The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Read Online Free Page A

one another in fear and surprise as the oozing mud came from within to consume them from without.
    Their master was a step ahead of them, his terra-cotta shell almost fired hard by now. The great ruler could barely move, staggering helplessly as his agony continued. The imperial guard, dumbfounded by what they’d witnessed, did not try to stop Zi Yuan as she left the palace. They were too busy watching as the terrible aura of heat finally ceased and revealed the smoking statue that the Emperor, now encased in a ceramic skin, had become. This reddish-brown shell he would wear for millennia, but Zi Yuan had not lied in her promise of eternal life: he would indeed remain alive within his terra-cotta cocoon . . . but in suspended animation . . .
    In the courtyard, hunching in pain, Zi Yuan cantered her horse as she rode out, through a motionless army that had shared its master’s fate, smoke rising lazily from their terra-cotta forms. So it was that the wizard’s daughter rode off into the night, never to be seen again . . . or at least never in recorded history.
    As for the Emperor, Er Shi Huangdi was buried by his eunuchs, who had been spared this hellish fate, his terra-cotta warriors interred with him.
    Here the chapter of the evil Emperor would seem at an end. But in ancient texts it is written that should Er Shi Huangdi ever be freed from his terra-cotta prison, he will again become a force of evil, only on a scale to make his previous savagery pale . . . raising his warriors to lay siege to the entire world—a shape-shifting master of the five elements, and a slave to his undying thirst for conquest.

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    Call to Adventure
    Oxfordshire, England
    W ith steely-eyed, life-or-death determination, Rick O’Connell stared at his foe.
    “You can run,” he said, his voice softly menacing, “but you can’t hide.”
    Among the enemies Richard O’Connell had stared down in his time were Tuaregs on horseback in the Sahara, in his French Foreign Legion days, and any number of bloodthirsty mercenaries who’d attempted to steal the treasures he and his Egyptologist wife had uncovered for museums on various digs. And this did not touch upon the assorted reanimated mummies he’d dispatched, from pygmies to high priests to the great Imhotep himself, and then there were the Med-jai warriors, and of course the Scorpion King, and . . .
    . . . the fat brown trout swimming lazily, arrogantly through the warm, gently flowing waters of a chalk stream theoretically perfect for fly-fishing.
    On this beautiful spring afternoon in 1946, O’Connell—Rick to some, “Ricochet” Rick to others—was wielding neither rifle nor machine gun, and certainly not a golden spear opened out of the Scepter of Osiris. A few years past forty, O’Connell retained the athletic physique and dashing good looks of an adventurer—strong-jawed, sun-bronzed, his unruly brown hair barely grayed at the temples.
    But rather than an open-collar shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and a sidearm in a snap holster at his hip, O’Connell wore a tailored tweed jacket and rubber boots, a creel resting on his hip—the very image of a gentleman fisher.
    “One o’clock, ten o’clock,” he muttered, and he forced his forward cast only to catch himself in the seat of his pants; then he felt a hook bite into his neck.
    “Oww!”
    His wife, Evelyn, was supposed to be the clumsy one in the family—he always found it endearing that her grace and ease could occasionally be interrupted by an awkward move, but what could compare to his clumsiness right now? Plowing through the willows, trying to untangle his errant fly, the tippet breaking, a branch poking him in the eye, and then somehow he was flat on his ass on the stream bank, moisture leaching through the cloth like blood from his wounded dignity.
    Eyes narrowing, his mouth a vicious slash in a pitiless face, he clawed at the wicker creel and fumbled for the Colt .45 revolver within.
    Then he was at the edge of the