Christopher Golden - Uncharted - The Fourth Labyrinth

“I didn’t think we should leave this in the room for sneaky ninja guys or Henriksen’s thugs to find if they searched it. Also, y’ know, maps.”

Sully frowned. “What the hell good will those do us? None of them are for this place. No one’s been here in forever.”

“He’s right,” Jada said. “My father was working with Maynard Cheney, studying labyrinths in general, including the design of what had already been uncovered at Crocodilopolis. His sketches in the journal refer to the maps in some places. It might not tell us every turn to take, but it could be the Rosetta Stone as far as figuring out the logic of this place.”

Sully shone his light on the journal while Drake flipped pages. Jada unfolded a map and then a second, finding what she wanted.

“Here,” she said, pointing to a junction in the labyrinth map that mirrored the one they were standing in. “It’s not the middle door. That’s going to double back into one of the other two. We’d be going in a circle.”

“If you’re right,” Sully told her.

Drake flipped another page, then went back three. “She’s right,” he said. “Luka has half a dozen variations on this, and only one of them has the middle door being the right one.”

“How do we know this isn’t one of those instances?” Sully asked.

“I don’t have all the answers,” Drake replied. “And neither did Luka. If it’s gotta be trial and error, then that’s what it’ll be.”

Sully nodded. “Okay.” He went over to the corner of the right-hand door, where the stone seemed worn by time, and kicked at the rough edge of the frame, knocking several chunks of rock to the floor.

“Just in case,” he said, holding up the biggest shard of stone. “Which way?”

“Let’s try this one first,” Jada said, shining her light into the left side tunnel.

Holding the journal open in his hands, Drake followed her. Sully seemed thoughtful but said nothing as he took up the rear. Drake studied the doorway, then looked along the corridor, which seemed to turn left again just ahead. Behind him, Sully paused to scratch something into the wall just inside the doorway.

“Your initials?” Drake asked.

“Hey, at least I didn’t write ‘Sully was here.’ ”

“But you were tempted.”

Sully shrugged. “Of course.”

Drake started to turn, but something caught his eye. He reached out for Sully’s arm and pulled him over, making him shine the flashlight beam at the wall just above the door. Something else had been inscribed there, and it wasn’t Sully’s initials.

“Jada!” Drake called.

She hurried back to join them, merging her light with Sully’s. In the bright splash of illumination, they could all see the small diamond shape engraved into the stone above the door.

“Do you think that means we chose right?” Jada asked.

Sully stepped back out into the junction, but Drake had a glimmer of memory. In the light from Jada’s flash, he scanned pages of Luka’s journal again, and a smile crept across his face. He tapped the same page he’d looked at before, showing several variations on the three-choice junction. In each instance, Luka had drawn a small diamond shape on two of the possible avenues but not the third.

“Look at the map,” Drake said quickly.

Jada set it on the floor and unfolded it. They huddled over it, studying it in the light.

“The middle path isn’t marked,” Sully called from the junction.

“He’s drawn them here, too,” Jada said, tapping a fingernail on the map, where her father had inscribed tiny diamond shapes in many places.

Drake got up and went out to the junction with Sully. He snatched the flashlight away and went into the middle tunnel, searching the wall above the door. Then he went into the third tunnel.

“Yes!” he shouted in triumph.

Sully and Jada stood in the junction watching him.

“So the diamond marks the path?” Sully asked.

“No,” Drake said, gesturing to the stone above the doorway. “It’s here, too. Only on the inside. No way to see it from out there.”

“But if it’s on two of them, how do you-” Sully began, and then he grinned, nodding. “Oh, I like that. The right way is the one that isn’t marked.”

“Exactly,” Drake said, glancing excitedly at Jada. “Your father had it figured out. But we never would’ve realized it if we’d only run into forks in the labyrinth. If it was one or the other, the diamonds wouldn’t have helped. But this has three choices, and if two are marked, that’s gotta mean that the absence of a diamond is what shows the right path. Which means we were wrong. It’s the middle door.”

The three of them stared at one another, smiling in triumph.

They hurried through the middle door and had gone about twenty feet when Sully halted abruptly.

“Wait, wait,” he said, running back to the entrance and scrawling his initials just inside the door. “Just in case we’re idiots.”

Though the difference was gradual and subtle, there could be no mistaking the fact that their travels through the labyrinth were taking them deeper. Drake had the impression they were also moving farther away from the fortress. In Egypt, they had explored only a small section of a sprawling maze that might have been the size of a town. The temple at Knossos had thousands of rooms, and he suspected that they were inside a structure just as vast as that one. There were small chambers off the tunnels and corridors; some apparently were for storage, whereas others appeared to have been used for rituals. Several had frescoes on the walls that were neither Egyptian nor Greek in style but a merging of both. Those rooms surprised them, as did the presence of the flower motif they had encountered at the entrance, which was repeated in many of the small rooms.

In the tunnels, however, there were no decorations, no frescoes, nothing that might be used as a landmark for those lost in the maze. Only those side chambers might have given an intruder clues, but although their contents might be different, their design was consistent from one to the next.

They had come three times to what seemed a dead end only to discover hidden doorways, and twice they had descended secret stairways into lower levels of the labyrinth. Sometimes it felt as if they were traveling far from their origin point, and at others it seemed to Drake they were going in ever diminishing circles.

The diamonds or lack thereof had not failed them yet. Not once had they had to retrace their steps. Yet Drake had wondered if the trail without diamonds was leading them to the center of the labyrinth or to some trap for fools who thought they were clever and ended up instead broken after a fall through a shaft in the floor.

There had been dozens of shafts. After Drake had come around a corner and had to hurl himself across one, nearly tumbling into it, they were taking corners more carefully now. The air that came up from the shafts was warm enough that each of them had built up a sheen of sweat. The deeper they descended, the more the temperature increased.

“I guess this is what comes from digging into the skin of a volcanic island,” Jada had said the first time she touched a wall and pulled her hand away, surprised at the heat.

But it didn’t slow her down. If anything, it spurred her on so that half the time she was in the lead, though they didn’t let her get too far ahead. There was no telling when some hidden trap might be sprung.

They worked their way through a series of narrow openings, nearly missed a turn made invisible by the placement and coloration of stone, and had to backtrack when they discovered they had entered a tunnel marked with a diamond. When they had righted themselves, they found a tunnel so low that they were forced to crouch to pass through.