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“I doubt it They didn’t show any sign, and none of them struck me as the type ould pretend not to see us They’d be more likely to chase us”

They took a roundabout route to their hotel, stopping now and then to see if they were followed When they reached their rooed it in to charge, waited, then called La Jolla

A voice they hadn’t been expecting said, “Hello?”

“Hi, Albrecht It’s us”

“Are you at your hotel in Taraz?”

“Yes We hired a driver who got us here, but he speaks no English”

“What does he speak?”

“Kazakh, and a little Russian”

“Sounds adequate Tell ”

“We just careen market that historians think is the site of ancient Taraz We spotted four of Poliakoff’s thugs at a café We don’t think they saw us We also don’t think the ht It’s too low to be a fort It’s also not on the river Maybe there are springs or wells in town, but we haven’t seen them”

They heard Albrecht typing on a coet a better perspective on this coht The old Chinese sources say that five hundred men worked two years to build the fort They were in the nu was the Chinese na a Han army of up to three hundred thousand men to arrive at so It would be built in the heights, and it would need a water supply We knoas high-walled because when the Chinese did co dirt up beside it until it was even with the wall The fight was furious, and even Zhizhi’s wives shot arrows from the battlements The Chi

nese overwhelmed them and won I don’t think the fort was at the modern marketplace The ruins under the market are more likely to be either a habitation or a cemetery”

“What will Mundzuk’s grave consist of?” asked Remi “What do we look for?”

“I’ you pictures of the known burials of the earliest Huns in Mongolia They were buried under mounds There’s a burial chamber made of stone, and then over it are layers of stone, soil, and logs of Siberian larch”

“That’s close to the sort of thing we found in France It had been s plastered with mortar”