“I don’t,” Gabriel said quickly. “I don’t doubt—”
“You lie!” the sphinx roared. It began pacing, walking in a tight circle around them. It had a musky, unwashed smell, a smell of exertion and lassitude. For all its explosive anger, Gabriel got a sense of fatigue from the creature, of extreme age and isolation.
“You lie,” it repeated. “And you must pay for it.” It leaned in close to Gabriel, its breath hot on his cheeks. “But I shall be fair. My kind always has been—we have always dealt by the rules we’re bound by, though we suffer grievously for it.
“I will pose for you a question, a simple question. It calls for a simple answer, and if you give it I will let you live—all of you. But if you do not answer, if you cannot answer, if you choose not to answer, if you fail to answer, then, human, I will let only you live—you alone of all humanity, and a world of stone to keep you company in your grief.”
“Gabriel, you can’t—” Sheba said.
“Ah, the female speaks as well,” the sphinx said. “It is unfortunate she counsels you so poorly.” It turned a baleful glare upon her. “Not only can he, he must. It is my will.”
“What’s the question?” Gabriel said, thinking of all the legends he’d read, all the stories about the Theban sphinx. There was the famous riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening, and is the weaker the more legs it has? The answer being man: the crawling infant, the erect adult, and the infirm elder. And there was its sometime corollary: What two sisters are they, the first giving birth to the second, and then the second once more to the first? To which the answer was night and day. Either of those he could answer, and he thought he could manage others of their ilk.
“The question is this,” the sphinx said. “What is my name?”
“Your name?” Gabriel said.
“My name!” the sphinx screamed, its voice echoing from the walls. “You will know my name. I will teach you my name. But—” It put a paw against Gabriel’s chest. “—only when you fail to guess my name.”
Rumpelstiltskin, Gabriel wanted to say. Your name is Rumpelstiltskin, and you can spin straw into gold…
Your name. Your name. How in God’s name, you’ll pardon the expression, am I supposed to pull the right answer out of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the almost infinite possibilities? This is no riddle! He wanted to shout it: This is a fix-up, a fraud, a pretext for slaughter!
But no—it wouldn’t be. If the beast had wanted merely to kill them it could have. If it really had the power it claimed, it could have slaughtered all humanity at any time. It needed no pretext. If instead of killing it had asked this question, there had to be a way to answer it—a clue, a hint…something. Gabriel thought back to his first glimpse of the Sphinx in Egypt, the great and terrible Abul-Hôl, looming in the night. He thought back to the inscriptions, to their talk of a divine or holy treasure, and to the statues into whose flanks they were carved—which statues, with their impossible degree of sculptural perfection, must, he now knew, have been actual, living sphinxes once. And he thought of the story Tigranes had recounted, of the Theban sphinx’s journeys and her tribulations.
And then suddenly he realized he knew the answer.
“Your name is Fear,” Gabriel said.
The sphinx stepped back, silent.
“You’re their child,” Gabriel said. “The child of the Father of Fear. What else would have been sufficient to bring the men of Taprobane on a voyage halfway around the world? No ordinary treasure would, no mere prize, no artifact. But a sphinx cub, unlawfully bred, the unlawful child of an illicit union—that they could not let alone. They came for you, they found you, and they brought you back here. You were the treasure—your father’s divine treasure, your mother’s holy treasure. And then they…what? Punished them? By turning them to stone?”
“They gave her a choice.” The sphinx’s head was bowed, its eyes downcast. “I was tiny then, a newborn practically, no more than a century and a half; but I remember it as if it were this morning. She could die, or I could.
“They told her my father had already chosen, that they’d left his body deep within his temple, at eternal rest. That he’d gone with her name on his lips. And they showed her a coin, I remember, from his land…”
Gabriel reached into his pocket and drew out the pair of coins. He held them out on his palm. The female sphinx and the amphora on one, the male profile on the other, the two facing one another in his hand.
The sphinx’s cheeks trembled as it looked from one to the other. It threw back its head and howled, tears running down its face.
“And this place,” Gabriel said, “became your cradle, this dark and terrible mountain. Have you never left it? For two thousand years?”
“Longer,” the sphinx said. “Even longer.”
“But you must leave it sometimes,” Gabriel said, “if just to hunt for food—”
“I am old,” the sphinx whispered. “I hardly hunt anymore. I hardly eat anymore.”
There was a tone of despair in its voice, a sound of finality.
“We can get you food,” Gabriel said. “I can arrange for supplies to be flow in, I can—”
“And face men each day? No. No.” It stepped back, toward the shadow. “You have given me all I need. You have shown me my mother’s face again.”
“Please, let me do something to help—”
“Gabriel,” Sheba said.
He turned to her. “What?”
“Look,” she said, and pointed.
Turning back, he saw the gray of the sphinx’s fur deepening, darkening; then he saw the skin of its face turning stiff, blank, saw the liquid surface of its eyes harden. The change crept across its body gradually, but rapidly. In seconds it was over.
Gabriel stepped forward, touched its shoulder. The stone was still slightly warm. But as he felt it, it cooled beneath his hand.
He took the two coins, stacked them, and gently slid them into the statue’s open mouth, beneath its tongue.
Chapter 27
They found a stairway, carved into the rock, that led up to the top. The climb was torment—by the end, Gabriel’s legs were burning with pain and Sheba could barely walk.
They came out into a clear night sky. The storm had passed. The stone surface glistened wetly, but the air was warm and dry.
At the far end of the rock, near where DeGroet’s body lay, a familiar helicopter stood, its door open. The pilot was by the door, talking into a microphone, and when he spotted them walking toward him, he shouted.
“Hold on—yes, hold on! I found them!”
They staggered forward.
“How did you…?” Gabriel began, but for the moment he couldn’t get any more words out.
“Talk to your brother,” the pilot said, and handed over the microphone, then stepped around Gabriel to help Sheba up into the cabin.
“Gabriel? Are you okay?” It was Michael’s voice.
“I’ve been better,” Gabriel said.
“I want you back here now.”
“Not half as much as I do,” Gabriel said. “How did you find me?”
“We tracked your signal,” Michael said.
“What…what signal? I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t have…”
“That guy, Cipher,” Michael said. “He sent me an e-mail saying he’d given you a device to track someone else, right? Well, he had the good sense to slip in a transmitter going the other way so we could track you, too. Clever, right? And we didn’t even ask him to do it, he just thought of it on his own.”