Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (16 page)

Gabriel grabbed hold of one chain, DeGroet another; they both clung desperately as the platform sped through the air, the solitary light of the flashlight dwindling far below them. They were being drawn up a stone shaft at tremendous speed, as though a mammoth counterweight had been dropped from some vast height and was now plunging into whatever stygian depths Istvan had fallen to.

They couldn’t see—not just each other, but anything. Gabriel brought his sword up in front of his face and he couldn’t see the blade. The walls of the vertical tunnel through which they were rocketing might have been feet away or inches—there was no way to know, other than to reach a hand out, and Gabriel wasn’t about to try that experiment. Looking up, he saw no sign of what waited for them overhead—

But then a crack opened, a narrow line above them,
lit by a concussive string of lightning strikes. It widened from a hairline to a handsbreadth and from there to a doorway’s width, two slabs of stone above them separating and tilting to either side to make room for the platform to emerge.

What had this been used for, Gabriel wondered, this primitive but effective elevator—raising beasts to the upper surface in dramatic fashion, to impress prospective purchasers?

The opening continued to spread wider and rainwater gushed down on them, the monsoon having reached its full strength while they were sheltered within the belly of the mountain.

The platform slowed, some sort of baffle kicking in. It shuddered to a halt when it was level with the upper surface. Gabriel stepped off between the chains, his legs unsteady.

The sight that greeted him in the next flash of lightning was extraordinary—all of Sri Lanka spread out below them, a thousand feet below or more, the treetops a vast furred carpet, the snaking lengths of highway and river like veins on an anatomy chart. The winds were powerful, gusting this way and that, buffeting him from behind, pushing him toward the rock’s edge. He saw DeGroet run toward him and raised his sword to meet the charge.

But it was hopeless. He parried high and DeGroet swung low, the point of his blade shredding the front of Gabriel’s leather jacket and the shirt and skin beneath. Gabriel tried to control his blade, to swing carefully rather than wildly and not give DeGroet any openings, but it was like a novice at chess playing against a master, his desperate attempts at strategy countered and foiled effortlessly.

He saw a cruel smile emerge on DeGroet’s lips as he pressed Gabriel back, back, till they were both near the
edge. Glancing down, Gabriel saw they were at one of the mountain’s overhang points—no slope at all that he might roll down safely, not even a sheer face he might dream of climbing if the rains hadn’t made that impossible. Just a fall—an endless, open drop into eternity.

There was still a way out, of course. There always was. But as DeGroet teased him with his blade, drawing blood here and here and there, he began to fear he might not manage it.

“Lajos,” he shouted, his words stripped almost to silence by the rushing winds. “Lajos!”

“Yes, Hunt?”

“I know where the treasure is,” he shouted. “I’ve figured it out!” The older man’s blade darted in again, nicked a bit of flesh from the side of Gabriel’s neck.

“You know what, Hunt? I don’t believe you. And even if it’s true…I don’t care. I’ll figure it out for myself. Or I’ll pay someone to do so.
I don’t need you.
” And with that he sent his saber’s blade spiraling out again, as he had in the chamber far below, and swept Gabriel’s sword out of his hand. They both watched as it spun end over end into the darkness.

Gabriel whipped off his jacket and threw it at DeGroet, who batted it aside with his sword. It landed at his feet. “That the best you can do? I am disappointed in you, Hunt.”

Gabriel looked behind him—only inches remained.

“There’s no wire for you to grab hold of here, is there?” DeGroet taunted.

Gabriel dropped to his knees.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t beg,” DeGroet shouted. “Meet your death like a man.”

“Just give me a moment, please,” Gabriel said. “One moment, to say a prayer.”

“One moment,” DeGroet said. “No more.”

“And please,” Gabriel said, “when you do it…swing hard. Make it clean.”

“Oh, I’ll swing hard,” DeGroet said and raised his sword high overhead.

There is a reason they say that in a lightning storm it is unwise to be the tallest thing in sight. How much less wise, Gabriel thought, to stand atop a thousand-foot boulder in a raging thunderstorm and raise a metal bar above your head?

He knew it wasn’t possible—he knew that lightning travels much too swiftly for its motion to be seen—but looking up at DeGroet standing over him he could have sworn he saw the charge gather in the clouds, saw the forked serpent’s tongue of electricity streak down, aimed unerringly for the point of DeGroet’s saber, saw it kiss the metal with its deadly, incinerating charge.

But it couldn’t be. Not just because of the speeds involved—but because he wasn’t there to see it.

The same people who said you shouldn’t be the highest point in a lightning storm had a thing or two to say about kneeling in a puddle of water beside a man being struck by lightning, too, and none of them were good. So before he could get incinerated along with DeGroet, Gabriel kicked off, hard, from the surface of the rock and flung himself outward into space.

Beneath his leather jacket he’d been wearing one last emergency supply he’d taken off the plane, a slender knapsack, and he reached now for the metal ring attached to one of the straps. Finding it, he tugged firmly.

And behind him a compact stream of folded fabric unfurled, blossoming with a satisfying
whoomp
into an airtight canopy that lowered him gently through the storm.

He landed where they’d begun their climb, at the foot of the mountain. As the folds of fabric pooled around him, he stripped the parachute off and squeezed between the walls of rock, beginning the laborious ascent once more. He was tired, he was wounded, he was weak—he would have liked nothing better than to make his way back to Dayani’s car and drive it to Dambulla, get help that way. But he couldn’t just leave Sheba alone in a dark cavern at the heart of a mountain fortress. And worse, she wasn’t alone. Karoly might have a broken wrist, but he might also have a flashlight—and a gun.

No, there was nothing for it but to climb, and he did, as quickly as he could without losing his footing or his grip, hugging the wall as he went. He passed the wasps’ nests, careful not to disturb them again; he passed the lacquered wall and the painted ladies; he passed the tiny cave with the bloody towel lying at its entrance. Rainwater washed his wounds clean as he went, and when twice he felt a moment of dizziness he leaned against the rock and waited for it to pass.

Eventually he made it to the lion’s paws. He staggered to the opening, waited for a lightning strike to illuminate the interior, showing him both the corridor and the gaping hole he’d have to cross to get to it. There was nothing for it—he had no rope, and the crossbeam was
gone anyway. He judged the angle as best he could, got a running start, and leaped.

He landed short, his chest hitting the floor, his legs dangling into the pit. He scrabbled with his hands as he felt himself begin to slide backwards. The floor was craggy, but the crags were low and worn, and his fingers, wet from the rain, couldn’t get a solid grip.

No
—

No. This wasn’t how he’d go, lost in darkness, buried beneath ten thousand pounds of stone. It couldn’t be. He bit down hard with his fingertips against the rock, squeezed till they caught hold of
something,
till he was hanging literally by his fingertips—but hanging all the same, not falling, not anymore. He took a deep breath, let his racing heartbeat slow for half a second, and then began the process of inching his fingers forward. After an eternity he managed to get one elbow up over the edge…then the other…then his wet and battered trunk, and finally his legs.

He rolled over onto his back, breathing heavily, his chest heaving, his eyes closed. Too close. He’d had too many close calls over the past few days, and this one may have been the worst. Or maybe it was just the accumulation that had worn him down. On a good day he would have made that jump easily.

Of course, on a good day he wouldn’t have been attempting it with a bandaged ankle and a lacerated thigh.

He got to his feet and felt his way along the corridor till he came to the branch at the entrance to the cage room. There was no light at all—and his Zippo was up on the top of the mountain, in his jacket pocket.

He opened his mouth to call out, then hesitated. If Karoly was nearby and heard him…

But what was the alternative? Blundering around in the dark?

He shouted: “Sheba!”

At first there was no answer. Then he heard footsteps running toward him, and saw a light approaching from the left-hand passageway. He backed up against the wall and raised a fist in case it was Karoly his call had attracted.

But a moment later he heard Sheba’s voice. “Gabriel, thank god,” she said, sounding every bit as exhausted as he felt—and something more than exhausted, too. Frightened? That would be natural enough. But it was somehow not just fear he heard in her voice—it was something worse.

“What is it?” he said, stepping into her path. She fell into his arms. He could feel her shaking. “Is it Karoly, is he—”

“Karoly’s dead,” she said, her words muffled against his chest.

“Then what…?”

“It was a mistranslation, Gabriel,” Sheba said, her voice more unsteady than he’d ever heard it. “You said it was the power to terrify—but it wasn’t, Gabriel, it wasn’t that at all. It was the power to
petrify.
”

“What are you talking about? The treasure?” Gabriel said, and he felt her chin move as she nodded. “You found it?”

“Karoly did,” she said.

“But…terrify, petrify,” Gabriel said, “what’s the difference?”

Sheba raised her head. There was a brittle edge of panic to her voice. “
Petrify,
Gabriel—from the Greek, ‘petra,’ meaning rock or stone. Gabriel, the sphinx’s power wasn’t the power to frighten men—
it was the power to turn them to stone.”

And she swung the flashlight’s beam around.

There was a statue in the passageway, just a few feet away. It was exquisitely detailed, as naturalistic as the
ones Gabriel had found in the chambers in Egypt and Greece. But this one didn’t depict a sphinx.

It was Karoly.

He was frozen in an attitude of terror, one hand flung up before his face, the other—the one with the broken wrist—dangling crookedly by his side. But his body, his clothing…

Was stone.

Gabriel ran his fingers over the surface. His heart began trip-hammering again, worse even than when he’d been dangling at the edge of the pit. “What happened? Did he touch something? Did he…did he step on something? Inhale something?”

Sheba shook her head vigorously. “I was running away. I heard him coming after me, and then a sound…”

“What sound?”

She didn’t answer. But, then, she didn’t have to. Because they both heard the sound then. It was a low, rumbling growl, accompanied by the slow padding of clawed footsteps against stone.

“Get back,” Gabriel said, taking the flashlight from her.

The footsteps came closer, then stopped, just out of sight.

“And you,”
came a voice from the darkness.
“Have you come to disturb my peace as well?”

It spoke in Greek. Not the modern Greek the men of Avgonyma had used—the voice had the same ring of antiquity about it that Tigranes had had when declaiming his verses of heroism and disaster.

“No,” Gabriel responded in the same tongue, “we do not wish to disturb anything.”

A shape appeared then at the edge of the pool of light the flashlight cast. The figure was low and muscular—an animal’s body. And when it moved it was with the
languorous rippling grace of a jungle cat, a jaguar or a lion. But its torso rose higher than any cat’s, and the silhouette of its head was…

Gabriel gripped the flashlight tighter.

The silhouette of its head was a man’s.

“You speak the language of Olympos like a foreigner,” the sphinx said, stepping forward into the light. “Like an
invader.
”

It reared up, its paws extended fully. It was almost Gabriel’s height this way—and clearly many times his weight. The hair cascading over its shoulders was as gray as the fur upon its chest, and its face was lined, drawn. But its eyes were fierce and clear, their irises a piercing sapphire blue. And stretching along the creature’s back Gabriel saw a folded pair of wings.

He blinked to clear his vision, thought back to the brief moments of vertigo he’d felt climbing the mountain, the stings he’d suffered from the wasps, the hours since he’d eaten. Could he be hallucinating? But if he was, Sheba seemed to be as well, judging by the strength with which her fingers were digging into his arm from behind.

Gabriel made himself step forward. “It’s true,” he said, “that we are not from Greece. But we are no invaders.”

“You come here,” the sphinx said, its voice rising as it spoke, “you discharge your weapons, you shatter a peace of centuries, and yet you say you are not invaders! How dare you?”

“We came to stop this man,” Gabriel said, gesturing behind him, toward Karoly’s remains, “and another you’ll find dead on the mountaintop. They were the invaders—they were searching for your treasure, to use it for terrible ends.”

“My treasure? I have no treasure.” The sphinx shook its head roughly, and its hair flew about.

“Maybe you don’t think of it as treasure,” Gabriel
said. “But whatever you used to…to do this.” And he gestured backwards again.

“All men have stone within them,” the sphinx said brusquely. “All living creatures do. When I wish, I bring it out. I don’t
use
anything to do so.”

“You do it just by…by looking at them?” Gabriel said.

“What does
looking
have to do with it? I could make a statue of you just as well with my eyes closed,” the sphinx said. “Both of you. Any of you! I could salt the earth with statues! I could end all of your kind at once, however many millions you now pestilentially represent. Or is it billions now, I wonder? You multiply so…”

“That can’t be,” Gabriel said. “It can’t. You can’t turn billions of people to stone.” But hearing himself say this he wondered—a day ago he’d have said it was impossible to turn even one person to stone. Was a billion less plausible?

“Don’t test me, human,” the sphinx said. “You will rue it. Perhaps I will leave you alive, the last of your kind as I am of mine, to lament to the end of your paltry days that you doubted me.”

“I don’t,” Gabriel said quickly. “I don’t doubt—”

“You lie!” the sphinx roared. It began pacing, walking in a tight circle around them. It had a musky, unwashed smell, a smell of exertion and lassitude. For all its explosive anger, Gabriel got a sense of fatigue from the creature, of extreme age and isolation.

“You lie,” it repeated. “And you must pay for it.” It leaned in close to Gabriel, its breath hot on his cheeks. “But I shall be fair. My kind always has been—we have always dealt by the rules we’re bound by, though we suffer grievously for it.

“I will pose for you a question, a simple question. It calls for a simple answer, and if you give it I will let you
live—all of you. But if you do not answer, if you cannot answer, if you choose not to answer, if you fail to answer, then, human, I will let
only
you live—you alone of all humanity, and a world of stone to keep you company in your grief.”

“Gabriel, you can’t—” Sheba said.

“Ah, the female speaks as well,” the sphinx said. “It is unfortunate she counsels you so poorly.” It turned a baleful glare upon her. “Not only
can
he, he
must.
It is my will.”

“What’s the question?” Gabriel said, thinking of all the legends he’d read, all the stories about the Theban sphinx. There was the famous riddle:
What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening, and is the weaker the more legs it has?
The answer being man: the crawling infant, the erect adult, and the infirm elder. And there was its sometime corollary:
What two sisters are they, the first giving birth to the second, and then the second once more to the first?
To which the answer was night and day. Either of those he could answer, and he thought he could manage others of their ilk.

“The question is this,” the sphinx said. “What is my name?”

“Your name?” Gabriel said.

“My name!”
the sphinx screamed, its voice echoing from the walls. “You will know my name. I will
teach
you my name. But—” It put a paw against Gabriel’s chest. “—only when you fail to
guess
my name.”

Rumpelstiltskin, Gabriel wanted to say. Your name is Rumpelstiltskin, and you can spin straw into gold…

Your name. Your name. How in God’s name, you’ll pardon the expression, am I supposed to pull the right answer out of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the almost infinite possibilities? This is no riddle! He
wanted to shout it: This is a fix-up, a fraud, a pretext for slaughter!

But no—it wouldn’t be. If the beast had wanted merely to kill them it could have. If it really had the power it claimed, it could have slaughtered all humanity at any time. It needed no pretext. If instead of killing it had asked this question, there had to be a way to answer it—a clue, a hint…something. Gabriel thought back to his first glimpse of the Sphinx in Egypt, the great and terrible Abul-Hôl, looming in the night. He thought back to the inscriptions, to their talk of a divine or holy treasure, and to the statues into whose flanks they were carved—which statues, with their impossible degree of sculptural perfection, must, he now knew, have been actual, living sphinxes once. And he thought of the story Tigranes had recounted, of the Theban sphinx’s journeys and her tribulations.

And then suddenly he realized he knew the answer.

“Your name is Fear,” Gabriel said.

The sphinx stepped back, silent.

“You’re their child,” Gabriel said. “The child of the Father of Fear. What else would have been sufficient to bring the men of Taprobane on a voyage halfway around the world? No ordinary treasure would, no mere prize, no artifact. But a sphinx cub, unlawfully bred, the unlawful child of an illicit union—that they could not let alone. They came for you, they found you, and they brought you back here.
You
were the treasure—your father’s divine treasure, your mother’s holy treasure. And then they…what? Punished them? By turning them to stone?”

“They gave her a choice.” The sphinx’s head was bowed, its eyes downcast. “I was tiny then, a newborn practically, no more than a century and a half; but I
remember it as if it were this morning. She could die, or I could.

“They told her my father had already chosen, that they’d left his body deep within his temple, at eternal rest. That he’d gone with her name on his lips. And they showed her a coin, I remember, from his land…”

Gabriel reached into his pocket and drew out the pair of coins. He held them out on his palm. The female sphinx and the amphora on one, the male profile on the other, the two facing one another in his hand.

The sphinx’s cheeks trembled as it looked from one to the other. It threw back its head and howled, tears running down its face.

“And this place,” Gabriel said, “became your cradle, this dark and terrible mountain. Have you never left it? For two thousand years?”

“Longer,” the sphinx said. “Even longer.”

“But you must leave it sometimes,” Gabriel said, “if just to hunt for food—”

“I am old,” the sphinx whispered. “I hardly hunt anymore. I hardly eat anymore.”

There was a tone of despair in its voice, a sound of finality.