23 September 1923. The expedition’s timetable said Sian was a pause. The last city with General Wu’s escort, the point where the university cars would turn back east, the place where arrangements with Mi Han would be made before the long pull toward Tun-Huang. In practice, Sian behaved like something else entirely. It offered the investigators shelter and tea and paperwork then quietly set a second problem on the table, smaller than Warner’s emergency telegram and somehow more intimate.
By morning, Zahra had decided that if the city was going to watch them, it wouldn’t be watching her. She took to the streets as Batu Sarnai, a Mongolian horse groom and porter. “Batu” for steadfastness, “Sarnai” for rose, an elegant contrast hidden under a teenage boy’s grime and anonymity. It was the kind of disguise the Silk Road itself would ignore. No one looked twice at a groom who knew how to move around caravans, how to keep his eyes down, how to speak only when necessary.
The investigators split their efforts with a grim practicality. Miriam and Marcy headed out beyond the southern wall toward the Small Goose Pagoda to dig for context in public records. Lee and Aiko returned to Kulou House to pull on the thread of thefts and the new American in the lobby. Batu wandered Sian’s wet streets, trying to see the city at ground level, where children and runners and small crimes were the true map. An Jinqiang disappeared into the night with a mission of his own that he did not disclose to the others.
On the walk back to the hotel, Lee and Aiko found their first unexpected lead in dimming daylight. Near the Drum Tower, a large red-painted handcart sat like a shopfront that could move at need. Its signboard was unapologetic: “Sai Na, Purveyor of Fine Religious Tokens and Artifacts.” Aiko’s eye went straight to a pile of corroded bronze coins, about an inch across, with that familiar square hole at their centre. Too similar to the terracotta death-coin from the pilgrim hostel to ignore.
Sai Na, genial and quick, sold Aiko five of the corroded coins and, more importantly, offered an invitation: if they wanted “the real antiques,” they should come that night, after nine, to an address he wrote out in Chinese, deep in the Muslim Quarter. Aiko checked with Lee before accepting, careful in the way the others sometimes weren’t. The offer felt honest, in that particular way a confident liar often does. Plausible enough to be believed, and precise enough to be acted upon.
While that bargain was being struck, Batu moved through the city’s lower currents and felt the now-familiar sensation settle in again, the low-grade, constant anxiety of being watched by an unseen force. For someone who prided herself on remaining hidden, the feeling was not merely unsettling. It was an insult. The disguise held, the boy’s posture and cadence convincing, yet the attention felt as if it slid over cloth and skin and found the shape beneath anyway.
Batu found the street urchins without difficulty. Sian had no shortage of them. Two boys, San and Ri Ho, accepted the Mongolian groom without question and fell easily into small talk. Batu described a life on the road: horses, caravans, tea, butter, roasted barley. They played a stupid, perfect street game, poking a crab with a stick, while the boys talked about their own lives. Begging, scavenging, being chased from temple steps and civic corners, the dependable fact that there was free food once a week at the mosque if you knew when to show up and how not to be noticed.
It was ordinary misery, told with the shrugging fatalism of children who’d grown old too early. And yet the ordinariness mattered. If something strange was moving through Sian wearing the shape of a child, then the real children were both cover and camouflage.
Not long after, Batu saw a theft happen. At the edge of the Muslim Quarter, a small urchin slipped up to a wealthy Chinese Muslim woman and plucked something from her without her noticing. Quick hands, practiced timing, gone. Batu tried to intimidate, but the girl bolted, and the chase snapped into being like a trap sprung.
They ran through wet lanes and tight alleys, knocking bins, dodging fish bones, cutting corners hard enough to skid. For a while Batu held her close enough to taste the child’s panic in the air, then lost her in the city’s folds. Sian swallowed the girl the way cities always do with little drama, but with endless options.
Miriam and Marcy’s day had a different rhythm. The Small Goose Pagoda stood outside the walls like a patient memory. Rain-dark stone rising out of damp earth. They approached the caretaker respectfully, stumbling through Chinese in that earnest, rain-soaked way that makes even politeness look bedraggled. The caretaker, uninterested in discouraging foreigners who asked nicely, allowed them to peruse public records.
What they found wasn’t a neat answer, but it was the kind of context that changes the temperature of everything else. In the records and markers they identified references, partial, dialect, heavy, hard to translate cleanly to the Thousand Buddhas and to a term rendered roughly as “She Zu.” More legible were the funerary threads. Terracotta tomb figurines called yong, substitutes for older sacrificial practices, and mingqi, miniature tools and objects meant to serve the dead in the afterlife. The language of exchange, of provision, of the dead requiring goods, sat beneath it all like a hidden ledger.
Back in Sian, Batu’s earlier failure to catch the thief didn’t sit well. Disguises are supposed to control the narrative. Being watched, being outrun, being mocked by a city’s smallest inhabitants, none of it suited Batu/Zahra’s temperament. She trusted to luck and patience instead. Hours later, she caught a glimpse of the same girl again and realised she was hiding in a hole in the wall behind stacked boxes, small enough to vanish if you blinked.
Batu didn’t confront her. Batu waited.
Out of sight, quiet as the dead, Batu outlasted the child’s stubbornness. Eventually the girl emerged, thinking she’d shaken pursuit. Batu followed at a distance and watched her slip beneath the steps of one of the city’s temples, through a fabric-covered entrance barely noticeable unless you knew it existed.
Inside, the space was cramped and dim, smelling of old cloth and damp stone. The girl sat on a prayer cushion, holding an armless terracotta doll, almost two feet tall, missing a leg, wrapped in rags as if someone had tried to make it whole. She stroked it with intense, almost reverent focus. There were few other possessions: a cheap paper lantern, scraps, the kind of marginal survival kit a street child might assemble. Yet the doll didn’t read like a toy. It read like an object with weight, something to soothe, or serve, or perhaps obey. After observing her, Batu departed without speaking to the urchin.
When the investigators reconvened later, the day’s threads began to braid. Aiko floated a practical idea: perhaps whoever was stealing these sentimental items was leaving the coins as payment. A crude, occult economy. Zahra, no longer Batu, pointed out what made that framing both useful and terrifying. These were not coins for this world. They were burial goods, money for the dead to spend in the afterlife. If they were being offered in exchange, then the buyer did not understand, or did not care, how the living measured value.
It was in that mood that Sai Na’s invitation became less a curiosity and more a test.
After nine, the investigators went to Sai Na’s address in the Muslim Quarter. The warehouse was cluttered with the sort of objects that make a person feel watched by history. Crates, wrapped bundles, shelves of religious tokens and carved fragments. The air smelled of dust and old ceramic. Sai Na played the genial host, the merchant’s patter smooth and selective, and the investigators quickly found the items that mattered to them: a porcelain pillow, a walking stick with a sea-creature handl, octopus-like, curling, and a heap of bronze pan liang coins.
The alignment was too neat to be coincidence. The pillow echoed the pilgrim hostel theft. The cane echoed Professor Johnson’s loss. The coins echoed the terracotta ming ch’ien. Sai Na claimed these things came from travelling pilgrims, purchased in the natural churn of the road. Lee listened and, in her quiet way, found the story wanting. It wasn’t that Sai Na was an obvious liar. It was that he was too comfortable with relevance.
Miriam chose control over purity. With pro-forma haggling and the calm certainty of a buyer who knows what she needs, she purchased the porcelain pillow and the walking stick to keep them out of other hands and to secure them for study. Marcy’s eye caught on an exquisite silver ring engraved with Buddhist motifs, beautiful enough to feel dangerous. Yet it remained out of reach. Some treasures, for now, stayed where they were.
The grave coins, Aiko’s bronze purchases and the terracotta ming ch’ien already in their possession, became a deliberate choice rather than an accidental contamination. Five coins were distributed among the five Society members present: Marcy, Miriam, Lee, Aiko, and Zahra. They kept them not because it was wise, but because it was informative. If the coins were bait, or markers, or receipts in an economy of the dead, then carrying them might provoke a response. The group wanted to know whether attention could be measured.
Back at Kulou House, the investigators talked about traps. Zahra, thinking like a burglar and a poet, returned to one detail that had surfaced again and again. The stolen items were never valuable in the conventional sense. They were sentimental. They were loved. They were carried because they mattered.
So she decided to make something that mattered.
On a fine piece of parchment, Zahra wrote a ghazal in Urdu, traditional, careful, the refrain returning like a held breath. The poem described her orchard vision from the lecture hall and the crisis of faith it had sparked: awe braided with doubt, the unsettling possibility that what she’d seen was either God’s whisper or something pretending to be one. When the ink dried, she pricked her thumb and pressed a bloody fingerprint into the bottom margin. For sincerity. For weight. For proof that the thing on the paper was not merely words.
The investigators ended the night with purchases secured, coins pocketed, and a poem waiting like a snare.
Sian had not offered them clarity. It had offered them a pattern. Theft as transaction, children as hands, funerary goods as currency, and merchants who smiled too easily when asked the right questions.
The expedition still needed to meet Mi Han and leave for the west, but Sian had made itself part of the story. It had reached into their pockets, into strangers’ grief, into the small private objects people carry because they can’t bear to lose them and it had suggested, almost insistently, that the dead had begun shopping again.
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