Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth

23

Drake thrashed in the water, tearing loose from Sully’s grip. The river rushed around him, but for long drowning seconds he could not discern up from down, life from death. Then his left foot hit something hard and unyielding, and he knew that it must be below. Fighting to keep himself from flipping over again in the powerful current, he thrust his legs down, struck bottom, and propelled himself upward. His chest convulsed with the need for air, and when at last he broke the surface, he gave himself over to a helpless primal gasping, his mind devoid of reason, desiring only to breathe.

A hand snagged his shirt, and then Sully latched on to him, arms and legs wrapped around him from behind, trying to force him down. Drake shot an elbow into his gut, felt the sharp exhalation behind him, then reached around and put Sully in a headlock. Choking and dragging him at the same time, he pushed for the rocky riverbank. He’d dropped his flashlight up on the plateau, and though he didn’t remember letting go of his gun, he had lost it when they’d plunged over the waterfall. All he had to fight with were his hands and his wits, and he hoped they wouldn’t fail him.

Only the dimmest light existed down there in the lower cavern. It might as well have been pitch-dark save for the gleam of moonlight and reflected illumination from wavering flashlight beams above. That wet blackness gave form to rocks and walls and its absence indicated the presence of tunnel mouths, but otherwise Drake was in darkness.

He felt the river bottom underfoot and knew he must be near the bank. The roar of the waterfall on his right made it hard to hear much else, yet another churning noise came from his left, and he glanced that way to see the glistening blackness of a vertical rock face-the far end of the cavern. The river flowed into a tunnel at the base of the rock.

Panic raced through him. His throat raw from nearly drowning, his profanity-laced mutterings came out a meager rasp, but in his mind he was shouting. If they were dragged into that river tunnel, the darkness would be complete, and there was no way to know when or if they would enter another cavern where they might climb out. The underground river might go on for miles, joining the Qin Huai or Yangtze somewhere beyond the city of Nanjing. By then, they probably would be dead.

Drake tried to hoist Sully from the water, staggering toward shore, fighting the current. Sully had seemed disoriented, but now he thrashed against Drake’s choke hold, elbowed his ribs, and clawed at his hands. He twisted and bucked, and Drake lost his footing. Then he fell into the torrent again, washing toward the back of the cavern to vanish into the subterranean river’s hidden path forever.

“No!” Drake screamed, getting his footing, grabbing Sully around the torso as if tackling him.

He drove Sully toward the shore, dragging them both waist deep through the water even as Sully tried to break his grip. In the shallows, where the river turned almost gentle, Drake gave Sully a shove and sent him careening onto the rocky bank. Lungs burning and heart thundering, Drake stood with his hands on his knees. His muscles were exhausted from fighting the river, and though the air tasted sweet, each sip made his ragged throat ache even worse.

In the dark, he saw the black silhouette of his best friend rise and turn toward him. The only feature he could make out was Sully’s eyes, which glistened in the dark, as wet and black as the rocks by the river.

“Sully, please,” Drake rasped. “It’s me. It’s Nate. I know you’re still in there. Don’t make me fight you.”

Silent as the hooded men, Sully lunged at him. Drake dodged left, grabbed his outstretched arm, and used it for leverage, slamming his knee up into Sully’s gut. He heard the explosion of breath as he knocked all the air out of Sully’s lungs. But Sully held on, wheezing and groaning, as Drake kneed him a second time.

Sully bit his arm, teeth sinking into flesh, and Drake cried out in pain that merged with the waterfall in a roaring chorus. With his free hand he punched Sully in the temple five times in quick succession until Sully’s jaw let go. Drake reeled away from him, careful not to fall into the deep current again. He felt hot blood coursing down his arm, smelled its coppery stink, and knew he had to finish this before Sully killed him.

Drake waded toward him, feinted twice, and then landed a blow to Sully’s gut and followed up with three quick strikes to the face. In the dark, he could make out only the shape of his old friend, but he didn’t need to see the details, didn’t want to see the lack of recognition in those blank eyes, especially now.

With one final blow, he sent Sully crashing to the rocky bank again, but as his friend began to rise, Drake got him into a choke hold again. This time Drake had solid ground beneath him and held on tightly as Sully’s struggles grew weaker. In what seemed only moments, his friend began to sag in his grasp, and Drake released him. Sully crumpled to the ground, where Drake felt for his pulse and found it still beating. He wrapped his arms around his friend and let out a shuddering breath.

Sully’s alive, he thought, frozen with shock and relief. For the first time, he admitted to himself that he had been half convinced that the hooded men had killed him. He had no idea how he would get them out of the labyrinth or what it would take to shake Sully out of the honey’s effects, but he knew he had to take it one step at a time.

Something dark floated by on the swift current, jutting from the water. Drake cursed himself and set Sully down, standing and turning to look up at the plateau. A pair of flashlights moved down the water-sprayed stairs, slowly descending toward him.

“Nate!” a voice cried, carrying to him over the crushing thunder of the waterfall.

“Here!” he shouted back, wading a few feet into the shallows. “I’ve got Sully!”

The two beams of light continued down the stairs carved beside the waterfall, and slowly he began to make out the shapes behind them. Jada and Henriksen had managed to defeat the three attackers who had come at them on the plateau with Sully and Ian Welch. One of them had just floated by in the river, dead or dying, and Drake figured the other two were probably dead as well, as was Welch.

“How deep is it?” Henriksen called. “Can we cross?”

Drake thought about that. At its deepest, would Jada’s feet reach the bottom?

“I don’t know. The current’s pretty strong!”

When Jada and Henriksen reached the bottom of the steps, standing on the rocky shelf on the opposite bank of the river, they began to scan the lower cavern with their flashlights, and Drake got a much better idea of his surroundings. The blossoms he still thought of as cave hellebore grew all over the walls on vines and in the moss. Where nothing grew, the cavern walls were carved with octagons, flowers etched inside of them, and ancient Chinese symbols had been painted and repainted over centuries.

“Nate, look!” Jada called, flashing her light on something at the end of the cavern, where the river flowed into the rock face.

It took a second for him to realize that the stony edges that glinted in the light were steps. He frowned, then started along the rock shelf on the riverbank, pacing their progress on the other side. As they searched with their flashlights, Drake saw the steps on his side as well and ran toward them. He passed high, rounded tunnel mouths but could see nothing but deeper darkness inside as he hurried by, and in seconds he had reached the bottom of those steps.

“There’s a bridge!” he called to them, amazed at the way the solid rock above where the river left the cavern had been cut away to form a crossing above the water.

Jada and Henriksen picked up their pace. Drake hesitated. He’d left Sully on the bank and still could make out the silhouette of the man lying in the dark. He went up the half dozen steps to the bridge but halted there. As Jada and Henriksen hurried toward their side of the bridge, Drake studied the tunnel mouths on the other side. Jada barely spared them a glance, but Henriksen slowed and shone his light inside as he went past, searching for the worship chamber they all expected to find.

As Henriksen continued, it seems for a moment that the illumination from his flashlight remained behind in the last of the tunnels. Drake blinked, staring at the phenomenon, and then realized the light inside the mouth of that tunnel was moving, jittering and swinging and growing brighter.

Company, he thought. He was about to shout to the others when staccato gunfire came from the tunnel, muffled but echoing out into the vast waterfall cavern. Drake flinched before he realized that whoever was coming wasn’t shooting at him, Jada, or Henriksen.

Jada turned, pausing on the steps on the other side of the bridge.

“Run!” Drake shouted, racing toward her over the rushing river.

Henriksen did the running for her, linking arms with her and sweeping her along as he bolted toward Drake. They both still had their flashlights and guns out, and it made for an awkward flight, lights bobbing and legs almost becoming tangled.

More gunshots rang out, and then the first of the mercenaries came hurtling out of the tunnel mouth, twisting around to cover the others with both light and weapon. They poured from the labyrinth and into the cavern; Drake counted five, including Olivia, Massarsky, and Garza, and when he saw the hooded men dart from the tunnel, hurling knives and what looked like small, sharpened metal rings, he knew the rest of their team must be dead.

“Go, go!” Jada yelled.

Drake already was turning back the way he’d come. The way Jada and Henriksen’s lights were bouncing, it was hard to make out the top of the stairs, and he had to go slowly. Henriksen had let Jada go, but now she nearly collided with Drake as they ran down the half dozen slippery steps to the rock shelf of the riverbank.

“I thought you were dead!” she said.

“So did I!”

“Don’t do it again!”

Drake had no snappy comeback. His focus was on the tunnel mouths on this side of the river.

“Jada!” he said, pointing. “Check those; see if any of them lead out of here. Olivia and her goons found another path to get into this cavern; there might be more than one way out.”

“I’m not going until I find the worship chamber!” Henriksen snapped.

Gunshots, and they all looked over to see a hooded woman with long black hair streaming beneath her hood drive a long blade through one of the mercenaries, momentum carrying them both into the river. But Olivia and the others were already at the base of the bridge. Drake knew she had spotted them-flashlights were dancing all over the cavern-but she had only three more thugs between her and certain death, and she was running like hell.

“You can do whatever the hell you want!” Drake snapped at Henriksen. “After you help me get Sully to cover!”

Henriksen blinked, but only once, and then they were running along the bank toward where Sully lay sprawled, still unconscious. They grabbed him under the arms as they heard Jada shouting their names and began to drag him toward her. She stood in the mouth of the tunnel closest to the waterfall, and they ran to join her, Sully’s boots trailing across the ground between them.

Back on the bridge, Massarsky, Garza, and a square-jawed black guy Drake thought was named Suarez were making a stand. They stood on the stone walkway above the river and shot the two hooded men who were out in the open on the riverbank. One or two more-perhaps only one or two more; it was impossible to tell-remained in the tunnel they had just vacated, but Massarsky and his people pinned them down. They couldn’t come out without being killed. Olivia stood behind Garza, gun in hand. Her blond hair was a tangled, dirty mess, and her face was etched with grim determination.

Olivia turned and looked right at Drake as he and Henriksen dragged Sully into the open tunnel. He could read the profanity on her lips. Then they were inside the tunnel and out of her sight, and she out of his.

Only when Drake turned to look for Jada did he see that the tunnel rounded a slight curve and then ended just ahead.

With three steps down into a worship chamber.

The octagonal altar sat in the center of the room. Drake felt himself go cold, a numb amazement spreading through him. They had found it. After all this, they were here.

He and Henriksen dragged Sully down the three steps, and then Henriksen let go. Drake had to catch Sully to keep him from crashing to the stone floor of the worship chamber as Henriksen raced around the room, shining his flashlight on the Chinese characters and the symbols and paintings all over the walls.

Jada already had rushed into the anteroom, the ritual preparation space that had been built next to the worship chamber, its design identical to that of the other labyrinths Daedalus had created. In every other way, Diyu was different from the first three labyrinths, but here at its heart, its origins echoed loudly.

Several more gunshots rang out, and then he heard Olivia shouting. He feared they were not going to be alone in the chamber much longer.

“The trigger!” he called to Jada. “Find the-”

“Already on it!” she replied, searching the corners of the anteroom with her flashlight. In the reflected illumination, he saw her eyes light up, and then she bent, pushing and then kicking at a stone block in the wall of the anteroom.

With a loud clunk of stone, the altar shifted a couple of inches. Jada had found the trigger.

Henriksen and Drake stood staring at the altar for a few seconds. On the ground, Sully began to groan and then move as he slowly came around. Drake had no idea which Sully would be waking up, the one he knew or the one the white hellebore poison had made.

He glanced at Jada. Regardless of her intentions toward the flower that had caused so many so much grief and suffering, he could see that she needed to know just as much as he did what they would find in the chamber below.

“Push!” Drake said, glancing at Henriksen.

In the short tunnel behind them, they could hear the footfalls and voices of Olivia and her trio of mercenary survivors. On the floor, Sully groaned louder, and in the most pissed-off, most graveled voice Drake had ever heard, he started muttering colorful curses about the Protectors of the Hidden Word and payback.

Henriksen threw himself against the octagonal altar, and Drake did the same thing; the whole thing slid back with a rumble of stone on stone.

The first thing Drake noticed about the darkness yawning below was the nauseating stink that wafted up at them. Then he saw two yellow eyes gleaming against the black and heard the bestial snarl that grew into a roar as the Minotaur thundered up the steps, slavering and reaching for Henriksen’s throat.

Drake had no gun. He threw the hardest punch he had in him, aiming for the vulnerable muscle cluster under the Minotaur’s arm. He felt his knuckles crunch on impact, and pain shot up his arm as he swore and reeled back. As the Minotaur closed one hand around Henriksen’s throat, it twisted and snarled at Drake. Jada shone her flashlight into its eyes, and it flinched, startled.

Henriksen shot it twice in the chest, and the human monstrosity rocked with the bullets, relaxing its grip enough for Henriksen to shake free. The Minotaur looked down at the holes in its chest, blood weeping and then spilling from the wounds, and Drake had a better look at its face and head. There could be no doubt that this was a man, deformed and hideous to behold but no less human for it. A light coat of hair covered even his cheeks, and ridges of what looked like bone were visible through the hair, but the horns on top of his head were those of an animal, clamped inside a frame of tarnished gold and held there with leather straps. The beast had no clothes, and the matted hair that covered its body had begun to thin in places. It looked almost sickly.

But the bullets had not stopped it.

A clatter of footsteps came from behind Drake, and he heard Garza swearing.

“Son of a bitch!” Suarez yelled.

Massarsky grabbed Olivia and shoved her behind him even as Garza lifted her weapon, taking aim.

“Get clear of that thing!” Garza shouted.

Drake didn’t have to be told twice. The single glance the Minotaur had given him had chilled his bones, so now he grabbed Jada and backpedaled with her into the wall. Henriksen backed up as well, and Drake wondered why he hadn’t kept shooting. He had his weapon leveled at the Minotaur, but it was almost as if now that its attention was elsewhere, he had no interest in destroying it.

Sully had risen unsteadily, and now he wavered on his feet, half blocking Garza’s aim.

“Get down!” Garza shouted.

“Just shoot!” Olivia screamed at her. “Kill him, too! You’re going to kill them all anyway; just shoot through the bastard!”

The Minotaur roared, batting at the flashlight beams that blinded it for a moment, but the way it twisted, gaze narrowing, Drake thought it had zeroed in on Olivia’s shrill voice, as if it recognized that she was giving the orders. And why not? Once upon a time, it had been just a man.

It barreled toward Olivia despite the others in the way. Sully dived from its path, dropping wearily to his knees as the Minotaur continued past. Garza pulled the trigger, bullets chipping the walls, the echo of the semiautomatic fire assaulting their ears. Three bullets stitched the Minotaur’s hip and arm and shoulder, and it screamed in pain, but it was inhumanly fast and changed direction in an instant.

Garza’s weapon clicked on empty, dry-firing, the clip out of bullets. She might have had another, but her time had run out. Her eyes went wide as the Minotaur reached for her, grabbing her head and giving it a savage twist. The dry snap of breaking bone was like a whip crack in the worship chamber.

“Come on, kid,” Sully said, grabbing Drake’s shoulder, half for support and half to get him moving.

Drake turned and saw that Henriksen already had started down through the secret passage beneath the altar. He slapped Sully’s back and pointed, then called to Jada, and the three of them were following fast. Gunfire ripped the air behind them, and Drake heard the sound of bullets punching through flesh. This time when the Minotaur roared, it came out as a scream, but then they left the sounds of violence behind, descending into the heart of the fourth labyrinth at long last.

In the shadows, with only Henriksen and Jada’s flashlights to guide them, they found the corridor leading from the bottom of the steps. The heavy, musky stink of the Minotaur seemed to coat the walls and floor, so strong that Drake scowled in disgust.

Sully stumbled a bit, and Drake looked at him, still wary of the way the protectors had toyed with his mind and still feeling the bruising on his neck from Sully trying to strangle him. He was alive, and the relief of that still felt like victory, but Drake didn’t want to celebrate just yet.

Then Sully tripped and would have fallen if Drake hadn’t caught him. He ducked under Sully’s arm, helping him stay balanced as they moved down the corridor. Under his breath, Sully grunted something that might have been words.

“What was that?” Drake asked.

“You deaf?” Sully rasped. “I said it smells like your laundry down here.”

Drake blinked in surprise, and then a smile spread across his face. “Glad to have you back, old man.”

Jada caught up to them, then, and they had to stop in the corridor as she threw her arms around Sully. Drake backed away to give them a moment, and for several long seconds they just held each other, Jada’s shoulders trembling with emotion as she buried her face in the crook of Sully’s neck.

“I’m so glad you’re not dead,” she murmured into the collar of his shirt.

“You and me both, darlin’,” Sully replied.

“Look at this,” Henriksen said.

Drake glanced up and saw Henriksen shining his flashlight through an open side passage. When Drake looked inside, he saw a warren of tunnels as well as an opening that seemed to lead into a kind of living space decorated with crude wall paintings that looked as if they’d been made in blood. The stink of filth and death was powerful, and Drake knew it must be where the Minotaur slept.

“Let’s go,” Sully said. “Let’s finish this.”

In moments they had reached the end of the corridor. It couldn’t have been more than sixty feet in length, so short that the beams of the surviving mercenaries’ flashlights still provided some illumination back on the stairs. At the end of the corridor was a heavy wooden door with iron bands holding the thick planks together. They had encountered nothing like this in the other labyrinths, but Drake noticed the age of the wood and realized the door had been added within the past century or so, as if in this one place the hooded men had acknowledged the passage of time. It didn’t jibe with the Minotaur’s savagery, this tiny concession to civilization.

And there was light under the door.

“What the hell-?” Drake began.

Henriksen handed Sully his flashlight and tried the latch. The door opened, swinging inward, and Henriksen gave it a shove with his gun. Empty-handed, Drake felt more vulnerable than ever, but as the door swung wide, he forgot about protecting himself-forgot almost everything.

Consistent with Daedalus’s design, there were three steps down, but this room dwarfed any of the other worship chambers they had seen. Fires burned in braziers set at intervals that went deep into the cave. A pair of iron chandeliers hung from chains hooked to the ceiling, fat white candles burning brightly. But even all that light could illuminate only a portion of the shadowed cave, which seemed to be some bizarre combination of vault and sepulcher.

The treasure of Daedalus lined the walls and filled the dark recesses at the back of the cave. Stone jars and vases overflowed with gold coins struck in ancient Greece and Egypt, with gem-encrusted headpieces and golden necklaces and gleaming scepters. A solid gold crocodile three feet in length must have come from the Temple of Sobek. And in the middle of it all, on a pedestal, stood a golden statue of a Minotaur, its horns massive shards of ruby.

In a single glance, Drake drank in the forgotten majesty of the place and the enormity of the secret truths it confirmed. But a moment was all he allowed himself, for the menace in that cave was far more dominant than its promise.

In the middle of the floor were three stone tombs, massive things like sarcophagi but with a Chinese influence on the design and the engravings. Beyond the three tombs, a small cluster of people waited, watching the intruders with eyes full of fear and loathing. There were three hooded men-one guardian for each tomb, perhaps. A woman stood in their midst, tall and veiled, the firelight throwing shadows across what little of her face was visible. Her eyes seemed to flicker yellow like the Minotaur’s. Behind her was an altar above which were shelves arrayed with vases and chalices. Upon the altar were drying white flowers, fragments of bone, and a variety of small stone cups. One cup had spilled a coppery powder across the pale stone.

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.

A huge block of stone in the wall of the cave pushed inward, falling onto the coin jars. They shattered, spilling coins all over the floor, just as a torrent of water rushed in through the hole the block had left behind. The rumbling and grinding went on. Another block slid from the wall, then a third and a fourth, and water crashed in, filling the vault with all the power of the river. So much water flooded in so quickly that in moments it began to rise around them.

Jada reached the stairs first, helping Suarez out of the rising water, which already had reached the second step. Drake and Sully were right behind them, but Sully turned to look back into the vault.

“What about her?” he said.

Drake turned to see Olivia in the middle of the maelstrom formed by the half dozen raging torrents coming through the walls. Treasures were flooded, knocked over, swirling and sinking, and Olivia screamed not in panic for herself but in anguish over the loss of the gold. She clutched the Minotaur statue to her chest as if it were her child, trying to keep it above the swiftly rising water.

“Come on, damn it!” Drake shouted, wading back toward her.

“Nate!” Sully called.

“Just go,” Drake snapped, waving him on. “I’m right behind you!”

The water had risen with stunning speed, washing around his waist now and still churning into the vault.

“Olivia! Drop the statue and swim!”

She glared at him with such hate that it stopped him cold. Olivia struggled to hold the heavy statue and forge her way through the maelstrom inside the vault. Drake swore and pushed toward her again, the river still flooding higher.

Something underwater must have tripped her, because she went down with a splash, submerging instantly. Drake thought she would drop the statue then, but there was no sign of flailing arms until suddenly she surfaced twenty feet to his right.

But Olivia was not alone. The dying Minotaur held her from behind, its gauzy white eyes shining in the light from the chandeliers above. The floodwater had knocked over the braziers and put them out, but the candles still burned. At first Drake thought the Minotaur had found the strength to attempt to survive and was trying to drag Olivia toward him and toward the door, but then he saw the way one of its clawed hands was tangled in her hair and the other gripped her throat, and the two of them sank under the water together.

Drake hesitated, furious with Olivia and with himself. Then, over the roar of the water, he heard Sully shouting to him from outside the vault and knew he had to go. He turned and slogged back toward the door, the floodwater swallowing him.

By the time he reached the steps, the water was up to his shoulders. As he climbed the submerged steps, he saw a flashlight up in the corridor and realized Sully had waited for him.

“Go!” he called, struggling out of the water and up the last step.

Sully hit him with the flashlight beam-Suarez must have had it in his pack-and shouted at him to hurry.

“Turn around!” Drake snapped as he ran toward Sully.

Then the water reached the top of the steps and began to pour into the corridor, and Sully’s eyes widened as he understood. They had a hundred feet or more of corridor to cover, and the water would keep churning, keep rising, until it matched the level of the river-at least ten feet above them.

The water washed around their legs, flooding along the tunnel. Sully stumbled once and Drake caught him, but they kept going. Up ahead they saw Jada helping Suarez up the stairs of the secret passage into the worship chamber. Suarez slipped and fell and didn’t rise again until Drake got there to help Jada with him, the water already above their knees.

They had to drag Suarez the last couple of steps and through the opening of the hidden entrance, where the altar remained rolled back from the stairs. Panting, bent over, with a single flashlight and only Suarez’s gun, they staggered out of the worship chamber, past the corpses of Massarsky, Garza, and the younger Minotaur, even as the water rushed up the stairs after them.

Three more steps took them out of the worship chamber, and then they were in the short tunnel that brought them to the rocky shelf of the riverbank, where the waterfall roared and the white hellebore grew as it always had.

Suarez died there only moments after they had set him down gently, too much blood lost from the wound in his side. Drake sank to his knees beside the man, sick to the bone of death and greed.

“Thanks for not killing us,” Drake whispered before he reached out and closed the dead man’s eyes.

He glanced at Sully and Jada, who were leaning against each other, exhausted and drained. Then he sat back on his haunches and glanced around the vast cavern, waiting long seconds to see if any of the Protectors of the Hidden Word would spring from one of the tunnels and try to kill them. No one appeared.

Far up in the ceiling of the cavern, he thought he could make out tiny slits of morning light.

“What do we do now?” Jada asked.

“What your father would have wanted,” Sully replied.

Drake nodded, rising wearily to his feet. He stared around at the blossoms on the walls among the moss and vines.

“Exactly,” he said. “We rip it all down, and then we burn it. We make sure white hellebore-the real thing-stays a myth.”

“We could set a charge, blow the tunnel under the Treasure Mound,” Sully suggested.

Drake shrugged. “Why bother? Once we close it up, the entrance is hidden, and the government forbids anyone from excavating.”

“Perkins left two of his people on guard. What do we say to them when we get out of here?” Jada asked.

Sully laughed. “Tell ’em they got lucky.”

Drake clapped him on the back, and the two of them smiled at Jada.

“Better yet,” Drake said, “tell ’em they’re fired.”