Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear gh-2

by Gabriel Hunt

  “You want to sell it,” Gabriel said. “You don’t even know what it is or what it can do, but you’ve decided you’re going to sell the thing to some dictator to use against his enemies—”

  “Did I say ‘dictator’? That is your word, not mine. I just said he had to be wealthy, not what his politics needed to be. And if there are two of these treasures to be found, as I believe there should be, I will gladly sell the other to his opponent—let them be locked forever in a stalemate of induced terror, I don’t care. Just as long as their payments clear.”

  “And if this mythical power of the sphinx is just that—mythical?”

  DeGroet smiled. “Then I’ll have a pair of relics that will still fetch an excellent price at auction, won’t I?”

  “You’d kill nine men for that?”

  “I’d kill ninety, Mr. Hunt,” DeGroet said.

  Behind him, Gabriel felt the point of Karoly’s gun jab him again. But it was no longer poking squarely into the small of his back; it was nearer to his side now—and to his elbow. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. He moved swiftly, pinning the barrel between his arm and his side. Then he wrenched his torso to the left, holding tight to his grip on the gun. Karoly howled as the metal twisted in his injured hand. The beam of the flashlight in his other hand swung wildly. The gun fired, then fired again, as Karoly desperately squeezed the trigger, but the bullets sped into darkness, hitting only the far wall. Gabriel felt the heat of the gun’s barrel through his jacket, smelled scorched leather beneath the stronger odor of gunpowder. He squeezed harder with his elbow and bent forward sharply. He heard the bones of Karoly’s wrist snap. The gun clattered to the floor.

  “Run!” Gabriel shouted over Karoly’s screams and he saw Sheba dart out of sight, her footsteps speeding back toward the room with the cages. Behind him he heard the sound of DeGroet’s walking stick unlocking and the deadly saber sliding out of its metal sheath.

  Gabriel raised his other arm and smashed his elbow backwards, connecting with Karoly’s face. The man fell, the flashlight tumbling from his hand and spinning across the floor, coming to a stop against the wooden platform. Gabriel bent forward and reached down for the gun—but his foot connected with it before his groping hand did, sending it skittering into some dark corner of the room.

  He heard the swish of DeGroet’s blade then, flashing through the air where his head would have been if he hadn’t been bent double. He launched himself into a shoulder roll, coming up against one of the stone benches. He reached over to find the metal rack beside it. Was this the one with the halberd? No—his hand closed on one arm of the giant pincers. He saw DeGroet’s light coming near, bobbing as the man ran forward. Gabriel yanked the pincers out of the rack and swung them at the light, but DeGroet stepped nimbly out of the way and they swept through empty air. A second later DeGroet’s blade struck from the side, slicing through one leg of Gabriel’s pants and the flesh of his thigh underneath. He felt the wound open, felt blood run warm and sticky down his skin. It was his injured leg, too. He limped out of range as fast as he could, pulling over the rack behind him with a huge clatter of metal against stone. Anything to slow DeGroet down.

  He staggered to the end of the next bench over and felt for the rack that should be there. Which one was this? He felt a surge of relief as his hand closed not on the shaft of a branding iron or some other bit of paraphernalia but the hilt of a sword. He drew it quickly. Ancient steel and probably fragile, not the thing you wanted most when facing a former gold medalist in fencing—but it would have to do. For good measure, he grabbed a second sword in his other hand, swinging one overhead and the other at chest level.

  DeGroet loomed suddenly out of the darkness, his blade striking mercilessly toward Gabriel’s face. Gabriel parried it at the last second, the saber’s narrower blade clashing noisily against the steel of the curved sword in his left hand. He feinted with the one in his right, aiming high at DeGroet’s shoulder, and then when DeGroet angled his torso to dodge it, Gabriel changed course, tilted the blade down, and used it to sweep the flashlight off his hip. It flew through the air and smashed against the floor, leaving them in darkness.

  He heard DeGroet’s blade coming and reached up blindly to meet it. The blades struck with a clang of metal against metal, and DeGroet’s slid off. Two parries in a row—Gabriel congratulated himself. Some of the finest fencers in two Olympics hadn’t managed that against DeGroet. But the second time had just been blind luck, Gabriel knew—and he couldn’t count on getting lucky again. He took several rapid steps backwards, heard DeGroet coming after him.

  Neither of them could see, which negated DeGroet’s advantage in terms of pure swordsmanship. But fighting in the dark like this for any real length of time was no good. It left survival up to chance—and Gabriel had never been one to bet his life on the toss of a coin.

  Orienting himself against the one light remaining in the room, he ran toward the flashlight lying against the wooden platform. If he could get hold of it, maybe use it to locate the gun…But as he got close, he saw DeGroet racing for the same spot. DeGroet saw him as well, and poured on extra speed Gabriel wouldn’t have thought the man was capable of. They stepped onto the wooden platform at the same instant.

  Lit indirectly from below, the combat between the two men took on an almost dreamlike quality, their blades slashing in and out of visibility, cutting brief blazing arcs and vanishing again as they passed beyond the cone of light. DeGroet swept his sword down from above, an angled stroke of the cutting edge that could remove a man’s head; but Gabriel crossed his blades and caught DeGroet’s in the crook of the X they formed. DeGroet yanked the saber free and sent it darting at Gabriel’s chest. Gabriel sidestepped, parried with the flat of one blade and lunged with the other. The point streaked against DeGroet’s cheek and blood welled up.

  “A touch,” DeGroet said grimly, raising a finger to his cheek. “It will be your last.” And he lashed out with his sword, spiraling it around the blade in Gabriel’s left fist once, twice, and suddenly the sword flew from Gabriel’s hand, yanked out of his grip by expert pressure against the blade in just the right spot.

  Now it was down to one blade against one—a contest Gabriel knew he couldn’t win.

  He kicked out with one foot, planting his boot in DeGroet’s midsection. DeGroet flew backwards, fetching up against one of the chains, grabbing onto it with his free hand to keep himself from falling off the platform. Before he could come back, Gabriel leaned out past the platform’s edge and took hold of the lever by its side. With a mighty heave, he pulled it toward him.

  It didn’t want to move, but Gabriel left it no choice, dragging it along the channel in the floor in which it was lodged. It came, scraping with a horrendous squeal. DeGroet, meanwhile, had regained his footing and had his sword poised for another stroke—but a sound from overhead stopped them both. It was a loud grinding of stone against stone, not unlike the sound they’d heard in the chamber within the Great Sphinx, just before poor Rashidi had been chopped in half. They felt a tremor beneath their feet—and then suddenly the platform they were on lifted into the air, the chains rattling as they got forcefully yanked upwards.

  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 con
cussive 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.

  Chapter 26

  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…