"Bao!" Jakli cried.
"It's all right," Kaju said, though his voice had no confidence. "Akzu has a plan. He will say he is checking the path for the Brigade herds to move to winter pasture. Sometimes there is water near here. If there is, he can save a day by cutting across the sand. He only wants to help the Brigade now, he will say, because he will be an owner soon. Since there is no water here, he will ask Bao to look on his map for a better route. If Bao wants to help, Akzu will go with him. If not, Akzu will keep talking until they all drive away together. Then he will return in four hours. It is agreed."
But the words seemed to give little comfort to the boys or to Deacon, all of whom stood wearing grim expressions in the dim light. The American had something in his hand that he had pulled out of his pocket— a small battery light, the size of a pencil. He had strapped his pack to his back and stepped to the window.
Shan watched Bao with a cold intense stare, remembering their last encounter, remembering how Bao's slap had drawn blood. The man seemed like a dark planet that had captured Shan in its orbit. Who else was there, how many others waited behind the dune in a knob patrol car?
Shan turned. Jakli was in the shadows with the boys now, one arm around each of them, comforting them. What a land we live in, he thought, where ten-year-old boys not only know what Public Security is but know to be terrified of it. He looked from Jakli to Deacon, and somehow knew each was thinking the same thing. Bao could take them all and have enough glory to get noticed in the capital. Shan the fugitive. Deacon the illegal American. The orphan boys for whom there was a private bounty. Jakli, absent from her paroled job.
Suddenly Bao was pointing at the building.
"We've got to go," Deacon said, and he began lifting Batu through the window.
"Go?" Kaju croaked in a desperate tone. "There is no place to go."
"Sure there is," Deacon replied. "We're going to become invisible." The American dropped Batu outside and climbed out himself.
Bao began slowly walking down the dune. Akzu hesitated, then followed, waving an unfolded map in the air, as if asking Bao a question. It took less than ten seconds for Jakli, Jengzi, Shan, and Kaju to clear the window.
Deacon was thirty feet away, at the remains of one of the small sheds, tearing away the floorboards. The shed was out of Bao's line of sight, blocked by the garage, but for how long no one could know. By the time Shan got to it the American had removed three planks and lowered the boys into a shaft underneath. Jakli and Kaju dropped inside, then Deacon pushed Shan in and jumped down himself.
"What is—" Shan began, but Deacon shoved him hard, pushing him into a darkness at the north side of the six-foot shaft. "As far as you can go!" Deacon ordered in a hushed, urgent voice, then he reached up to replace the planks.
Not until the American finished and began moving toward the others with his light did Shan see that they were in a tunnel lined with stone, nearly four feet high and perhaps five feet wide. Jengzi was crying, held by Jakli at the front. Kaju was next with Batu.
"Okay," Deacon said from behind Shan. "Today's archaeology lesson is about to begin."
"Archaeology?" Kaju gasped. Shan could hear the Tibetan breathing hard, as if he couldn't get enough air.
"Thirty more feet and it'll be safe to talk," Deacon said in a loud whisper.
The bottom of the tunnel was coated with a layer of sand, under which were the same square-cut stones that lined the rest of the tunnel. Every eight feet, wooden timbers, many still with their bark, stretched across the width of the tunnel, supported by small posts. As the group inched along in the dim light from Deacon's pencil lamp, sand trickled down from between the stones overhead.
"The karez," Deacon said when they stopped. "The ancient irrigation tunnels from the mountains, built to carry the melt water, like at Sand Mountain."
"Still intact?" Shan asked.
"Sure. See for yourself. Runs for miles in places. Up around Turfan, they still use them for irrigation, like some of the old Roman aqueducts in Italy. We found a map at Sand Mountain. Seemed to indicate a tunnel here. I checked it out this morning."
"But it's impossible," Kaju said, still breathing hard. "It can't be stable. We'll be—" He stopped, and Shan looked up the tunnel. The teacher's eyes were on his students.
"There were portals, all along the way," Deacon said. "Access for maintenance, access for taking out water. Just like what we came through. Just got to find the next one and out we go. Like pikas from their den."
The builders of the aqueduct had done their job well. For long stretches the stone work still fitted so tightly that the karez appeared to have been swept clean. In places there were small, stagnant puddles, meaning, Deacon pointed out excitedly, that at times of high water, in the spring thaw, some water was still finding its way down the old tunnels.
Shan began to recognize a pattern in the tunnel supports as they moved slowly forward. Every fifth set of beams was thicker and carved with scrolls and the shapes of plants, the plants once kept alive by the karez. In the center of each of the heavier beams was a small dragon head, facing north, ready in defense should demons seek to invade by subterranean means. To the front he heard Jengzi make a whimpering sound, calling out that there were spiderwebs. Shan felt like whimpering himself. There was no danger of Bao discovering them now, only the much more real threat of disturbing the fragile walls. If the roof collapsed, there would be no rescue, only blackness and enough time for horror to take hold as the oxygen was exhausted.
He heard Jakli speak calming words.
Khoshakhan
, he heard her repeat, the calming word for lambs. Jengzi, in front of Shan, stopped whimpering. But as they paused the boy began to inch forward to be beside Kaju. Shan was about to warn him that there was no room for two abreast when the boy's foot pulled against one of the ancient posts. There was a sound not of cracking or splintering, but simply a dry crunching noise as the bottom of the post fell away. The dribble of sand above became a steady flow, creating a thin falling veil that quickly accumulated on the tunnel floor.
"Go!" Deacon shouted. Jengzi scrambled forward, followed by Kaju and Shan. A stone fell onto Shan's back as he passed through the spilling sand. Before he cleared the breach, a second stone fell onto his leg. He paused to see if Deacon needed help.
"Go!" the American shouted again.
Shan shot forward ten feet and turned just as the entire roof around the weakened support collapsed. Deacon was halfway through as the stone and sand closed over him. Shan reached out and grabbed his flashlight with one hand, then grabbed Deacon's wrist with the other and pulled.
With a great heave the American came out of the rubble. He lay face down, gasping for a moment, then took the light and shined it forward, into the face of each of those ahead of him. "Okay," he said with a forced grin. "Guess Bao can't hear us now."
"Where exactly is the exit you promised?" Jakli asked slowly, each word sounding like a vast effort of self-control. The light barely reached her face. Beyond her was the vague shape of the tunnel extending a few feet, then blackness.
"There's access, has to be. There was a community here. You saw the stone ruins," Deacon said. "And cisterns. Almost all the cisterns have been sealed off at the top, but they might have only a foot or two of desert above them."
"But when?" Kaju said, unable to hide the fear in his voice. "Where is a cistern? It's hard to breathe."
"I think Mr. Deacon is saying we just keep going," Shan offered.
"Right," Deacon said in a subdued voice. "A few more days, maybe we'll come out in the northern mountains, with frogs in our pockets." He aimed his light at the boys' faces. "They say there's treasure in some of the old Karez," he offered with hollow enthusiasm.
Batu smiled. Jengzi looked at the American with skepticism, but they both began to crawl with new energy, following Jakli as she probed the darkness.
No one spoke for several minutes, as though fearful that a sound might shatter another of the frail supports. Then Kaju suddenly stopped. "Here!" he said, and pointed to the beam above his head. "We have protection."
As Deacon raised the light, an inscription painted with crimson pigment in Tibetan script could be seen. "The six-syllable mantra," Kaju said with a glimmer of hope in his voice. "The tunnel has been blessed."
"Again!" Jakli called out, pointing to a beam near her own head. The same inscription, in the same paint. She crawled ahead at a faster pace, as though the mark might portend a portal. As Shan watched, she faded into the darkness, but the sound of her movements continued. Then suddenly there was a sound of stones falling and a splash. Jengzi called out Jakli's name in alarm. There was no reply.
"Nobody move!" Deacon warned. "Not a muscle. Not a hair. I'll go."
"No," Shan said. "You're in the back. Pass the light to Batu."
The boy's eyes were wide with fear, but he took the light without speaking and inched forward. He moved twenty, then thirty feet in front of them. Jakli's voice could be heard in the distance, echoing as though in a hollow chamber. The muffled words of a conversation rolled down the tunnel and then, incredibly, laughter. Kaju and Jengzi shot forward, followed closely by Shan and Deacon.
Shan and the American arrived to find Kaju and the boys arrayed on a stone ledge, depressed along its bottom to continue the main course of the karez as it curved around a huge hole lined with stones. The cistern that had been designed to capture the overflow from the main channel was at least forty feet in diameter under a dome of tightly fitting cut stones, and had been built in four tiers, each several feet higher than the one below. Jakli stood below them, on the top tier, up to her waist in water, her head three feet below the top ledge.
Deacon whistled in awe at the construction as he shined his light along the ceiling and far wall. Roots pierced the stone at the apex of the chamber. Shan remembered the surprisingly vigorous clump of shrubs that grew near the far end of the bowl.
"With Jakli's permission," the American said, "I will record Batu and Jengzi as the discoverers. The solvers of the great mystery."
"Mystery?" asked Kaju.
"Sure. We just found out why this place has always been called Stone Lake."
The boys wore grins that nearly reached their ears. Jakli splashed them from below.
"If there was a cistern," Shan suggested, "there must have been access."
Deacon was already easing himself along the ledge toward the far wall. "Probably a stone stairway leading down from something like a bath house." He stopped and aimed his light at a point just below where the dome began on the opposite side. "Right about there," he said. A large stone could be seen, supported by two cut-stone posts. But the area below the lintel stone was packed with rock, sand, and timber debris. The entrance had collapsed.
As Shan and Kaju reached down and pulled Jakli onto the ledge, Deacon's light searched the side of the cistern. "It's too fragile here," the American concluded. "We could collapse the whole thing by moving the rocks. But the cistern would have been near the center of the settlement here. There will be more access ahead."
Just as his hopeful words rang out his light flickered and went dim. He shook it and it brightened, though not nearly to the brilliance it had a moment before. "Go!" he barked.
Two hundred feet past the cistern, Jakli, in the lead, asked for the light. A moment later she began describing in a shaking voice what lay ahead. But there was no need for words. The beam of the light told them everything. Several side posts were loose, three of them fallen and leaning across the tunnel. One top beam had fallen to the bottom and had a pile of sand and stones around it. Another small beam was rotted away, with little more than a few splinters holding it up. The tunnel appeared ready to collapse at any instant.
Time seemed to have a different quality in the tomblike stillness. The small party stared at the doom ahead, and Shan had no idea how long it was before Deacon spoke.
"Okay," the American said in a taut voice. Shan heard him breathe deeply, as if trying to calm himself. "It'll be like this. The light stays with Jakli. She goes first, then the boys. We need someone strong behind, in case there's quick digging to do, so Kaju goes, then Shan. Call back when you reach a stable zone, and I'll come. I'm the biggest, and so the most dangerous."
No one argued. Jakli began inching forward.
"You'll have no light," Kaju called back to the American.
"I got matches," Deacon said in a hollow tone. "No problem."
Shan urged the Tibetan forward with a touch on his leg, and gradually the four in front made progress. Ten feet, proceeding with agonizing slowness, then twenty feet, and the light began to quickly fade, as if perhaps the tunnel had curved.
"I know you're here, damn you," Deacon said in the darkness. "You're smaller than Kaju. You can make it."
