out of his speech, and his shoulders are hunched. “You have army. I have army.”
The old automaton gestures at the row upon row of terra-cotta warriors, his long sleeve wavering. The dusty statues look pathetic. Leizu cocks a hand on her hip and laughs once.
In response, Huangdi’s eyes narrow over a sneer.
“Your skin is soft. Your voice is music. But once, Wife, we were hard. Our hearts were hard. Our skin.”
Huangdi spreads his arms, the scepter in his outstretched hand.
“I will remind you,” he says.
A trickling sound fills the cavern, like a waterfall of dropped dishes. I startle as something glances off my cheek. A chunk of terra-cotta shatters at my feet. The statues around me are crumbling, surfaces fracturing. Like baby birds pecking out of their shells, clay shards are falling away and crashing against the rock floor.
Leizu turns, her hair flying as she surveys the room, fear twisting her features.
“Shoot them!” she shouts to the commandos that have taken position around the room. “Shoot them before they emerge!”
I drop to the floor as the cavern erupts into controlled bursts of gunfire. Bullets tear into the ranks of terra-cotta warriors, life-size artifacts of pottery: swordsmen, pikemen, cavalry, and archers. In strobing muzzle flashes and deafening snaps of sound, the clay warriors are falling, bodies fracturing into mounds of reddish dust.
Now. Shit. Now, now, now.
Broken pottery shells litter the floor, already knee-de
ep in places. I push through them, crawling out from behind the pillar and heading straight for the side of the throne. Head down, I quickly reach the dark stone.
I hear the first hoarse shout of fear.
Clinging to the base of the throne, I peer out into the confusion of light and dust. As each shell collapses, it reveals a crawling thing, something dark and damp. Leizu’s men are firing frantically on the writhing mass of broken pottery, and the mounds of it are swarming now with insect-like movement.
Newborn warriors are climbing to their feet, hefting ancient weapons. Each man-shaped machine wears glistening black armor, pristine after ages locked inside an earthen shell. The faces of the awakened monsters are carved obsidian masks, long sculpted mustaches curling over eternally smiling lips.
And on each forehead, the symbol on Huangdi’s relic.
These things aren’t avtomat, not exactly. They seem mindless, more like the golems I’ve read about in Jewish fairy tales.
I run my fingers over the carved throne, finding a grip. Pulling myself up a step, I watch Leizu dive into the front ranks of the warriors, hacking with her sword.
Ancient weapons bristle out of the darkness, scimitars and pikes tipped with bronze. There are so many varieties. A row of archers pivots in unison, drawing arrows from quivers on their backs and nocking them. Lines of pikemen advance in lockstep, wooden spears quivering before them. Swordsmen move in formation, hacking.
Between gunfire, I hear real screaming from Leizu’s human soldiers.
The birth of the terra-cotta army is like an eruption of locusts after decades of hibernation. Leizu’s trained men are panicking at the sight of them, spreading out to the walls, looking for better firing positions. I watch one man step into a pool of mercury and vanish silently into the heavy liquid.
I climb higher.
Face pressed into the cool folds of carved rock, I hear Leizu scream a challenge at the throne. I feel the vibration as the ancient automaton bellows his response: “I am made for you, Leizu. You are made for me. And our war is destiny.”
54
STALINGRAD, 1942
Light and dark consume each other between the blinks of my eyes. Mechanical shrieks of artillery fire rip through greenish clouds of fog, offset by the paper-tearing sound of falling flares and the urgent cough of mortars. And Leizu’s face hovers over mine, her black hair spilling like silk over the collar of her German trench coat.
One knee planted in my chest, she holds me by the lapels.
“You killed yourself once,” Leizu says. “I am giving you another chance.”
Blinking away the intrusive filaments of memory, I understand now that her cruel black eyes cover a deep vulnerability. The truth of her has been exposed. The punishment she inflicts on the world isn’t one tenth of the hell she suffers.
“It was never Huangdi I sought, Peter,” she says. “It was you.”
A sad smile crooks onto her lips and she relaxes her grip.
“Huangdi chose to eat his children, and he would have consumed your anima, too. Loyalty pulled you away from me then, but now you have lived another life without him. You can see that you owe him nothing.”
“What of my brother?” I ask.
“Talus failed as my equal. His nature is to serve and I was always his master.”
I shove her knee away and Leizu falls onto me, elbows digging into my chest. Her words are fast and feverish, desperation under her rising voice.
“My purpose has gone unfulfilled for too long…like being buried alive—burning from the inside out. I have endured it for millennia, Peter. I am dying. Going mad. My Word is chaos and only you can give me the balance I need—the Oneness.”
Fingers crawling, I feel a ragged tooth of metal lying in the dirt. The whistle and thump of mortar fire grows nearer.
“Look around,” says Leizu. “We are so close to the next age. Through war I have pushed men to new frontiers of science. The remaining avtomat can sustain our power. We will stoke the fires of human ingenuity, push new conflicts upon them until they invent a future that understands us—”
I drive the trench knife into her torso like a piston, throwing her body upward and tearing her grasp away from my greatcoat. Pinning her under my forearm, I look down on her beautiful, mud-spattered face.
“Strong—” she says, smiling, and then her hair shivers in the oddest way.
The long black tendrils drift up, brushing over my face, caressing my cheek as I spin her over, shielding myself with her body.
All is silent as the shock wave snaps through us. Leizu is looking down at me, lips pursed mid-word, as the mortar blast evaporates half her face. I close my eyes to the unthinking violence of physics, giving myself to it, allowing the world to rotate around me in a kaleidoscope of suspended dirt and ice and metal.
Leizu’s body leaves my orbit.
Tumbling to the frozen earth, I lie still and open my eyes to the pure silence of aftershock and a green sky still raining earth.
A dark body lies nearby.
Pushing onto all fours, I crawl to where Leizu leans against the remains of the shattered tree trunk. She is stunned, her body burned and mangled, but she lives. Clothed in a shredded uniform, she looks like a wounded child in an adult’s clothes. Pity for her rises in my throat, an understanding of what drove her here over the ages—gnawing hunger and pain and the barren search for purpose.
“Leizu,” I say, my lips close to her ruined face, “you are right. Huangdi was a monster. It is true, we were meant to lead humankind to a great destiny.”
Her eyes are bright and awake, but she is too damaged to speak.
“Mother of silkworms,” I say, “you have become the thing we both hated. You have fed on your own kind and on the suffering of humanity, and you will never find anything to balance that.”
Dawn has broken.
Stumbling, my greatcoat flapping open, I push through the mist away from where Leizu is lying. My rifle is gone and my hat sits cockeyed on my head as I race away in unsteady steps through the misty trenches.
My old master, Huangdi, was a beast. The memory of it courses through me in jerks and hitches. The meaning of pravda, the first thing, the false human word for another, deeper thing, is evaporating from my heart. So many masters that I have tried to serve, and I never thought to listen to myself.
In the distance, streaks of light are pouring from tumbling clouds as Nazi dive-bombers attack ships fleeing over the Volga River. The blazing stars plummet from the heavens like fallen angels, moving faster than the muted scream of their own propellers.
Rifle shots are snapping blindly all around me, German and Russian, as I crunch through brittle ice on the outskirts of no-man’s-land. Near the riverbank, I rest beside a broken wall and watch troops move past in the fog. The Russian infantry are trying desperately to cover a civilian escape.
Trying and failing.
I hear the grinding purr of a German tank—a tiger-striped panzer, its color washed out in the mist and oily smoke, turret swinging, searching for targets. A handful of German troops trot beside it, like loll-tongued wolves in the wake of their pack leader.
Crouching by instinct, I pick bits of shrapnel from my chest and drop them like glittering confetti. I watch as the vehicle stops, tensing like an animal. Its soldiers drop to their knees and put fingers in their ears, a long-practiced routine, their eyes squeezed shut as a familiar shiver of force washes over their clothes.
The turret jerks, coughing a shell, furiously spitting fire from its nozzle as the metal-plated creature rocks back on its treads. A nearby berm, bristling with rifles, explodes into dirt and shrapnel and a low rolling cloud of smoke, obscenely throwing the bodies of Russian soldiers out of their cover, leaving them to join other dead things on the battlefield.
The warm anticipation of pravda courses into my body in the face of this terrible injustice. Leaving cover, I stride silently toward the tank, fists tight with righteous anger as I step over clumps of dirt and sliver
s of metal and empty helmets. A crater has been erased from the hill, its contents redistributed in a starburst pattern over the torn landscape.
The first German notices me as I get within arm’s reach. He lifts his sidearm. I take his hand and tuck it into his stomach and pull his finger over the trigger until no more bullets come out. His body falls on its own, I am already moving on.
Alerted by the gunfire, two gray-clothed Germans come around the side of the tank and into my waiting arms. A head in each hand, I smash them together and feel their skulls crack inside sloped metal helmets. I drop their bodies beside the tank and stop.
I am being watched.
A Russian boy is lying on his side in the mud, half buried in loose dirt, his torso stained maroon. His chest rises and falls in the shallow breaths of a wounded animal. From the clarity in his eyes, I can see he is strong.
He will live.
A round glint of metal hangs from a chain at his hip. It is a battered pocket watch—an antique from the first era of timepieces. This one is a distinctly Russian artifact, finicky, and it must have required an absurd amount of care in this desolate environment. This boy with the watch…he has the feel of a throwback, an old soul abandoned to a modern battlefield.
Even as I register the squeak of a hatch opening, a torrent of bullets rattles across my shoulder blades. I stumble forward a few steps as blunted bullet fragments spray past my face. I let myself fall, twisting onto my back at the last instant and half closing my eyes.
Soon, the silhouette of a German falls over me.
At the opportune moment, I snake out my hand and wrap my fingers around his surprised face. Squeezing, I put an end to him. Then I stand up and shake out my greatcoat, ignoring the melody of falling metal as it sprinkles to the icy dirt.
Rumbling and belching fumes, the panzer is retreating.
Accelerating through two long strides, I throw myself onto the tank. I wrench the hatch out of the other person’s grasp and rip it off its hinges. The German inside screams as I drag him out of the tank. To make him stop, I ram his head against the armored skin of his vehicle.
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