Christopher Golden - Uncharted - The Fourth Labyrinth

“We can’t stay here,” he said.

Henriksen risked one last hate-filled glance at Olivia, and then all three of them rushed for the tunnel entrance near the supports of the long-ruined bridge.

“Go get them!” Olivia screamed at someone. “Get over there and kill them!”

As Drake ducked through the tunnel entrance, he thought it was Massarsky’s voice he heard behind him.

“You’re out of your mind, lady. No one’s jumping that. You’d have to be crazy or out of choices, and we’re neither. They can’t get out without going past us.”

There was more, but as Drake, Jada, and Henriksen hurried into the twisted knot of tunnels on the other side of the ravine, the voices were muffled and they could hear only gunshots.

Henriksen had no flashlight, but Drake and Jada lit the way ahead. They made wordless progress, coming to junctions and doors, narrow passages and dead ends, as they had before, but they had become veritable experts in navigating through labyrinths by now, and when they chose the wrong direction, it was never for very long.

Soon they had left the echoes of gunshots and murder behind, but Drake knew the danger would catch up to them eventually and hadn’t a clue what they would do when it did.

In another piece of hell-these torture rooms like the chambers of this diabolical labyrinth’s heart-they stopped to catch their breath. Drake and Jada leaned against the edges of the entry passage while Henriksen walked around the hideous cavern, plunging unwisely into the shadows.

“Throw some light over here?” he asked.

Jada ignored him, so Drake raised his flashlight. Henriksen had his back to them, staring at an enormous mechanism composed of a huge stone wheel with hooks jutting from the rock. The wheel had been stained dark with ancient blood, yet Drake thought he detected the scent of copper in the air. He wondered if pain could have a ghost, if the stink of human suffering could haunt a place when even the most tenacious souls had long since departed.

He wanted out of the fourth labyrinth. Out of Diyu. He didn’t care about gold or treasure. From the moment Sully had been dragged off, this job had been about getting his best friend back alive, but the sense of adventure and the promise of gold had maintained a certain secondary allure in the back of his head. No more.

“Hey,” Jada whispered.

Drake looked over at her. In the glow of their flashlights, he saw that magenta strands had come loose from her ponytail. To someone who hadn’t been at her side these last days, she might have looked fragile, but to Drake, she seemed as strong as if she’d been forged in fire.

“Thanks,” she said.

He didn’t feel deserving of her gratitude. What had he done for her thus far except be by her side while people died around her, while she took a life for the first time, while her godfather had been stolen from her and her stepmother betrayed her? He couldn’t bring her father back to life.

The best he could do was finish the job they’d started.

“Any time,” he said, grinning. “I wouldn’t want to go on a suicide mission with anyone else.”

Jada pushed off from the wall and went to punch him.

“Enough!” Drake said, holding up his hands in surrender.

Jada smiled. “Tough guy.” Then she walked toward Henriksen. “All right, Tyr. Time to tell us what the hell that was all about back there.”

Henriksen turned, still in the pool of Drake’s flashlight. He hung his head, shadows gathering under his eyes, and it made him look a century older.

“I never thought she would go so far,” he said. Lifting his head, he turned his sorrowful gaze upon Jada. “Tonight I have blood on my hands for the first time.”

“Join the club,” she said. She tried to sound cavalier, but Drake heard the pain in her voice. “But you’re not exactly an innocent. Your whole career has been about doing whatever it took to get what you wanted. If you never killed someone or had anybody killed, I’m willing to bet people have died because of you before.”

The words scuffed the walls, but they were nothing compared to the screams that once had reverberated here.

“She’s got you there,” Drake said.

Henriksen glanced at him and managed to look almost ashamed. “You are not what I expected, Mr. Drake.” He nodded toward Jada. “Either of you. You are survivors, and you have my admiration.”

“Yeah, well, considering we thought you were pretty much the devil when this all started, I guess you’re not what we expected, either,” Drake said. “But we don’t have time for group therapy, Tyr. I’m going to bet there are still some spooky ninja guys-”

“And girls,” Jada put in.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Drake said. “My point is, no matter how many Protectors of the Hidden Word were killed by Perkins’s goon squad, I doubt they’re all dead. If I was calling the shots, I’d have held some of my people back. They’ve got Sully and Ian Welch somewhere, and maybe others. Never mind the gold. There could be one or two right around the next turn. So we’re not going another step until you tell us what it is you’ve been holding back.”

Henriksen frowned. Jada aimed her flashlight at his eyes, and he squinted, turning away.

“Come on,” she said. “No more secrets. If the three of us are going to make it through till morning, we need to work together.”

Several seconds ticked by in the silence of the torture chamber. Its gruesomeness struck Drake anew, and he became more impatient than ever to be gone from there, to find the heart of the labyrinth and make an end to things.

“Tyr-”

“Knossos,” Henriksen said.

Drake shrugged. “What about it?”

“The labyrinth there is in ruins,” Henriksen went on, his gaze shifting from Drake to Jada. “But I’ve had theories about Minos for years, and I’ve had teams going through the ruins, doing small excavations, all through museums and universities but with my people running it. One of those excavations turned up the wreckage of a chamber.”

“A worship chamber,” Jada said, her voice low.

Henriksen nodded. “I brought your father in after my people had translated fragments of several tablets and the writing on a shattered sacramental jar we had recovered. I had been keeping track of progress at Crocodilopolis for a while, but once your father confirmed my suspicions that Daedalus had designed both the labyrinth at Knossos and the one in Crocodile City, it became my priority. I’d hoped to find a complete worship chamber there, and of course we found even more than that.”

“But there are things you knew already,” Drake said, studying his face. “Things you learned from the fragments from Knossos.”

“Bits and pieces. Suppositions,” Henriksen said. “The first Mistress of the Labyrinth was Ariadne herself. Her beauty and gentleness kept the Minotaur calm-”

“There’s no such thing-” Jada began.

“But there was!” Henriksen snapped. “You don’t understand.”

He took Drake’s flashlight and shone it upon the wall, where a gruesome painting in the ancient Chinese style represented the Mistress of the Labyrinth tipping a cup of honey into the mouth of a slave whose back was streaked with scars from the lash. Others awaited the same communion. One of them, off to the right, was hunched over, having already received the cup. Horns jutted from his head, and his features were contorted, almost savage.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Drake rasped, staring. “The honey? What, it turned them into monsters?”

“Not with horns,” Henriksen said, waving his disbelief away. “Those were an affectation, something to frighten the others, I think, and to perpetuate the legend that Daedalus had so carefully built. The skeleton we examined in the labyrinth of Sobek-the one you found on the stairs under the altar-had the horns of an actual bull. They were probably tied to his head with some kind of leather strap.