The Lost Labyrinth

FORTY-THREE
I

The lamps were each connected by a short white flex to the main cable, noted Gaille, the junctions wrapped in balls of duct-tape to keep out moisture. They made eerie pockets of light in the darkness, coaxing ghosts and monsters from the walls, so that she suffered a sudden brief flashback to a forgotten childhood trauma, losing hold of her mother's hand while walking with her through a fairground haunted house, giving her a horror of the darkness that had lasted for months.

She reached a new gallery, sparkling with seams of quartz and calcium, glanced almost instinctively upwards to see how high the chamber's ceiling was; but the footing was too slick for such liberties, and her feet went from beneath her, so that she had to grab the wall and cling on. The moment she let go again, however, she slipped once more, clapping her ankle against rock, grazing her skin, feeling the sharp pulse of drawn blood.

There were chalk-marks scrawled in French upon the wall. Plumed head, read one. Ox-hide, read another. Symbols from the Phaistos disc, discovered and marked up by Petitier, more evidence that the disc was a map designed to find and navigate through this place. But navigate to what? A low overhang forced her down onto hands and knees. She crawled through a cobweb veil, gossamer, flies and grit congealing in her hair.

A lamp was wasting its light by lying face-down against the left-hand wall. She turned it around to illuminate a large chamber with a ribbed roof and several shallow pits dug in the dirt floor. Several boxes of artefacts were stacked against the walls, votive offerings and what looked like fragments of bone. Caves had often been used as cemeteries by the ancients, one reason why so many of them had become sacred ancestral sites. An albino insect scurried for the darkness as she set the lamp back down, giving hints of a closed ecosystem in which everything fed off everything else.

She followed the orange cable up a hummock of loose rubble, an ancient rock-fall through which Petitier had burrowed a tunnel several metres long. She hoped that the far side would prove defensible, like the cave mouth had been, but the new gallery opened up too gradually for an ambush. Again, Petitier had left abundant evidence of his excavations; despite everything, Gaille couldn't help but notice how meticulous he'd been. He hadn't simply charged around with a spade, looking for plunder, as she'd half expected. He'd taken great pains to-

Mikhail suddenly grunted behind her. She whirled around, heart in her mouth, expecting to see him almost upon her; but she was alone. Nothing but cave acoustics. The fright spurred her on, however. The cave forked in two ahead, with symbols carved into the rock above either passage, circled and chalked by Petitier. The orange cable led away down the left-hand passage, offering her a very Manichaean choice between light and dark. She was about to choose darkness, the better to hide, when it occurred to her that if Mikhail had taken the torch, he'd have too great an advantage. She headed left instead, came to a high rock shelf against which a wooden ladder was strapped with frayed white rope. She climbed it quickly, knelt down to untie it and pull it up after her, but the knots were damp and pulled so tight that she couldn't work her fingernails into them, and then she heard Mikhail coming and it was too late.

She fled deeper into the caves, reaching the top of a sloped shelf of rock, so smooth it looked almost polished. She got onto her backside and used her palms and heels as brakes as she slithered down to the foot, finding herself at the opening of a very different kind of passage, one that had been deliberately excavated out of the rock: its floor was level, its ceiling arched, and its walls were smoothed and inlaid with fragments of marble and precious stones. There were even substantial sections of surviving plaster, the paint upon them recently revived by Petitier, to judge from the basket of cleaning equipment upon the floor. To her left, a young man vaulted over a bull. To her right, three goddesses held up poppies, grapes, mushrooms and other gifts of the earth, while snakes weaved about their feet.

She walked along this corridor to the top of a staircase. But it didn't lead her far. A great section of the roof and side-wall had collapsed, laying an impassable barrier of rubble across it. Petitier had leaned a short wooden ladder against the leftmost section of this accidental wall, and had dug a hole in its top corner, through which he'd fed the orange cable, so that a little light glowed weakly from the other side. She climbed the ladder, hoping she might somehow be able to squeeze and wriggle through, but the hole was too small-no bigger than was necessary to reach a camera and its flash attachment through, and take photographs. And again she realised that perhaps she'd misjudged Petitier: he hadn't sought to address the conference from fear of being caught, but because he was an archaeologist at heart, and he'd considered whatever lay behind this wall too important for him to tackle by himself. And so he'd stopped.

Scuffling and heavy breathing behind her. She turned to see Mikhail arriving at the far end of the passage, his shirt shredded, his powerful upper body revealed, the patchwork of crude tattoos, the Mauser slung over his shoulder, his hunting knife in his hand. She climbed back down the ladder, but there was nowhere left to run or hide. He must have realised she was trapped, for he came unhurriedly towards her, almost with a swagger. She stooped for a sharp and heavy stone, held it behind her back. He reached the top of the steps then sauntered down them, tucking his knife into his belt as he came. She waited until he was close and then swung the stone hard at his temple; but he must have been expecting it, for he caught her wrist easily and twisted it until she cried out and dropped the stone. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled her sharply sideways until she was off-balance, then he hauled her by it back up to the passage floor, where he threw her down and kicked her onto her back and stood astride her, pinning her wrists beneath his feet.

'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.'