Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear by Gabriel Hunt, Charles Ardai

steps were about half a foot high and Gabriel counted fifty-three of them before the descent bottomed out. So they were some twenty-five feet below the statue’s base. The passageway opened up, widening slightly, and the torchlight cast into relief a set of carved images on either side. Bordered with a double row of hieroglyphs above and below were long, narrow strips of art depicting seated deities with animal heads, men of various descriptions, what looked like scenes of court life on the left wall and of farming on the right. Sheba stopped at several points to examine a particular image or piece of writing, then continued on in silence.
    Gabriel could only imagine what this was like for her—it was extraordinary enough for him, and he wasn’t a linguist with a specialization in ancient languages. Tosomeone in Sheba’s field, this corridor by itself was a lifetime’s work, handed to her on a platter. At the same time, she was twenty-five feet underground, in a claustrophobic stone corridor, breathing musty air and not enough of it, surrounded by men with torches and blades who’d already kidnapped her twice and threatened to do worse. Of course Gabriel was there, too—but she didn’t know that, and there was no way he could tell her.
    They came, eventually, to another staircase, this one leading up, and from the direction they’d been walking Gabriel concluded they were now ascending into the belly of the beast, literally: by his mental calculations he’d have said they were more or less at the geometric center of the Sphinx, equally far from the right and left sides, from front and back. The steps here were taller, and Gabriel only counted thirty of them before they had reached a chamber at the top. Gabriel hung back, pulled the fabric of the burnoose around to cover his nose and mouth and held his torch away from his face so that he remained in shadow.
    “Rashidi,” DeGroet said and gestured at the young man in the lead. “Show her.”
    Rashidi looked to his older relative for guidance, received a nod, and then cautiously brought his torch closer to the far wall.
    Gabriel noticed two things immediately—three, really, if you counted the smell. The first was a rectangular panel on the wall, similar in size to the stele outside and filled with what to his eyes looked like similar writing. The second was a hole in the wall at waist height, circular and dark, just about wide enough for a trim man to fit inside.
    Then there was the smell, which was the unwholesome odor of a morgue or a battlefield, the smell of bodies that had lain out too long and been neglected. Gabrielwondered if it was the remains of the unfortunate men DeGroet had sent in earlier that he was smelling. Even if they’d removed the bodies (and he didn’t see them lying around anywhere), this was certainly not the sort of place you could air out afterwards.
    The flickering torchlight played over the writing on the wall and Gabriel saw Sheba’s face fixed in concentration. Her lips moved rapidly but without sound, as though she were talking to herself.
    “You see what we are dealing with, Miss McCoy?” DeGroet said. “We’ve had the symbols translated as best we could—which was not very well, I’m afraid. But even if we knew accurately what each symbol meant, that wouldn’t tell us anything by itself, would it?”
    “No,” Sheba said.
    “So you tell us, please. What is on the other side of this wall, and how can we get to it?”
    “It’s a…a reliquary, a storage chamber for, for…well, it says here ‘the remains of the gods,’ but the word for ‘remains’ is ambiguous, it could also refer to artifacts—artifacts depicting the gods, ritual artifacts, that sort of thing.” She paused. “There is a warning that says only priests shall enter. ‘A priest of Sekhmet may cross the threshold’—you see the lioness figure, there, that’s Sekhmet.”
    “Good, good,” DeGroet said. “And how shall they enter?”
    Sheba