“Just as long as you don’t get any bright ideas,” Karoly said.
“If I were the type to get bright ideas,” Gabriel said, “I wouldn’t be here, would I?” He swung the rope back across the pit.
DeGroet caught it, handed his walking stick to Istvan, moved his grip around a bit till he got comfortable with it, and then swung across, the light hanging from his hip brushing a reflected arc against the stone wall. When he had landed, he had Istvan throw the walking stick to him. He snatched it one-handed out of the air.
Then he sent the rope back. Istvan took hold of it and walked up to the edge. He tugged on the rope a couple of times, wrapped it around one hand as Sheba had, held on with the other hand, and launched himself across.
When he’d made it halfway, the crossbeam snapped.
He vanished in a split second, plummeting into the pit. He screamed all the way down.
It took him as long to hit bottom as it had taken the stone block to fall. The sound of his impact, when it came, was quieter. That made it no less painful to hear.
“Unfortunate,” DeGroet said, after a moment. He aimed his stick down the corridor. “Now get moving.”
Chapter 25
Karoly had taken the flashlight back from Sheba and was shining it between them, lighting the path a few feet ahead. They were walking two abreast, Gabriel and Sheba in front, DeGroet and Karoly in the rear, the clicks of the old man’s stick against the stone floor punctuating their progress as they went.
The main corridor ended at an archway that led into a circular chamber, though there were other, smaller archways branching off to the left and right as well. Prodded by Karoly’s gun in his back, Gabriel walked forward.
The room was large enough that it took them some time to explore it all. There was no map on any of the walls, Gabriel noted, and no sculptures, of sphinxes or otherwise. What they did find was cages, their bars extending all the way from the rough-hewn floor to a ceiling some fourteen or fifteen feet overhead. In each there were metal shackles attached to the walls by heavy chains, the circular bands lying open and empty on the ground. Some cages had just one pair, some had two. One had three. And the walls were covered with the intricate swoops and whorls of the Sinhala alphabet, the faded ink showing dimly in the yellow beams of the flashlights.
“Please do us the kindness of translating this…this scribbling,” DeGroet said to Sheba.
“I’m no expert—” Sheba began
“Come now,” DeGroet said. “We both know that an expert is precisely what you are. I seem to recall seeing a paper of yours on Sri Lankan vowel variants in the Journal of Phonetics, and though I didn’t understand two words of it, I trust the peer reviewers wouldn’t have accepted it if its author had been illiterate in the languages it purported to analyze. Now—what does that say?” And he swung his stick to point at a passage inscribed beside the largest of the cages.
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?”