- Prey
- Sphere
- Black Rose
- The Great Train Robbery
- Blue Dahlia
- Carnal Innocence
- Dance Upon the Air
- High Noon
- Lawless
- Sacred Sins
- Tribute
- Face the Fire
- Holding the Dream
- A Man for Amanda
- All the Possibilities
- Next
- Prey
- Sphere
- Black Rose
- The Great Train Robbery
- Blue Dahlia
- Carnal Innocence
- Dance Upon the Air
- High Noon
- Lawless
- Sacred Sins
- Tribute
- Face the Fire
- Holding the Dream
- A Man for Amanda
Uncharted: The Fourth LabyrinthPage 27
“Come on!” Jada snapped at them. Their bickering was really starting to get to her, which amused Drake no end. It was also, he hoped, distracting her from her grief and from the danger they were in and from the burden of guilt they all felt for Ian Welch’s abduction and possible murder. They were all on edge, aware that they had to at least accept the possibility that the hooded men who had been waiting for them in the labyrinth of Sobek might be lurking down here already. “She loves us,” Drake whispered to Sully. Sully nodded sagely. “How could she not?” The corridor jagged to the left, then to the right, and in a dozen steps they came to a junction with three possible avenues ahead. “Looks like we’re in the right place,” Drake said. Jada stared at the three doorways, shaking her head. “This isn’t going to work. We need rope—something better than bread crumbs to leave a trail. Otherwise we could be down here forever. We could get so lost, we might die before we found our way out.” Drake shook his head. “I don’t think so.” “How do you figure?” Sully asked. Drake lifted his shirt and tugged a cloth packet from his waistband. He unwrapped the cloth napkin he had taken from a room service tray left in the hotel corridor to reveal Luka Hzujak’s journal and maps, folded tightly and all tied together with shoelaces he’d purchased in the small store in the lobby. “I didn’t think we should leave this in the room for sneaky ninja guys or Henriksen’s thugs to find if they searched it. Also, y’ know, maps.” Sully frowned. “What the hell good will those do us? None of them are for this place. No one’s been here in forever.” “He’s right,” Jada said. “My father was working with Maynard Cheney, studying labyrinths in general, including the design of what had already been uncovered at Crocodilopolis. His sketches in the journal refer to the maps in some places. It might not tell us every turn to take, but it could be the Rosetta Stone as far as figuring out the logic of this place.” Sully shone his light on the journal while Drake flipped pages. Jada unfolded a map and then a second, finding what she wanted. “Here,” she said, pointing to a junction in the labyrinth map that mirrored the one they were standing in. “It’s not the middle door. That’s going to double back into one of the other two. We’d be going in a circle.” “If you’re right,” Sully told her. Drake flipped another page, then went back three. “She’s right,” he said. “Luka has half a dozen variations on this, and only one of them has the middle door being the right one.” “How do we know this isn’t one of those instances?” Sully asked. “I don’t have all the answers,” Drake replied. “And neither did Luka. If it’s gotta be trial and error, then that’s what it’ll be.” Sully nodded. “Okay.” He went over to the corner of the right-hand door, where the stone seemed worn by time, and kicked at the rough edge of the frame, knocking several chunks of rock to the floor. “Just in case,” he said, holding up the biggest shard of stone. “Which way?” “Let’s try this one first,” Jada said, shining her light into the left side tunnel. Holding the journal open in his hands, Drake followed her. Sully seemed thoughtful but said nothing as he took up the rear. Drake studied the doorway, then looked along the corridor, which seemed to turn left again just ahead. Behind him, Sully paused to scratch something into the wall just inside the doorway. “Your initials?” Drake asked. “Hey, at least I didn’t write ‘Sully was here.’ ” “But you were tempted.” Sully shrugged. “Of course.” Drake started to turn, but something caught his eye. He reached out for Sully’s arm and pulled him over, making him shine the flashlight beam at the wall just above the door. Something else had been inscribed there, and it wasn’t Sully’s initials. “Jada!” Drake called. She hurried back to join them, merging her light with Sully’s. In the bright splash of illumination, they could all see the small diamond shape engraved into the stone above the door. “Do you think that means we chose right?” Jada asked. Sully stepped back out into the junction, but Drake had a glimmer of memory. In the light from Jada’s flash, he scanned pages of Luka’s journal again, and a smile crept across his face. He tapped the same page he’d looked at before, showing several variations on the three-choice junction. In each instance, Luka had drawn a small diamond shape on two of the possible avenues but not the third. “Look at the map,” Drake said quickly. Jada set it on the floor and unfolded it. They huddled over it, studying it in the light. “The middle path isn’t marked,” Sully called from the junction. “He’s drawn them here, too,” Jada said, tapping a fingernail on the map, where her father had inscribed tiny diamond shapes in many places. Drake got up and went out to the junction with Sully. He snatched the flashlight away and went into the middle tunnel, searching the wall above the door. Then he went into the third tunnel. “Yes!” he shouted in triumph. Sully and Jada stood in the junction watching him. “So the diamond marks the path?” Sully asked. “No,” Drake said, gesturing to the stone above the doorway. “It’s here, too. Only on the inside. No way to see it from out there.” “But if it’s on two of them, how do you—” Sully began, and then he grinned, nodding. “Oh, I like that. The right way is the one that isn’t marked.” “Exactly,” Drake said, glancing excitedly at Jada. “Your father had it figured out. But we never would’ve realized it if we’d only run into forks in the labyrinth. If it was one or the other, the diamonds wouldn’t have helped. But this has three choices, and if two are marked, that’s gotta mean that the absence of a diamond is what shows the right path. Which means we were wrong. It’s the middle door.” The three of them stared at one another, smiling in triumph. They hurried through the middle door and had gone about twenty feet when Sully halted abruptly. “Wait, wait,” he said, running back to the entrance and scrawling his initials just inside the door. “Just in case we’re idiots.” 15 Though the difference was gradual and subtle, there could be no mistaking the fact that their travels through the labyrinth were taking them deeper. Drake had the impression they were also moving farther away from the fortress. In Egypt, they had explored only a small section of a sprawling maze that might have been the size of a town. The temple at Knossos had thousands of rooms, and he suspected that they were inside a structure just as vast as that one. There were small chambers off the tunnels and corridors; some apparently were for storage, whereas others appeared to have been used for rituals. Several had frescoes on the walls that were neither Egyptian nor Greek in style but a merging of both. Those rooms surprised them, as did the presence of the flower motif they had encountered at the entrance, which was repeated in many of the small rooms. In the tunnels, however, there were no decorations, no frescoes, nothing that might be used as a landmark for those lost in the maze. Only those side chambers might have given an intruder clues, but although their contents might be different, their design was consistent from one to the next. |
- The Loners
- The Saints
- Switched
- Fangtastic!
- Re-Vamped!
- Vampalicious!
- Tome of the Undergates
- Black Halo
- The Skybound Sea
- If You Stay
- If You Leave
- Until We Burn
- Before We Fall
- Every Last Kiss
- Fated
- Suspiciously Obedient
- Random Acts of Crazy
- Random Acts of Trust
- Her First Billionaire
- Her Second Billionaire
- Her Two Billionaires
- Her Two Billionaires and a Baby
- His Majesty's Dragon
- Throne of Jade
- Black Powder War
- Victory of Eagles
- Tongues of Serpents
- Empire of Ivory
- Crucible of Gold
- Delirium