Gabriel Hunt - Hunt at World's End

Daniel limped back to the jeep to get the flashlight. When he returned, he handed it down to Joyce. “This is your find, Joyce. It’s your name they’ll put on this before anyone else’s. It should be you who has the honor of being the first to set foot inside.”

Joyce took the flashlight from him and held onto his hand. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

“I know, my dear. I know how much you wanted this. And I want you to know I’m sorry for—well, for everything, but especially for trying to stand in the way of your doing…this. I never should have treated you like you’re still a little girl who needs her foolish, overprotective uncle’s help.” He squeezed her hand. “But most of all, I want you to know how proud of you I am. I’m frightened for you—but I couldn’t be prouder.”

Gabriel raised his left hand in the air. The luminous digits on the dial of his wristwatch had begun to glow as the daylight faded into darkness. “Not that I want to come between a girl and her uncle, but…”

“No, you’re right,” Daniel said. He released Joyce’s hand, picked up a pair of electric lanterns and handed them down. Then he climbed down into the pit himself.

Joyce led the way through the door. Gabriel followed and Daniel brought up the rear. The stale air inside the crypt was stifling. They followed a stone stairway down into darkness, their footsteps echoing off the walls, the lanterns lending an orange tint to their surroundings.

At the bottom of the steps, a long corridor stretched into the blackness. The lantern beams illuminated alcoves along the walls on either side. The bodies inside them had been mummified by the dry air, their skin shrunken against their bones like a thin layer of old leather, brown and cracked; but their armor remained mostly intact, preserved by the lack of moisture. As the lantern light passed along the corpses’ empty eye sockets, it almost looked like the dead soldiers were watching them pass.

Ahead, the corridor led through an archway into a small chamber where colored light shimmered against the wall. But instead of the green light they’d seen in the other two crypts, this time the light was a deep, rich crimson. Gabriel raised his lantern up over his head and Joyce did the same with hers. At the far end of the chamber, atop a pedestal and gripped in a stone hand, sat an enormous ruby.

“Well, that’s different,” she said. She walked to the pedestal for a closer look.

“Be careful,” Gabriel said. “Don’t touch it yet.” He glanced up at the ceiling, wondering what trap the Hittite architects had in store for them this time.

“Look at this,” Joyce said. “The inscription is different, too.” She held her lantern up to the wall behind the pedestal. Nesili symbols were carved into the rock—but more of them this time than there had been in the other crypts.

“Fascinating,” Daniel said, stepping forward.

“Want to do the honors?” Gabriel asked. “My Nesili’s okay, but I’m not the best sight reader.”

Daniel translated as Joyce moved the light slowly across the symbols. “ ‘Three armies will determine its fate…’ It’s the final verse of the legend. It explains how, when the time comes, three armies will determine how the Spearhead will be used—as a force for destruction or as something that benefits mankind. And it describes Teshub’s final judgment as to whether mankind is wise enough to possess the Spearhead.”

“I guess the answer was no,” Gabriel said.

“More like ‘not yet,’ ” Daniel said. “Teshub didn’t destroy it, after all. He hid it. And what’s hidden can be found.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you two get over by the door.” They went to stand by the archway while Gabriel carefully approached the ruby. “And if I say run, you run—understand? Don’t even look back, just get the hell out of here.”

Joyce nodded. “Be careful.”

Gabriel studied the ruby in the stone hand’s grasp. It was lit from within by the same natural iridescence as the emeralds had been. It had the same wide, flat octagonal cut, too, but this gem was bigger, almost twice the size of the others. As Gabriel reached for it, he heard the pitch of the electrical hum emanating from it change and felt the hairs on the back of his arm stand straight up. He took hold of the ruby with both hands and lifted it gently out of the stone fingers’ grasp. The stone felt warm in his hands, and the electrical charge it gave off was much stronger than that of the second Eye.

The fingers of the stone hand began to scrape closed. Gabriel backed away, watching the ceiling for any signs of movement. There weren’t any—in the ceiling. But the whole chamber began to shake, almost as if the area were in the grip of an earthquake. Daniel put one arm around Joyce and braced himself in the archway. Sand sifted down from cracks in the ceiling.

“ Run, ” Gabriel said.

They raced out of the chamber and into the corridor, sprinting toward the steps leading up to the desert. Knocked free by the tremors, the mummified bodies tumbled out of their alcoves and smashed against the floor. In the lead, Joyce leapt over one and kept going, while Daniel, limping on his bad leg, took pains to skirt another. Behind them both, Gabriel hurtled over one only to find another falling against him. He found himself wrestling with a corpse, its shriveled head inches from his face, the mummified jaw hanging open in an eternal expression of shock. Gabriel shoved the body aside and kept running, taking the stairs two at a time while the crypt trembled and shook around him.

Outside, he pulled himself quickly out of the pit. Joyce and Daniel were already standing on the sand, looking around nervously. A deep rumbling continued to emanate from somewhere below, but none of the baobabs in the distance were swaying, no animals had run into the open. Definitely not an earthquake, Gabriel thought. Something rarer and stranger was happening.

“What’s that?” Joyce shouted, pointing.

A few dozen yards away, the sand had begun to undulate, bulging upward in the shape of an enormous dome. A massive stone broke through the surface and kept rising, the sand pouring off its sides. Initially it looked like it was only a dome, a smaller version of Uluru in Australia, perhaps, an extrusion resulting from plate tectonics. But after a moment it became apparent that this was no mere dome. Because the next thing that came into view as the stone continued rising was a pair of roughly carved eyes. The eyes were followed by an enormous carved nose. It was a giant stone head—then a giant bearded head—then a head and neck—then head, neck, and shoulders—and still it came, this giant figure, displacing tons of sand as it emerged into the night air. The figure’s wide shoulders appeared, then its chest, its torso. Its arms; its hips and thighs; its knees. Gabriel watched as the titanic figure emerged, until finally the statue towered seventy feet above them, silhouetted against the moonlit sky.

Daniel stepped forward, staring with awe. “Teshub.”

The statue of Teshub stood silently before them, one hand at its side, the other held out, palm up, as if offering something to his followers. But the hand was empty. The Spearhead wasn’t there.

“Look at the eyes,” Daniel said, craning his neck to do so.

The statue’s eyes were wide, blank ovals of stone, and where the iris of each eye should have been was a dark, empty socket, that looked just about deep enough for one of the gemstones to fit inside.

“Fascinating,” Daniel said. “The storm god risen from the desert sand, awaiting the return of his eyes, and ready to give his gift to the world. Have you ever seen anything so magnificent?”