Throwing her arms out, Leizu drops her cloak to the floor. The ceiling of false stars sends blue sparkles of light chasing one another over her armor. Each plate on the flexing mesh is made of the telltale crescent shape of a relic. I can make out the faint glow of each relic’s symbol, smoldering orange licks of a forgotten language.
“While you slept, Son of Light, I feasted on the weak,” says Leizu. “With their souls, I forged a mantle of the gods. I do not fear you.”
Huangdi is silent, then a low laugh builds in the automaton’s chest. The laugh grows, mechanical and grating, until it echoes from the ceiling.
“You are alone,” says Leizu, gesturing to her mercenaries. Even so, her voice is not as sure. “You are helpless against modern training and weaponry.”
“Ah,” says Huangdi, and now the old man seems sad. Some of the fire has gone out of his speech, and his shoulders are hunched. “You have army. I have army.”
The old automaton gestures at the row upon row of terra-cotta warriors, his long sleeve wavering. The dusty statues look pathetic. Leizu cocks a hand on her hip and laughs once.
In response, Huangdi’s eyes narrow over a sneer.
“Your skin is soft. Your voice is music. But once, Wife, we were hard. Our hearts were hard. Our skin.”
Huangdi spreads his arms, the scepter in his outstretched hand.
“I will remind you,” he says.
A trickling sound fills the cavern, like a waterfall of dropped dishes. I startle as something glances off my cheek. A chunk of terra-cotta shatters at my feet. The statues around me are crumbling, surfaces fracturing. Like baby birds pecking out of their shells, clay shards are falling away and crashing against the rock floor.
Leizu turns, her hair flying as she surveys the room, fear twisting her features.
“Shoot them!” she shouts to the commandos that have taken position around the room. “Shoot them before they emerge!”
I drop to the floor as the cavern erupts into controlled bursts of gunfire. Bullets tear into the ranks of terra-cotta warriors, life-size artifacts of pottery: swordsmen, pikemen, cavalry, and archers. In strobing muzzle flashes and deafening snaps of sound, the clay warriors are falling, bodies fracturing into mounds of reddish dust.
Now. Shit. Now, now, now.
Broken pottery shells litter the floor, already knee-deep in places. I push through them, crawling out from behind the pillar and heading straight for the side of the throne. Head down, I quickly reach the dark stone.
I hear the first hoarse shout of fear.
Clinging to the base of the throne, I peer out into the confusion of light and dust. As each shell collapses, it reveals a crawling thing, something dark and damp. Leizu’s men are firing frantically on the writhing mass of broken pottery, and the mounds of it are swarming now with insect-like movement.
Newborn warriors are climbing to their feet, hefting ancient weapons. Each man-shaped machine wears glistening black armor, pristine after ages locked inside an earthen shell. The faces of the awakened monsters are carved obsidian masks, long sculpted mustaches curling over eternally smiling lips.
And on each forehead, the symbol on Huangdi’s relic.
These things aren’t avtomat, not exactly. They seem mindless, more like the golems I’ve read about in Jewish fairy tales.
I run my fingers over the carved throne, finding a grip. Pulling myself up a step, I watch Leizu dive into the front ranks of the warriors, hacking with her sword.
Ancient weapons bristle out of the darkness, scimitars and pikes tipped with bronze. There are so many varieties. A row of archers pivots in unison, drawing arrows from quivers on their backs and nocking them. Lines of pikemen advance in lockstep, wooden spears quivering before them. Swordsmen move in formation, hacking.
Between gunfire, I hear real screaming from Leizu’s human soldiers.
The birth of the terra-cotta army is like an eruption of locusts after decades of hibernation. Leizu’s trained men are panicking at the sight of them, spreading out to the walls, looking for better firing positions. I watch one man step into a pool of mercury and vanish silently into the heavy liquid.
I climb higher.
Face pressed into the cool folds of carved rock, I hear Leizu scream a challenge at the throne. I feel the vibration as the ancient automaton bellows his response: “I am made for you, Leizu. You are made for me. And our war is destiny.”
54
STALINGRAD, 1942
Light and dark consume each other between the blinks of my eyes. Mechanical shrieks of artillery fire rip through greenish clouds of fog, offset by the paper-tearing sound of falling flares and the urgent cough of mortars. And Leizu’s face hovers over mine, her black hair spilling like silk over the collar of her German trench coat.
One knee planted in my chest, she holds me by the lapels.
“You killed yourself once,” Leizu says. “I am giving you another chance.”
Blinking away the intrusive filaments of memory, I understand now that her cruel black eyes cover a deep vulnerability. The truth of her has been exposed. The punishment she inflicts on the world isn’t one tenth of the hell she suffers.
“It was never Huangdi I sought, Peter,” she says. “It was you.”
A sad smile crooks onto her lips and she relaxes her grip.
“Huangdi chose to eat his children, and he would have consumed your anima, too. Loyalty pulled you away from me then, but now you have lived another life without him. You can see that you owe him nothing.”
“What of my brother?” I ask.
“Talus failed as my equal. His nature is to serve and I was always his master.”
I shove her knee away and Leizu falls onto me, elbows digging into my chest. Her words are fast and feverish, desperation under her rising voice.
“My purpose has gone unfulfilled for too long…like being buried alive—burning from the inside out. I have endured it for millennia, Peter. I am dying. Going mad. My Word is chaos and only you can give me the balance I need—the Oneness.”
Fingers crawling, I feel a ragged tooth of metal lying in the dirt. The whistle and thump of mortar fire grows nearer.
“Look around,” says Leizu. “We are so close to the next age. Through war I have pushed men to new frontiers of science. The remaining avtomat can sustain our power. We will stoke the fires of human ingenuity, push new conflicts upon them until they invent a future that understands us—”
I drive the trench knife into her torso like a piston, throwing her body upward and tearing her grasp away from my greatcoat. Pinning her under my forearm, I look down on her beautiful, mud-spattered face.
“Strong—” she says, smiling, and then her hair shivers in the oddest way.
The long black tendrils drift up, brushing over my face, caressing my cheek as I spin her over, shielding myself with her body.
All is silent as the shock wave snaps through us. Leizu is looking down at me, lips pursed mid-word, as the mortar blast evaporates half her face. I close my eyes to the unthinking violence of physics, giving myself to it, allowing the world to rotate around me in a kaleidoscope of suspended dirt and ice and metal.
Leizu’s body leaves my orbit.
Tumbling to the frozen earth, I lie still and open my eyes to the pure silence of aftershock and a green sky still raining earth.