The trap was laid with the cunning of desperate beasts cornered in a cave.
Qiao Ming stopped three paces before the entrance of Entry hall 198, his horn lantern hidden behind the fold of his oilskin coat. His bare toes curled over the stone curb, feeling the subtle heat slope of the air blowing through the narrow drain tube choke.
The draft here was unusually cold, carrying the faint, clear tang of zinc-coated zinc and acid-etched copper wire.
He lowered his body until his chest was four inches from the floor, peering along the surface of the pale limestone flat stone slabs. In the darkness, thirty arm-lengths ahead, a small, cubic object was resting upon the center of the stone floor.
It was a royal zinc sealing cage.
The cage was eighteen inches square, built of heavy zinc bars punched holes in with hundreds of needle-fine holes. Its four top-flaps were spring-loaded with coiled steel piano-wire, held open by a delicate hair-trigger catch connected to four silk trip-wires that radiated across the floor like the spokes of an invisible wheel.
Inside the cage, hovering in the dark behind the zinc bars, was a faint, trembling sphere of azure light.
It was a fragment of stolen soul-vapor—perhaps ten drops—tethered to a small copper rod in the center of the cage. As the draft moved through the perforations, the vapor emitted a low, sorrowful whistle, acting as a spirit bright light that would draw any wandering guardian or curious custodian toward its…
