"Jack showed you the coin from our shipwreck, didn't he, Rebecca?" Costas said. "That celebrates the return of the eagles, the sacred legionary standards."

Jack nodded, his mind racing. "The only other hint from Roman sources is in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, who says the captured legionaries were taken to Margiana, the Parthian capital in present-day Turkmenistan."

"That's what gives the Periplus plausibility," Hiebermeyer said. "And look at the Alexander reference. He only tells us what he can verify. Alexander is known to have set up altars during his conquest. They could have been where Alexander took his army across the Turkmenistan desert toward central Asia."

"Of course," Jack replied. "Alexander went past Margiana, modern Merv. And if prisoners were escaping east from Merv, they could have pa.s.sed these altars on the way east toward central Asia. It all fits."

"Why would the author later delete this reference?" Costas asked.

"It must have been something he felt was true, but could never substantiate," Aysha said. "Ancient coins you can hold, altars you can see, but stories are just that. We imagine he was told the story by a trader, perhaps a Bactrian or Sogdian middleman who brought him silk. But perhaps that trader had broken off contact, had disappeared without a trace as so often happened on the Silk Route. Perhaps as an old man the author may even have doubted his memory. The story of treasure on the Silk Route may have sounded like an adventurer's fable. There was enough doubt in the end for him to strike a line through that sentence on the sherd and ditch it into the refuse pile. It was an anecdote best pa.s.sed on by word of mouth, that might one day reach the ear of an encyclopedist like Pliny the Elder, and find its way into a cornucopia of fact and hearsay like the Natural History"

"And perhaps it did, but only in small part - Pliny refers to the prisoners in Merv, but nothing about the escape east," Jack said.

"But you talked to me in the helicopter about this, Jack," Costas said. "About how Roman legionaries might have got to China. The evidence in the Chinese annals."

"It's been on my mind for several months now, since I saw Katya."

"At the Transoxiana Conference?" Hiebermeyer asked.

"Katya's his new girlfriend," Rebecca said matter-of-factly to Aysha. "Well, not new, exactly. He met her when he was searching for Atlantis in the Black Sea, but after that she needed some off-time. Then Dad kind of saw someone else for a while, but she was traumatized after another guy she was seeing got spread-eagled. Or something like that. Anyway, she needed some off-time as well."

Costas coughed, and Jack stared hard at the ground, trying to keep a straight face. He cleared his throat. "As I was saying" - he shot Rebecca a look - "the Chinese connection. In the 1950s an Oxford scholar published a radical theory that Roman mercenaries were used by the Huns of Mongolia in a Chinese border war during the Han period, the Chinese dynasty at the time of the Periplus. The evidence was a reference to a formation that sounded like the Roman testudo, the tortoise, where shields are interlocked above. The battle was in 36 BC. Then a study of the Han annals suggested that Roman prisoners from the battle had been settled in a town in Gansu on the final stretch of the Silk Road toward Xian. Someone noticed that the population of the village today contains a proportion of fair-featured people, and so began the legend of the Roman legionaries in China."

"What's the archaeological evidence?" Costas asked.

"There's nothing definite," Jack replied. "But you wouldn't expect to find much. A band of Roman soldiers after decades of imprisonment would have little with them that was recognizably Roman. Escaped soldiers could have made themselves legionary sandals for marching, and possibly rectangular wooden shields, the basis for the testudo theory. But otherwise they would have scavenged what they could on the way, weapons, armor, clothing, anything from Parthian and Bactrian to Sogdian and Han Chinese. But one thing they could have done was leave inscriptions on stone. That's what got Katya interested. It's right up her street. The Romans loved making inscriptions, milestones, grave markers, stamps of authority in newly conquered territory. And that's where archaeology comes into play. A few years ago a Latin inscription was found in a cave complex in southern Uzbekistan, three hundred kilometers to the east of Merv near the border with Afghanistan." Jack flipped through a notebook he pulled from his pocket, then opened a page with a sketch on it. "Katya drew it for me." He showed them the letters: LIC.

AP.LG.

"Fascinating," Hiebermeyer murmured. "The first line's a personal name, probably Licinius. And the second line's Apollinaris Legio, isn't it? That's the legion dedicated to Apollo. That was the Fifteenth legion, wasn't it, raised by Augustus?"

Jack nodded. "Pretty good for an Egyptologist. I remember your boyhood pa.s.sion was the Roman army in Germany. But this wasn't Augustus as emperor. He raised the legion in his earlier guise as Octavian, adoptive successor of Julius Caesar. The Fifteenth Apollinaris that he raised dates from 41 BC, soon after Caesar's a.s.sa.s.sination. That's twelve years after the Battle of Carrhae. Over the next three centuries it spent a lot of its time in the eastern frontiers of the empire fighting the Parthians. One theory has the inscription carved by a legionary captured by the Parthians and used as a border guard, on the far eastern edge of the Parthian Empire."

"But?" Costas said.

"I've never bought the idea of prisoners of war being used as border guards, let alone one of them making an inscription. Katya and I brainstormed it one day walking the walls of Merv, and came up with another hypothesis. This line from the Periplus gives it just that little bit more weight."

"Spill it, Jack."

"At the time of Cra.s.sus, most legions were raised for specific campaigns and usually disbanded after six years. We know very few of these legions by number or name, and the same numbers might be used repeatedly. Plutarch and Dio Ca.s.sius, the main sources for Carrhae, don't tell us the names of the legions involved. But already a few legions were gaining legendary status, the legions that had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul and Britain in the years before Carrhae. Several of those legions survived to become the most famous of the Imperial army, cherished by Augustus because of their a.s.sociation with Caesar. The Seventh Claudia, the Eighth Augusta, the Tenth Gemina."

"You're suggesting the Fifteenth was one of these?"

"The Fifteenth was founded in 41 BC, right? That's only a couple of years after Caesar was a.s.sa.s.sinated. The young Octavian was trying to consolidate his strength, and anything that harked back to his ill.u.s.trious father was seized upon. The historians tell us that a thousand of the cavalry at Carrhae were veterans of Caesar's campaigns. Why not one of the legions too? Our theory is that the Fifteenth Apollinaris wasn't founded in 41 BC, it was refounded. We're suggesting that Octavian deliberately reconst.i.tuted one of Caesar's revered legions, one that had been shamefully lost by the incompetence of Cra.s.sus. It would have been a ma.s.sive show of confidence and of reverence for past glory, exactly the kind of thing Octavian would have done."

"Not so glorious for the surviving legionaries, chained up in Merv," Costas said. "It would have written them off."

"It was too late for them anyway," Hiebermeyer said. "Even if people knew the defeat was caused by the incompetence of Cra.s.sus, the survivors still couldn't hold their heads high. They would already have been marching with the dead, looking forward only to finding death with honor so they could join their brothers-in-arms in Elysium."

"But you're suggesting that some escaped prisoner was not above inscribing the name of his legion in a cave on the trek east," Costas said.

"For the survivors, the name of the legion would still have been their binding force, even with the sacred eagle standard gone."

"So they were still loyal to Rome."

"They had fought for themselves, for their comrades, as soldiers always have done. They were proud of being citizen-soldiers, of having civilian professions. They were proud to fight for a commander if they respected him, if he was one among them, primus inter pares. They fought for Caesar. They fought for their families. Whether they would have fought for Rome as an empire is another matter."

"And the legion?" Costas asked.

"The legion was sacred," Hiebermeyer replied. "That was where loyalties lay. And within it, the cohort, the century, the contubernium, the squad of ten or twelve men who even called each other brother, frater"

"So losing the eagle was bad, big-time," Rebecca cut in.

"The worst. A battle they could lose, Cra.s.sus they couldn't care less about. But losing the eagle? A legion that lost its eagle would have been a legion of the dead, never able to show themselves in Rome again. Even to their families."

"Do you think they fragged him, Cra.s.sus?" Costas said.

"Cra.s.sus signed his own death warrant as soon as he committed them to battle. They probably would have called it a.s.sisted suicide."

"These men, if they really did survive and escape, must have been the toughest of the tough," Aysha said.

"There are always a few," Jack said. "Those who escape execution, who survive the beatings and the torture, who have the mental strength to endure. And some of the legionaries with Cra.s.sus were men who had been recruited five years before and fought with Caesar in Gaul. They may have been citizen-soldiers, but they were among the most ruthless killers the world has ever known. Men who killed with the spear, the sword, with their bare hands."

"And with the legion a hollow memory, there are no checks, no controls," Costas said.

Jack nodded. "Some of these guys in the late republic saw much more action than the professional legionaries of the empire, and the idea of their civilian lives, their jobs, became a kind of myth. But if you spend your life killing, who knows where the boundaries are? When the time comes, if it ever does, how do you know when to stop being a soldier, and become a citizen again?"

"An age-old problem," Hiebermeyer murmured.

"If they did escape, word would have pa.s.sed on the Silk Route," Jack said. "That was bandit country, but even there the Romans' reputation would have preceded them. You would not have wanted to encounter these guys."

"What about the Silk Route?" Costas asked. "Are there any more inscriptions?"

"Katya's spent the last couple of seasons roaming the mountains and pa.s.ses of central Asia, searching. A lot of it's still unexplored territory."

"And still bandit country," Hiebermeyer said.

"I seem to remember Katya knows how to use a Kalashnikov," Costas murmured.

Jack opened his notebook again. "A few months ago she hit pay dirt at a place called Cholpon-Ata, on the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. That's hundreds of miles east along the northern Silk Route from the place with the Fifteenth Legion inscription, on the edge of the Tien Shan Mountains and the pa.s.s that leads down to the Taklamakan Desert and China. For years now archaeologists have known about this place, a desolate boulder-strewn landscape where there are hundreds, probably thousands of petroglyphs, shallow-cut rock carvings of ibexes, other animals, hunters. Most were carved by Scythian nomads. But it would also have been a staging post along the Silk Route for traders who had survived the trek from the west, and before embarking on boats toward China."

"How big is the lake?" Rebecca asked.

"It's the second biggest mountain lake in the world after Lake t.i.ticaca. There are many stories of sunken settlements, of treasure. There's a lot to be found. The Soviets used the lake as a submarine and torpedo testing site."

"Can we go?" Rebecca said. "I want to meet Katya."

Jack smiled. "It's on the cards. Last year, Katya stumbled across a boulder there that might have an inscription on it. The boulder was almost entirely buried, and the permit for an excavation had only just come through at the time of the conference. She's out there now."

"Not alone, I hope," Aysha said.

"She has Kyrgyz collaboration," Jack said. "That means one guy and a creaky old tractor, as far as I can tell."

"You've spoken to her recently?" Costas eyed Jack.

"This morning."

Costas grunted. "So we might be able to join some dots."

"There's another thing. A really fascinating idea."

"Fire away."

"Well, the dots might not just lead east. They might also throw a curveball south."

"Map, Jack," Costas said.

Aysha reached over and unrolled a map of the world on the chart table. Jack traced out the features as he talked. "The Silk Route goes west-east, from Merv in Parthia to Xian in China, through the mountains of central Asia. Lake Issyk-Kul lies at the northeastern end of that ma.s.sif with only one major pa.s.s to go before you get to China. But you can also leave the route along the way and break off south. If you do that from Lake Issyk-Kul, you've got a huge ma.s.s of mountains to get through, really forbidding places, through eastern Afghanistan, but then you break into northern Pakistan and the jungles of India. From there, if you're a traveler from the west in the first century BC, the Roman world is within reach again."

Costas' eyes narrowed. "Are you suggesting that escaped Roman prisoners may have gone that way?"

Jack paused. "One of Katya's colleagues, a man named Hai Chen, is an independent scholar based in Xian who's made a lifelong study of the Roman connection. He encouraged Katya to explore Kyrgyzstan, the petroglyphs at Issyk-Kul. He believes pa.s.sionately in the story of Cra.s.sus' lost legionaries, but with a twist. He's originally a linguist, an expert on a.n.a.lyzing foundation stories and mythology among peoples with a strong oral tradition. As a young man he spent several years in Chitral, a kind of Shangri-la in northeastern Pakistan, the first place you'd come to after breaking through the mountains from the north."

"The people who believe they're descended from Alexander the Great," Hiebermeyer murmured.

"The mythologies of the region - Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist - are full of stories of travelers from afar, princes, pilgrims, holy men dispensing wisdom. Sometimes they're on a quest, or princes on a transformative journey, like Buddha himself Imagine the Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hercules' Labors, Moses in the desert. Sometimes the arrival fulfills a local prophecy, and the traveler becomes king."

"Didn't Fa-hsien come through the mountains?" Hiebermeyer asked.

Jack nodded, and glanced at Costas. "A Chinese Buddhist monk who came to India in the early fifth century AD in search of the holy texts of his religion. His Records of the Buddhistic Kingdoms is one of the great early travel books. He came to Gandhara, the ancient Buddhist state of northern India. But Katya's colleague Hai Chen wasn't on the trail of a Buddhist monk. He'd heard of someone else. The traveler he recorded from the oral stories was a yavana, meaning westerner. And this yavana was no monk but a warrior, one who ruled with a golden hand. He came to Chitral for a short time, and then left. Farther south Hai Chen heard another legend of a G.o.d-king called Haljit Singh, Tiger Hand. He too left, and went south."

"Where are we leading with this?" Costas said.

"If you're our Roman, once you get through the mountains of Afghanistan, past Chitral, the way's open to the west. You have two options. You can travel down the valley of the Indus southwest to the head of the Indian Ocean, to the port of Barygaza, near modern Karachi in Pakistan. From there you can sail to Arabia, then the Red Sea toward home. But there was another option. If you want to make contact with fellow yavanas, with other Romans in India, the better route was to go southeast, down the valley of the Ganges to the Bay of Bengal. You'd end up pa.s.sing extensive tracts of jungle in eastern India. Look at the travels of the monk Fa-hsien. He took that route, and sailed south all the way to Sri Lanka. Then look at the Periplus. It describes the same route, just looking in the opposite direction. Listen to this." Jack picked up the modern edition of the Periplus on the table, and flicked through it until he came to the page he was looking for. "After this, toward the east and with the ocean on the right, sailing offsh.o.r.e past the remaining lands on the left, you come upon the land of the Ganges; in this region is a river, itself called the Ganges, that is the greatest of all the rivers in India, and which rises and falls like the Nile." Jack gestured toward the porthole, where the sh.o.r.e was just visible. "Remember, the author of the Periplus was recalling being here off southern India, looking north. It was probably as far as he ever came. But he knows men who've come down from there, maybe Indian middlemen from Gandhara, maybe even traders who have come all the way down from central Asia - Bactrians, Sogdians, even western Han Chinese."

"The kind of trader who would have told our yavana, our escaped Roman, which way to go," Aysha said.

"But probably not lived long enough to guide him there," Jack said. "All a Roman legionary needed was a pair of stout marching sandals and a clear view of the sun and stars. With that, he was set. A guide would never have kept up with him."

"It's all about the monsoon, isn't it?" Costas said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, why a legionary looking for fellow Romans might not go to this place at the mouth of the Indus, Barygaza," he said, pointing at the map. "It's a lot closer to Egypt. But ships can sail there from the Red Sea pretty well year round, hugging the coast, sometimes taking a direct open-sea route during the monsoon season. There was no need for a permanent western presence at Barygaza, to maintain the port during the off-season. The native traders could do that. But the south of India was a different story. I take it the Egyptian shippers only got there and back during the monsoon season, taking the open-sea route across the Indian Ocean?"

Jack nodded. "The coastal route down western India was too treacherous. The author of the Periplus makes that pretty clear. It was like the Skeleton Coast of west Africa, beset with reefs and infested with pirates."

"So for half the year Arikamedu and the other south Indian ports are empty of business. But it's crucial that they operate during the sailing season. You need people there during the off-season, your own people, people you trust. That's my point. If you're going to search for fellow Romans in India, you go south, not west. That's what our traveler would have been told. And that's what this is all leading to, isn't it? We're talking about a grizzled old legionary who wants to make contact. Maybe he's too ashamed to go home, but something drives him to try, some hope, a dream."

"Maybe he had a family, all those years ago in Rome before he marched off to war," Aysha said. "They were citizen-soldiers. They had a life before joining up."

"We can only speculate," Jack said. "Maybe he had a dream, cherished over all those years of captivity. Going to Barygaza might have put him on a ship to Egypt, yet with little foreknowledge of what to expect, committing him to discovering a truth he may never have wanted. But going to the south of India, to Arikamedu, would have put him directly in contact with other Romans. They would have told him of the civil wars, of the new order, the sweeping away of all that had been before, the pa.s.sing of the Rome he had known. Maybe he would have had some hint of this from traders they'd encountered on the Silk Route, but he needed to know for certain. Maybe he knew all along that a return voyage could never be more than a fantasy, laden with disappointment and grief. But he still had to make contact, a yearning that could only be satisfied by talking to those who had come from the world he had left."

Hiebermeyer peered at Jack. "It sounds as if Katya's colleague might have been following this trail. Did he go farther south?"

Jack pursed his lips. "He was planning an expedition to the tribal peoples of eastern India. Katya said he'd had a revelation about some character in Hindu mythology, a Roman connection. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, but he was secretive about it, didn't want her to get involved. Katya thinks it was here, just in from the G.o.davari River Delta." Jack pointed to a spot north of Arikamedu, in from the east coast of India. "He was going to reveal everything to Katya when he got back. He was due at the Transoxiana Conference, but never made it. That was almost four months ago."

"Is any of his research published?" Hiebermeyer asked.

"No. He was always secretive. Katya said he always seemed to regret anything he revealed. He was suspicious of everyone around him. And it wasn't just a scholar with unorthodox ideas battling against the academic establishment. She said it was as if he had some great secret. He thought he was being followed. He always seemed to be putting people off the scent. Katya said he'd been like that as long as she could remember."

"So how can we trust what he told Katya?" Hiebermeyer asked.

"Because he's her uncle," Jack replied.

"Her uncle!" Costas exclaimed. "Good G.o.d. This gets more mysterious by the minute. Uncles tell their nieces things, don't they? And they're both archaeologists, linguists. He must have let her in on a bit more of the secret. Didn't she say anything to you?"

"She said he was like one of the Silk Route explorers of a hundred years ago, searching for an elusive treasure he could never seem to find."

"What treasure, Jack?"

Jack paused. "You're right. Katya knew more than she was letting on, but I wasn't going to press her. One thing did happen, though. In the hotel at the conference she showed me her uncle's work on Chitral. It was his doctoral thesis, one of the few times he wrote anything down. She hadn't read the section before about the legend of the G.o.d-king called Haljit Singh, Tiger Hand. When she read that, she visibly paled. I told her about an artifact I had and where it came from, and she nearly fainted. After that she said nothing. End of topic. But she was more troubled than usual. I think there are dark forces at play. Someone who wants her uncle stopped. And that was when she began to get seriously worried about his whereabouts."

"So is that really why we're going to the jungle, Jack? To find Katya's uncle? To find what he was after? The elusive treasure?"

Jack stared at the map for a moment, then looked out of the lab at the open door of his day cabin. "There's more to it than that. A lot more." He glanced at the clock. "We're due at Arikamedu early tomorrow morning. Before that, there's something I want you all to see. A little treasure trove of my own."

The great bronze doors of the chamber swung shut, and the heat and smell of the desert were instantly gone. The man inside pressed the remote control, and a thin shaft of light lit up the long black slab of the table and the high recesses of the ceiling above. Then it was gone, and darkness enveloped him, a darkness so complete it seemed to suppress his very being, to make him at one with the elemental force around him. He was sitting cross-legged on the cool marble floor, his palms turned upward in the lotus position, the silk of his robe sliding against his skin when he reached down to the control pad. For years he had played, created, in front of a screen, always yearning to be within, and now he was here, controlling a world of imagery and sensation that seemed one step from the celestial existence that would soon be his.

He had already set the sequence in motion. It would prepare him for what was ahead, cleanse him, focus him, as it had done countless times before when he had come to this place. From somewhere in the darkness came a trickling sound, then the noise of a small waterfall, just enough to conceal the sound of his own breathing, to remove all sense of himself He felt the strength course through him, shuide, the power of water. He closed his eyes, and sensed them all, wu de, the five powers, earth, wood, metal, fire, water, each one overcoming the last, just as the dynasty of Qin had overcome the reviled Zhou, the power of water extinguishing the power of fire. And with the power of water had come darkness, a time of inchoate forms, of endless winter, of death, a sweeping away of all that had been. And into this emptiness had come Shihuangdi, the First Emperor, the Celestial One, who had remade the universe in his own image, a universe where his will was felt in every corner of existence, a will that none could escape. And now the Brotherhood, in the sixty-sixth generation since the tomb had been closed, prepared for the moment when the celestial universe of Shihuangdi would fold out into reality, when his earthly warriors would ride once again. But before then they had one final task. That was why he had summoned the others here today.

The man opened his eyes. A cool alpine breeze had come upon him, bringing with it the sweet fragrance of mountain flowers. The darkness was gone, replaced by a thin, crepuscular light, and he had the sensation of being raised high into the sky, of levitating. The image of a mountainous landscape appeared, projected as if wrapping around him, gnarled turrets of rock jutting out of a sea of cloud below, serried peaks visible in the distance, olive-green and pastel-brown, surmounted by leafy groves of emerald-green, coursed through with a fantastic architecture of villas and courtyards and paG.o.das, structures that blended in as if they were natural protrusions of the rock. This was what the First Emperor had seen. Shihuangdi, who went to the highest peaks in his realm, who claimed this s.p.a.ce between heaven and earth as his own, who inscribed the rock with the record of his accomplishments, who proclaimed his power over earth and cosmos. The image receded into the background, and an inscription took its place, lines of white Chinese symbols against a dark background. The man began to whisper the words, sacred expressions of power: Great is the virtue of our emperor Who pacifies all corners of the earth, Who punishes traitors, roots out evil men And, with profitable measures brings prosperity.

Tasks are done at the proper season, All things flourish and grow; The common people know peace And have laid aside weapons and armor; Kinsmen care for each other, There are no robbers or thieves; Men delight in his rule All understanding the law and discipline.

The universe entire Is our emperor's realm...

He repeated the final phrase. The universe entire is our emperor's realm. His clipped accent and precise vowels sounded in keeping with the message, everything ordered, in its place, in control. He inhaled slowly, then relaxed completely. He hardly needed to breathe. He felt the blood drain from his heart. The power was within him, the power of shuide. He seemed to levitate again, far above the clouds and peaks, to the very edge of s.p.a.ce itself, to the liminal zone between heaven and earth. Above him was darkness, suddenly suffused with a million brilliant stars, the constellations revolving in slow motion. Below him the earth was reduced to a featureless sphere. But then as he watched the surface began to sparkle, and was suddenly coursing with rivers, streams of quicksilver. The hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtse, and the seas surrounding them. The sparkle came from a thousand palaces and temples, from a million precious treasures. He seemed to swoop down, and to float above a misty stream, among geese and swans, cranes and herons, with tinkling music in the background. Then the scene disappeared, and the warriors were there, all around him, extending off in ranks as far as he could see, waiting. Some held spears, some wore armor. Generals stood in front of foot soldiers, cavalrymen held horses at bay. The protectors of the universe. The army of the Qin. They who would rise again, who would march forth when heaven and earth came together, when the power of water was replaced by the power of light. The power that he himself would wield.

The man tensed in antic.i.p.ation. There was a blinding flash of green, then blue, as if the sun had been caught in a giant revolving prism in the darkness above. Then the two colors seemed to commingle and become a dazzling white. The rivers of quicksilver flowed again, sparkling and shimmering. Reeds shot up beside them, vivid green, trembling with life. Birds arched their necks upward, drawing in the light. And all around him the warrior army seemed to stir, the gray monotone becoming pastel, colors more defined with every second-flesh glowing, robes of vivid blue, armor shimmering silver, banners of red emblazoned with the roaring golden tiger that furled and rustled like the river reeds. He could feel the warmth. He reached out, exultant.

Then it was gone. He was sitting in a dark chamber again, alone in front of a low table like a raised tomb. He let his hands drop onto the surface. It was cold, hard, real. Everything before had been a phantasm. A phantasm he had created. But it was a premonition of what was to come. The celestial jewel would shine once again.

He looked at the low table, its polished surface gleaming. He could see the Chinese characters carved in front of each place, six on one side, six on the other. Xu, Tan, Ju, Zhongli, Yunyan, Tuqiu, Jiangliang, Huang, Jiang, Xiuyu, Baiming, Feilian. He reached out and traced his fingers in the lines, faultlessly cut by laser into the marble. They were the twelve, the Brotherhood, the trusted guardians of Shihuangdi, the First Emperor, those who awaited the return. One place would be empty. He clenched his fists until the knuckles were white. The one who had strayed. The one who had been tempted to search for the jewel himself, who had succ.u.mbed to his own greed, had taken his eyes off the true path. They had hunted him down, as they had hunted down all who had failed to follow the path of Shihuangdi.

He relaxed his hands and closed his eyes, suffused by the power of the Qin, the all-encompa.s.sing. Soon the empty place at the table would be filled again. They had found another whose ancestry traced back through the clan, to those who had ridden, armored, weapon-girt, over the steppeland from their homeland to Xian, at the side of he who would become Shihuangdi, First Emperor. The initiate had been taught the skills of zhishau, the swordsmanship of the Qin, how to strike mortal fear into the heart of all enemies of Shihuangdi, how to vanquish them. He would complete the murderous task that would a.s.sure him his place at the table. The place of the tiger warrior.

The man touched the control pad, and the thin shaft of light spread outward to reveal a crossed pair of swords lying in front of him, their blades shimmering as if they were speckled with a thousand jewels. He put his hands into the gleaming gauntlets, curling his fingers around the crossbars, feeling the power of the blades as they extended out from the snarling tigers that adorned each fist. He tensed, and he was suddenly there, among the heavenly steeds, thundering over the steppe, foam-flecked, cutting through the mist of red that streamed off their necks, the glistening sweat of blood. He felt the exaltation of the warrior, of knowing that all would be swept before him. He felt himself cry out, and all he saw was crimson, all he heard was panting, rearing, stamping.