Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

Sheba read it over twice. “It’s a…a feeding guide. It specifies a diet of one whole cow and two goat flanks daily, to be provided freshly slaughtered but not prepared in any other way.”

“Provided to what ?” DeGroet said.

“It doesn’t say.”

“All right. How about this one?” DeGroet pointed out a bit of text a few cages down.

“Same thing. Only this one got goats and sheep, one of each in the morning and then again at night.”

“That’s all?” DeGroet said.

“It says they’re to be brought to the cage alive,” Sheba said.

“Not a word about what it was that would eat all these goats and sheep?”

Sheba shook her head.

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“I’m not lying,” Sheba said. “That’s what it says.”

DeGroet looked around at the rows of empty cages. His face betrayed a strange mix of elation and disappointment. “It’s proof,” he muttered, half to himself. “It’s proof enough.”

“Of what?” Gabriel said. “That thousands of years ago, they bred sphinxes here? I don’t think so.”

“It’s proof they bred something, Hunt. Something big. Look at the size of those shackles. Something carnivorous, too—we know that, thanks to Miss McCoy. What do you suppose it was they were breeding?”

“I don’t suppose anything,” Gabriel said. “If I had to guess, I’d say maybe lions. Or maybe they brought some tigers over from South India. Or jackals—they have those in India as well.”

“You ever see a jackal eat a cow?”

“Actually, yes,” Gabriel said. “I have.”

“By itself? One jackal, a whole cow?”

“No,” Gabriel said, “there were a few of them, but—”

“You wouldn’t build a cage like this to house a jackal,” DeGroet said, and silently Gabriel had to admit he agreed. “And you couldn’t sell a jackal for much at all. No prince would come across the sea to buy one. No, the inhabitants of these cages were far rarer than that.”

“Maybe,” Gabriel said. “But they were not monsters. Terrible creatures, perhaps. Fierce ones trained to attack or to guard. But not crossbreeds between animals and men.”

“You are so very sure of yourself,” DeGroet said. “It must be comforting at a time like this.” He gestured toward Karoly. “Let’s go on.”

Karoly prodded Gabriel into the next room. This one seemed to have once been an antechamber of some sort, smaller than the previous room and with stone benches where the other room had cages. Between each bench and its neighbor a metal rack stood, covered thickly with dust and cobwebs and crammed with various tools and implements. In the brief glance he got as the flashlights’ beams swept past, Gabriel spotted a sort of halberd or poleax in one, with both a blade and a point at the end—the sort of thing you might use to keep a large animal at bay. He also saw what looked like a branding iron, and something else that resembled a long-armed pair of pincers, and—was that a rack of swords and armor pieces? But DeGroet and Karoly pressed them onward and the narrow shafts of light moved on as well.

In the center of the room there was a circular platform made from what looked like a single thickly varnished slab of wood, with vertical chains attached to the perimeter at regular intervals. Karoly angled his flashlight up to see what the other ends of the chains were attached to, but they receded into darkness too far above for the light to reach.

A long metal lever abutted the platform and DeGroet approached it, struck it ringingly with the side of his walking stick. “Interesting,” he said. “Interesting.” He turned in a tight circle, the light on his belt traveling along the walls. “What do you think, Hunt? If you were going to hide an ancient treasure somewhere here, where would you put it?”

“Can I ask what it is you’re looking for?” Gabriel said. DeGroet didn’t answer him. “You don’t know, do you?” He felt a jab from Karoly’s gun but he went on anyway. “I don’t think you have the faintest idea.”

“Oh, I have as much of an idea as you have,” DeGroet said, “and that was enough to bring you halfway around the world, wasn’t it? It’s a treasure—we know that. Is it a mechanical device of some sort? A religious artifact? Some physical relic of a living sphinx? No one knows. But there is no question that a treasure of some sort was taken out of Egypt and brought back here—and apparently one from Greece, too. Something precious. And powerful—very, very powerful.”

“You believe that?” Gabriel said. “This business about the power to terrify with a glance?”

“I have what you might call an open mind,” DeGroet said.

“But what would you even want with it?” Gabriel said. “Did you suddenly wake up one morning and decide you wanted to rule the world?”

“Rule the world? Me?” DeGroet laughed, a sincere, full-throated laugh that echoed against the ancient stone walls. “I’d sooner hang myself. No, Mr. Hunt, I don’t want this power for myself. I’m quite content living a life of leisure. Ruling the world would be a terrible chore.”

“Then why…?”

“ I don’t wish to rule the world,” DeGroet said, “but that doesn’t mean no one does. And while some of the men who do are penurious madmen living in squalid apartments in third-world slums, with no possibility of paying someone who could help them realize their ambition, others are quite wealthy and would give a large fraction of that wealth for a treasure of the ancient world that might confer upon them the power to terrify an army into immobility.”

“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.