The Kingdom

“Enough to turn away even the bravest of explorers,” Sam agreed.

“But not us,” Remi replied with a smile Sam could hear in her voice. “What’s the plan?”

“Everything depends on those stalagmites. Did you bring up the rope we left behind?”

“Here.”

Sam reached back until he felt Remi’s outstretched hand, grabbed the carabiner, and pulled the coil up to him. He tied first a slipknot into the loose end, followed by a stopper knot; to this, for weight, he clipped the carabiner. He maneuvered his body until his arms were free of the opening, then tossed the line across the pit, aiming for one of the larger stalagmites a few feet below the opposite tu

“Care to help me with a stress test?” Sam asked Remi. “On three, pull with everything you’ve got. One . . . two . . . three!”

Together, they heaved on the rope, doing their best to rip the stalagmite from the wall. It held steady. “I think we’re okay,” Sam said. “Can you find a crack in the wall and-”

“I’m looking . . . Found one.”

Remi slid a spring-loaded cam into the crack and fed the rope through it, then through a ratchet carabiner. “Take up the slack.”

Sam did so, heaving on the rope as Remi slid the carabiner up to the cam until the line was as taut. Sam gave it a test pluck. “Looks good.”

Remi said, “I suppose it goes unsaid-”

“What, be careful?”

“Yes.”

“It does. But it’s nice to hear anyway.”

“Luck.”

Sam wrapped both hands around the rope and shimmied forward, slowly transferring his weight onto the line. “How’s the cam look?” he asked.

“Steady.”

Sam took a steadying breath, then pulled his lower legs free of the crawl space. He dangled in the air, not daring to move, gauging the sag in the rope and listening for the sound of cracking rock, until ten seconds had passed. He then pulled his legs up, hooked his ankles over the line, and began inching across the pit.

“Holding steady on this end,” Remi called when Sam reached the halfway point.

Sam reached the opposite wall, transferred first one hand, then the other, to the stalagmite, then swung his legs up and braced his right heel against another protrusion. Testing his weight as he went, he contorted his body until he was sitting perched atop the stalagmite. He took a moment to catch his breath, then slowly stood up until he was level with the opening. A quick boost with his hands and a shove off the stalagmite, and he was inside the crawl space.

“Be right back,” he called to Remi, then scrabbled inside. He was back thirty seconds later. “Looks good. It widens out farther on.”

“On my way,” Remi answered.

In two minutes she was across, and Sam was pulling her into the opening. They lay still together for a few moments, enjoying the feeling of solid rock beneath them.

“This reminds me a lot of our third date,” Remi said.

“Fourth,” Sam corrected her. “The third date was horseback riding. The fourth was the rock climbing.”

Remi smiled, kissed him on the cheek. “And they say guys don’t remember those things.”

“Who’s they?”

“They who haven’t met you.” Remi shone her headlamp around. “Any sign of booby traps?”

“Not yet. We’ll keep a sharp eye, but if your estimate on the age of that spear is accurate, I doubt any trip mechanisms would still be working.”

“Famous last words.”

“You have my permission to put it on my tombstone. Come on.”

Sam started crawling, with Remi right behind him. As Sam had promised, a few seconds later the crawl space opened into a kidney-shaped alcove roughly twenty feet wide and five feet tall. In the opposite wall were three vertical clefts, each no wider than eighteen inches.

They stood up and stoop-walked to the first cleft. Sam shone his headlamp inside. “Dead end,” he said. Remi checked the next: another dead end. The third cleft, while deeper than its neighbors, also petered out a half dozen paces inside.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Sam said.

“Maybe not,” Remi murmured, then started toward the right-hand wall, her headlamp pointing at what looked like a horizontal slash of darker rock where the wall met the ceiling. As they drew closer, the slash seemed to grow taller, rising into the ceiling, until they realized they were looking at a slot-like tu

Standing side by side, Sam and Remi peered into the opening, which rose away from them at a forty-five-degree angle for twenty feet before rounding over a jagged bump in the floor.

“Sam, do you see what-”

“I think I do.”

Jutting over the ridge in the floor was what appeared to be the sole of a boot.

9

CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL

The lack of treads on the boot’s sole told Sam and Remi they weren’t looking at a modern piece of footwear, and the skeletal toe poking through a rotted patch in the boot told them the owner had long since departed the earthly plane.

“Is it strange that this sort of thing doesn’t shock me anymore?” Remi said, staring at the foot.

“We’ve stumbled across our fair share of skeletons,” Sam agreed. Such surprises were part and parcel of their avocation. “See any trip wires?”

“No.”

“Let’s take a look around.”

Sam braced his legs against one wall, his back against the other, and let Remi use his arm to pull herself up. He made his way up the slope and over the hump in the floor. After pa

She was beside him in an instant. Kneeling together, they examined the skeleton.

Protected from the elements and predators, and entombed in the relative dryness of the cave, the remains had partially mummified. The clothes, which appeared to be made mostly of laminated and layered leather, remained largely intact.

“I don’t see any obvious signs of trauma,” Remi said.

“How old?”

“Just speculating . . . at least four hundred years.”

“In the same range as the spear.”

“Right.”

“This looks like a uniform,” said Sam, touching a sleeve.

“Then that makes more sense,” replied Remi, pointing. Jutting from what had once been a belt sheath was the hilt of a dagger. She pa

“Home, perhaps,” Sam replied, “but sweet? . . . I suppose everything’s relative.”

A few paces from the flat area on which the skeleton lay, the tu

Remi stood up and began walking around the space.

“He was definitely expecting unfriendly company,” Sam observed. “This has all the signs of a last stand. But to what end?”

“Maybe it has something to do with this,” Remi said, and knelt down beside the wooden chest. Sam walked over. About the size of a small ottoman, the chest was a perfect cube made of a dark, heavily lacquered hardwood, with leather carrying straps on three sides and double shoulder straps on the fourth. Sam and Remi could find no hinges, no locking mechanisms. The seams were so well formed, they were nearly invisible. Engraved into the top of the chest were four intricate Asian characters in a two-by-two grid pattern.