The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (3 page)

“Thank you, my lord.”

“Has my trusted general shared with you my problem? My ambitions outdistance a normal life span. Can you be of help?”

Standing before him with head lowered, she said, “I do not possess the answer you seek, my lord.”

His forehead tightened. “Then you have disappointed me, after all.”

Her eyes met his. “I
do
know where an answer
might
be found.”

“Good. Good. Then I bid you find it.”

She bowed again. “Yes, my lord.”

As she exited, escorted by eunuch guards, the Emperor gestured for Ming Guo to lean near.

“No man is to touch her,” the Emperor said. “She is mine.”

Ming Guo responded with a nod that was also a bow. The Emperor could not know that his trusted general had long since disobeyed that order.

Still, the Emperor may have had his doubts. Over the months to come, Ming Guo and Zi Yuan were not aware that the Emperor’s head minister traveled discreetly behind them. They were blissfully ignorant of Li Zhou’s presence as they rode away from the capital city across a sea of golden sand dunes. They remained unmindful of this shadow even as they approached the Monastery of Turfan on the Silk Road, kicking up clouds of dust as their horses raced toward the gates of the enormous minaret, an architectural wonder that mingled Chinese and Islamic traditions.

The lovely, enigmatic Zi Yuan spent her days searching the library for ancient texts, often seated at the circular desk in the midst of the colossal library chamber, poring over scrolls unearthed from long-forgotten boxes and bins.

Hour upon fruitless hour, the wizard’s daughter worked, until finally—at the bottom of yet another documents container—she came upon a dusty puzzle box. This she recognized as a kind of key, and she was able to quickly flower it open, its petals indeed comprising a shape that she felt would fit a slot on a large lacquer tube she had examined days before. Though that tube had been replete with arcane warnings, she stepped unhesitatingly to the shelf and inserted and turned the oversized key, setting forth a chain reaction of unlocking mechanisms.

Startled momentarily, she quickly opened the tube to withdraw a bizarre timeworn object that appeared to be a sort of scroll, fashioned from human bones no less, and onto which Chinese letters had been etched. These she recognized at once as the fabled Oracle Bones, a collection of medical and mystical knowledge from the mists of antiquity.

In her bedchamber at the monastery, Zi Yuan shared this discovery with Ming Guo, as they lay naked in each other’s arms . . .

Unfortunately, another discovery was made by the Emperor’s man, Li Zhou, who had been watching the lovers through a peephole, confirming long-held suspicions. Ming Guo and Zi Yuan had thought they could keep their passion a secret, but they should have known: an Emperor like Er Shi Huangdi has eyes everywhere.

Fate did grant the couple one favor: while in his lover’s embrace in the darkened bedchamber, Ming Guo spied a flicker of light indicating they were indeed being spied upon. The naked Ming Guo raced to a door that opened onto the library, where he could see the fleeing figure of the eunuch who was his emperor’s head minister. The general turned in dismay to the beautiful daughter of a wizard, and they shared looks of dread, their forbidden love discovered.

“We should flee, my love,” she told him as they embraced on the bed.

“There is nowhere to hide,” Ming Guo said. “Nor can my love for you erase my duty as a soldier. I may disapprove of things my emperor does, but I must stay loyal, or I am nothing.”

“Your loyalty should be to our love.”

“And it is. Only by returning, and throwing myself upon . . .” He could barely say it. “. . . the mercy of my lord may we be spared.”

But though he spoke the word
we,
Ming Guo knew his best, his only hope, would be that Zi Yuan herself might be spared. His doom had been sealed when that eunuch had seen him in Zi Yuan’s bed.

A hot, dusty morning marked the return of the two riders through the palace gates. They rode slowly, heads held high, through row upon row of warriors assembled in the palace courtyard. The two rode to the foot of the steps of the palace, dismounted, and then the lovers bowed to each other.

Softly, her eyes moist, Zi Yuan said, “Good-bye, my love.”

“Not good-bye,” Ming Guo said. “For whatever happens, our love will live on. That much we know. And I would face far worse than Er Shi Huangdi to have shared this time with you.”

Zi Yuan nodded solemnly, then turned and began the climb, as the rest of this journey was hers to make.

In the throne room, she found herself alone with the Emperor, at whose feet she knelt, withdrawing from her robe the Oracle Bones. She held the object up to him. “Your answer is here, my lord.”

He did not take the unusual scroll, but said, “You have served me well. In return, I will grant you anything.”

She looked up from her kneeling posture.
“Anything,
my lord?”

“Anything you desire, yes.”

Zi Yuan swallowed. She did not stand. Her eyes sought some sign in his blank expression, but none presented itself.

Finally she said, “I have only one wish, my lord. And I mean you no disrespect. But I wish to spend the rest of my days with Ming Guo.”

“Of course,” he said, his voice, his manner, as calm as a summer day. “Just read.”

She rose and unrolled the scroll and began to read in ancient Sanskrit.

“Stop!” His brow tightened in suspicion. “What is this strange language?”

“It is more ancient than the Shan, from a land at the end of the world.”

“. . . Read on.”

What Zi Yuan did not say was that this was a dialect so ancient only a sorcerer or a sorcerer’s daughter might know it.

And what she read was this:
“In the dark heart of the creator, from the depths of hate, from the mud of evil, should Er Shi Huangdi betray my love and me, cover this man with the dirt of his soul. Bake him in the kiln of torture and enshroud him in a tomb of clay for all eternity.”

The Emperor’s suspicion had faded—this was, after all, a spell, and Er Shi Huangdi did not need to understand the words for them to do their work. He felt a tingling, a warmth, a rush he had never before sensed, coursing through him.

From the window across the chamber came the whinnying of horses in the courtyard below, a terrified nickering that belied the Emperor’s calm manner. Unsettling though the sounds were, Zi Yuan continued to read aloud in the tongue of antiquity . . .

. . . unaware that the animals were reacting, as soldiers bound the hands and feet of Ming Guo, other soldiers looking on, as fearful as the nostril-flaring horses, sickened at the sight of their beloved general being prepared for the worst of deaths.

A wind kicked up dust and blew through palace windows to whip brazier fires and further give lie to the Emperor’s peaceful demeanor.

Finally, Zi Yuan closed the scroll. “It is done.”

Eyes glittering, fists raised, the Emperor breathed in deep. “Your words were a mystery to me, but I feel their strength coursing through my veins. It is working. I can
feel
it.”

“Eternal life is yours, my lord. You have received a great gift. And you have bestowed a great gift upon me. I am grateful.”

He gestured to the wizard’s daughter. “Come. Come to the window.”

Er Shi Huangdi walked her to the window and revealed to her a sight that filled Zi Yuan with horror. Down in the courtyard, Ming Guo was tethered between four teams of horses. The eyes of the lovers met in desperation.

The Emperor gestured down to his general, and the horses who threatened to tear him apart. He spoke loud enough for all to hear: “Become my queen and I will forgive this traitor. I will let him live!”

The Emperor’s voice had not stopped echoing across the courtyard when Ming Guo shouted,
“Don’t believe him!”

Defiant, she turned to the Emperor. “He is right. You will never keep your word.”

“You are wise,” Er Shi Huangdi admitted, and with a smirk he gave the signal.

The teams of horses took off in four directions and the Emperor watched with pleasure as his former general was torn asunder, ripped into pieces that trailed the steeds, limbs bouncing along grotesquely, leaving streaks of blood in the dust.

Zi Yuan, who had turned away from the atrocity, not wanting its sight in her memory, now found herself in the foul embrace of the man who had just ordered her lover’s gruesome demise.

“Now join Ming Guo in hell,” Er Shi Huangdi said.

She felt the blade pierce her side and she staggered back a step and looked down with wide eyes at the dagger plunged to its dragon hilt, just under ribs and above the hipbone. He withdrew the blade and flung it to the floor, his upper lip curling in contempt.

But as the wizard’s child fell to her knees, the Emperor felt within him a terrible, strange shifting. This was a pain the likes of which he’d never experienced. He had been wounded in battle and healed; he had suffered sickness and survived. But this was a molten churning that filled his very veins, coursed through his every organ, with fiery agony. Tears slipped from his eyes, and he wiped them away only to see that they were brown—like liquid clay!

He stared in shock at the kneeling, bleeding woman. “What have you
done
to me, witch? What spell did you cast in that ancient tongue?”

She smiled up at him, and now her upper lip peeled back in disgust, and triumph. “I have cursed you! You, and all those who spill blood in your name.”

From his temples and his forehead, a brown slurry cascaded like thick, ugly perspiration, streaming down his face. Screaming, he tried to wipe it off, but still it came, gushing now. He tore at his robe only to find the muddy substance now oozing from his armpits. And from under his topknot, a fountain of gooey mud erupted like lava, flowing down his body, soaking his robes and his boots.

Zi Yuan got to her feet and moved away, not dying, but her wound serious indeed. Li Zhou and the imperial guards, spears in hand, rushed in, only to back away in horror. Neither the guards nor the head minister even noticed as the wizard’s daughter slipped away in the shadows.

And yet the process of Zi Yuan’s terra-cotta curse had only begun:
now came the fire.

Five hundred times hotter than the flames that had consumed so many cities during Er Shi Huangdi’s reign of conquest, a white heat ignited, its aura glowing as the flames consumed the Emperor and baked the man alive. For a time he screamed, his howls those of a man suffering as no man ever had before, his eyeballs cooking white as the clay fired, his shrill dismay echoing . . .

The screams summoned the Emperor’s army, but as they formed up in rows to secure the palace, they began to weep their own muddy tears. Soon they too were emitting bloodcurdling wails, as the stunned soldiers looked at one another in fear and surprise as the oozing mud came from within to consume them from without.

Their master was a step ahead of them, his terra-cotta shell almost fired hard by now. The great ruler could barely move, staggering helplessly as his agony continued. The imperial guard, dumbfounded by what they’d witnessed, did not try to stop Zi Yuan as she left the palace. They were too busy watching as the terrible aura of heat finally ceased and revealed the smoking statue that the Emperor, now encased in a ceramic skin, had become. This reddish-brown shell he would wear for millennia, but Zi Yuan had not lied in her promise of eternal life: he would indeed remain alive within his terra-cotta cocoon . . . but in suspended animation . . .

In the courtyard, hunching in pain, Zi Yuan cantered her horse as she rode out, through a motionless army that had shared its master’s fate, smoke rising lazily from their terra-cotta forms. So it was that the wizard’s daughter rode off into the night, never to be seen again . . . or at least never in recorded history.

As for the Emperor, Er Shi Huangdi was buried by his eunuchs, who had been spared this hellish fate, his terra-cotta warriors interred with him.

Here the chapter of the evil Emperor would seem at an end. But in ancient texts it is written that should Er Shi Huangdi ever be freed from his terra-cotta prison, he will again become a force of evil, only on a scale to make his previous savagery pale . . . raising his warriors to lay siege to the entire world—a shape-shifting master of the five elements, and a slave to his undying thirst for conquest.

 
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