Dr. Shen Xia died in the dark. As the foremost forensic archaeologist in China, she had spent her life uncovering the secrets of the Tang Dynasty. Her final discovery was the “Cursed Tomb” of Consort Ling, a woman erased from history for allegedly murdering the Emperor’s heir. When the tunnel collapsed, Xia’s last sight was the jade pendant on the Consort’s skeleton.
When she woke, she wasn’t in the dark. She was bathed in the blinding glow of a thousand silk lanterns.
“Consort Ling! You’ve fainted!” a frantic voice cried.
Xia sat up, her head throbbing. She wasn’t in her khakis and boots. She was draped in twenty pounds of embroidered silk. Her hands were small, soft, and unscarred by years of digging in the dirt. She looked into a bronze mirror and gasped. It was the face from the funerary mask—the woman she had just spent five years studying.
She was in the year 740 AD. And if her memory of the history books was correct, she was exactly forty-eight hours away from being executed by forced hemlock poisoning.
