Chapter 12: Down

The scaffolding ended forty feet down. The tomb began.

Lin Xuan stepped off the last metal rung onto stone that had been cut before the Roman Empire fell. His flashlight beam crawled across a corridor ten feet wide, the walls covered in murals faded to ghosts of color. Cranes. Pine trees. A furnace with flames that some long-dead painter had gilded.

Withered Pine lineage, he confirmed. Old Gu, you sentimental fool. You painted your own sect crest in your tomb.

He slowed despite himself. The murals told a life in the formal, boastful style of the era. A young man presenting herbs to an elder. A furnace burning with painted gold flame. A wedding, perhaps, or a sworn brotherhood; the faces were too faded to tell.

One mural showed two old men arguing over a pill furnace, brushstrokes agitated, ink nearly tearing the plaster. Lin Xuan stopped and stared at it, and something three thousand years old surfaced in his chest.

The Azure Cloud conclave. Three days. He and Gu Changqing had nearly come to blows over fire timing in the Nine Apertures Rebirth Pill, and the whole conclave had taken bets, and in the end they had gotten drunk together and agreed that everyone else was wrong.

You were still wrong about the third firing, he thought at the painted figure. I hope you knew that before the end.

He switched the flashlight off. The dark pressed in, complete and absolute. Then he breathed in, slow, and let his divine sense unspool.

It was thin. At Qi Refining 5, his divine sense reached perhaps thirty feet, a candle in a cavern. But it was enough to feel the corridor's shape, the air currents, the places where the stone had been taught to kill.

Three pressure plates in the first twenty feet. A dart slot in the left wall, long since rusted shut. And at the corridor's end, a killing formation, its lines dim but intact.

Sloppy, he thought, stepping neatly around the first plate. The plates are spaced for a man's stride. Gu always did assume his robbers would be tall.

He walked the corridor the way a man walks through his own kitchen in the dark. Twice he paused to admire a mural. Once he stopped to retie his shoe.

The killing formation at the corridor's end was a standard Eight Trigrams lock, the kind taught to inner disciples. Its control node was behind the third mural panel. Lin Xuan pressed the crane's eye, and the formation sighed and went dormant.

"Your paranoia was always performative, Old Gu," he murmured.

The corridor opened into a burial chamber the size of a basketball court. His flashlight found stone guardians in two rows, their faces eroded to smooth ovals. Offerings rotted in bronze vessels. And in the center, a stone sarcophagus with its lid shifted.

Shifted. Recently. The dust on the floor was disturbed.

Lin Xuan crouched and studied the footprints. Modern boots. Four, maybe five sets. One set had paused by the sarcophagus and dropped something.

He picked it up. A cigarette butt, still faintly fragrant.

Zhao Kai's quiet men, he thought. Old Chen was right.

He circled the sarcophagus slowly. The lid had been shifted with pry bars, modern steel against ancient stone, and the scratches were fresh. Inside lay dust, a rotted silk shroud, and nothing else. No bones. No grave goods. The men had stood here, shone their lights into an empty box, and argued about it; he could read the scuffed argument in the dust.

Amateurs, he thought. They opened the decoy and ran.

Every tomb of this era had a decoy. The masters of the Withered Pine lineage were paranoid about grave robbers in a way that bordered on hobby. The real burial chamber was always deeper, always meaner, and always built by a man who had personally imagined you, the robber, and found you wanting.

He almost felt sorry for Zhao's men. Almost.

He straightened and followed the footprints with his flashlight. They led to a doorway in the far wall, and beyond it, a staircase going deeper. The men had been here hours ago, maybe a full day. They had brute-forced the sarcophagus lid and found it empty, or found something they did not like, because the footprints on the far side were hurried.

Lin Xuan started down the second staircase, and the air grew sweeter with every step.

Corpse miasma. Thick enough to make a mortal's lungs bleed.

He stopped on a landing, set down the rice cooker, and opened Old Chen's paper packet. The powder inside was gray-green and smelled of sulfur and old medicine. He dusted it across his sleeves and collar, then tied a strip of cloth soaked in it across his nose and mouth.

Thank you, Old Chen, he thought. Your paranoia is the functional kind.

The staircase ended at a pair of bronze doors, green with age, standing open. Beyond them lay a hall that made Lin Xuan stop and stare.

It was a pill-refining chamber. Full-sized. Furnace pits in the floor, herb racks along the walls (long since rotted to dust), and a great bronze cauldron in the center, blackened with three thousand years of disuse.

And the corpse puppets.

There were six of them, standing in two rows like honor guards. They had been cultivators once, or servants. Now they were desiccated things in rotted silk, their eyes replaced with glowing formation cores. Puppet wardens, the Withered Pine's signature: the sect had always preferred its guards silent and its silence permanent.

One of them turned its head toward Lin Xuan with a sound like dry wood splitting.

Puppet wardens, he thought. Gu, you really did not want visitors.

He felt a flicker of something he refused to name. Three thousand years, and here were Old Gu's guards, still at their posts, still loyal to a dead man's paranoia. Lin Xuan had outlived everyone he ever argued with. It was becoming a habit he disliked.

Then the first puppet moved, and sentiment ended. It was fast, faster than anything dead had a right to be, its claws aimed at his throat.

Lin Xuan did not dodge. He stepped into its reach, caught its wrist, and pressed his thumb into the hollow beneath its jaw where the control core sat.

The core cracked. The puppet folded like a puppet with cut strings.

The second puppet came from his left. Lin Xuan picked up the rice cooker and swung it.

The dented appliance connected with the puppet's skull with a sound like a temple bell. The skull caved. The puppet dropped.

Lin Xuan looked at the rice cooker. The dent was deeper now.

"Good," he told it. "You are earning your place."

Four puppets left. They came together this time, claws and teeth and three thousand years of spite, and Lin Xuan sighed, and became very busy for ninety seconds.

When it was done, six piles of ancient silk and bone lay on the chamber floor. Lin Xuan was breathing slightly harder than before. One of his sleeves was torn. The rice cooker had acquired a second dent.

He retrieved his flashlight and examined the chamber. The footprints of Zhao's men were everywhere. They had fought here too. There were scorch marks on the floor, modern boot prints in frantic patterns, and a discarded crowbar bent at an angle that suggested it had met something harder than bronze.

But no bodies. The men had gotten through.

Professionals, then, Lin Xuan thought. Or lucky.

He found their trail at the back of the chamber: a narrow passage, natural rock, sloping down. The air from it was cold and smelled of wet stone and something else.

Something alive. Or something that remembered being alive.

He checked his backpack. He checked the knife. He picked up the rice cooker, which now rattled faintly when shaken.

Old Gu, he thought, stepping into the passage, your hospitality needs work.

The passage twisted down for a hundred feet. The formation residue grew stronger with every step, until his teeth ached with it. This was the seal's heart. Whatever it had been keeping in, or keeping out, was close.

The passage ended at a stone archway. Beyond it, a vast dark space breathed cold air into his face.

And in that dark, far ahead, he saw it.

Torchlight. Moving. Modern torches, the harsh white of LED lamps.

Voices, echoing off stone. A man's laugh. A woman's sharp reply. The clink of equipment.

Zhao Kai's team was already inside. Ahead of him. Close.

Lin Xuan switched off his flashlight, set down the rice cooker without a sound, and melted into the dark beside the archway.

Let us see, he thought, what the quiet men are doing in my old friend's tomb.