Ying heard a shriek overhead and looked up to see an eagle soaring above them. He shook his head at the irony.
“What's next, Ying?” Tonglong asked. “A tiger cub? A white monkey?” He laughed. “You know, those former brothers of yours and a round eye attacked two of my men in Hangzhou yesterday. In some ways, you have them to thank for my coming this morning. I assumed that you were with them and that you were all heading to this dragon house immediately. I worked through the night to hire a boat and crew large enough to transport my twenty best men and the treasure we're about to take.”
Ying said nothing.
They made it to the top of the steep hill, then slid and scraped their way down the other side. They repeated this two more times over progressively taller, steeper hills until Ying guessed that they had traveled well over a It.
Halfway up the fourth hill, in an area thick with foliage, the ground suddenly leveled off. WanSow pushed aside a wall of ferns to reveal a small cave entrance. It was about as wide as Ying's shoulders and as tall as his chest.
“Okay, so this would have taken a few weeks to locate,” Tonglong said. “This had better not be a trick.”
WanSow ignored Tonglong. She ducked into the cave and Ying went in after her, followed by Tonglong with his short qiang. The soldiers waited just outside the entrance.
Once inside, Ying found he could stand without difficulty. The cave was dark, and he could just make out his mother crossing to the back corner. She hunched down, low to the ground, and Ying heard the clink of metal hitting stone. He headed toward her and realized that she was striking a fire stone with a piece of metal. A few sparks found their mark, and a small candle ignited.
Ying wondered if his mother had hidden a qiang or a knife in that corner along with the candles and fire-starting items.
She hadn't.
WanSow used the little candle to light a second small candle, which she handed to Ying. He raised it over his head and saw the true dimensions of the space. It wasn't very big, roughly twenty paces wide and thirty paces long. He watched his mother move to the back wall and stop there, facing it.
Ying walked to her side and saw that she was staring at a huge section of rock face that had been ground flat and polished to a high sheen. A simple map had been carved into it. Ying memorized the map in three heartbeats.
Tonglong approached and stared over WanSow's shoulder from several paces behind. It took him much longer to commit the map to memory.
Tonglong backed up to the entrance, leaving Ying and his mother alone in front of the map. “Who carved that?” Tonglong asked.
“No one knows,” WanSow replied.
“According to the legends, it was China's mystical Treasure Dragon,” Tonglong said. “Do you believe that?”
“I have no reason to disbelieve it,” WanSow said. “Why do you ask?”
Tonglong smiled. “I was just wondering if I need to keep one eye fixed over my shoulder after I take his treasure. I've been told certain dragons can be vengeful creatures.” He looked at Ying and laughed, then pointed his qiang at Ying's head.
Something inside Ying snapped. He threw his candle at Tonglong and leaped forward as if he had nothing left to lose, for indeed that was the case. He heard the click as the hammer on Tonglong's qiang fell, and in the same moment he saw a flash of metal strike Tong long in the side of the head. His mother had thrown the fire stone's strike bar. Tonglong cried out, twisting the qiang in her direction.
Fizz … BANG!
Tonglong's qiang erupted with a deafening BOOM! inside the small cave. His shot went high, over Wan-Sow's head, and was followed by the terrible rumbling sound of massive boulders shifting. WanSow managed to take two steps toward the cave's entrance before a huge section of the ceiling collapsed directly above her.
“No!” Ying shouted. He stopped short of Tonglong and turned toward the pile of rubble that had buried his mother. Out of the corner of his eye, Ying saw Tong long drop the smoking qiang and leap backward out of the entrance as another wave of grinding and shifting shuddered around them. Ying scrambled for the entrance but was too slow. A second avalanche of debris fell, this time over the entrance. In the blink of an eye, the opening was filled in with more rock than Ying could hope to move in a year. He was thrust into absolute darkness.
Ying glanced around for his mother's candle. It had been snuffed out. He could hardly breathe. Chalky dust filled his mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. He coughed and called out to his mother.
She didn't reply.
Ying clawed his way around the cave, searching over, under, and in between jagged piles of stone until his fingers finally found something soft. It was his mother's arm. Ying fumbled as quickly as he dared with rocks of all sizes, tossing them aside, digging his mother free.