Hunt at World's End (17 page)

“Yes, High Priest. How many will you require?”

“All of them,” Vassily said.

The jeep’s tires kicked up clouds of dust as it rattled and bumped over the uneven terrain of the desert. To make better time, Gabriel avoided the salt flats and the more verdant areas of the Kalahari, not wanting to be slowed down by traffic, safari tours or any of the native San villages. Massive, spiderlike baobab trees rose up every few hundred yards like sentinels amid the ocean of sand. The dry brush that poked out of the dunes scratched at the underside of the jeep as they raced over it while dust-colored meerkats poked their heads curiously out of their burrows to watch them pass. In the seat next to him, Joyce was buckled in, but only loosely so she could twist around to face Daniel in back. They were reviewing the only information they had left: the notes and coordinates he’d written down back in Veda’s house when they’d identified the location of the third Eye. As the jeep bounded over a low dune, the equipment in the back clattered.

The flight from Madagascar to Botswana had been quick and, compared to the events on the
African Princess
, painless. They’d managed to duck into a cab at the pier and go straight to the airport, evading the local police who wanted to keep all the passengers for questioning about the cult’s attack. A few hours later, their plane had touched down at Sir Seretse Khama
International Airport in Gabarone. They’d rented the jeep at the airport counter after the clerk had assured them it could handle off-road driving in the desert, though nearly bouncing out of the driver’s seat each time they raced over a dune, Gabriel wasn’t so sure they hadn’t been sold a bill of goods. They’d also purchased a wide range of equipment from a local store that clearly catered mainly to hobbyists on holiday who liked to go digging in the desert. The salesman had been surprised to hear fluent Tswana coming from an American and, when Gabriel explained their bona fides, had shown them to the section of the store for professionals. Daniel and Joyce had picked out a haul that included shovels, a pickaxe, a pair of metal buckets, binoculars, lanterns, surveying tools, and more, while Gabriel had sought out a different aisle, the one where they sold bullets.

In the backseat of the jeep, Daniel consulted a pocket compass. “It shouldn’t be much farther now,” he shouted over the rattle of the vehicle. “Keep going straight.”

Gabriel swerved around a wide baobab tree, then righted their course. He called back to Daniel: “Just let me know when we’re—”

“Now!” Daniel shouted.

“Now?”

“Yes!”

Gabriel slammed on the brakes and swung the steering wheel hard around. A dust cloud surrounded the jeep for a moment, then settled. From his seat he saw only rolling dunes and small, brittle tufts of shrubbery. “Are you sure this is the place?” It looked utterly desolate, as empty and featureless as any of the landscape they’d been passing through for the better part of two hours.

“According to the map,” Daniel replied, “yes. It should be about three meters ahead of us.”

Gabriel opened the door and stepped out onto the sand. The afternoon sun beat down hard on his head and shoulders. Behind him, Daniel and Joyce got out of the jeep, shielded their eyes and looked around.

“I admit it doesn’t look very promising,” Daniel said.

“To be fair, the other sites didn’t look promising either,” Gabriel said.

Her brow beading with sweat from the oppressive heat, Joyce took off the shirt she wore over her tanktop and tossed it in the jeep. She circled to the rear, opened the hatchback and pulled out an armful of shovels. “I suppose it would’ve been too much to ask for the gemstone to be out in the open, just this once,” she said. She put the shovels down and went back for the pickaxe and buckets.

Daniel walked out across the flat expanse of sand, rubbing at the bandage on his injured shoulder. He read the compass every few feet and checked it against his notes. “Think of it,” he said. “I’ve studied the legend of the Three Eyes of Teshub for decades, as many others have. But unlike, say, El Dorado or Atlantis or any number of legends that aren’t true—”

“Don’t be so sure about El Dorado,” Gabriel muttered.

“What?” Daniel asked.

“Nothing. Go on.”

“I’m just thinking it’s remarkable that after studying this legend for so long I’ve held one of the actual Eyes of Teshub in my hands. They’re real. They’re not a fantasy or a made-up story or the invention of some bard drunk on kumis. And now we’re standing where the third and final Eye has rested for thousands of
years. Buried by eons of wind and sand. It’s extraordinary.”

Gabriel shielded his eyes and looked up at the sun. They’d already lost half the day getting here. Grissom could be anywhere. If they were lucky, he hadn’t figured out the location of the third gemstone and was still tooling around Turkey looking for them. Unfortunately, that had never been Gabriel’s kind of luck.

“Did any of your studies suggest how far down it might be?” he asked. “We may not have a lot of time to dig.”

Daniel shrugged. “Who can say? There’s a small village of mastaba tombs in the shadow of the Pyramid of Cheops. They were buried in the desert for millennia before anyone found them. And do you know how far they had to dig? Just fifteen feet. In the desert, the wind is always changing and the sand is always shifting. What’s buried hundreds of feet down one year might be so near the surface the next that a mild sandstorm could unearth it. We just have to hope this is a good year.” He stopped walking and pointed at the sand at his feet. “Here.” He stuffed his notes in his pocket, grabbed the pickaxe and used it to draw an X in the sand. “This is where we start.”

The sun crawled across the desert sky as Gabriel and Joyce dug. Daniel, his shoulder still sore from the arrow wound, worked on maintaining the pit walls instead, using a shovel and bucket to move the sand away from the ditch so it wouldn’t slide back in and fill up again.

It was backbreaking work. Rivulets of sweat flowed along Gabriel’s back, chest, neck and forehead. They paused occasionally to swig from the gallon jugs of bottled water they’d picked up in town, then got back to work. All the while, the baking sun
kept at them mercilessly. They’d dug ten feet down by the time the heat broke and the sun started to dip toward the horizon.

Gabriel grabbed a water bottle and lifted it to his parched lips. As he took a swallow and bent to replace the bottle on the ground, he felt the Death’s Head Key twitch where it lay against his chest. He looked down and saw it pressing against his shirt. Reaching into his collar for the leather strap around his neck, he pulled the key out and held it over the pit. Instead of hanging straight down it trembled at the end of the strap, hanging at a ten-degree angle. Joyce and Daniel stared at it. “We’re close,” he told them.

They resumed digging. The farther down they got, the more the Death’s Head Key strained against its strap. Up above them, Daniel rubbed his hands together, though whether it was with excitement or anxiety, Gabriel couldn’t say. Probably a bit of both—Gabriel was certainly feeling both himself.

Gabriel drove the edge of his shovel into the wall of sand before him, and it struck something hard. Something the metal blade of the shovel struck with a ringing
clank.

“My God,” Daniel whispered. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Let’s hope,” Gabriel said.

The sky was turning red with sunset by the time they cleared the sand away from a buried door. The door itself was made of metal, though it was set into a wall composed of blocks of sandstone. Like the others they’d seen, this door was covered with ornate carvings and had no handle, only the keyhole with its three slots and the small skull design carved above it. Gabriel took the key from around his neck and lined it up with the lock. This time he was prepared—but when the key jumped from his hand and pulled itself
into the lock, he still found his heart beating faster. Gabriel threw his strength into turning the key. It seemed to take more effort than the first two, but it was hard to say—after all, he hadn’t been the one turning it the first time and they had been underwater the second. All he knew for sure was that the imprint of the skull would be pressed into the flesh of his palm for a good long time. But he kept straining until he heard the loud, metallic click he was waiting for. He felt the resistance give way as the internal mechanism kicked in and the door began creaking open. They stepped back to make way. Dry, fetid air blew out of the crypt, stirring the sands around them.

Daniel limped back to the jeep to get the flashlight. When he returned, he handed it down to Joyce. “This is your find, Joyce. It’s your name they’ll put on this before anyone else’s. It should be you who has the honor of being the first to set foot inside.”

Joyce took the flashlight from him and held onto his hand. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

“I know, my dear. I know how much you wanted this. And I want you to know I’m sorry for—well, for everything, but especially for trying to stand in the way of your doing…this. I never should have treated you like you’re still a little girl who needs her foolish, overprotective uncle’s help.” He squeezed her hand. “But most of all, I want you to know how proud of you I am. I’m frightened for you—but I couldn’t be prouder.”

Gabriel raised his left hand in the air. The luminous digits on the dial of his wristwatch had begun to glow as the daylight faded into darkness. “Not that I want to come between a girl and her uncle, but…”

“No, you’re right,” Daniel said. He released Joyce’s hand, picked up a pair of electric lanterns and handed
them down. Then he climbed down into the pit himself.

Joyce led the way through the door. Gabriel followed and Daniel brought up the rear. The stale air inside the crypt was stifling. They followed a stone stairway down into darkness, their footsteps echoing off the walls, the lanterns lending an orange tint to their surroundings.

At the bottom of the steps, a long corridor stretched into the blackness. The lantern beams illuminated alcoves along the walls on either side. The bodies inside them had been mummified by the dry air, their skin shrunken against their bones like a thin layer of old leather, brown and cracked; but their armor remained mostly intact, preserved by the lack of moisture. As the lantern light passed along the corpses’ empty eye sockets, it almost looked like the dead soldiers were watching them pass.

Ahead, the corridor led through an archway into a small chamber where colored light shimmered against the wall. But instead of the green light they’d seen in the other two crypts, this time the light was a deep, rich crimson. Gabriel raised his lantern up over his head and Joyce did the same with hers. At the far end of the chamber, atop a pedestal and gripped in a stone hand, sat an enormous ruby.

“Well, that’s different,” she said. She walked to the pedestal for a closer look.

“Be careful,” Gabriel said. “Don’t touch it yet.” He glanced up at the ceiling, wondering what trap the Hittite architects had in store for them this time.

“Look at this,” Joyce said. “The inscription is different, too.” She held her lantern up to the wall behind the pedestal. Nesili symbols were carved into the
rock—but more of them this time than there had been in the other crypts.

“Fascinating,” Daniel said, stepping forward.

“Want to do the honors?” Gabriel asked. “My Nesili’s okay, but I’m not the best sight reader.”

Daniel translated as Joyce moved the light slowly across the symbols. “ ‘Three armies will determine its fate…’ It’s the final verse of the legend. It explains how, when the time comes, three armies will determine how the Spearhead will be used—as a force for destruction or as something that benefits mankind. And it describes Teshub’s final judgment as to whether mankind is wise enough to possess the Spearhead.”

“I guess the answer was no,” Gabriel said.

“More like ‘not yet,’ ” Daniel said. “Teshub didn’t destroy it, after all. He hid it. And what’s hidden can be found.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you two get over by the door.” They went to stand by the archway while Gabriel carefully approached the ruby. “And if I say run, you run—understand? Don’t even look back, just get the hell out of here.”

Joyce nodded. “Be careful.”

Gabriel studied the ruby in the stone hand’s grasp. It was lit from within by the same natural iridescence as the emeralds had been. It had the same wide, flat octagonal cut, too, but this gem was bigger, almost twice the size of the others. As Gabriel reached for it, he heard the pitch of the electrical hum emanating from it change and felt the hairs on the back of his arm stand straight up. He took hold of the ruby with both hands and lifted it gently out of the stone fingers’ grasp. The stone felt warm in his hands, and the electrical charge it gave off was much stronger than that of the second Eye.

The fingers of the stone hand began to scrape closed. Gabriel backed away, watching the ceiling for any signs of movement. There weren’t any—in the ceiling. But the whole chamber began to shake, almost as if the area were in the grip of an earthquake. Daniel put one arm around Joyce and braced himself in the archway. Sand sifted down from cracks in the ceiling.

“
Run,
” Gabriel said.

They raced out of the chamber and into the corridor, sprinting toward the steps leading up to the desert. Knocked free by the tremors, the mummified bodies tumbled out of their alcoves and smashed against the floor. In the lead, Joyce leapt over one and kept going, while Daniel, limping on his bad leg, took pains to skirt another. Behind them both, Gabriel hurtled over one only to find another falling against him. He found himself wrestling with a corpse, its shriveled head inches from his face, the mummified jaw hanging open in an eternal expression of shock. Gabriel shoved the body aside and kept running, taking the stairs two at a time while the crypt trembled and shook around him.

Outside, he pulled himself quickly out of the pit. Joyce and Daniel were already standing on the sand, looking around nervously. A deep rumbling continued to emanate from somewhere below, but none of the baobabs in the distance were swaying, no animals had run into the open. Definitely not an earthquake, Gabriel thought. Something rarer and stranger was happening.