A low hum reached his ears. He glanced around the chamber, trying to find the source, until he realized it was coming from the emerald itself.
Grissom stepped up to the pedestal. His whole body seemed to tremble in anticipation. His flashlight beam struck the wall behind the pedestal and revealed large cuneiform symbols etched across the stone. It was the same alphabet as on the Star and the map.
Grissom swept his beam slowly across the symbols. “‘The fire at world’s end,’” he translated. “The end of the world! An apocalyptic prophecy. How perfect.”
“Light,” Joyce said.
Grissom turned to her. “What?”
“It’s doesn’t say the fire at world’s end, it says the light at world’s end,” Joyce replied. “The Nesili cuneiforms for light and fire are close, but they’re not the same. It’s an easy mistake to make, for an amateur.”
Grissom frowned. “If you’re expecting to get a rise out of me, Ms. Wingard, you’re sorely mistaken.” He turned back to the gemstone. They barely heard him mutter, “My son, on the other hand…”
Julian whirled around and punched Joyce in the stomach so quickly Gabriel didn’t even see it coming. Joyce doubled over, coughing and trying to catch her breath.
“Leave her alone!” Gabriel shouted. He struggled against his bonds, but the barrel of the gun behind him dug deeper into his back, a reminder to behave himself.
“What kind of a coward do you have to be,” Noboru said, “to hit a defenseless woman?”
Julian stepped up to Noboru and pulled back his fist, this time the one with the silver stag’s head ring. Without even turning around to see what his son was doing, Grissom said, “That’s enough, Julian.” Glowering at Noboru, the blond man lowered his hand and returned to his father’s side.
The gunman behind Joyce pulled on the ropes around her wrists, yanking her upright. She coughed again, her face red with exertion, tears squeezing from the corners of her eyes.
“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked.
She nodded and spat on the ground. “He just caught me off guard.” She shouted at Julian, “Next time try that when my hands aren’t tied!”
“Hold your tongue, Ms. Wingard, or I will remove it,” Grissom said. He reached for the gemstone. As his hands moved closer to it, the humming seemed to grow higher in pitch. “An energy field,” he marveled. “Given off by the stone itself. There can be no doubt it’s just as the legend describes. Not only a key to Teshub’s weapon, but a kind of battery that powers it.” He lifted the emerald out of the stone hand’s grasp and laughed with excitement. “I can feel it. Like the pulse of the storm god himself!”
Julian pulled a black velvet sack out of a pocket in his vest. Grissom deposited the emerald into it. Julian pulled the strings around the sack’s mouth tight and returned it to his pocket.
A strange grinding sound came from the pedestal. The fingers of the stone hand suddenly bent inward on hidden hinges, forming a fist around the space where the emerald had been. Above, the ceiling rumbled and started to pull back from where it met the wall. Thick brown clods of dirt rained down over the pedestal. The ceiling continued to slide away on ancient tracks, dumping more dirt into the chamber. Gears within the walls groaned, and a thick stone slab started slowly descending in front of the archway, gradually sealing off the way they’d come in.
Grissom, Julian and the four gunmen all made a dash for the archway. Gabriel glanced around quickly, desperate to find another way out of the chamber. But there was no other exit, only the arch, and that was rapidly vanishing behind the descending slab. The dirt, meanwhile, was already up to his shins, with more raining down as the ceiling continued to withdraw.
Joyce and Noboru hurried toward the archway, their steps uneven. Joyce stumbled and dropped to one knee. Gabriel came up behind her and tried to help her to her feet again. It wasn’t easy with his hands tied behind him. He nudged his shoulder under her arm, and she leaned back against him, levering herself upright. The level of dirt was rising higher, with some piles already at waist height. More rained down continuously, making it harder to move. By the time they reached the archway, only a narrow opening remained between the growing pile of dirt on the floor and the slab of stone dropping from above.
Joyce plunged through, tumbling forward headfirst, her feet kicking as she fell. Then Noboru slid through, his back scraping the underside of the stone slab. Gabriel struggled forward. He threw himself at the shrinking hole, ducking under the slab and eeling out into the corridor on his belly. A moment later, the bottom of the slab hit the top of the dirt mound below it, closing off the chamber.
Pushing himself back onto his feet, he could hear the dirt, tons of it, pouring against the other side of the stone slab. If they’d been trapped inside, they would shortly have joined the six Hittites in being buried alive.
Grissom and his men were standing around them in a half-circle, their guns drawn.
“Well,” Grissom said, brushing dirt from his legs. “That’s one down, two to go.”
Gabriel shook the dirt from his hair. “What are you going to do with us?”
“Never fear. I have uses for you and your friends yet, Mr. Hunt,” Grissom replied. He started back along the corridor toward the steps to the surface.
As they were marched along behind Grissom, Gabriel tried to loosen the knot around his wrists, but the ropes wouldn’t budge.
When they emerged into the sunlight, Grissom kept walking toward the forest. Julian stayed behind, hovering by the door of the crypt. Gabriel kept his eyes on him even as the gunman behind him shoved him forward, watching intently as Julian pulled the Death’s Head Key out of the lock of the still-open iron door and hung it around his neck again.
By this point, Grissom had reached the tree line. He turned to face them. “We’re done here,” he called to Julian. “Destroy the crypt.”
“What?” Gabriel said. He turned around to see one of Grissom’s men passing Julian a bundle of dynamite.
“You can’t!” Joyce cried. “Do you have any idea how old that crypt is? Who knows what else can be learned from it?”
Grissom shrugged. “Undoubtedly. But I don’t want anyone to know where we’ve been, or what we have found. I’m afraid certain sacrifices must be made.” He turned his back on them and kept walking into the trees.
Gabriel watched as Julian flicked a lighter under the long fuse attached to the dynamite. Julian threw the lit bundle into the open door and began tearing across the clearing toward the spot where his father had vanished. “Move!” the gunman behind Gabriel shouted. “Now!”
They had just reached the edge of the clearing when a loud explosion rocked the trees. Birds screamed and flew out of the canopy, soaring away from the cloud of dark smoke that billowed into the sky.
From his vantage point amid the trees on the opposite side, Vassily Platonov saw the blond man toss the dynamite into the doorway, then watched him and the others run off, the armed men and their three bound captives. The blond man was not one of those who had deprived Ulikummis of his sacrifice the night before, but it hardly mattered. In following the interlopers who had dared come to their sacred ground and free the American girl, Vassily now saw there were even more trespassers to be dealt with. The ground shook suddenly with an enormous subterranean explosion. Black smoke erupted from the doorway as the structure collapsed, taking half the hillside with it.