Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

'Please,' she begged. 'Let me go.'

He laughed at that, as though she'd only meant it as a joke. 'I've been looking forward to this,' he told her, kneading the sideways bulge of his erection through his trousers. 'I gave your boyfriend my word. I always keep my word.'

The lamplight stuttered a moment, as though the generator was running out of fuel. There was noise back along the way they'd come. Gaille turned her head sideways just in time to see a third person arrive at the far end of the passage, sledgehammer in his hand.

'You!' scowled Mikhail.

'Yes,' agreed Knox. 'Me.'

It had been a mixed morning for the Intensive Care team. One of their charges had died; another had been returned to a general ward. As a result, the unit was empty except for Augustin and two nurses, so Claire felt free to unplug the headphones from the DVD player Nico had brought the day before.

She hadn't watched it the night before; she'd had too much else on her mind. But this morning she'd already played it through twice. There was something compelling about it, though she wasn't sure what. Not the words themselves, for even though they'd been written by Augustin, the technical language and obscure references mostly went over her head. It was more to do with the way Knox had somehow captured Augustin's qualities of voice, despite their different accents: his cadence, his metre, his trick of making listeners wait, the mischievous delivery of his punch-lines.

When this calamity had befallen Augustin, a treasonous internal voice had whispered to Claire that protocol didn't compel her to stick by him, as she'd stuck by her father. He wasn't blood, after all; they weren't yet married. She could simply fly back to America and pretend this episode had never happened. But she knew now that wasn't possible. When you gave your heart this completely to another person, it was no longer yours to take back.

On the DVD, Knox was nearing the end of his talk. She turned the volume up. It was a real comfort to listen to Augustin's words, but this was what she truly enjoyed, the extraordinary ovation that would shortly greet its conclusion, the tribute it so clearly represented to the man she loved. Each time she played it, it made her heart swell.

Augustin's left eyelash fluttered, delicate as a fly's wing. Though it was one of the few times she'd seen him show even that much sign of life, she didn't let it get her spirits up. His doctors had taken him off the barbiturates the night before, in the hopes that he might come out of the induced coma; but she was experienced enough with ICU patients to know that such tics happened all the time.

She leaned closer, just in case, murmured his name and squeezed his hand. His eyelash fluttered again, then opened for a blink before closing once more. She watched transfixed, simultaneously terrified and charged with hope. Then both his eyes sprang open, bloodshot and perplexed, even alarmed. She stood and leaned over him so that he'd know she was there, that he was safe and loved and cared for. But it didn't seem to do any good. His agitation increased, he slid his eyes to the side, he tried to speak.

'Don't talk,' she pleaded, anxiety battling euphoria. 'Just try to rest.'

He didn't listen, his lips moved again, he muttered something that she couldn't hear, because the applause had just started on the DVD, all that splendid thunder. She jabbed the button to silence it, put her ear back to Augustin's mouth, and finally made out his words. 'What's that bastard Knox doing,' he murmured, 'delivering my talk?'

Gaille's euphoria at seeing Knox was almost instantly extinguished as Mikhail grabbed his Mauser and turned it on him. Knox had no time to reach him or even flee, so Gaille twisted her wrist free from beneath Mikhail's foot, reached up and grabbed the Mauser's strap and tugged down hard just as he fired, the bullet crashing into the rock floor and then ricocheting harmlessly away.

Knox seized the moment she'd bought him, charging down the passage with a full-throated roar, swinging the sledgehammer in a wild arc at Mikhail's head, forcing him to use the Mauser as a staff to defend himself. It cracked and splintered in his hands, the barrel coming loose from the stock, yet still holding sufficiently to save him from the sledge, though his knees buckled and he stumbled backwards. He threw away the broken gun and grabbed the sledgehammer's head instead, wrestling Knox for it, using his greater strength to swing Knox around and against the wall of rubble, tearing the hammer from him as he do so.

Mikhail took it by the shaft and went straight after him, swinging like a baseball batter aiming for the bleachers. Knox ducked in time and it slammed into the rubble behind him, dislodging some of the smaller stones that cascaded away down the other side, making Petitier's hole a fraction bigger. Mikhail cursed and briefly let go of the shaft, his hands fizzing from the impact, then swung a second time. Knox tried to duck beneath it again, but Mikhail was expecting it and lowered his arc just enough for the head to clip Knox's temple as it passed, before smashing like a wrecking ball into the rock behind, sending more stones crashing, creating a thin but distinct gap at the top. With Knox dazed and down, Mikhail raised the sledgehammer for the kill, but Gaille thrust the Mauser's splintered stock at his face, making him lose his footing on the scattered stone marbles, and fall backwards. She grabbed Knox's hand and dragged him up and over the shrunken mound, then they were fighting their way through the rubble, pushing it aside as they went, scrambling down the other side, coughing and blinking from the thick dust.

They found themselves near the top of a wide flight of steps, looking out over the floor of a huge gallery, vast and dark as a night-time cathedral. The only thing Gaille could see clearly was the thin crevice in its high domed roof, its jagged edges overgrown with vegetation, the walls beneath black with dirt and guano. A few bats, disturbed from their roosts, flapped around so high above them they looked like specks of dust. On the wall beneath the crevice, a little weak sunlight glittered on waterfalls of quartz that fell in frozen cascades, and threw shadows on ridges of stalactites and stalagmites, so that they looked for all the world like the pipes of some grotesque church organ.

There was grunting and cursing behind, as Mikhail came after them. Knox still looked disoriented; she led him briskly down the steps to the cavern floor. A narrow flight of steps led up to a circular dais on which sat a marble throne, glowing palely in the darkness. A pair of golden rings set with rough-cut stones lay in the thick dust upon the throne's seat, while a golden headband with two gilded horns lay beside it, along with a golden goblet; and just for a blink Gaille had the strongest image of a man sitting here millennia before, and perhaps even dying here.

Something on the throne's high back caught her eye. A sheepskin robe, only woven from the finest imaginable thread that gleamed beneath its coat of dust as only one metal could. Her breath caught in her throat as she touched it. 'Jesus!' muttered Knox groggily. 'Is that…'

'The golden fleece,' whispered Gaille. 'So he found it after all.'

Footsteps on the cavern floor. Mikhail was coming. A narrow walkway led away from the dais along a colonnade of double axes. They fled down it to a second, larger platform. Her eyes had adjusted a little to the intense gloom, and she could see that this new platform was shaped like a giant rosette, with the largest stalagmite that Gaille had ever seen at its heart, thrusting almost obscenely upwards. It had a shallow basin at its foot for libations and sacrifices, as though it had once been worshipped as some great deity come to earth; and now she drew close enough that with a shock she realised what deity it was, for it looked just like a gigantic bull rearing up on its hind legs above her; and it wasn't merely imagination playing tricks, but a deliberate likeness of a bull sculpted from an original accident of rock. Elephant tusks had been set upon its head, and its shoulders had been smoothed and shaped, and the limestone ridging of its torso had been exaggerated to create the impression of a coat, creating a Minotaur to stand immortal guardian at the heart of this natural labyrinth. Only its base had been left unshaped, perhaps out of reverence, or perhaps because the whole stalagmite stood at a slight angle, and they'd feared to weaken it, lest it topple and shatter.