“Careful,” he says, nodding at the ground.
The roughhewn stone floor is coated in dust and veined with streams of mercury. Peter nudges a small rock into the calm silver surface and it slips under silently, disappearing without a ripple.
I pull my arm away, stepping more carefully now.
This dead city is trapped in suspended animation—hibernating out of time as the progress of civilization has gone on frenetically overhead. It is a world that has grown at the speed of a stalagmite, insulated from earthquakes and floods and fire, while empires outside have risen and fallen over the ages.
And every one of these dark warriors is oriented in a single direction. Thousands of sightless eyes are trained on a single point in the distance. Moving slowly in the crisp white beam of my headlamp, I let the unspoken posture of an eternal army guide me.
I stop when I see the black chaos of dragons rising, carved from the bare rock. Placed at the head of the room, the royal throne is an unfathomably complex sculpture that rises two stories high, the ceiling carved into a cupola to accommodate. A ring of tall stone pillars surrounds the frightening structure, supporting the raised portion of ceiling over the throne. And sitting at the top, I can make out the small figure of a man.
“My old master,” says Peter, voice echoing.
A distant boom rolls through the cavern, like a giant knocking to be let in. Leizu must be using explosives to breach the collapsed excavation tunnel. Peter and I share a look.
It’s time to work.
Approaching the black throne, I see the emperor’s eyes are closed to the vast necropolis. He has been waiting here for thousands of years. His elaborate silk robes have turned brittle, collapsed mostly to dust. But the angles of his body are untouched, preserved in the cool, dry cave, under the soft glow of bioluminescent stars. At his elbow, a rusty iron bar rests on the arm of the throne—a ruyi, the scepter’s head forged into the shape of a blooming flower.
I climb the dais until I’m at the emperor’s feet.
I lay Batuo’s leather tool roll on the automaton’s lap and flip it open. A motley array of instruments, both futuristic and prehistoric, gleam under my headlamp. As I snap on a pair of blue latex gloves, I think again of the girl of Saint Petersburg. It seems so long ago now. That little doll had a message locked inside her, waiting to be released.
This old man isn’t so different.
I peel the stiff robes away from its chest, the fabric disintegrating under my touch. Beneath, intricate ridges and bumps are painted onto a half-open chest plate made from thick ceramic layered with metal filaments. I could almost mistake him for another terra-cotta sculpture but for the ingenious hairline gaps around his face, chest, and joints that once allowed his limbs to articulate, each sheath of pottery sliding over the other.
Pulling out a canister, I clean him with short hisses of compressed air. Puffs of rock dust mushroom away from the emperor’s body. Below the layers of grit, a golden sheen begins to appear.
“Do you remember him?” I ask.
Peter stands in the empty semicircle of space at the foot of the throne, running a finger along the face of a terra-cotta statue. “Some things,” he says. A slight waver under his voice betrays how deeply he is affected. “Please be careful.”
“Does this mean you’re not really Russian?” I ask, half joking. “Are you Chinese?”
Peter smiles up at me in the dim light, his cheek torn.
“Perhaps both. Or neither,” he says. “Avtomat belong to the first race of man, whoever they were. Nobody is alive to tell us.”
Under the eye of my headlamp, I notice a strange rock. Next to the emperor’s hip, the pale stone has been wedged into an intricately carved niche. A stippled spine of dots run like a rash over its surface. Cautiously, I dislodge it.
For some reason, I think of my dedushka.
Another boom echoes through the cavern.
“Hurry,” says Peter.
Quickly, I jam the odd stone into my pack.
Turning back to the automaton, I press my rubber-gloved fingers against the ceramic chest piece. Dragging right to left, I slide it the rest of the way open to reveal an empty cavity. The interior is simple and clean. There are no fake lungs, no digesting apparatus, no circulatory system—none of the artifice that makes Peter and the other avtomat seem like walking, talking human beings. There is only a simple pedestal, like a cradle, connected to clockwork struts.
“He didn’t even pretend to breathe…” I muse out loud. “Anybody would have known he isn’t human.”
“They thought he was a god,” says Peter, and he sounds almost bitter. “And they may have been right.”
Illuminating the vessel with my headlamp, I make out an indentation in the cradle—the familiar shape of a crescent moon. After two hundred generations, my relic has finally found its way home.
Sliding the relic over my head, I hold it in both hands and snap off the chain. The same old labyrinth of etchings coats its surface, glinting in the harsh beam of my headlamp. I trace the contours of a teardrop with a dot inside. The ancient elemental symbol of yang.
When I first held this artifact as a girl, my grandfather watched me realize what he already knew—a riddle was locked in the fractal folds of metal, a mystery that he felt, too, the moment he plucked it from a snowy battlefield. The old man carried this relic for forty years. He kept its secret as loyally as Peter ever did.
I share a look with Peter, take a deep breath, and reach into my tool roll. With a fossil brush, I sweep dust off the cradle, trying to expose any connectors that might be inside. I finish the cleaning job off with a few more blasts of compressed air.
This automaton is both more ancient and advanced than anything I’ve ever laid my hands on. Unique, but with similarities to the mechanisms I have seen in Talus, Batuo, and Peter. Holding the relic in both hands, I press it to my lips.
Then I push my hands into the automaton’s chest.
Eyes closed, I use my sense of touch to determine the perfect configuration. As the relic finally clicks into place, a buzzing kiss of electricity washes over my fingertips.
Stepping back, I snap off my headlamp.
The relic is locked into place, occupying the heart of the old automaton. In the darkness, I watch the still figure.
Some part of my mind is waiting, poised on the starting line and anticipating the fire of a starter pistol. But it doesn’t come. The roar of a distant, invisible underground river echoes through the miles of blackness around us. Dust motes drop silently over the sepia skin of a frozen army.
This world is empty and still.
“Nothing is happening,” says Peter.
“He’s been sitting here for millennia, Peter,” I say. “Give him a minute.”
I flinch as an explosion from the back of the room rolls over us. Rocks are rattling down from the ceiling, some splashing into the rivers of mercury. Streaks of blue light—dislodged glowworms—are dribbling down over the army like falling stars.