The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (6 page)

That got a cheer out of them. He only hoped the guy who found the damn door didn’t get killed by a coworker seeking the credit, and the hundred bucks.

Fifteen minutes later, Roger Wilson dismounted from his mule, obviously at least as weary as the animal; in his early sixties, Wilson had spent decades at dozens of sites for nearly as many museums, and he was yet to have truly made his mark.

The balding, white-haired Britisher wore an olive-colored shirt with suspenders and chinos and he too was layered with the dust of these near-desert conditions. He received a warm hug from Alex, patting the boy on the back and turning the melancholy line that was his mouth into a smile.

Alex grinned and said, in an English accent not unlike his mother’s, “What a relief you’re here. You’re a couple of days late, Professor—I was beginning to think you’d run into bandits.”

“Appreciate the concern, dear boy,” Wilson said, and mopped his brow with a filthy hanky. “But it was nothing so glamorous—we simply had some minor difficulties lining up proper supplies.”

Alex handed his mentor a canteen and the man gulped from it, then the professor’s eyes took in the impressive strides in the excavation that had been made in his absence. “Very good, Alex. Fine work indeed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “You know, when I saw you standing on that mound, surveying your kingdom, so to speak . . .” He chuckled. “. . . I thought for a moment there I was looking at your father. You are
definitely
Rick O’Connell’s son.”

With half a grin, Alex said, “Let us hope after
this
discovery, he’ll be known as
Alex O’Connell’s
father.”

Wilson’s smile spoke of obvious affection and pride, and this Alex relished.

The professor, hands on hips, appraised the partly exposed head of the colossus. “What a powerful gaze our friend has . . . My colleagues at the museum were of course thrilled when I told them you’d discovered the Er Shi Huangdi Colossus—but they have the, uh, well,
usual
questions expected from those who fund such expeditions.”

Alex smirked. “They want to know when I’m going to find the tomb. They want us to get in there and find the good stuff for them.”

Wilson smiled, seemingly at Alex’s frustration, the boy not realizing the professor found it amusing when Alex spoke idiomatically like his father in the cultured accent of his mother.

“Dear boy,” he said, again placing a hand on Alex’s shoulder, “you can’t let the bureaucrats get you down. Not if you want to last in
this
game . . . You’ll find the entrance, I know you will. I have the utmost confidence in you.”

Alex grinned. “Thanks, Professor. You believing in me, well . . . it means a lot.”

Their eyes met and the older man nodded and again a smile formed on the gruff, weathered face. Alex wondered why his own father didn’t treat him with this kind of respect, or for that matter warmth.

The moment was interrupted by a shout from below. Alex and Wilson moved to where they could look down into the pit and saw Chu Wah looking up excitedly even as he pointed to what appeared to be the tomb’s entrance, at the bottom of the sheer cliff of earth they’d excavated below the partially exposed Colossus.

“Boss!”
Chu Wah yelled in Mandarin.
“I found the door, boss!”
Then in English: “I get hundred smackers, right?”

Alex laughed and called down: “You do indeed!” Then to Wilson he said, “Grab the dynamite! They’ve found the entrance . . . By the way, you owe Chu Wah a hundred bucks.”

“I do?”

“You do.”

Alex slipped the battered leather-covered journal into his satchel as he charged off, leaving Wilson to ponder how he’d managed to incur this debt, not having been here.

Within minutes, Alex was back, and he moved the older man to a safe position, and advised him to cover his ears, which he did. So did Alex, and then a huge explosion shook the plains and sent dirt and rock spewing upward, as if the earth had spit out a distasteful mouthful.

With another grin, Alex turned to his mentor and asked, “Ready to make history, Professor?”

Wilson chuckled. “Indeed I am. I have waited a very, very long
time
to make it . . .”

And they headed toward stairs that had been installed over two thousand years before, by slaves whose bones had become one with the earth the modern-day diggers had just disrupted.

With a flashlight in his gloved hand, Alex led the way into the mausoleum with Wilson just behind him, followed by Chu Wah and a pair of Chinese diggers. Shafts of daylight slanted like swords in a magician’s box through the deadfall of beams and structure caused by the blast. Despite the dynamite-created clutter, the space was too large and too dark to see much of anything. No one had set foot in here for many centuries . . .

. . . so why did Alex sense something was wrong?

“Move!”
he said, but Wilson froze, and Alex had to grab the older man and yank him forward, just as two huge wooden arms, each affixed with a spiked plate, swung down from the ceiling, smacking together like huge cymbals right where the professor and his prize pupil had been standing.

The only victim, fortunately, was Alex’s baseball cap, though one might also mark the nerves of Chu Wah and his diggers as casualties, the workers exchanging looks of alarm and muttering in Mandarin.

To the wide-eyed Wilson, Alex said, “Apparently the Emperor wasn’t big on houseguests.” Then in Mandarin he said,
“Stay together!”

They stayed together, all right, cautiously descending a long, impossibly wide stone stairway with many massive stone beams at landings every dozen steps or so. The feel, now, was that of a temple, rife with Chinese carvings and figures on the walls. At the next landing, a shadowy figure could be glimpsed, mostly hidden in back of the beam just below, as if lying in wait for them, positioned to pick them off.

Alex stopped his little party with an upraised hand. He frowned. No one else had been in this mausoleum for several thousand years, right? Or had someone with his own agenda slipped inside right after the explosion—a religious fanatic maybe . . .

Alex withdrew his sidearm and called, “You can come out now. We see you.”

No answer.

With another upraised hand, he gestured for Wilson and the others to hang back on the stairs; then Alex went on down to the next landing. When he cocked the nine-millimeter Browning, the small sharp sound seemed deafening.

Stepping around the stone pillar carefully, nose of his gun paving the way, he could see the figure standing there, but slumped; and then his flashlight showed him who—or what—their one-man welcoming committee really was: a skeletal corpse. Its head bowed under a safari hat, the very old corpse was stuck to the beam, impaled by an Oriental throwing knife. On the rotting khaki shirt were initials:
CB.

“It’s all right!” Alex called, his voice echoing, and the others joined him on the landing. He turned to Wilson. “Sir Colin Bembridge, almost certainly.”

Wilson frowned. “How in God’s name did he get in here?”

“I don’t know. Must be a way in we don’t know about.”

The head of the Bembridge Scholars was known to have gone searching for the tomb of Er Shi Huangdi, making several expeditions, the last one some seventy years ago, from which he never returned.

“Well,” Wilson said, nodding toward Alex’s satchel, “you can thank the old boy for that journal of his.”

If Alex hadn’t discovered the long-forgotten book in the archives of the library at Harvard, this expedition would not have happened.

“Thanks,” Alex said softly to the corpse.

He lifted the safari hat by its brim and the skull rolled off and down the stairs, making little clunks as it went; the absence of the skull revealed (stuck in the stone) an oversized bronze throwing star.

“Somebody left him here,” Alex said, his gut wrenching with sympathy for the poor bastard, “as a warning.”

“Unfortunately for Sir Colin,” Wilson said, “he’s not the dead man we’re looking for.
He
won’t make us rich and famous . . . Let’s keep moving, shall we?”

Alex nodded, but his first step depressed a floor tile, setting something strange and wonderful in motion: dumping accumulated sand, skylights slid back one by one, allowing shafts of sunlight to cascade down, thanks to the dynamite clearing away much of the roof of the mausoleum.

Now the awestruck group got a sense of the enormity of their find. The space was vast and entirely covered by an array of terra-cotta warriors, many with terra-cotta horses, standing at attention and lined up on wooden-plank flooring to stretch into the dimmest recesses of the mausoleum. Oddly, the soldiers seemed arranged to face a large open space at their center . . .

Beside Alex, Wilson said, “Incredible . . . no two faces are alike. Can you imagine how long it must have taken to cast all these? What sort of artists they must have had!”

Alex shook his head. “Not artists, if the ancient legends are to be believed—more like sorcerers.”

“Surely you can’t believe that.”

But he did. He had reason to. He said, “They weren’t cast, Professor—trust me, they were cursed.”

Wilson snorted a laugh. “Don’t tell me you actually believe such mystical poppycock! What sort of tales did your parents tell you at bedtime? Oh, don’t remind me—I’ve heard the wild stories flying around Cairo about your parents, and mummies being raised from the dead to walk among us.”

They did more than just walk,
Alex thought. He had been there—he had been Imhotep’s prisoner, and he had fought side by side as a boy of ten, with his father, to defeat the Mummy and his minions. But in his mind he could see his mother, with a finger to her lips in
shush
fashion: “Family secret, Alex. Family
secret . . .”

“Professor,” Alex said, “you have really got to stop reading my mummy’s mummy books.”

Wilson, interested neither in puns nor curses, moved ahead, and Alex fell in with him, the Chinese trio behind them. In awe, the party walked down an aisle between uniform rows of terra-cotta soldiers and horses. Their flashlights cut the dust-mote-filled air like blades.

They trod on, in cathedral-like silence, until Chu Wah stepped on another tile, triggering a blast of yellow gas that shot up from the floor and into his startled face. He began to choke and gag and do a terrible dance, his skin blistering horrifically.

And then he collapsed.

“Chu Wah!”

Quickly Alex went to his loyal crew captain and knelt and checked for a pulse.

Too late.

“Poor bugger’s dead,” Alex said, looking up at the professor, who frowned but said nothing.

None of the party could see, nearby in the shadows, an ancient seismograph with bronze balls resting delicately on its lids. The commotion Chu Wah made dying had shaken the lid and the balls thereon, which were now rolling to fall off and into a bronze frog’s mouth . . .

A ratchet sound echoed in the chamber.

Alex rose from the corpse of his crew captain and looked around as the grinding sound continued.

And when it stopped, crossbow bolts
thwacked
as dozens of arrows flew from the darkness like strafing machine-gun fire. Alex was right in their path, and Wilson yelled for him to run, and he did, but the Chinese digger just behind Alex was nailed by a volley and pinned to the floor, the sharp arrows ripping through him, killing him before he could even cry out.

High in the dark recesses of the chamber, racks of crossbows on gimbals sent arrows raking blindly to kill any living thing that dared violate the sacred aisles below. Alex ran, the arrows seemingly chasing him, flurries of them landing just behind him as he pressed forward into the gloom. Wilson was running, too, and the surviving digger.

Then the arrows seemed to have stopped.

But another ratcheting noise announced another volley, this time of the razor-sharp throwing disks, like the one that had dispatched Bembridge so many years ago.

Alex called,
“Duck!”

Wilson dove behind a terra-cotta warrior, who was decapitated in short order. The remaining digger caught a star deep in his chest, and flipped backward, dead before he hit the floor. At the same time, Alex dove as one of the buzz-saw-like disks flew almost close enough to give him the shave he needed.

Again the mausoleum fell quiet.

No one moved for what seemed a very long time, but was actually a matter of seconds. Finally Wilson peeked out cautiously. He and Alex were the only ones left alive, and Alex—tucked behind a terra-cotta horse—felt not at all cocky at the moment, his self-confidence drained out of him like blood from a wound.

Nonetheless, the young man rose and strode out and over to the final of the diggers, on his back with that disk sunk into his chest, a spreading red blossom on his tunic around the deadly steel star. Alex knelt next to the man, and checked his pulse just to be sure.

Wilson came up. “He’s dead, son. There’s not a thing in the world you can do for him.”

Alex stared at the dead man. He remembered seeing him laughing and drinking with his fellow diggers the night before, vital, alive. “He’s dead because of me, Professor. All
three
are dead because of me.”

Alex got to his feet and punched one of the terra-cotta warriors in the face, crumbling its head.

Wilson took the distraught young man by the shoulders and faced him, sternly but not unkindly. “Danger of this sort comes with the territory, lad. You know that better than most.”

Alex swallowed and nodded. He pushed the guilt down so he could get back to the work at hand.

Wilson clapped his hands. “Now! Let’s find the crypt, and make sure these poor sods didn’t die in vain.”

They walked into the open central space, the bare area that the terra-cotta warriors were lined in rows to face.

Alex squinted. “All the warriors are arranged as if they’re waiting for an order from their emperor.”

Wilson nodded. “Agreed. But then . . . where the hell
is
he? There’s no statue, no coffin. Or did some grave robbers beat us to the prize?”