Barry Hughart - The Story of the Stone

Grief of Dawn was a born fighter, and the job of an archer in close quarters is to guard the exposed rear. She walked backward, totally secure at the touch of Moon Boy's guiding hand, and she was sure-footed as a mountain goat. I placed my foot on the first step and we started down.

Recent torch cinders marked the steps, and there were smoke stains on the ceiling. The steps were smooth and regular and steep, and we came to four landings. The air was fresh but rather moist, and Moon Boy said he could hear water. Finally I could too, and as we arrived at the last step our torchlight reached out to an underground river.

The story of Wolf flashed through my mind. The water was jet black because of the rock bed it ran through, and on the other side was something huge and dark. It made no movement or sound. I bent down and swung my torch until I found the right angle, and light bounced across the water to an enormous stone statue. It was of a man, and the features were rather familiar.

“Yen-wang-yeh, the former First Lord of Hell,” Master Li said in a normal tone of voice. “There's no need to whisper, you know. Our torchlight will have already announced our presence.”

He studied the statue thoughtfully. “The representation of a guardian of the dead suggests that this cavern actually is an extension of the tomb of the Laughing Prince, as we had assumed. Considering the fact that the bastard tunneled under most of the valley, he may have built the largest tomb in history.”

The cavern was immense. Our torchlight barely reached the ceiling. The slap of our sandals echoed away in the darkness and came bouncing back in a distorted manner, as though filtering through a maze of side tunnels. Master Li started off upstream, while I clutched my axe and glared ferociously at the shadows. Grief of Dawn's bow swung back and forth behind us, with a notched arrow ready.

Spaced at about two-hundred-foot intervals were more huge stone statues. Master Li identified the strangely named Emma-hoo, the Japanese King of the Dead, and muttered something about the Laughing Prince having enlisted deities from every culture he could think of. Many of the figures Master Li couldn't identify, but he bowed deeply to a strong young hero who was holding a captured lion, and as he walked on he began chanting under his breath. I caught part of it.

“Doesn't sound very heroic to me,” I muttered.

“Dear boy, the story of Gilgamesh makes our epics of the heroic quest look like scribblings of half-witted children,” Master Li said sternly.

I was in no position to argue with him. The next statues were Egyptian underworld deities, and there were an extraordinary number of them. I nearly jumped out of my sandals when the torchlight picked up a huge threatening mummy holding some kind of hideous creature, but Master Li said it wasn't intended to represent the Laughing Prince, but Osiris and the monster Amemait. He identified a god with the head of a jackal as Anubis and a lady with a feather as Ament, but he seemed to be looking for something else. Finally he stopped and pointed.

“Toth,” he said. “Grief of Dawn, in your delirium you said, ‘There's the ibis statue,’ and here he is. What we're looking for, incidentally, is a statue with the head of a raven.”

The only sounds were the lapping of water and the slapping of sandals and the hiss of torches. The shadowed emptiness seemed infinite. I felt the cold chill of eternity pressing down on me and I clutched my axe tighter; statue after statue, secretive, monstrous, eternally guarding the mummy of a laughing madman whose coffin was empty; I would not have been surprised to hear deadly shrieking squeals and see seven black bats flapping overhead.

Master Li grunted with satisfaction. Moon Boy had bounced torchlight across the water to another statue. It was a woman whose head was that of a raven. “I have no idea what she represents, but Grief of Dawn said, ‘There's the raven and the river,” and just before that she said, ‘There's the goat statue.’ We can assume that she had just come in sight of the river, so start looking for a side passage. If we don't find one here, we'll try the other bank.”

We were on the right side. Sixty feet farther on we found a side passage with steps leading up, and on the first landing was a statue of a deity with a goat's head and horns. We reached countless landings, and I was willing to bet that we had climbed far above the level of the valley and were inside one of the hills. Finally the steps came to an end. We had reached a semicircular marble floor like that of an anteroom. Four iron doors were set into the stone wall, and beside each one was a stone statue with a porcelain jar in its hands.

“Back to Egypt,” said Master Li. “These represent the four sons of Horus, whose jars hold organs removed during embalming. The one with the human head is Imstey, who protects the liver. Dog-head Hapi protects the lungs, jackal-head Duamure protects the stomach, and hawk-head Quebhsnuf protects the intestines.” He scratched his nose thoughtfully. “The style isn't Egyptian but Chinese, and I wonder if the Laughing Prince had a different symbolism in mind. Hapi's head resembles that of the Celestial Dog, and perhaps the Laughing Prince felt he deserved a bodyguard equal to that of the Emperor of Heaven.”

Not everything was stone and rigid, so Master Li reached out and lifted the jar from the statue's hands. The rest of us jumped backward as the door beside the statue slid open. The prince jammed his spear in the frame to keep the door from accidentally closing. We lifted our torches and stepped inside, and Grief of Dawn and Moon Boy cried out in wonder.

They hadn't seen it before, but we had. We were back inside the formal tomb, and the door was so neatly hidden in the wall that we would never have found it. Now we knew how fresh air could get in and a mummy in a jade suit could be carried out. There was no sign or sound of merry fellows dressed up in motley.

Nothing had been taken since we had been there. When we looked into the room where the skeletons of poisoned concubines lay in their beds I saw tears trickle down the cheeks of Grief of Dawn. Once she had laughed and cried with these girls, and one terrible day she had run away with one of them. What must it have been like to live in the shadow of Tou Wan, and to be at the command of a lunatic torturer and murderer like the Laughing Prince? Looming over all of them had been the strange power of a mysterious stone, and Master Li had the stone in mind as he led the way to the burial chamber and the exposed mummy of Tou Wan.

“Ox, see if you can get the jade plates away from the skull,” he said.

It was a slow process, but finally I managed to break the gold wire at the corners of one of the plates, and after that it went more quickly. White bones appeared, and then I let out a howl of terror and jumped four feet backward. I know nothing of embalming, but somehow the hair had survived. I thought it was a living creature as it bulged out between cracks. I got hold of myself and removed the last plates. Master Li reached out and withdrew the hairpin, and a lustrous black lock, shocking against the bare white bone, slid over my hand like a snake. Master Li swore. The tip of the hairpin had been snapped clean off.

“The sliver is gone, the piece of stone from the sacristy is gone, and if the Laughing Prince used the third piece for an amulet—hell, he's gone,” Master Li snarled. He scratched his head and frowned. “Odd. Something deep inside my mind had expected this,” he muttered. “In Hell I had Tou Wan say that the stone from her pin had been stolen, possibly by her maid. Why did I suspect the sliver was gone?”