Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Inside the shrine room Qingzhao had led him to, Gabriel gazed with breathless disbelief.

Suffocated by vines and tree roots at the far end of the chamber, clotted with decades of dried mud and impacted dust, was a giant bronze statue of a grotesque figure, pointing one bony sculpted finger toward the center of the room. Underlit by torchlight it was positively ghoulish, a nightmare vision, an evil god. The scaling and tarnish on the bronze made the looming statue appear to be leprous.

It took the better part of two hours for Gabriel to clean, hack, and chip away the main debris around the base of the statue, uncovering an iron panel. The panel, nearly a foot thick, gradually inched backward until there was a gap into which Gabriel could shove a lantern. He popped a flare and dropped it through. That was when he first saw that the metal floor below was writhing with worms and salamanders, some as much as a foot long…