A good place to hide a great treasure…

Corvus’s men returned to the helicopters to collect more equipment as their leader headed for the distinctive rock, the others following. Nina found herself drenched in sweat in barely a minute. She asked Sophia to let the sweltering Chase take off his jacket, but as she’d expected, the request was rejected-with a degree of pleasure.

They reached the rock and found a smaller boulder lying half buried next to it. The gap between them formed a passage some four feet wide, which led deeper into the hillside. Corvus’s man, Bertillon, peered out of the shadows within as the group arrived. “It goes back quite a way, sir. And there’s something you should see. We’re not the first people to come here.”

Using flashlights, they entered the tunnel mouth. “Not very impressive,” sniffed Sophia as she shone her light around the chamber inside.

“There’s more back here, ma’am,” said Bertillon, moving deeper. An archway marked the entrance to a second chamber, the air cool and still. Nina immediately identified the architecture as ancient Athenian in design, still elegant despite the wear of millennia. They were almost certainly in the right place, then, but what else would they find?

“Oh wow,” she gasped as she saw the awesome sight for herself.

Sophia stopped next to her, playing her flashlight beam over the huge object. “All right, I admit-that’s impressive.”

It was a statue, a stylized representation of a lion close to twelve feet high and almost as wide, blocking the end of the chamber. Its mouth was open in a silent roar, one clawed paw raised as if to strike, the other flat on the stone floor.

Beneath that paw was a body.

“Dead a long time,” Nina said, kneeling for a better look. The crushed corpse was little more than a dusty skeleton, desiccated scraps of skin clinging to it. “A thousand years, at least. Maybe even longer.”

“What happened to him?” asked Corvus, shining his light at the lion’s mouth, which was almost eight feet off the ground. While the statue itself was stone, its teeth were tarnished bronze… with faint stains of blood still visible on them, more having gushed down the lion’s jaw as if it had bitten somebody’s arm off.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Chase, nodding at the heavy stone paw that had flattened the luckless explorer. “Clarence here squashed him. The thing’s a booby trap.”

Everyone quickly stepped back to a respectful distance from the statue, and all eyes turned to Nina. “I think it’s time you told us what else you’ve found in your translations,” Sophia said, resting a hand on her holstered gun.

Nina flicked back through her notebook. “I guess this is the Nemean lion-the first of the ten trials of Hercules.”

“Ten?” Sophia raised a dubious eyebrow. “I thought there were twelve.”

“It depends which version of the legend you read. In the earliest tellings from ancient Greece, Hercules only had ten trials, and the order in which they took place varied according to who was telling the story. The only constants were that the first task was always slaying the Nemean lion, the hide of which Hercules used to make his impenetrable cloak, and the second was killing the Lernaean hydra, where he obtained the poison for his arrows. The final task was always the same as well-defeating Cerberus, the guardian of the Underworld.”

“So to get into Herc’s tomb, you’ve got to reenact his challenges?” asked Chase. Everyone looked at him. “What? I’m right, aren’t I, Nina?”

“He is,” Nina confirmed, nodding. “That’s what was hidden in the text of Hermocrates-it tells you what the challenges are, and also which direction to go through the labyrinth, which is supposed to represent the Underworld, to reach them.”

Sophia regarded her with suspicion. “But not how to beat them?”

“It wouldn’t need to. The trials of Hercules were as familiar to every ancient Greek as the stories of Cinderella or Robin Hood or…or Star Wars are to us. Any self-respecting Athenian would already know how to beat them.” Nina indicated the lion’s mouth. “Hercules defeated the Nemean lion by reaching into its mouth and pulling out its insides. My guess would be that there’s some kind of trigger in there that you have to release to open the way into the next chamber.”

Komosa tentatively clambered up on one of the lion’s paws and shone a light into its mouth. Close up, it was clear that the lower jaw was separate from the main body of the statue itself, able to hinge open and shut. “She’s right,” he said after a moment. “There’s a lever in here, looks like bronze.” He leaned back, directing the light into the gap between the two paws. “And there’s another passage down here.”

“Whoever tried to enter the Tomb obviously got past the first challenge, then,” said Nina. “But not all of them survived.” She glanced at the crushed skeleton. “This guy got stomped, and judging from those stains somebody else lost an arm trying to reach into the lion’s mouth.”

Corvus gave her an incredulous look. “Are you saying that the statue moved?”

“Yeah. You set off a trap somewhere, and the lion rolls up the passage, the mouth bites, and the paws go up and down to try to gore or crush you. In fact…” She backed up, running a toe over the floor of the chamber until she found a section that was slightly lower than those around it. It shifted under her touch. “Here. See? This is loose-it’s probably what sprung the trap. Step on this, and you get shut in, with the only way out being…”

“… to beat the challenge in the same way that Hercules did,” said Sophia thoughtfully. “Assuming they haven’t all been beaten, could any of the traps still be functioning?”

“I don’t know. I would have said no, until Eddie told me about the one in Tibet, which would have been much older than these. If the mechanisms were made of stone and metal rather than wood and rope, then maybe…”

Sophia shone her light into Nina’s face. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re here to guide us through them. How far have you gotten?”

“I’ve reached the sixth trial, and gotten the directions through the labyrinth up to that point as well,” Nina said, blinking in irritation. “I’d be able to work faster if, y’know, you took these damn things off of me.” She held up both hands, tugging the chain of the handcuffs taut between them.

Sophia considered for a moment. “Release her,” she ordered at last.

“Are you sure?” asked Corvus.

Sophia smiled and walked over to Chase, running a hand along the shoulders of his leather jacket. “She won’t do anything stupid as long as we have him.”

Corvus nodded. “Very well.” One of his men unlocked Nina’s cuffs. She rubbed her wrists where the metal had dug grooves into her flesh. “Now, let us proceed.”

One by one, the expedition members slipped through the narrow gap between the lion’s paws.

The passages beyond were indeed a labyrinth, a tight, dusty maze. Nina had already written down the directions, however, and progression was a simple matter of following the correct choice of left or right at each junction.

The question had occurred to her of what would happen if the wrong path were taken, but she decided not to bring it up in case Sophia or Corvus decided to make Chase be the one to investigate.

They encountered other tasks along the way, more stylized statues frozen midattack when the release switch was found by past tomb raiders, or jammed against the end of each chamber having killed those who had tried-and failed-to pass them. With nobody to reset the traps, they were rendered harmless once triggered… but that didn’t stop the party from negotiating each challenge with the utmost caution. Just in case.

The Lernaean hydra: seven snakelike heads that had once shot poisoned darts taking the lives of three intruders, their skeletons twisted on the ground in the agonized contortions of death. The stone heads now lay broken on the floor, the statue decapitated. Not a literal interpretation of the myth, Nina knew, but she doubted that the Tomb’s builders could make metal and stone spontaneously regenerate.