“Ugh,” groaned Jack. “Seriously?”
“What?” Gwen tore a strip of silk from the skeleton’s linen undershirt and wrapped it around the end of the bone. “We’ll need a torch, right?” She dipped her stolen thighbone into one of the pots of burning oil and walked along the arches, taking a closer look at the animals. Red dust glittered within the black rock. “This really was a ruby mine.”
“It’s this one.” Jack crossed ahead of her to the third arch, pointing at the birdlike carving above it. “A hawk guards against tomb raiders. I’ll bet that part of the legend works on multiple levels.” Without waiting for a response, he took a step through the doorway.
Gwen yanked him back by the collar as a giant stone pillar came crashing down behind the arch, missing him by inches. Sparkling black dust rolled out into the chamber. They both retreated to the center.
“How . . . did you . . . know?” asked Jack, coughing in the dust.
“I . . . figured out . . . what this is,” Gwen coughed back. She patted her coat, sending up more sparkling dust, and waved a hand in front of her face to fend it off. “It’s a zodiac. Twelve animals for a twelve-year cycle, same as the Chinese—year of the rabbit, year of the monkey, and all that.”
“So we’re looking for the animal sign Temujin was born under. Any idea what it was?”
“Not the slightest. But now we know it’s not a hawk, don’t we? Besides, I think that one looks more like a chicken.” She swung the torch in a wide arc so that the light passed over the other animals. “We’re not even sure when Temujin was born. 1161? 1162, perhaps? Even if we did, neither of us knows the corresponding signs.” She glanced down, frowning at the smooth black rock beneath their feet. “Perhaps you could spark and see which door Tanner took.”
It was worth a try. Jack crouched down, pressing his palm against the stone. Static. He shook his head. “Maybe if I use the zed.”
“No. We’re not that desperate.”
“Aren’t we?”
Gwen pursed her lips at him.
“Fine.” Jack stood and paced along the carvings, feeling like an art critic in the world’s most dangerous museum. “Monkey . . . ox . . . tiger . . . I’ve seen this group before. This is the menagerie from all those pictures of Genghis Khan in the count’s library.” He thought he had something, but his excitement waned when he came to the fifth arch. A cobra glared down at him, like the one he had faced on the hillside. He shook his head. “Never mind. I didn’t see any snakes in—”
Didn’t see. As those words passed Jack’s lips, a phrase came back to him—something Ash had told him during the Hunt.
Sometimes the best clue is the one that you don’t see.
“That’s it.” He grabbed Gwen by the arm, pulling her to the cobra’s arch. “In each picture, the artist drew a complete Mongolian zodiac. But Temujin himself represented his own sign, rather than the animal. Temujin was the cobra.”
“Are you sure?” Gwen cautiously extended the torch through the doorway. Despite the firelight, nothing was visible beyond the first few feet. “Your last guess didn’t go so well.”
“This time it’s not a guess,” said Jack, and he stepped into the darkness.
Chapter Fifty-Six
NO GIANT STONES came crashing down. No spears or darts shot out of the walls. And not one single tarantula appeared.
There were, however, a lot of bones.
The tunnel widened and Jack and Gwen followed a long, descending curve, as if spiraling down around the outer wall of a cylinder. Their steps took on a wooden echo, and a sweep of the torch showed ancient planks beneath their feet. On either side lay piles of cattle bones, with yokes at their necks and big wooden wheels between each pair.
Jack eyed a horned skull that looked like it belonged in a Hollywood western. “So they left cows behind as extra guards?”
Gwen elbowed him. “Those were oxen. And the wheels were for the carts they pulled. Temujin’s men left him some transportation for the afterlife.”
The afterlife. What sort of afterlife had been waiting for a man who had killed millions?
Jack glanced over at Gwen. “Do you think Tanner could really harness the spirit of Genghis Khan?”
She stopped walking and looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head and continued on. “I don’t think you can trap a person’s spirit, or harness it for your own use. But you and I both know that gems capture sight and sound.” She passed the torch along the black wall. Red dust sparkled within. “Perhaps this mine’s particular brand of balas ruby absorbs and projects negative emotion too—evil, if you like. If anything is trapped in the fourth ruby, I think it’s a big ball of greed, hatred, and malice. Not some dead general’s ghost.”
The tunnel made a ninety-degree bend, and they arrived at the entry to a second chamber, as perfectly round as the first but much larger, with a strange gutter around the periphery and a rock ceiling carved in the sloped style of a circus tent. Silks covered the walls, along with golden shields and silver helmets set with jade and opal.
“It’s a yurt,” said Gwen, halting with her toes hanging over the gutter. “I get it now. They’re all yurts.”
“A what?”
“A yurt, Jack. A Mongolian tent, like the round tent in that photograph of your great-great-grandparents.” She held the torch out into the room. “Look at the slope of the ceiling, the silks on the walls. Tombs mirror the houses of the living, and Genghis Khan would have spent his last years in a collection of tents that looked like this on the inside—a mobile palace.”
Jack looked back over his shoulder at the passage behind them. “That’s what the oxen and the cart wheels were for, to pull his palace.”
“Both in life and in death,” said Gwen. “In life, the palace yurts would have been arranged in a circle for defense. I think these tomb yurts are arranged vertically, instead.”
The black rock floor bounded by the circular gutter was carved with the same zodiac creatures they had seen in the chamber above. The eleven lesser animals played or hunted between the body segments of a giant cobra that spiraled outward to a doorway on the opposite side. “Vertically,” Jack repeated, eyeing the door. “So the tomb chamber will be . . .”
“Directly below us. Yes.”
“Then that’s where we’ll find Tanner and the antidote.” Jack set off across the room. He made it halfway to the center before he heard a resounding crack. The floor groaned beneath him. “What’s happening?” He turned and thought he saw Gwen rising, along with the entryway. But that wasn’t quite right. Gwen wasn’t going up. He was going down.
The floor was one giant stone disk, balanced on a point.
Chains ripped free from the silk coverings on the walls, pulled by the low side of the disk, and rattled down through holes at the edge of the ceiling. An instant later, water poured from spouts farther up. Jack ducked and covered under the onslaught of a freezing shower and then watched the water work its way ominously through the carvings. The extra weight gathering in the gutter tilted the disk farther, so that he could barely keep from sliding down. Beneath the edge he saw the dull gleam of bronze spikes.
“The other side, Jack!” shouted Gwen, waving the torch. “Run to the othe