The Last Odyssey (Sigma Force #15) - James Rollins Page 0,70

living here.

Roe stepped closer to him. “But you should know the ancient Greeks had a different name for the nuraghe fortresses. They called them daidaleia.”

Gray looked harder at the monsignor.

“For Daedalus,” Howard confirmed. “The mythic master craftsman of the Greeks, the man who devised the Labyrinth that housed the minotaur, who was the father of Icarus, the boy who died when he flew too close to the sun.”

Also the man whom the key to the golden map had been named after.

“I don’t understand,” Seichan said. “Why were those ancient fortresses named after Daedalus?”

Roe answered, “Because Sardinia was his home.”

20

June 24, 11:14 A.M. CEST

Tyrrhenian Sea

I’m not going to make it.

Elena checked the lounge’s wall clock for the hundredth time. The glare of the midday sun reflected off the surrounding seas, sharpening her headache. The noon deadline set by Nehir weighed on her. She had been up all night, only catnapping on the sofa when she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer.

Joe had mostly kept her company, but when his conversation turned into riotous snoring last night, she had chased him below, all but shoving him at the guards out in the hall. She had needed to concentrate.

Then a couple of hours ago, Joe had returned, along with breakfast.

By that time, her sprawl of books had spread to twice its size.

Joe slowly paced the lounge, skirting her piles of books. His leg irons clanked with each step. He winced and groaned occasionally, clearly pained by the brand burned into his thigh.

Guilt ate at her.

If I don’t solve this, he’ll suffer worse.

He continued his clanking and groaning until she couldn’t take it any longer.

“Can you please quit that?” she begged.

Joe cringed. “Sorry.” He tried to slink quietly to the sofa, but it only made the chains clink louder. He finally reached the leather seat and sat down. “How’re you doing?” he asked.

As an answer, she placed her head in her hands.

“Maybe if you talked it through,” he said. “Gray always likes to do that.”

She didn’t know who Gray was, but maybe Joe was right. She glanced out to the three towering calderas of Vulcano. She had spent most of the night reading about Hephaestus, the god of the forge. She had searched for every reference to the blacksmith’s creations—which were numerous.

The god had crafted special arrows for the huntress Artemis, magical shafts that never missed their mark. He fashioned armor for countless heroes, including Achilles from the Iliad. But it was his autonomous creations that she had concentrated on.

Even here, Hephaestus had been busy. He built a temple to Apollo, the god of music, and adorned it with the Keledones Chryseai, six golden statues of women who would sing on command. For King Minos, the blacksmith built a bronze hunting hound named Laelaps. According to Apollonius’s Argonautica, Hephaestus had created an army of bronze warriors that once awoken would keep on killing until destroyed.

But there were two creations she found the most intriguing, remembering the stories Joe had related to her, about Mac’s encounters with bronze killing machines.

“Let me read you something,” Elena said and drew out the pages of Argonautica again from the piles on the desk. She skipped to a passage she had flagged and translated it aloud. “‘The craftsman-god Hephaestus had fashioned for the palace of Aeetes a pair of bulls with feet of bronze, and their mouths were of bronze, and from them they breathed out a terrible flame of fire.’”

Joe sat up straighter. “That sounds like what Mac and Maria saw in that cave, what tried to attack them.”

Elena believed she had caught a glimpse of it, too, before being taken away. She remembered seeing a horned, fiery figure emerge from the smoke of the burning dhow. “They were called the Khalkotauroi,” she said. “Also known as the Colchis Bulls. Terrifying creatures, with bodies of bronze, horns of silver, and eyes of rubies. They were eventually subdued by Jason of the Argonauts, who doused their flames with a black potion given to him by the witch Medea, ‘a powerful pharmaka called Promethean Blood.’”

Joe looked at her, not getting what she was implying.

She sighed. “Mac said the fiery crabs were preserved in black oil in giant storage pots. And when he splashed the same oil on one of them, it killed the fires fueling the creature.”

Joe slowly nodded.

“And then there’s the story of Talos, a giant bronze guardian of the island of Crete. It was also built by Hephaestus. The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos described Talos as