The Golden Elephant. Alex Archer
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green stone was smooth as a water-polished pebble. It was hard, yet seemed to have some sort of give, as if it were a living thing and not a carved stone artifact. The workmanship was fully as exquisite as might be expected. Each of the toes on the dragon’s feet was clearly visible, and the characters inscribed around it stood in clear relief. To hold such an object in her hand was itself a reward—reminding her, half-guiltily, how abundantly she would have earned her commission.
A rustle of movement tickled her ear in the stillness of the tomb—a dry creaking, a soft sound as of falling dust. A flicker of motion tugged at her peripheral vision.
She turned. Emperor Lu was sitting up on his bier. The shriveled face with its empty eye sockets looked not just mad, but angry.
Annja gasped.
For a moment she crouched there clutching the jade and staring at its moldering owner like a deer caught in the headlights. And then a great downward geyser of water shot out of the ceiling, drowning the mummy and knocking Annja sprawling.
She was washed toward the bronze door on a torrent of glutinous mud. For a moment the wildly spiraling beam of her headlamp illuminated the mummy. It sat there on its catafalque in the midst of the stream as if taking a shower. The jaw had fallen open, she could clearly see. It was as if Lu laughed at her—enjoying his final joke on the woman who had despoiled his tomb.
Then the water obscured her sight of him. She managed to get onto her feet against the rushing torrent. She scrambled out with the water sloshing around her shins.
Annja realized the corridor was only flat relative to the steep decline she had descended, for it filled with water more slowly than it would have if level. Out of options, she ran for all she was worth. The quick death of tripping some trap, previously discovered or not, and being impaled with ancient spears seemed infinitely preferable to being trapped down here to drown in the dark. The prospect woke a whole host of fears in Annja’s soul, like myriad rats maddened by an ancient plague.
She vaulted the hinged-floor trap, still outlined in thin white lines of light, without hesitation. Her long jump wasn’t quite good enough. The floor pivoted heart-wrenchingly beneath her feet. Adrenaline fueled a second frantic leap that carried her to safety. She raced up the steeper tunnel as the water gurgled at her heels.
It followed her right up the ramp. The place was seriously shipping water. She wondered why the passageway wasn’t fatally flooded already.
That made her run the faster. Her light swung wildly before her.
But even under the direst circumstances Annja never altogether lost her presence of mind. A part of her always kept assessing, evaluating, even in the heat of passion. Or panic.
Since survival in the current situation didn’t require fast thinking so much as fast legwork, she realized why the air in the tomb had not been stale and why dust had settled so deeply on the floor and upon the emperor.
That hole in the ceiling may or may not have been a celestial escape route for Lu’s soul. It certainly was an air shaft. No matter how disposable labor was in his day—and she suspected that it was mighty disposable indeed—Lu had to know his tomb would never get built if the laborers kept dropping dead of asphyxiation the moment they reached the work site. Not to mention the fact that in those days skilled masons and engineers weren’t disposable, and had he treated them that way, his tomb never would’ve been built in the first place.
No doubt an extensive network of ventilation shafts terminated at the tomb mound’s sides at shallow angles. They would have been built with doglegs and baffles to prevent water getting in under normal circumstances. Otherwise the old emperor and his last bier would have been a stalagmite.
That also explained why Annja wasn’t swimming hopelessly upstream right now. One peculiarity— eccentricity was probably the word, considering the creator—of Mad Emperor Lu’s tomb was that it was entered from the top. Annja had made her way gingerly down, and was making her way a good deal less carefully back up a series of winding ramps and passages. The vent shafts were probably entirely discrete from the corridors. Perhaps Lu had contrived a way to flood his subterranean burial chamber from ground water or a buried cistern.
Screaming with friction, spears leaped from the wall to Annja’s left. The green bronze heads crashed the far wall’s stone behind her back. The traps were timed for a party advancing at a deliberate pace. Annja was fleeing.
Up through the tunnels Annja raced. When she dared risk a glance back over her shoulder she saw water surging after her like a monster made of froth. She was gaining, though.
That gave her cold comfort. No way was ground water, much less water stored in a buried cistern, rising this far this fast, she thought. It took serious pressure to drive this mass of water. The valley was clearly flooding a lot quicker than she had been assured it would.
So now she was racing the waters rising outside the mound, as well as those within.
If the water outside got too high, the helicopter Annja had hired to bring her here and carry her away when she emerged would simply fly away. She couldn’t much blame the pilot. There’d be nothing to do for her.
Trying hard not to think about the unthinkable, Annja ran harder. A stone trigger gave beneath her feet; another spring trap she hadn’t tripped on her way down thrust its spears from the wall. They missed, too.
From time to time side passages joined the main corridor. In her haste she missed the one that led to the entrance she had come in by, which was not at the mound’s absolute apex. She only realized her error when she came into a hemispherical chamber at what must have been the actual top. A hole in the ceiling let in vague, milky light from an appropriately overcast sky.
Annja stopped, panting. Though she knew it was a bad way to recover she bent over to rest hands on thighs. For the first time she realized she still clutched the imperial seal in a death grip. The expedition wasn’t a total write-off.
Provided I live, she thought.
Forcing herself to straighten and draw deep abdominal breaths, she looked up at the hole. It was small. She guessed she could get through. But only just. She would never pass while she wore her day pack. And she wasn’t going to risk wriggling through with the seal in a cargo pocket. The fit was tight enough it would almost certainly break.
“Darn,” she said. She swung off her pack. Wrapping the seal in a handkerchief, she stuck it in a Ziploc bag she had brought for protecting artifacts. She stowed it carefully in her pack and set off back down the corridor to find the real way out.
She was stopped within a few steps. The water had caught her.
“Oh, dear,” she said faintly as it surged toward her. The valley was flooding fast.
She ran back up to the apex chamber. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she shouted, “Hello? Can you hear me? I need a little help here!”
She did so without much hope. The pilot and copilot would be sitting in the cockpit with both engines running. With the waters rising so fast they had to be ready for a quick getaway. In fact, Annja had no particularly good reason to believe they hadn’t already flown away.
To her surprise she was answered almost at once.
“Hello down there,” a voice called back through the hole. “I’ll lend you a hand.”
Annja stared at the hole for a moment, although she could see nothing but grey cloud. She had no idea who her rescuer was. It sure wasn’t the pilot or the copilot—they weren’t young women with what sounded for all the world like an Oxford accent.
“Um—hello?” Annja called out.
“I’m throwing down a rope,” the young woman said. A pale blue nylon line uncoiled from the ceiling.
“I’ve got a pack,” Annja called up, looking nervously back over her shoulder at the chamber’s entrance. She could hear the slosh of rising water just outside. “It’s got important artifacts in it. Extremely delicate. I’ll have to ask you to pull the pack up first.