Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth (20 page)

“Wasted?” Melissa asked, and now she laughed in disbelief.

At that moment, they heard shuffling out in the tunnel, a few bumps and thuds, and then Guillermo came carefully around the corner and stood at the entrance to the worship chamber, the ladder under his arm. He looked sweaty and pale from the effort.

“Got it,” he said.

Drake waved him off. “Yeah, thanks. We’re all set.”

Guillermo saw the open stairwell and slumped against the door frame. “Seriously?” he said to no one in particular. “Someone couldn’t have come to tell me?”

“We’ve been a little busy,” Alan said, snapping photos of the skeleton and the open stairwell.

“Holy crap,” Guillermo muttered, coming into the chamber and staring at the bones.

“I know, right?” Alan agreed.

Drake had spotted a rack of industrial flashlights like the one in Melissa’s hand when they had first entered. Now he snapped a couple off the rack and tossed them to Sully and Jada, then took a third for himself. Melissa and Alan stared at him, but neither made a move to stop him, perhaps because it was so clear that he had Welch’s blessing.

He started down the stairs after Welch, and Sully and Jada followed, all of them treading very carefully.

“Ian, please, you have to stop,” Melissa pleaded. “If you do this, I’m not going to be able to cover for you.”

“Trust me,” Welch called back up to her. “You’re better off. Just stay up there. I’m sure Hilary will be along shortly.”

Drake cast a glance over his shoulder and saw Melissa pacing, tugging at a lock of her coppery hair. She wanted so badly to be with them, to see what secrets might lie below, but she knew that if she went any farther, her job might be forfeit. She started for the stairs.

“Melissa,” Guillermo said.

“Shut up!” she snapped at him.

But it stopped her. She cursed loudly, first in general and then down into the darkness at Welch. By then, Drake couldn’t see her anymore and had lost interest. The labyrinth’s secrets awaited.

12

At the bottom of the hidden stairs was a corridor. Their flashlights threw ghost shadows along its length. Every twenty feet or so there seemed to be another doorway, and for a moment Drake was reminded of the optical illusion created by standing between mirrors. With one in front and one behind, the reflections seemed to go on forever in a diminishing hallway of gleaming frames. This corridor did not go on forever. It ended in a darkness that beckoned them onward, as if hungry for light.

The silence troubled Drake the most. They were underground, in a place that had been a secret even in the age in which it had been occupied. The dry, cool air seemed thick with ominous portent. If he had been a more superstitious man, he might have said it felt as if it had been waiting for discovery, as if—after so many years—it finally had exhaled. But superstitious or not, he wouldn’t have said the words out loud.
Unless you’d had too much tequila
, he thought.
Tequila makes you say stupid things
.

He comforted himself with the knowledge that tequila could make almost anybody say stupid things.

“Spooky as hell down here,” Jada whispered.

Sully chomped on a fresh cigar. When he’d smoked the stub of the other one—or lost it—Drake had no idea. But Sully didn’t light up—not down here. They were surrounded by stone, but there was no telling what they might encounter. Drake figured he didn’t want to drop burning ashes on ancient papyrus or the bandages of a mummy.

“How much time do you think we have?” Drake asked Welch. “If your boss gave Henriksen the full tour, I mean?”

“Twenty minutes,” Welch said. “Thirty if we’re lucky.”

Barely time to get back up the stairs and through the labyrinth to the breach in the wall. No one addressed the renewed urgency, but they hurried a bit faster along the corridor. The slight draft Jada had noticed before persisted. It might be no bigger than a mouse could fit through, but there was an opening down here.

And “down” was the operative word. The floor slanted downward, and the four of them followed. Flashlight beams danced on the painted walls and the floor and the unadorned ceiling. Drake shone his straight ahead and saw that they were coming to an opening; a moment later, he realized it was some kind of junction.

“How far does this thing go?” Sully asked.

“It could be quite extensive,” Welch replied.

“You know how these things work,” Drake added. “Whatever they were hiding down here, the Egyptians loved their secret passages and halls.”

“So far it’s just straight ahead,” Jada said. “Not much of a maze.”

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Welch asked. “Part of the labyrinth and yet not part of the labyrinth.”

Unlike a reflection of a reflection, the corridor did not go on forever. They’d followed it for perhaps fifty yards when it opened into a small anteroom that resembled the one above, and they found themselves looking at the entrances to three separate worship chambers. Each had the triple-octagon symbol engraved in the lintel above the doorway, and each had the trio of steps leading down.

“This is different,” Drake muttered. “The lady or the tiger—or the other tiger?”

“I don’t think we should split up,” Welch said quickly.

Jada laughed. “Yeah. Bad idea.”

“No need,” Sully said, flashing his light into the leftmost doorway. “They’re not much bigger than the worship chamber upstairs. Altar. Same layout.”

Then he stopped and glanced back at them. “Except there’s a door on the other side.”

Drake hurried to the central doorway and stood on the threshold, flashing his light across the small chamber. “Here, too.”

He quickly scanned the room with his torch, agreeing with Sully’s assessment. The layout was identical to that of the worship chamber upstairs. He figured the dimensions would be the same. But as he let the light linger a moment on the altar, he froze, brows knitting.

“Hey, Sully? Does your room over there have the same paintings, hieroglyphics, and stuff as the chamber upstairs?”

Sully flashed his light at Drake’s face. “Yeah, why?”

Drake squinted, putting up a hand to block the brightness as he turned to look at Welch and Jada. “This one has the same altar. An octagon.”

“The shape of the labyrinth’s design, I suspect. It’s a circle, but within the circle, the perimeter of the maze is really an octagon,” Welch explained.

“Yeah, great. Daedalus knew his shapes. Call Elmo. What I was saying is that this one doesn’t have Egyptian writing.” Drake flashed his light into the room and held it on the altar as they all moved to see inside. “It’s Greek.”

The look on Welch’s face was almost comical. He went from surprise to childlike glee in an instant, pushing past Drake and hurrying down the few steps into the worship chamber and flashing his light around in fits and starts.

“This is remarkable,” he said, pausing every few seconds to take a closer look at the writing on the wall or the paintings on the base of the altar.

As Jada, Sully, and Drake followed him into the room, Drake saw that it wasn’t exactly like the chamber upstairs, after all. There were several shelves cut into the walls, each holding several large jars. Then, of course, there was also the door at the back of the room, a formidable stone block with no visible means of opening it. But Drake felt sure it was genuinely a door, just one that required some kind of trick to open.

“What does this mean?” Jada asked.

Welch nodded to her but didn’t answer. Instead, he hurried from the room and rushed into the chamber Sully had been investigating at first. Twenty seconds passed, and then he rejoined them, standing on the threshold of the central room, a fervent smile on his face.

“The room on the left is devoted to Sobek, as we would expect. But
this
one—this one is dedicated to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and madness.”

Drake focused his light on the jars on one shelf, studying the grape design there. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Jada said, tucking a magenta strand behind her ear and lighting up with a grin. “Daedalus built the labyrinth at Knossos to impress Ariadne, but according to myth, she was the bride of Dionysus.”

Sully slipped an arm around her shoulders and favored her with a proud look. “Someone’s been paying attention.”

“ ‘Bride’ could mean many things,” Welch said. “She could simply have been devoted to him, as a priestess, for instance.”

“Like the Mistress of the Labyrinth?” Drake suggested.

Welch nodded thoughtfully. “Possibly. But you’re all missing the point. The first chamber explicitly refers to Crocodilopolis, and this one to Knossos and the island of Crete.”

Drake stared at him, eyebrows shooting up.

Sully chomped on his cigar and growled, “What the hell are you standing there for?”

Welch stood aside as they rushed out of the worship chamber corresponding to the labyrinth at Knossos. Jada led the way down the few steps into the third room, her flashlight beam bouncing around in front of her.

“Greek!” she said, turning to face them as they followed. “This one’s in Greek, too.”

But as Drake studied the octagonal altar, noticing the triple-octagon symbol in the center, he thought something looked different about the inscriptions on the base. He flashed his light at the walls and at the vases, and his suspicion increased.

“Are you sure—”

“It’s Hellenic, without question,” Welch said, picking up one of the jars and peering more closely at the writing. “But it isn’t any variation on ancient Greek I’ve ever seen. Doubtless a dialect, but something rare.”

He looked over at Sully. “This might be a lost language,” he said excitedly.

“That’s nice, Ian. Really,” Sully said. “I’m sure you and your lost language will be very happy together. But the clock is ticking.”

“Can you tell what god the chamber’s devoted to?” Drake asked.

“Oh, that’s easy enough,” Welch said, moving his flashlight beam across the paintings on the walls. Drake spotted a trident. “The third labyrinth was built in worship of Poseidon. Or some aspect of Poseidon native to—wherever this language comes from.”

“And?” Jada asked, frustrated. “Any idea where that might be?”

A chill went up the back of Drake’s neck, and he felt a shiver. Frowning, he glanced around. Had he heard a whisper?

The four of them moved through the chamber with the flashlights, though Welch concentrated mostly on the jars. Some things required no explanation. There were images on each altar base that showed the same scene as the one upstairs of the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and there were others that depicted the Minotaur. There were labrys, the symbol for a labyrinth, carved into stone and painted on jars. He had noticed in the second chamber that there were paintings clearly showing a throne made of gold and other objects that had been painted that color and might have indicated the presence of treasure. There were similar images here. But the rest of it was unreadable to him.

A shadow moved in his peripheral vision, and he thought he heard the rustle of cloth. He glanced at the entrance to the room and thought the darkness seemed a bit darker than before.

“Did you guys hear something?” Drake asked.

“Just you,” Sully said, gnawing the end of his cigar.

Jada glanced at Drake and shook her head. She hadn’t heard a thing.

Welch was crouched at a lower shelf, one of the jars—or honey pots, if that was really what they were—in his hand.

“Here we go,” he muttered.

Drake and the others turned to stare at him. Welch whispered to himself, translating under his breath and nodding.

He gave no warning before his legs went out from under him and he sat down hard, the jar slipping into his lap, protected from breaking by the loose cotton of his shirt.

“Thera,” he said.

“Never heard of—” Sully began, but then his eyes lit up.

“Thera as in Santorini?” Drake asked.

Welch’s face had gone slack. Drake thought he’d had too much revelation and epiphany for a single day and his archaeology geek brain might have blown a circuit.

“I’ve been there,” Jada said. “It’s beautiful.”

Drake agreed. The whitewashed buildings and blue domes, the multicolored boats and shutters, the bells, the ocean, the wine. There was nothing about Santorini he did not love, though he’d been there only once. But he had a feeling Welch wasn’t thinking about vacation spots.

“Talk to us, Ian,” Drake prodded.

Welch looked up at him. “Daedalus built the third labyrinth on Thera.”

“Santorini,” Jada said, apparently trying to clarify that they were talking about the same place.

But Welch shook his head. “No.”

“The whole thing’s an active volcano,” Sully said.

“Right,” Jada said, snapping her fingers as she recalled. “There are a bunch of little islands that make up the rim. So you’re talking Thera before it exploded or whatever?”

Welch smiled. “Oh, yeah.”

Drake frowned, not sure what he was getting so excited about. In modern times, Thera was an archipelago, but really the string of islands formed a circle around the deepest spot in the Mediterranean. The islands were all that remained of the much larger Thera as it had been before the massive eruption in—he thought it was the fourteenth century
B.C
., but it might have been the fifteenth. He didn’t remember any lava flowing on Santorini, but he knew that some of the smaller islands in the archipelago had volcanic vents and were still active.

“Minoan civilization collapsed around the same time as the destruction of Thera,” Welch said.

Jada threw up her hands in frustration. “Well, that’s great. So if the third labyrinth was there, we’ve lost any clues we might’ve found in a volcanic eruption thousands of years in the past.”

“Maybe and maybe not,” Sully said quickly, jabbing at the air with his unlit cigar to emphasize the point. He turned to Welch. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Welch grinned. “I think I am.”

“Would the two of you stop talking in riddles!” Drake snapped. “It hurts my head.”

Sully arched an eyebrow and shook his head. “Oh, Nate, you’re going to kick yourself for not getting this one. You’ve been to Santorini. There’s only one archaeological dig going on there that’s of any consequence.”