He landed short, his chest hitting the floor, his legs dangling into the pit. He scrabbled with his hands as he felt himself begin to slide backwards. The floor was craggy, but the crags were low and worn, and his fingers, wet from the rain, couldn’t get a solid grip.
No—
No. This wasn’t how he’d go, lost in darkness, buried beneath ten thousand pounds of stone. It couldn’t be. He bit down hard with his fingertips against the rock, squeezed till they caught hold of something, till he was hanging literally by his fingertips—but hanging all the same, not falling, not anymore. He took a deep breath, let his racing heartbeat slow for half a second, and then began the process of inching his fingers forward. After an eternity he managed to get one elbow up over the edge…then the other…then his wet and battered trunk, and finally his legs.
He rolled over onto his back, breathing heavily, his chest heaving, his eyes closed. Too close. He’d had too many close calls over the past few days, and this one may have been the worst. Or maybe it was just the accumulation that had worn him down. On a good day he would have made that jump easily.
Of course, on a good day he wouldn’t have been attempting it with a bandaged ankle and a lacerated thigh.
He got to his feet and felt his way along the corridor till he came to the branch at the entrance to the cage room. There was no light at all—and his Zippo was up on the top of the mountain, in his jacket pocket.
He opened his mouth to call out, then hesitated. If Karoly was nearby and heard him…
But what was the alternative? Blundering around in the dark?
He shouted: “Sheba!”
At first there was no answer. Then he heard footsteps running toward him, and saw a light approaching from the left-hand passageway. He backed up against the wall and raised a fist in case it was Karoly his call had attracted.
But a moment later he heard Sheba’s voice. “Gabriel, thank god,” she said, sounding every bit as exhausted as he felt—and something more than exhausted, too. Frightened? That would be natural enough. But it was somehow not just fear he heard in her voice—it was something worse.
“What is it?” he said, stepping into her path. She fell into his arms. He could feel her shaking. “Is it Karoly, is he—”
“Karoly’s dead,” she said, her words muffled against his chest.
“Then what…?”
“It was a mistranslation, Gabriel,” Sheba said, her voice more unsteady than he’d ever heard it. “You said it was the power to terrify—but it wasn’t, Gabriel, it wasn’t that at all. It was the power to petrify.”
“What are you talking about? The treasure?” Gabriel said, and he felt her chin move as she nodded. “You found it?”
“Karoly did,” she said.
“But…terrify, petrify,” Gabriel said, “what’s the difference?”
Sheba raised her head. There was a brittle edge of panic to her voice. “Petrify, Gabriel—from the Greek, ‘petra,’ meaning rock or stone. Gabriel, the sphinx’s power wasn’t the power to frighten men—it was the power to turn them to stone.”
And she swung the flashlight’s beam around.
There was a statue in the passageway, just a few feet away. It was exquisitely detailed, as naturalistic as the ones Gabriel had found in the chambers in Egypt and Greece. But this one didn’t depict a sphinx.
It was Karoly.
He was frozen in an attitude of terror, one hand flung up before his face, the other—the one with the broken wrist—dangling crookedly by his side. But his body, his clothing…
Was stone.
Gabriel ran his fingers over the surface. His heart began trip-hammering again, worse even than when he’d been dangling at the edge of the pit. “What happened? Did he touch something? Did he…did he step on something? Inhale something?”
Sheba shook her head vigorously. “I was running away. I heard him coming after me, and then a sound…”
“What sound?”
She didn’t answer. But, then, she didn’t have to. Because they both heard the sound then. It was a low, rumbling growl, accompanied by the slow padding of clawed footsteps against stone.
“Get back,” Gabriel said, taking the flashlight from her.
The footsteps came closer, then stopped, just out of sight.
“And you,” came a voice from the darkness. “Have you come to disturb my peace as well?”
It spoke in Greek. Not the modern Greek the men of Avgonyma had used—the voice had the same ring of antiquity about it that Tigranes had had when declaiming his verses of heroism and disaster.
“No,” Gabriel responded in the same tongue, “we do not wish to disturb anything.”
A shape appeared then at the edge of the pool of light the flashlight cast. The figure was low and muscular—an animal’s body. And when it moved it was with the languorous rippling grace of a jungle cat, a jaguar or a lion. But its torso rose higher than any cat’s, and the silhouette of its head was…
Gabriel gripped the flashlight tighter.
The silhouette of its head was a man’s.
“You speak the language of Olympos like a foreigner,” the sphinx said, stepping forward into the light. “Like an invader.”
It reared up, its paws extended fully. It was almost Gabriel’s height this way—and clearly many times his weight. The hair cascading over its shoulders was as gray as the fur upon its chest, and its face was lined, drawn. But its eyes were fierce and clear, their irises a piercing sapphire blue. And stretching along the creature’s back Gabriel saw a folded pair of wings.
He blinked to clear his vision, thought back to the brief moments of vertigo he’d felt climbing the mountain, the stings he’d suffered from the wasps, the hours since he’d eaten. Could he be hallucinating? But if he was, Sheba seemed to be as well, judging by the strength with which her fingers were digging into his arm from behind.
Gabriel made himself step forward. “It’s true,” he said, “that we are not from Greece. But we are no invaders.”
“You come here,” the sphinx said, its voice rising as it spoke, “you discharge your weapons, you shatter a peace of centuries, and yet you say you are not invaders! How dare you?”
“We came to stop this man,” Gabriel said, gesturing behind him, toward Karoly’s remains, “and another you’ll find dead on the mountaintop. They were the invaders—they were searching for your treasure, to use it for terrible ends.”
“My treasure? I have no treasure.” The sphinx shook its head roughly, and its hair flew about.
“Maybe you don’t think of it as treasure,” Gabriel said. “But whatever you used to…to do this.” And he gestured backwards again.
“All men have stone within them,” the sphinx said brusquely. “All living creatures do. When I wish, I bring it out. I don’t use anything to do so.”
“You do it just by…by looking at them?” Gabriel said.
“What does looking have to do with it? I could make a statue of you just as well with my eyes closed,” the sphinx said. “Both of you. Any of you! I could salt the earth with statues! I could end all of your kind at once, however many millions you now pestilentially represent. Or is it billions now, I wonder? You multiply so…”
“That can’t be,” Gabriel said. “It can’t. You can’t turn billions of people to stone.” But hearing himself say this he wondered—a day ago he’d have said it was impossible to turn even one person to stone. Was a billion less plausible?
“Don’t test me, human,” the sphinx said. “You will rue it. Perhaps I will leave you alive, the last of your kind as I am of mine, to lament to the end of your paltry days that you doubted me.”