Sounds Beneath the Sand

In Kashgar's Old City, Shen Nanyin can hear the voices beneath the sand. On a night of sandstorms, a voice dead for thirty years calls her name. Gu Xizhou, a relic restorer, arrives with a jade cicada passed down through his family, leading to a Kunlun eagle-bone flute left behind by her mother. Legend says that the priests of the thirty-six kingdoms of the Western Regions used sound to suppress evil spirits, sealing disasters inside a sound prison beneath a sunken city. Now the city is about to rise, and a gang from the black-market sand trade is searching for the key. One wild, one steady, they must travel from the old city's bazaar to the Pamirs and Kunlun, and play that flute to seal a city that should never have been opened. But when the flute sounds, what will it set free?