Shortly thereafter, the passageway leveled off, and the group arrived at what seemed to be a type of foyer. The room opened up a bit wider then the rest of the tunnel, with a set of heavy wood doors that loomed imposingly straight ahead. The walls to their right and left were adorned with one dragon-head sconce each, directly beneath which stood half-round brick walls that seemed to be surrounding some kind of a well on each side. Cutter peered over the knee-high wall and scoffed. "Quicksilver," he said, using both hands to point to the wells. "Mercury." He glanced at Nate. "Looks like Sima Qian was right on the whole thing about rivers of mercury."
"Yeah," Nate said. "They must have siphoned all of this off of the mausoleum project. Unless this connects to it," he added, noticing the apparent motion of the mercury below.
"Yeaaahhh," Chloe drawled. "It all seems a little overkill for this clandestine-Peng Lai-cult-clubhouse thing, huh?"
"Only a little," Charlie understated.
Nate turned his attention to the doors. Striding confidently forward, he wrapped his fingers around the bottom edge of a thick plank that rested in a set of iron brackets, barring the doors shut, and heaved on it. Finding it to be surprisingly heavy, he crouched down, putting his shoulder under it, and then used his legs to push up until the plank came out of the brackets and fell to the floor with a crack that echoed loudly in the small area. "Open sesame," Nate smiled, giving the doors a shove.
"This is the complete wrong demographic for that line, mate," Charlie countered.
As the doors swung open, a collective gasp was uttered by the small group. The chamber thus revealed was square, with a golden dragon statue in the center that was reared up on its hind legs atop a small pedestal, and a table off to one side that was littered with objects that ranged from terra cotta pots and crude glass vials, to skulls, to tools of various types. At both sides of the room were ditches, about six feet wide, that were a continuation of the wells in the foyer and flowed with liquid mercury, and at the four corners of the room were low stone shelves or shrines of some kind. To the left of the doors burned a single dragon sconce, but this one had two unlit torches mounted above it.
Moving over to the table and picking up the skull, Sully commented, "It's some kind of alchemist's lab."
"Yeah," Chloe agreed. "But I don't see anything that looks like it would be our next clue. No parchments, no maps, no..." she trailed off as she looked in disgust at the contents of one of the clay pots, "...anything."
Nate was walking in a slow circle around the golden dragon, taking careful note of the shelves in the corners of the room as he passed them, then looked up at the ceiling. "No," he said. "It's here. Look!" He pointed to the ceiling, where there was a disk suspended by chains that had what appeared to be an Argead star that was missing some of its arms, resulting in a lopsided design. Upon closer inspection, it could be seen that the design was painted on a series of wheels that were superimposed on top of each other, each made out of amber-colored glass, and that in the free spaces around the star were painted various Chinese characters, as well as a smattering of seemingly random dots and lines. "Now look at these," Nate said, pointing to each of the shrines in turn. "See those little pictures above each of them? I'm a little fuzzy on the mythology, but I'm pretty sure that each of those represent an element."
"You're right," Ming jie gasped. "It's the four symbols!"
Jabbing a finger at his five companions in that determined, "I-just-figured-out-the-answer-to-this-puzzle" kind of way Nate did, he continued, "I bet if we find something that represents their respective elements and put them on those shelves, we might just get somewhere."
Cutter was already making his way over to one. "Alright, well what do we have?" He studied the stylized image on the shrine in front of him. "This one looks like a snake or something."
Everyone looked to Ming, who answered, "The Azure Dragon of the East. Its element is wood."
"Nate," Elena called holding up a pot that contained a small and long-dead tree. "This might do the trick."
"Right," Nate said. Taking the pot from her, he stepped up to the edge of the river of mercury across from the dragon shrine. "Here goes." He leaped across, landing on the narrow ledge on the other side, then reached to place the pot down on the shelf.
"Wait!" Elena suddenly called. "What if it's a trap?"
Nate stopped and met eyes with her while he considered the valid point she had made. "Umm, I don't know," he admitted. "I guess... we hope it's not?"
Elena sighed heavily. "That's what I thought you were going to say."
Nate shrugged and grinned what he hoped was a reassuring grin, then set the tree down on the shelf. There was a moment of silent anticipation, then a low grinding noise came from the ceiling. Looking up, they saw that the wheels had turned, giving the star another arm.
"Bloody hell, you're right!" Charlie muttered.
"Did you expect anything different?" Nate said cockily as he jumped back to their side of the river.
"Don't pull any important muscles patting yourself on the back," Sully grumbled.
"Alright, what about this one?" Chloe asked. "It's the tiger, if I remember right."
"Metal is the element represented by the White Tiger of the West," Ming replied.
A quick scan of the table, and Nate landed on an anvil-like hunk of metal. "One order of metal, coming right up!" Again clearing the river, he placed the metal and was rewarded by another turn of the wheels, gaining them two more arms on the star.
"Only two more points, and we'll be good to go!" Chloe cheered.
"I think I've got some kind of turtle over here?" Sully said in a way that came out more as a question. "I mean it's either that or a tumor..."
Again Ming came to their aid on the interpretation. "The Black Tortoise of the North, representative of the element water."
"There's no water here, though," Sully pointed out. "Even if there was, it probably would have all dried up over the last two thousand years."
"No, there's no water," Charlie began slowly, "but there is a representation of it!" He pointed to the ditches of mercury.
"Of course!" Nate exclaimed. "Genius, Cutter.." He smacked him on the back, then called out, "Chloe, hand me one of those clay jars!"
"Be my guest," she said, pinching her nose as she emptied out the foul-smelling contents of the jar she had seen earlier and then handing it to him. Seemingly undeterred by the stench, Nate quickly dipped it in the mercury and then jumped to the tortoise shrine. Finding that this one had a small, bowl-shaped indentation in it, he used the contents of the jar to fill it up and then set the jar to the side. The expected grinding of the wheels sounded in the room, but this time they turned the opposite way, and when they looked up they had lost three of the arms that were there before and gained one new one.
"That put us down two!" Sully complained. "Did we do something wrong?"
Nate frowned, but answered, "Something tells me that if we had done it wrong, I probably wouldn't be standing here." He shrugged. "Let's keep going."
"This one is the Vermillion Bird of the South, whose element is fire," Ming supplied from the final corner of the room. As one man they all turned to face the dragon sconce by the door.
"No guesswork here, amiright?" Nate said, taking one of the torches above the sconce and holding it in the dragon's mouth to ignite it. Crossing the river one more time, he placed the torch on the shelf. The wheels turned in the direction they had before, for longer then they had before, and when it was over only one point was missing on the star.
"So close," Sully tutted, "yet no cigar."
Cutter was confounded. "Yeah. What's the deal mate? What are we missing?"
Ming hesitated only for a moment. "The dragon," he said, pointing to the statue in the center. "The Central element, earth, represented by the Yellow Dragon."
"Earth..." Nate repeated thoughtfully, then looked around. "What do we have tor represent earth?"
"Oh, god," Chloe groaned. "It's probably this god-awful stuff I dumped on the ground. I call 'not it'," she said, holding up her hands.
Nate rolled his eyes. "C'mon, what kind of treasure hunter are you?" He grabbed a shovel-like implement from the table and scooped some of the dirt of the floor in one swift motion.
"I'm one that likes to not play with things that smell like that," Chloe retorted.
The dragon's hands were cupped together in front of it, and Nate emptied the shovel into them and then stepped back. The grinding of the wheels shook the chamber once more, and the Argead Star appeared in its fullness. The six people in the chamber all gathered beneath it, gazing up in wonder at the image and the writing that surrounded it.
"What does it say?" Nate asked Ming, pointing up at the wheels.
The young man faltered, then admitted, "I don't know. It is very strange- like some things are still missing. See all these strokes and lines that do not form any characters?" He pointed some of them out. "Also, the characters that are fully formed- it is as if they are written in reverse. Like a mirror image." Ming shook his head, looking a little defeated.
A mirror image... Nate looked back and forth between his young colleague and the disks suspended above them. "I think I have an idea," he announced. Moving quickly to the sconce by the door, he took the second torch from its holder and ignited it in the dragon's mouth, then spun around and held it out to Sully. "Hold this, will you?" Sully obliged, and Nate turned back to the door. A lip of stone around the door frame made for his first handhold, after which he launched himself up, securing a hold in the mortar line between two stones while his foot rested on the torch holder.
"Oh, here we go," Cutter said sarcastically.
Throwing himself upwards, Nate grabbed onto a detail that ran the perimeter of the room, carved with images of dragons and half-lion dogs. He shimmied along that for a few feet until he found another foothold in the crumbling mortar, then twisted to scope out his next jump. The disks with the star were a good twelve feet away in the middle of the room, meaning that it would not be an easy jump from his position of hanging on the wall with little purchase. Taking a deep breath, he tensed his muscles and dug his toes into their spot on the wall, steeling himself to milk every bit of distance out of this jump he could.
"Nate?" he heard Elena call to him. "Be careful!"
"Always am!" he replied, then threw himself off the wall. The chains rattled as he grabbed the edge of the wheels, his legs continuing to swing forward from inertia, and the whole fixture began to sway gently from side to side.
"Hey! Are you sure that thing can hold you?" Sully asked.
"Not particularly, no!" Nate's left hand slipped off just as his body reached the end of its arc, and the momentum threatened to pull his other hand off as well. "WHOA-oh," he cried, flailing his free arm until he found his grip on the edge again. He pulled himself up using the chains, taking care to only stand on the iron band at the rim of the wheels, as he wasn't sure if the glass would hold his weight. Catching his breath as the whole apparatus slowly stopped swinging, he noticed that, just as he suspected, there was a glass bowl or urn just above the wheels, filled with some type of powder. "Sully, throw me the torch!" he shouted down to them. A moment later, it appeared in the air beside him, flames dancing in the wind displaced by the throw, and Nate snatched it with the hand that wasn't holding on to the chain. Leaning out as far as he could reach, he just managed to touch the torch to the contents of the bowl, which immediately sprung up in flames.
The light from the fire shone through the transparent bowl and then through the wheels below, dramatically casting the shadows of their markings on the floor beneath, while at the same time bathing the room in a warm, almost ethereal amber glow. Nate grinned as he looked down at the results- clearly formed Chinese characters surrounding the image of the Argead star.
"Eh, waddaya know?" Sully said in admiration. "It's a regular projector!"
Nate dropped down to the ground and pulled out his notebook to start sketching it.
Ming was in awe. "That's amazing! In shining through the wheels, it transfers the marks off of all the layers of glass, filling out the lines we couldn't see before!" He stammered, almost overwhelmed by the beautiful antiquity of it all as he pulled out his I-phone and began snapping pictures. "Th- the engineering behind this! The planning! The technology-"
"Yeah, that's all well and good, mate," Charlie interrupted. "Now what's it say?"
Looking slightly pouty at Cutter's brash interruption of his reverie, Ming jie began translating. "It says: 'The path of the immortals will be found from the Void, at the gates to the city of the great Western beast.'"
There was a pause, which was finally broken by Sully complaining, "Why do they never just say something like, 'Go to the Seven Eleven and take a left, the treasure's straight ahead next to the liquor store.'" A moment later, he added, "Don't answer that."
"'The Great Western beast'," Chloe repeated with a hum. "Is that like the White Tiger of the West?"
"Maybe," Nate mused, "but I think more likely it's the 'Great Ram' it mentioned in the parchment- which I'm pretty sure is Alexander the Great."
"Oh good," Cutter said dryly. "That narrows it down. I mean he only founded about twenty cities, we should be done looking by the time we're all ready to retire."
"It has to have something to do with the 'void', though," Chloe said.
As the others continued to discuss the possibilities, Nate took advantage of the moment of peace to ask the one question that had been nagging at him all night. Turning to his wife, he gently put a hand on her shoulder and spoke softly, "Hey, you're awfully quiet. You all right?"
She looked at him with a downcast expression. "I'm fine, Nate. Really. I just... have this feeling that something bad is about to happen. You know, like that feeling you get before a hurricane or something?"
"Yeah." He smiled bravely. "Don't worry, Elena. We're gonna be fine."
"Draaaake?" The voice was distorted slightly and amplified, giving the impression that it was coming through a loudspeaker, but it was unmistakably Floki's voice. It drifted down to them in a sing-song tone that sounded especially unnatural from someone with such a normally brutish roar. "Draaaaake, I know you're in there! Come on out, and play, Drake. Don't make me come down there!"
Immediately every one of them, besides Ming jie, who was unarmed, drew their guns and held them ready. "Where is he?" Chloe growled, spinning first one way, then the other.
"Ahhhh, explosions are not the most quiet way to excavate, are they my friend?"
Nate briefly made eye contact with Chloe, who glared daggers back at him in a way that communicated "don't even think about it". "Oh yeah?" Nate yelled back up the tunnel. "Well, shouting through a megaphone isn't exactly the apex of subtlety, either! Let's just call this a learning experience for both of us, and go home happy."
Floki's laughter echoed down the tunnel, the sound especially grating when amplified. "You Americans have quite the sense of humor! Now," he said, still using his fake friendly tone. "Why don't you come out of your hole like the rat you are, before I have to send down the kitties to drag you out?"
"What is up with this guy?" Sully rumbled, pulling the hammer back on his revolver.
"Nice try, Eric the Red, but we're not scared of you!" Nate shouted back.
There was a moment of silence, then Floki called down to them again, all pretense of affability gone in favor of his usual growl. "Very well, then. Here come the cats!"
"Why do I get the feeling that sounded more intimidating in 'is head?" Cutter muttered.
"Ming jie! Get down!" Nate called, shoving him down behind the Yellow Dragon statue. He and Sully and Elena all trained their weapons on the door while Chloe and Charlie pressed themselves flat to the wall on either side just before the first of the goons came into view. As the muzzle of an AK-47 appeared in the doorway, Chloe grabbed it and jerked it forward, causing the thug at the other end to come stumbling into the room. She promptly pistol-whipped him, knocking him to the ground, while Cutter shot the next one after. In the moments that followed, the air became a flurry of gunfire, causing Nate, Elena, and Sully to dive for any available cover while Chloe and Cutter blind-fired around the door frame.
Crouched next to Ming behind the dragon, Nat fired off a few shots at the thugs before he saw the first one that Chloe had knocked down reaching for his machine gun and scrambling to his feet. "Chloe!" he screamed, taking aim to bring the man down. But she had seen him too, and quickly grabbed him by his forearms and kneed him in the gut, causing him to grunt in pain and stagger backwards. The lull in return fire that had resulted when Chloe became distracted left an opening for the others still in the foyer to surge forward into the room, immediately locking Cutter into a brawl with two of them while the others fanned out across the room.
"This is really getting out of hand!" Nate shouted. Flinging himself forward into the fray, he punched one of the thugs in the jaw, then on the return drove his elbow into the chest of the next nearest goon. In the next moment Nate was grabbed from behind, and he swung his elbow into his aggressor's side repeatedly until he finally broke free, and then whirled around to meet him. But before he even had time to recover, Nate found himself staring down the gleaming blade of a long and evil looking knife that was coming right for his stomach. Nate's eyes went wide and he braced for the pain. The crack of pistol fire came next, a cry and a moan, and the knife-wielding thug slumped lifelessly to the ground, revealing Elena with a smoking 9 mil behind him. The thought registered with Nate that he was really going to have to thank his wife after this one, but he knew better than to try to talk right now. Instead he spun on his heel to continue battling their way out of the lab.
Chloe swung the butt of the machine gun she had wrestled from her opponent's grasp, striking him across the face and knocking him out cold. Returning it to a firing position, Chloe squeezed the trigger and the chatter of automatic gunfire echoed deafeningly in the room. Three more thugs got caught by her fire and fell dead, while the others dove out of the way and one from the foyer shot at Chloe, hitting her in the arm. She cried out in pain, dropping the AK-47 and falling to the ground. Cutter was quick to back her up, throwing a devastating right hook to the side of the offender's face and dislocating his jaw. Over by the Vermillion Bird shrine, Nate and Sully were finishing up a joint attack on two thugs when Nate was once more jumped from behind. This time he used the thug's momentum to his advantage: grabbing the man's sleeve, he bent at the waist and performed a passable throw that landed the goon in the river of mercury. As Nate stood up and turned, he was suddenly punched hard in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, and then lifted bodily from the ground on the shoulder of a burly thug who had obvious intentions of making him suffer the same fate. But as the thug went to throw him, Nate used his feet to push off of the man's thighs, knocking the man back and gaining himself what he hoped would be enough of a boost to clear the river. He got his answer a moment later when his right shoulder collided with hard stone and he rolled into the corner of the small ledge on the other side of the mercury. Infuriated, the thug drew his weapon to shoot him, but even while laying on his side Nate was faster on the draw, taking down first him and then another goon on the other side of the room who was about to rabbit punch Cutter. A kick from Charlie's boot sent another thug to an unpleasant grave at the bottom of the mercury, and then the gang of treasure hunters turned to face an empty room.
"Where'd those bastards go?" Cutter growled, fists still raised.
Jumping the river back to the other side, Nate landed in a crouch and looked around. "They're gone!" He stood, confusion spreading across his face. "Why are they gone?" Out of instinct, Nate immediately did a head count of their group, something Elena had already begun. Chloe, Cutter, Sully...
They both arrived at the same realization at the same time, and cried in unison, "Ming jie- he's gone!"