Christopher Golden - Uncharted - The Fourth Labyrinth

The Mistress of the Labyrinth. It could be no one else.

Yet Drake’s gaze was drawn past her, to the right of the three tombs, where a withered monster lay ailing on a wooden pallet, swaddled in thick woolen blankets. Its eyes were opalescent, blind and seeking, and its ugly, wrinkled, misshapen head was covered with scabs and the stains of age. Once it had been a Minotaur, but now it was only a pitiful, mindless old man on the verge of death.

“We should never have come here,” Jada whispered.

Drake understood. The scene wrenched at his heart so powerfully that for a moment he allowed himself to forget more than two thousand years of slavery, torture, and murder. And then the mistress of the fourth-and last-labyrinth pointed one trembling finger at them and barked an order with a sneer of such cruelty and disdain that he could feel the venom in her.

The hooded men attacked, leaping on top of the three tombs and launching themselves through the air. Henriksen fired, but the black-clothed protector was too fast, twisting and lunging. The two careened to the ground and fell, struggling, onto the floor. Henriksen’s gun skidded away across the stone.

Jada shot the one nearest her. The bullet struck his shoulder and spun him around, but Drake missed whatever happened next. The third killer came at him, darting and moving, swaying like a serpent, a curved blade flashing in his grip. Drake waited for him to attack, then swung Henriksen’s flashlight, which shattered the hooded man’s wrist. The dagger clattered to the floor, but the killer kept coming, striking Drake in the throat with his good hand. Drake spun, trying to avoid the strike, and the hooded man missed his larynx by inches, punching the side of his neck instead.

Sully tackled the killer, lifting him off the ground and slamming him into one of the tombs so hard that the hooded man cried out in pain and fell to the ground, wheezing and grabbing for the small of his back, dragging his legs behind him uselessly.

Automatic gunfire stitched the firelit vault, bullets chinking into gold and shattering vases.

Everyone froze except for Henriksen, who delivered a final blow that knocked his opponent senseless. The hooded man groaned, barely conscious, and Henriksen glanced up, his enemy’s blade in his hand.

Drake and Sully stood together. Jada hovered near the corpse of the hooded man she apparently had shot a second time. But they all stared at the entrance to the vault, where Suarez and Olivia were descending the last step, his arm around her. Blood soaked his left side and pain etched his face, but his grip on his gun was strong enough and his eyes seemed clear.

Olivia gazed at the gold with open lust, her grin fervent with glee. The Minotaur had clawed the right side of her face, slicing deep furrows in her cheek, and she hardly seemed to have noticed. In her left hand, she still clutched a pistol.

She started to speak but couldn’t get the words out without bursting into a fit of laughter. Blood trickled down her chin and neck, staining her shirt and jacket.

“Look at this!” Olivia said. “Damn it, Tyr, look at all of this!”

“I’m looking,” Henriksen said warily.

“We were both right!” Olivia said, extricating herself from Suarez, who managed to stay standing on his own. “Go on, soldier. Finish them. All of them.”

Suarez’s gun barrel didn’t even twitch. “I don’t think so. No way am I getting out of this pit without help, and you can’t exactly carry me.”

Olivia turned to sneer at him.

As she did, a shriek came from behind Drake, and he turned, ready for a fight. The mistress, he thought. She and her dying charge had seemed helpless, and for a moment they’d forgotten her. Even as he turned, he saw the tall veiled woman grab Henriksen from behind, one hand clamped over his face as she drew the wickedly curved blade across his throat. Dying, he tore at her veil, revealing a grotesque countenance without the bestial features of the Minotaur but ruined by a lifetime’s slow poisoning by white hellebore.

Suarez opened fire, blowing her back among the tombs in a heap of tangled limbs and a growing pool of blood. The final hooded man began to rise groggily from the beating Henriksen had given him, and Olivia took aim and tried to kill him, but she had run out of ammunition. With a short burst from his weapon, Suarez finished the job.

Drake reached for Jada, as much to take comfort as to give it. He put an arm around her, and Sully joined them. Only Jada still had a gun, but whatever happened next was going to be up to Suarez. Drake felt sick looking at Henriksen and the Mistress of the Labyrinth and the bodies of what he could only assume were the last of the Protectors of the Labyrinth.

He glanced over at the ancient dying Minotaur on its worn pallet. It shivered, staring blindly into nothing, as if its mind was so far gone that it barely knew they were there in the vault with it. Perhaps that was true. If so, Drake thought it was for the best.

“There’s nothing here I want,” he said.

Sully looked sick. It was clear he and Jada shared that sentiment.

But Olivia still wore the same lunatic grin. She left Suarez standing at the bottom of the steps and rushed to the wall on her left, digging her hands into the stone jars of coins and letting them run through her hands. Drake tried not to calculate the worth of so much gold pressed into such ancient coins. Each was practically priceless.

“Stop,” Sully said. “There isn’t-”

Suarez took a step toward him, gesturing with the gun. “For the moment we’re all friends here, ’cause I want to live. If you folks don’t want to be richer than sin, that’s your business. Me, I have no objection to treasure.”

Drake could have told him that the flowers they had passed upon first entering the labyrinth and seen many times since were worth more than all the treasure in the vault combined. But he doubted Suarez would believe him and didn’t much want to share the information, anyway. For her part, Olivia knew all about the white hellebore, and Henriksen had suggested she would not hesitate to do as he’d planned and sell it to the highest bidder, but it was clear that gold was her first priority.

Olivia took out a heavy Egyptian necklace of beaten gold and put it around her throat, smiling like a little girl playing dress-up in Mommy’s closet. She stepped on top of the golden crocodile and glanced around, shaking her head as if it were too much for her to take in, and then her gaze locked onto the gold statue of the Minotaur with its ruby horns. She jumped down and ran to the pedestal where it stood.

As she reached for the statue, Drake felt a surge of shame. He glanced over at the dying Minotaur, an old man ravaged by poisons and physiological side effects his entire life, and saw the monster lower its head and turn away. Perhaps it was not entirely blind, but what, Drake wondered, did it not want to see?

Drake turned and stared at Olivia, firelight and shadows playing across her slim body, and as her fingers touched the gold and ruby statue, somehow he knew. He broke away from Jada and Sully and ran toward her even as she hefted the statue from its pedestal, admiring its shine.

A wide octagonal stone began to rise out of the top of the pedestal. The statue had been a counterweight, and now it had been removed. Loud grinding noises filled the walls, the thunking and crashing of stone blocks shook the room, and Drake turned and ran.

“Get out of here!” he shouted at Sully and Jada.

Suarez looked at him, and the man’s eyes went wide. He didn’t know what had just happened, but he saw their panic and turned and started to limp toward the three stairs.

“Where the hell are you-?” Olivia screamed after them.