Chapter 2

At that moment, at the foot of Zhongnan Mountain, twenty or thirty thousand people had gathered: court officials from the Three Departments, Six Ministries, Nine Courts, and Five Directorates, imperial guards standing watch and patrolling, craftsmen carving bricks and stone, monks and Daoists chanting sutras to deliver the dead, and palace eunuchs and maids. None knew that a long robbers' tunnel ran beneath their feet, leading unseen and unsuspected to the princess's residence in the underworld.

Above stood the guards; below lay the burial chamber's sealed entrance. Three stone doors were secured with steel pins, and the joints between the lintel stones had been filled with molten tin, making them impregnable. Wei Xun, however, had found another path. First, he had slipped among the craftsmen to ascertain the chamber's shape and exact position. Then, far beyond anyone's eyes and ears, he had dug a tunnel slanting beneath it and worked his way upward into the tomb. Leaving aside how swiftly he dug, the calculations alone, which could not tolerate the slightest error, were a divine feat far beyond ordinary tomb robbers.

Old Chen had bought Wei Xun as a child and forced him to learn the trade. By fifteen, the pupil had surpassed his master, like blue dye deeper than the indigo from which it came. Yet Wei Xun cared nothing for wealth, and his luck was wretched; he often returned empty-handed. The whole crew had hoped to rise on his coattails, but he was so lackadaisical that, after Old Chen breathed his last, his fellow apprentices scattered like monkeys from a fallen tree, each forming a band of his own.

Wei Xun worked in the pitch-black tunnel, mentally calculating that he had nearly reached the right distance. A moment later, the iron rod in his hand rang against something with the clear note of metal on jade. It was icy to the touch: these were the "gold bricks" fired in government kilns expressly for the imperial family.

Gold bricks were not made of actual gold. They were fired from a special clay passed through fine sieves, yielding a fine, hard texture, and were reserved for imperial buildings. Not only were they costly, but their recipe was a closely guarded secret. The tomb's bricks had been laid in nine alternating layers. The craftsmen had not dared cut corners; the bricks fitted so snugly that not even a sheet of paper could slide between them. But so long as the joints had not been grouted, they posed no obstacle to him.

Wei Xun drew a dagger from inside his robe, felt for a seam, and inserted the blade. Then, slicing around all four sides as though cutting tofu, he removed the brick. Once the first was out, the rest became much easier. A gap gradually appeared in one corner of the level burial chamber floor.

The chamber was dark and chilling. Though there was not a breath of wind, the cold seeped into his bones, making it seem another world from the scorching summer aboveground. The tomb entrance had been sealed less than two days earlier, so the air was still fairly fresh, though a faint bloody odor drifted through it. Wei Xun braced himself against the wall and leaned inside. Finding it wet and sticky beneath his hand, he thought the funeral must have been so rushed that they had sealed the tomb before the murals were dry.

He did not hurry to take out his fire striker, but listened in the darkness for a while. In a place where daylight never reached, the body's instincts were far more useful than the eyes for detecting dangerous mechanisms. Wei Xun felt around in the tunnel behind him for a few small stones and tossed them in different directions.

A sharp rush of air swept toward his face in the darkness. Wei Xun shifted slightly aside, and a crossbow bolt struck the brick wall with a hollow echo. From the reverberations, he already had a clear sense of the chamber's layout and his own position.

Lavish as the princess's tomb was, the hurried burial had left no time to prepare elaborate, large-scale traps such as sand seas or fire dragons. Only six crossbows had been installed above and below the tomb passage. Once Wei Xun removed their strings, there were no further tricks awaiting him. Even if there were corpse fumes or poisonous mercury mist, there had not been enough time for them to develop and spread. Apart from the bloody smell lingering around his nose, which troubled him somewhat, nothing else seemed amiss.

Wei Xun took out his fire striker and lit a candle. In its tiny flame, one corner of the magnificent underground palace lifted its veil.

For a princess, this tomb far exceeded the permitted scale, approaching the specifications of an imperial mausoleum. There were light wells above and recessed chambers to the sides. Along both sides of the tomb passage, murals depicted groups of maids holding fans or carrying ewers, attending their noble mistress as they had in life. In the haste, many of their skirts had yet to be fully colored. The princess's burial treasures, enough to heap up mountains and fill seas, lay strewn through every corner.

Holding his candle, Wei Xun slowly inspected this immense wealth, unimaginable to ordinary people. Chests of silk and satin, gold basins and jade bowls, spiral-shell eyebrow pigment and rouge had not been sorted into categories, but piled together with harnesses, pottery figures, incense vessels, and even all manner of food.

The more Wei Xun looked, the stranger he found it. Strict ritual governed the arrangement of grave goods. Unless tomb robbers had already ransacked the place on a grand scale, it should never have been so chaotic. Farther down the passage, there had not even been time to paint murals, so silk and satin had been hung as decorations instead. The arrangements for the princess's afterlife were extraordinarily grand and extravagant, yet astonishingly careless and rushed.

Crystal cakes rested on crystal dishes, and cream pastries gleamed on golden plates. The dead were served as though still alive. These utensils meant for living hands and delicacies meant for living mouths sat in the cold tomb, their incongruity lending them an eerie air.

Ivory and rhinoceros horn, coral and mica, pearl curtains and jade tables-Wei Xun passed these priceless treasures without the slightest stirring of desire. None was what he sought. He stopped to inspect a four-legged incense cauldron carved from a single piece of fine jade, but upon finding only incense inside, immediately put it out of his mind.

The bloody smell grew stronger.

In the faint glow of the bean-sized candle flame, a life-sized maid figurine came into view. She wore a green gauze skirt and knelt prostrate on the ground, bowing toward the tomb's mistress in the depths of the chamber. Her posture was remarkably lifelike.

No... it was not a figurine.

Wei Xun's thin-soled boots stepped into a pool of blood. This was a corpse whose head had been severed by a sharp blade. The head, its hair arranged in a drooping horse-fall bun, was still attached to the neck by a strip of flesh. The blood had turned cold and sticky. The woman wore a palace maid's clothing, and her limbs had been bound into a kneeling posture. Even after stiffening, her body retained the position in which she had died.

Wei Xun was appalled. Since the First Emperor's time, human sacrifice in burials had long disappeared. Han and Tang tombs used figurines as funerary attendants; even emperors' and empresses' mausoleums almost never involved killing people for burial. His doubts multiplied. What was so unusual about Princess Wanshou's death?

When he reached the largest space, the central burial chamber, the cruelest and bloodiest sight of the night unfolded before him: dozens of executed maids and eunuchs, all bound hand and foot, lay prostrate, bowing toward the princess's coffin on its stone platform. Blood spattered the entire chamber, a sight that shocked the eyes and heart.

Wei Xun examined the bodies one by one. Not only had they died horribly, but they had suffered every kind of torture beforehand. Tendons severed, bones broken, skin and flesh torn to pieces-they were unbearable to look at.

Had the princess died suddenly of illness, and the emperor vented his anger on the servants who had failed in their duties?

Wei Xun's brows drew tight. Disgust and fury filled him, and he wanted to burn it all to ashes. But he was cautious by nature and did not act hastily. Inspecting carefully by candlelight, he circled the chamber twice and discovered that the servants' bodies had not been placed at random. They had been deliberately arranged in a formation based on the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches.

No time to sort the grave goods, yet time enough to arrange the bodies?

He turned his gaze to the enormous stone coffin in the center. Presumably, Princess Wanshou, the tomb's mistress, lay within. The coffin had probably been prepared for an imperial prince. Its exterior was carved into an ornate palace with sweeping eaves and interlocking brackets, with halberd-bearing guards standing at its four corners.

Wei Xun ran a finger along it and found that the seam beneath the lid had not been filled with beeswax as custom required. Such neglected details were everywhere in the princess's tomb, too numerous to count.

Since he had come this far, how could he possibly refrain from opening the coffin to seek treasure? Looking at the servants' bodies around him, Wei Xun felt a faint urge for revenge.

He inserted the flattened end of his steel rod beneath the lid and pushed, using four ounces of force to shift a thousand pounds. The lid slid askew, opening a crack. After several more efforts, the heavy palace roof crashed to the ground, breaking into several stone slabs.

Inside lay a valuable golden-thread nanmu coffin. Over it was draped an apricot-yellow prayer banner, two feet wide and seven or eight feet long. Wei Xun had seen high officials and nobles cover their coffins with silk paintings, usually depicting auspicious scenes of the deceased attaining immortality. This silk, however, was covered in incantations. At a glance, all those he recognized were talismans for suppressing souls and warding off evil.

Had this princess become a corpse demon or a vengeful ghost after death?

Looking again at the servants' bodies arranged around him, he could discern the same underlying intent to suppress and subdue.

By this point, an ordinary timid tomb robber would have had every hair standing on end and begun thinking of retreat. How could he still dare open the coffin? But this man was born rebellious and believed in neither ghosts nor gods. The more others shunned something, the more he insisted on trying it. Wei Xun gave a cold laugh, grabbed the prayer banner, crushed it into a ball, and tossed it aside.

Then he pulled the nails and lifted the coffin lid, unceremoniously exposing the tomb's mistress to the light once more.

Dazzling jewels shone before him. The inner coffin was so lavish that a whole measure of pearls lined its bottom, surrounding its occupant. A sinister, hideous mask covered the corpse's face, seeming ready to leap to life in the flickering candlelight. This four-eyed mask was called an "Exorcism Mask," an implement used in folk rituals to drive out evil and suppress souls.

People often said that one should conceal the faults of the dead. When burying a relative, no matter how rich or poor, noble or lowly they had been in life, some measure of respect was due. Usually, a face cloth of white silk covered the features. Here there was no face cloth; instead, an Exorcism Mask had been placed on the corpse to imprison the soul within its body and prevent a vengeful ghost from wreaking havoc. Thus, this princess would be unable to reincarnate. Her soul could only remain trapped in her rotting body, suffering for eternity.

Though Wei Xun did not believe in ghosts, he was still startled by the viciousness of whoever had devised this. It was worse than digging up a dead political enemy to whip the corpse and scatter the ashes. What kind of hatred could have prompted this?

But whatever grudges and secrets lurked within the palace had nothing to do with him.

Wei Xun searched repeatedly through the pearls. He did not know what the thing he sought looked like, only that it should not be a forehead ornament, nor resemble a dangling hairpin, much less a comb. Casting aside these priceless jewels, he found nothing matching the object he imagined. Generally, the grave goods kept against the deceased's body were the most precious, and the things they had loved most in life. He decided to search the corpse as well.

An Exorcism Mask covered the corpse's face, and layer upon layer of brocade quilts covered her body, bound with silk ribbons and wrapped as tightly as a cicada's cocoon. Wei Xun cut open the bindings and peeled away the quilts one by one, revealing a delicate figure dressed in a pale-yellow ceremonial gown with broad sleeves.

A subtle fragrance drifted out, refreshing the heart and lungs. It was unlike any perfume he had ever smelled.

Wei Xun paused, then cupped his hands in apology according to the rules of his trade. "Sorry for the intrusion."

Holding a folded piece of white paper between his teeth, he climbed into the coffin and knelt over the body, feeling the princess from head to foot. The more he touched her, the more puzzled he became. Her body felt warm and soft, nothing like a stiff corpse. Though the burial chamber was much colder than outside, at least seven or eight days had passed since the princess's reported death. How could someone dead that long show neither swelling nor the stench of decay, and still retain body heat?

A thought stirred in him, and he reached out to lift the Exorcism Mask.

Beneath the hideous mask lay a beautiful young woman, rounded as a pearl and lustrous as jade. Her cloudlike hair was piled in a high bun, adorned with a twelve-branched flowering hairpin. Her face bore heavy formal makeup, with gold-leaf forehead ornaments, powdered cheeks, and scarlet lips. There was not the slightest sign of her turning into a vengeful ghost.

An unregistered, rootless drifter like Wei Xun had naturally never seen a noblewoman secluded deep within the palace. But word throughout Chang'an was that Prince Shao took after his mother, while the princess resembled her father, especially in her auspicious ears, which bore the noble features of the imperial house. The woman in the coffin did indeed have full, rounded earlobes.

Wei Xun tried pinching the princess's cheek. It felt soft and elastic. His suspicions were now so strong that he had to test them. He reached into her cloudlike hair, found the Baihui and Shenting acupoints, and pressed. His force penetrated to the bone as he sent internal energy into her, while repeatedly patting her cheeks.

"Wake up! The sun's already three poles high! The millet in your dream is cooked!"

After he repeated this for a short while, the young woman's throat moved slightly, and she spat out a translucent cicada carved from mutton-fat jade. This was a funerary mouth offering placed between the lips of the dead. That its owner could spit it out meant she was not quite thoroughly dead.

Looking closely now, he saw that although the princess had not awakened, her lashes trembled and her chest rose and fell. He, a living man with deathly pale skin and icy hands, looked more like a corpse than she did.

Everything became clear to Wei Xun: this was the root of all the strange things in the tomb. Princess Wanshou was not dead at all. She had been buried alive!

As his thoughts raced, Wei Xun made his decision. No longer fixated on that elusive object, he leaped out of the coffin and landed lightly, without a sound. According to ritual, members of the imperial clan were to be buried with a thousand varieties of fine food and heavenly wine. He surveyed the vessels around him. Wines, nectars, and dairy drinks were piled like mountains. If there were not a thousand kinds, there were certainly far more than a hundred.

Wei Xun chose a jar and broke its clay seal. Instantly, an exquisitely sweet wine fragrance filled the air. The paper seal read, "Imperially bestowed Dew Nectar." He lifted the jar and drank deeply. After drinking for a while, he felt his strength stirring and growing, so he tossed the jar aside and jumped back into the coffin. Sliding one hand behind the unconscious princess's neck and the other beneath her knees, he lifted her out in his arms.

Thirteenth Son crouched by the tunnel entrance, keeping watch. It was nearly the fifth watch, and with the sky about to turn fish-belly white, he could not help growing anxious. Once full daylight came, his novice monk's guise would no longer allow him to wander idly about.

Suddenly, muffled knocking sounded beneath his feet. Delighted, he immediately moved the stone trough aside and overturned the turf. Several more large bundles of earth were passed up.

Hadn't he already broken through? Why was he still digging? Eldest Senior Brother had never miscalculated a position before!

Suppressing his doubts, Thirteenth Son took the bundles of earth and set them aside. Then the iron rod flew, and the little opening swiftly widened several times over. This time, two heads emerged. Wei Xun had a young woman's corpse on his back, her hair covered in pearls and jade, and climbed out of the robbers' tunnel on hands and feet.

Thirteenth Son's face changed in horror, and he blurted, "Eldest Senior Brother, you absolutely mustn't! Even if the corpse is still fresh... you can't follow Fourth Brother's example!"

Wei Xun nearly laughed. "Don't talk nonsense. She's alive."

Thirteenth Son had no time to wonder why a living person had been in a tomb. He asked urgently, "Did you find that thing?"

Wei Xun silently shook his head. His junior brother's disappointment was plain.

He had labored for more than forty hours without sleep, and his strength was nearly spent. Not a trace of color remained in his face. He feared that if he stopped even to catch his breath, his strength would fail altogether; he had no energy left to go down and search again. Perhaps this was heaven's will. Wei Xun thought he might as well carry on in one push and settle her somewhere safe, making the fullest use of this life of his.

"You clean up here. We'll meet at Green Micro Temple afterward."

Leaving that instruction behind, he strode away with the princess on his back.

Only once he was aboveground could he stretch his limbs and bring all his skill into play. Though carrying another person, his footsteps made no sound. Swift as lightning and light as a leopard cat, he vanished without a trace in moments.

Thirteenth Son watched his senior brother's departing figure with envy, knowing he could never catch him even if he ran himself to death. Such astonishing, peerless skill could not be attained merely through a master's wholehearted instruction and diligent practice. Most of it was innate talent.