Word on the Street | An Old Mojin Hand Says Three Vaults Must Never Be Sited — the Third Is Worst When You Get It Right

(This piece is a transcript of an account that circulates in the trade. There is no telling how much of it is true; take it for entertainment.)

In this trade the rules weigh more than a life. What the old hands pass down mostly comes without explanation; you are simply told to remember it. The passage below is said to come from an old Mojin hand, retired for years, who would not give his name. The man who transcribed it added one line of background: while he talked, the old man kept working an unshelled peanut between his fingers, and every time he stopped talking he gave it a squeeze.

The word "rob" was not in his mouth. Going into a tomb he called going down; taking something he called inviting it out; a man who did not come back had stayed behind. He opened with a rule. In this trade you never say a thing all the way through.

Say it all, and the vault hears you.

Stay in this long enough, he said, and you hear about three kinds of vaults. The names do not match from house to house. His line calls the first the Dead-Ground Vault; another house out in Guanzhong calls it the Masterless Vault. They mean the same thing.

The first, the Dead-Ground Vault. The breath-vent is sealed dead, whoever goes in does not come out, and smothers down there. Site this one wrong and the one who dies is you. In his young days he went along on a job out in Gansu. The man ahead of him went down first, and the rope stopped paying out at 18 meters. They hauled him up still breathing, eyes open, the dirt packed under his fingernails. Down there he had been digging upward, and had dug all night.

The second, the Reverse-Dragon Vault. The sand and water run backward, the earth's breath runs against itself. Site this one wrong and the ones who die are your family. A younger man who learned the craft from him sited one; the goods moved smoothly and his cut came to 300,000. Less than 4 months after he got home, his father broke his neck in his own courtyard. That younger man does not touch the trade any more, and does not go into his own family graves either.

There are words you do not let out of your mouth inside a tomb. No full names. A name, he said, is a thing that can be taken from you; call one out and there is one more down there who knows it. No counting either: a count you fail to finish will follow you out. And the words "going back" are not to be said until you are through the mouth of the hole.

The third he would not go into. He left one line: "Get the first two wrong and someone dies. With the third, what you should fear is getting it right."

Someone pressed him on what the third is called. He sat silent a long moment, then said: "What is buried in there isn't a person. It's the thing a person took off." Whoever sites it right, goes in, and comes out alive, what comes out is not necessarily the one who went in.

Three people had pressed him about it, as he remembered. Two of them he could still reach. The third is still around too; only his family says the man sits in front of a mirror in the middle of the night reciting a run of characters nobody can make out, and keeps at it for hours.

Before he left he added one more thing, out of nowhere:

If you see a whole human skin lying in the coffin with no bones under it, back out the way you came, and be quick. That skin was not peeled off by anyone. It came off by itself.

Whether any of this is true, nobody has a way to test. But there really are old men in the trade who change color the moment they hear "burial figures with vertical pupils," and are gone before morning.

If some day you get into a tomb and the structure feels less like something built for people to live in than like something built for a thing bigger than a man to crawl through, do not push it. Back out the way you came. The last word goes to him:

Lose your life and someone still comes to collect the body. With the third kind, the ones who come to collect would not know whose body to take.