Gabriel Hunt - Hunt at World's End

He raised both hands, palms out, placating. “I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t important, Veda. I need your help.”

“You need what ?”

“A place to stay for a couple of hours,” Gabriel said. “A phone we can use. Some water. That’s all. I promise, it won’t happen again, but I do need your help now.”

One of her hands curled into a fist against the door. “And we both know what your promises are worth.”

“You know that’s not fair,” Gabriel said. “I thought you were dead, Veda. I saw the plane blow up—”

“Oh, and remind me, which ancient culture’s mourning rituals involve sleeping with the deceased’s sister?”

Joyce and Daniel both looked at him. Joyce especially.

“And who are you, sweetheart?” Veda said, turning to Joyce. “His latest?” She looked Joyce up and down, like she was measuring her for a coffin. “Well, Gabriel, I guess you are maturing. At least this one’s not eighteen. Are you, honey?”

“Excuse me,” Joyce said, her eyes sparking every bit as much as Veda’s. “We just barely escaped being shot at and blown up and chased off a hotel roof, we climbed down thirty stories and stole a car, and all this is after we very nearly got buried alive twice — and I spent five days hanging in a goddamn cage—and we’re asking you for what, a lousy glass of water and a place to sit down? Lady, maybe he did screw your sister, but right this moment I honestly don’t give a damn!”

“Well, now,” Veda said. “Little spitfire, aren’t you? I’d watch out for this one, Gabriel. She might actually use the cleaver when the time comes.”

“The time won’t come,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry it ever did with you. Honestly, Veda, I never meant to hurt you.”

Veda blew a raspberry. “No, you just meant to deflower my sister. You know the worst part? She still talks about you. Says she never had another man who could measure up to you.”

Daniel and Joyce looked at him again. Especially Joyce.

“Do you think, maybe,” Gabriel said, in a small voice, “we could have this conversation inside? And maybe also in private? No reason Joyce and Daniel need to hear this. They’re tired—”

“I’m not too tired,” Joyce said. “And I’m finding this fascinating.”

“Well, take notes, love, because with this one you can’t be too careful.”

“Veda,” Gabriel said, “you’ve got the wrong impression, we’re not involved—”

“Shush, you,” Veda said, and turned back to Joyce. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Joyce told her. “And that’s your father?”

“My uncle,” Joyce said.

“Your uncle. I’m sure you have a good reason for carting him around while people shoot at you. Why don’t you come to the kitchen with me and tell me all about it…”

Veda took Joyce by the elbow and led her off, leaving the front door open. It was as much of an invitation as he was going to get, Gabriel thought. And maybe more than he deserved.

“You really slept with her sister?” Daniel whispered as they stepped inside.

“Daniel,” Gabriel said, “I’d think twice before lecturing anyone else on the subject of betrayal.”

Sitting on the couch, Joyce held the Star of Arnuwanda and read off the Nesili symbols along the outer rim: spire , cattle , tilled field , ash , offering , manure , dune , killing , dread , tar pit , and on and on, dozens of them, like some sort of glossary of the Hittite world. Daniel, sitting beside her and holding a bag of ice on his swollen knee, periodically corrected her translations.

Veda came into the living room. “So that’s the Star you were telling me about?”

“The Star of Arnuwanda, that’s right,” Joyce said. “It’ll tell us where the third Eye of Teshub is hidden—but only if we can figure out what the third element is.”

“You mean element like hydrogen and helium and uranium?”

“More like earth, air, fire, and water,” Daniel said. “This was a very long time ago. And the Hittites made it even simpler: They divided their world into just three fundamental substances, earth, water, and something else, but no one knows what that third one actually was.”

“Why not?”

“Because the only tablet on which it was carved that survived the destruction of their civilization was lost nearly a hundred years ago and all we’ve got are translations that aren’t very clear. We don’t know which symbol the translator had in mind when he wrote about the third element. ‘Loose soil’—there are any number of symbols that could correspond to, especially when some symbols have multiple meanings. Tilled field , for instance, also meant ‘fertile land’—and fertile soil might be described as ‘loose.’ Or manure , as in ‘night soil.’ Even cattle , which is sometimes translated as ‘breakers of the soil.’”

“Or ash ,” Veda said.

“I suppose,” Daniel said, thinking it over. “Ash is certainly loose, and that would at least push in the direction of ‘fire,’ which would be in keeping with the Greek model…”

“The problem is, there are too many possibilities,” Joyce said. “We need some way to narrow them down.”

“Well, there’s the map,” Daniel said. “It only covers the eastern hemisphere, so obviously that means all three gemstones were somewhere on these four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia.”

“It could be underwater, like the last one,” Gabriel pointed out. “The map also includes the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the South China Sea…”

“No,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Only one of the elements was water. The other two were definitely solids. Earth and…” He trailed off.

“That’s the question,” Joyce said. “Earth, water and what?”

“Maybe we’re approaching this from the wrong angle,” Gabriel said. “Rather than focusing on what the element is, maybe we should be thinking about what we know about the Eyes and how the Hittites hid them.”

“What do you mean?” Daniel said.

“I don’t know yet,” Gabriel said. “But we’ve seen two of the three hiding places—maybe there’s something there that will help us find the third.”

Daniel shifted on the couch, adjusting the bag of ice. “All right, let’s think it through. What have you seen in the crypts other than the jewels themselves?”

Joyce chewed her lip, thinking back to the underwater crypt in the Mediterranean and the one in Borneo. “They both had corpses stationed as guardians, men in armor who had been buried alive.”

“That’s generally what you find with the Hittites,” Daniel said. “Other cultures, too, for that matter—the Chinese at the Great Wall, even the British used to entomb workers in the foundation when they put up a bridge.”

“You’re kidding,” Veda said.

“No, no, it’s quite true,” Daniel said. “You know that verse of the song ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ that goes ‘Set a man to watch all night, watch all night, watch all night’? That’s a reference to burying a man in the bridge foundation, as a sort of guardian.”

“Learn something new every day,” Veda said.

“Come on, what else do we know?” Gabriel said.

Joyce’s eyes slid shut. “There were altars in both, with the jewels held in carved stone hands. The hands had hinged fingers that bent inward when the jewels were removed. In each case there was a panel overhead, a trap, that was released when the fingers moved. There was the light from the jewels, flickering on the walls…”

She opened her eyes. “The inscription,” she said.