David Sakmyster - The Mongol Objective

“It is tough rope,” he shouted back in accented English. “I-”

“Wait!” Orlando shouted. “I didn’t finish. You have to pull it, hand over hand, like you’re opening a set of curtains. And you pull from left to right. If you go the other way…”

Phoebe gasped, holding her head. A flash revealed…

… a scene where dozens of men with helmets and torches stand back on the stairs, bows drawn, arrows aimed at a man on a ladder in the same corner. With a sheepish look, the prisoner grasps the rope and pulls right to left as he was told. And something shiny, flickering with all the torchlight, rips across the room, at about neck-height. It is secured by three iron bars from the ceiling, running on embedded tracks. The ladder is severed at the eighth rung, just below the man’s feet, as the room-width blade whisks past. He falls, rolls and is about to get up when he sees it coming back, hauling across again to its starting position. So he ducks, hugging his knees — which leaves him in the perfect position to be sliced in half by the second blade, which rips from the right to left, two feet off the ground.

Phoebe staggered back, fighting the bile rising in her throat, still blinking away the sight of the prisoner’s two halves flopping and unraveling on this very floor, while the Khan’s men admired the effectiveness of their trap.

She grabbed a flashlight from one of the men and directed it to the side wall. “There. See the three vertical tracks? And it’s probably imperceptible, but there should be two horizontal ones too, for the blades. The first one decapitates a normal-sized man, the second, coming from the other side, ensures that at the least, they aren’t walking forward.”

“Jeez,” Orlando said to Qara. “You guys aren’t very hospitable to visitors.”

Renee started backing up, heading to the stairs. “Okay, left to right then, but just to be sure…” She took a few steps up, then nodded to Chang, who remained in the middle of the room, his face cloaked in fear. “Now, do it.”

The man took a deep breath, closed his eyes, then pulled. Once, twice. Something made a grinding noise, the room shook, and the great stone door trembled. He kept pulling, and then a crack released from the left-most edge. He pulled, as the man holding him strained to keep his balance. The crack grew. Two feet. Four. Five. Six.

“Enough,” said Renee.

The man released his hold on the rope. But then the door started to close. He grabbed it and kept pulling. “Get it open all the way!” Orlando shouted. “Otherwise it slams shut, and I think that just might set off that trap.”

“Pull!” Chang ordered, and eight flashlight beams, including Caleb’s, stabbed at the blackness through the gap as the door continued sliding open.

Qara inched closer to Caleb, watching as the portal that hadn’t been opened in almost eight hundred years moved to one side. She held her ribs, wheezing. “That,” she said, “was the easy part. I hope you’ve got a lot more in your bag of tricks, because once we walk through there, I’m not going to be much help.”

“Don’t let Renee hear that,” Caleb whispered.

“I don’t care. I’ve failed my master. Brought you right to his doorstep.”

Caleb touched her elbow, leading her ahead. “I thought that only death released a Darkhad from her sacred obligation.”

She nodded grimly. “Then my release, which will come at the same time as yours, is imminent.”

Just past the door, Chang set up the generator and hooked up the portable floodlights. Soon, all the soldiers had gathered inside the first area before the intersection, and the passageway was bathed in light. What stopped them, piled high in a heap against the left wall, were skeletons. The laborers, killed and left here to ensure their silence.

“Hey there,” Orlando said reverently, meeting the hollow stares of bleak eye sockets set in a dozen cracked skulls. “Should’ve unionized.”

“Shh,” Phoebe scolded. “And don’t move any closer.”

The walls were bare, white and sturdy. But the floor, revealed in the brilliant light, was smooth up until the “T” twenty yards ahead, where they could see the large square about forty feet to a side set in the floor between the east and west passages. It was set with a mosaic-tiled surface. Beyond this square and the intersection, the passage continued on into the regrouping darkness.

“A map,” Renee said, pushing past the others and gingerly walking close to the edge and gazing at the mosaic picture on the floor. “Looks like China and Mongolia, Arabia, and part of Russia.”

“The Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan,” Caleb said.

Orlando whistled. “And let me guess: step on the wrong one and you wind up on a rotisserie?”

“You got it,” Phoebe said. “I saw at least a dozen spikes from each side, spring-loaded and launched across on some kind of harness.”

Renee pointed and Chang’s men complied. A few of the soldiers shined their lights east and west, glancing their beams off the far wall, highlighting a slab that looked like Swiss cheese, full of various-sized holes.

“Okay, so where’s the path?”

Caleb passed the iPad back to Orlando, then stood beside Renee, hands on his hips. He scanned the map, the beautiful mural with its vibrant colors, mini-tiles making up each of the four hundred or so larger tiles.

“Need me to RV it again?” Phoebe asked.

Caleb shook his head. “No, I’ve got it. Even without your vision, I think we could have figured it out.”

“Maybe after a few of us got spiked first?”

Caleb turned to Chang. “Do you have a piece of chalk, or I don’t know, a paint gun?”

“No.”

“Bread crumbs?”

Chang thought for a moment, then called one of his men over, who carried a cooler. “We have raw Marmat meat.” He smiled at Caleb. “Very raw.”

“Ewww,” Phoebe said, covering her mouth when the lid was opened.

“That’ll do,” said Caleb. “Give it here. I’ll use the blood to mark each tile as I cross over, and you can follow after.”

“What’s the trick?” Renee asked.

“His last siege,” Caleb answered, heading for the fifth square from the left and setting foot on it. “Lucky I’m a history professor with a good memory. Here, at Xi-Xia, he died, most believe after a fall from his horse weeks earlier. He had been boar hunting, despite warnings from the philosopher Chi-Chang that he should give up hunting. Internal injuries perhaps. But while laying siege to the rebellious Xi-Xia, he passed on. Although there are some who claim the besieged kingdom had sent him a princess who delivered him a mortal wound while in bed together, but that’s-”

“Vicious lies,” Qara said under her breath.

“Probably. In any case, the path to take would be the reverse of his last mission, back from here, through Ghazni and Balkh, here.” After marking the first tile with the dripping Marmat meat, he took another step, diagonally to the left. When nothing happened, he smiled and smeared another X with the bloody chunk of flesh. He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the history. “Around Samarkand, through Bukhara…” He took two steps ahead, covering two more squares, marking each.

Then he paused, thinking again.

“To your right.” Phoebe pointed. “I can see it again, from my vision. I’ll guide you if you get lost.”

“Ok,” he said, taking a step. “Then northeast through Otrar, and continuing at this angle…” Slowly, carefully watching every footstep, he took ten more large strides, marking each as he picked up speed, seeing it all now, just as Phoebe must have seen it. “Back to Lake Baikhal where his armies launched their missions.”

He was one foot away from the edge of the mosaic floor. Marking this last tile, he stepped off onto the clear granite on the other side. He turned around, breathing a sigh and only then realizing how tense his muscles had been. He set down the cooler and wiped his hands on his pants, a little disgusted.