ROGUE ANGELTM.

Alex Archer.

THE GOLDEN ELEPHANT.

1.

Tomb of the Mad Emperor.

"Oops," Annja Creed said as she felt something give beneath the cleated heel of her Red Wing walking shoe.

The floor of the pa.s.sageway was caked inches thick in dust. Annja couldn't see the trigger. She had sensed more than heard something like a twig snapping.

Already in motion, Annja dived for the floor. She heard a grind, a rumble, a rusty creaking. Then with a hefty metallic sound something shot from the stone walls above her.

Catching herself on her hands, Annja looked around by the light of her bulky hand lantern, which lay several feet ahead of her. She spotted three bronze spears spanning the two-yard-wide corridor a yard above the floor. They were meant to impale any unwary intruder. That included her.

Annja shook her head. "Emperor Lu may or may not have been crazy," she muttered. "But he sure was paranoid."

The echoes of her words chased each other down the slanting corridor, deep into the earth's dark recesses.

CAUTIOUSLY ANNJA WIGGLED forward. As her weight came off the hidden floor plate the spears began to retract into the walls. By the time she reached her lantern they had vanished. The stone plates that covered the ports through which the spears had thrust out swung back into place.

Coughing on the dust she had stirred up doing her snake act, Annja sat up and shone her light on the walls. She could see no sign of where the spears had come from. The walls had been painted with some kind of murals, perhaps once quite colorful. They had faded to mere swirls and suggestions of faint color. They worked to camouflage the trap, though.

She shook her head and picked herself up. "Got to move," she told herself softly as she dusted off the front of her tan shirt and khaki cargo pants. This would be her only shot. With the construction of a giant dam nearby, the floodwaters were rising. By tomorrow they would make the subterranean tunnels unsafe.

With redoubled caution she made her way deeper into the lost emperor's tomb.

The corridor walls were hewed from a yellow limestone. Tests showed it had been quarried in some hills several miles away. The pa.s.sageway air was cool and dry. It smelled of stone and earth.

Some indeterminate distance down, as Annja began to feel the weight, not just of years, but of millions of tons of earth pressing upon her, the corridor leveled. It had taken several bends and a couple of doglegs, and had plateaued briefly, as well. Annja wasn't sure whether the zigs and zags had some ritual significance, were meant to additionally befuddle an interloper or were simply to prevent a cart full of spoil from running all the way back down to the bottom during the digging of the corridor. She suspected it was all of the above.

Far down the hallway, in which she could just stand upright, Annja saw that something was blocking the way. Could that be the door to Lu's actual tomb? she wondered. Her heart beat quickened. According to the ground-penetrating radar scans, it could be. The last Chinese team to come down here had intended to open the bronze door to the burial chamber proper. She had no idea whether they had or not.

The Beijing University officials who had hired Annja suggested that they felt the last team had indeed made some major discoveries and had then departed by some currently unknown entrance to the great mound before vanishing. There was nothing intrinsically unlikely about that. Such huge structures often had multiple entrances. But she was being asked to play archaeology cop-to find out if the tomb had been plundered and, if possible, to trace the thieves. She was certainly willing enough. Like any real archaeologist she had an unremitting hatred of tomb robbers.

"Of course that a.s.sumes a lot of ifs," Annja said aloud. Her voice, echoing down the chamber, rea.s.sured her. Something about the place bothered her.

She flashed her light down the corridor. She thought she saw a hint of green from the obstruction. She knew that was consistent with bronze doors. The copper in the alloy turned green as it oxidized. Otherwise bronze wasn't p.r.o.ne to corrosion, as iron and steel were.

I wonder if I should have looked more closely for bloodstains around those spear traps, she thought. The two expeditions that had returned had warned about various b.o.o.by traps.

But she wasn't here to do forensic work. Time pressed. So did the billions of tons of water that would soon be rushing to engulf the mound.

As she moved forward toward the door she became aware of a strange smell. A bad smell, and all too familiar-the stench of death.

It grew stronger as she approached the door. And then she fell right into another of Emperor Lu's little surprises.

The floor tipped abruptly beneath her. The right side pivoted up. She dropped straight down.

Without thought she formed her right hand into a fist. Obedient to her call, the hilt of the legendary blade of Joan of Arc filled her hand. Falling, she thrust the sword to her left and drove it eight inches into the pit's wall.

It was enough. Grabbing the hilt with her left hand, as well, she clung desperately and looked down.

The hint of scent had become a foul cloud that enveloped her. She choked and gagged. The floor trap was hinged longitudinally along the center. The pit was twenty feet long and sank at least twelve feet deep. Bronze spearheads jutted up from the floor like snaggled green teeth.

Entangled and impaled among them, almost directly below her, lay a number of bodies. She couldn't tell exactly how many; they had become tangled together as they fell onto the spears. The glare of her lantern, which lay tilted fortuitously up and angled in a corner, turned them into something from a nightmare.

One man hung alone to one side, bent backward. His mouth was wide open in a final scream at the spearhead that jutted two feet upward from his belly. The remnants of what looked like a stretcher of sorts, possibly improvised out of backpack-frames, lay beneath him.

At the shadow-clotted base of the pit she could just make out the dome of a skull or the multiple arch of a rib cage protruding from ages of drifted dust. The missing Chinese archaeology team were not the first victims.

She looked up. She had fallen only a couple of yards below the pit's lip. The sword had entered the wall blade-vertical. It flexed only slightly under her weight. She knew it could break-the English had done it, when they burned its former holder at the stake-but it didn't seem strained at the moment.

Unwilling to test it any longer than she had to, she swung back and forth experimentally, gaining momentum. Then she launched her legs back and up and let go.

Whatever kind of graceful landing she was hoping for didn't happen. Her legs and hips flopped up onto the floor. Her head and upper torso swung over empty s.p.a.ce-and the waiting bronze spearheads. As her body started to topple forward she got her hands on the rim of the pit and halted herself. Her hair escaped from the clip holding it to hang about her face like a curtain.

With something like revulsion she threw herself backward. She sprawled on her b.u.t.t and elbows, sc.r.a.ping the latter. Then she just lay like that awhile and breathed deeply.

The sword had vanished into the otherwhere.

One thing her life had taught her since she had come, unwittingly and quite unwillingly, into possession of Joan of Arc's Sword was to bounce back from the most outlandish occurrences as if they were no more significant or unusual than spilling a cup of coffee.

"That got the old heart rate going," she said.

She slowly got to her feet. The trapdoor swung over and began to settle back to the appearance of a normal, innocuous stretch of floor. As it eclipsed the beam of her lost lamp, shining up from the pit like h.e.l.lfire, she reached up to switch on her headlamp. Its rea.s.suring yellow glow sprang out as the glare was cut off.

It wasn't very powerful. The darkness seemed to flood around the narrow beam, with a palpable weight and presence. "It'll be enough," she muttered. "It has to be."

Putting her back to the left-hand wall, she edged down the corridor. The dust, which had settled in the past few weeks, hiding the doomed expedition's footsteps, had been dumped into the pit, except for a certain quant.i.ty that still swirled in the air and rasped her lungs like sandpaper. The clean patch of floor, limned by the white light shining from below, made its end obvious.

Cautiously she moved the rest of the way down the corridor toward the green door. No more traps tried to grab her.

As she'd suspected, the door was verdigrised bronze. It had a stylized dragon embossed on it-the ancient symbol of imperial might. She hesitated. She saw no obvious k.n.o.b or handle.

Reaching into her pocket for a tissue to cover her hand, she pushed on the door. It swung inward creakily. She had to put her weight behind it before it opened fully.

A great wash of cool air swept over her. Surprisingly, it lacked the staleness she would have expected from a tomb sealed for two and a half millennia. Bending low, she stepped inside.

The tomb of Mad Emperor Lu was almost anticlimactic. It was a simple domed s.p.a.ce, twenty yards in diameter, rising to ten at the apex, through which a hole about a yard wide opened through smooth-polished stone. Annja wondered if had been intended to allow the emperor's spirit to depart the burial chamber.

Dust covered the floor, a good four inches deep, so that it swamped Annja's shoes. In the midst of the dust pond stood a catafalque, four feet high and wide, eight feet long. On it lay an effigy in what appeared to be moldering robes, long cobwebbed and gone the color of the dust that had mounded over it, half obscuring it. A second mound rose suggestively by the feet.

Annja dug her digital camera from her pack. She snapped several photos. The built-in flash would have to do. Feeling time and the approaching floodwaters pressing down, Annja moved forward as cautiously as she could through the dust. Her archaeologist's reflex was to disturb things as little as possible.

But that wasn't the reason for her deliberation. Soon all this would be underwater-a great crime against history itself, but one about which she could do nothing. She still sought to do as little damage as possible, in hopes someday the artificial lake might be drained and what the water left of the tomb properly excavated. She was more worried about stirring a cloud of blinding dust.

And more traps.

Uneventfully she reached the foot of the bier. On closer inspection the reclining figure seemed to be a mummy rather than an effigy. Annja presumed it was the man himself, Emperor Lu, his madness tempered by age and desiccation and, of course, being dead. It still gave her a shiver to be in the presence of such a mythic figure.

"This isn't right," she said softly. She felt a great sorrow mixed with anger that this corpse, this priceless relic, was soon to be desecrated, and almost certainly to decay to nothing in the waters of a new lake. She thought about trying to carry it out with her.

She sighed and forced herself to let the inevitable happen. She snapped some shots of the old guy, though, from several angles, always being careful where she put her feet, lest the floor swallow her up and dump her down another awful chasm.

But Lu seemed to have no more surprises awaiting intruders upon his celestial nap. Surprisingly little did await the intrepid tomb robber, leaving aside the august but somewhat diminished imperial person. Except, perhaps, that mound by the mummy's feet.

She finished recording Lu for posterity and knelt by the foot of the bier. The mound was about as wide as a dinner plate and four or five inches high. Gently Annja brushed dust away with her hands.

In a moment she uncovered the artifact-a beautiful circular seal of milky green jade, six inches wide and a good inch thick, engraved with the figure of a sinuous dragon. It was Lu's imperial seal, beyond doubt. Annju's heart caught in her throat. Bingo, she thought. Properly displayed in some museum, it would be a worthy relic of Mad Lu's long-forgotten reign.

Reverently she reached out and touched it. The 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 pa.s.sageway wasn't fatally flooded already.

That made her run the faster. Her light swung wildly before her.

But even under the direst circ.u.mstances Annja never altogether lost her presence of mind. A part of her always kept a.s.sessing, evaluating, even in the heat of pa.s.sion. 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pa.s.sages. 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. 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 pa.s.sages. 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 ma.s.s of water. The valley was clearly flooding a lot quicker than she had been a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.s 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, "h.e.l.lo? 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 c.o.c.kpit 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.

"h.e.l.lo 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-h.e.l.lo?" 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. I can't fit through the hole while carrying it."

She expected her unseen benefactor to argue-the primary value of human life and all that. But instead she replied, "Very well. Tie it on and I'll pull it up straightaway."

Annja did so. When she called out that it was secure, it rose rapidly toward the ceiling. She frowned, but the woman slowed it down when it neared the top. She extracted it without its synthetic fabric touching the sides of the hole.

"Thanks," Annja called. "Good job."