Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,115

Jada, though two of them hung back, staying to guard their exit. That made fourteen in Perkins’s squad and nineteen all together, counting Drake and Jada, Henriksen and Olivia, and Corelli. Nobody spoke as they moved along the corridor, listening for any sign of a potential attack coming from ahead and watching for hidden doorways.

The tunnel spiraled downward, taking them deeper, and then straightened out again and ran on for perhaps fifty yards before it ended in a vaulted chamber that caused them all to come to a halt. Two passages led away and farther downward from the chamber, and mercenaries were investigating both paths. But the rest of the group had focused elsewhere, and as flashlight beams illuminated the walls and ceiling, Drake stared in amazement.

“This isn’t man-made,” Henriksen said. “It’s a natural cave.”

Moss grew in thick patches on the walls. Stains on the solid rock showed the patterns where water had dripped down from above, and Drake shone his flashlight upward. He pressed himself against the wall alongside Olivia, who was doing the same thing.

“Do you see it?” she asked.

“A crevice,” he said.

Long, thick roots jutted from stone and earth and hung down, partially blocking the view, but Drake could see the glint of his light off jagged stone. Far above, where his beam could not reach, was a thin sliver of moonlight.

“Another one over here,” Garza called from the other side of the cave.

Corelli swore softly. “Olivia. Better have a look at this.”

Drake frowned and glanced at Henriksen, who had turned to look at Corelli. The bodyguard had his light trained on a blanket of moss, but there were hints of white among the green and brown.

“They’re flower buds,” Olivia said, a tinge of wonder in her voice.

“Not just buds,” Jada said, from a jagged alcove where the moss grew particularly thick. She shined her flashlight at a spot perhaps ten feet off the cave floor, where a trio of white flowers grew, dangling and half wilted.

“Those look familiar to you?” Drake asked.

Jada nodded. “Sure do.”

Henriksen came over to inspect them. “These aren’t white hellebore at all. They look similar—could be related—but the petals have a different shape.”

“And white hellebore can’t grow in moss with this little light,” Olivia added, coming up behind him.

Drake pushed against the wall and looked up, spotting another crevice. The moss was wet from the rain that ran down into the cave when it stormed. He pushed back and thrust his fingers into the moss, finding thick vines beneath it. He tugged them out to show the others.

“There you go,” Corelli said, as if to himself.

Perkins called for Henriksen, but Drake kept his eyes on the flowers. Cave hellebore, he thought, wondering if they had discovered a new species of flora.

“—no sign of diamond carvings or any other differentiating marks,” Perkins was saying.

Drake stiffened and turned. He stared at the two men and then at the two doors, and he realized something they obviously had figured out already. Two doors—two possible choices—this was the start of the fourth labyrinth.

“Jada,” he said. “Where’s the emperor’s tomb?”

Jada nodded slowly, but it was Olivia who answered.

“Maybe it was never here. Your professor friend in Oxford said they’d established it was here because they knew something was here. It made sense to assume it was the burial site—the underground palace.”

Corelli had gone over to the right-hand passage and begun to explore it, searching for markings the mercenary team already had established weren’t there. Drake liked the man less and less as the minutes ticked by. For a flunky, he seemed fairly presumptuous, almost as if he forgot from time to time that he was just an employee.

Henriksen glanced at Drake. “I have a theory.”

Drake nodded. “Let’s hear it.”

“It never made any sense to me that Daedalus would’ve marked the correct path through the Thera labyrinth.”

“He didn’t,” Jada said. “He marked the wrong path.”

“Granted,” Henriksen replied, blue eyes turned gray in the reflected illumination of so many flashlights. “But how long did it take us to figure that out? A man who would design such a puzzle would never offer so simple a solution. But what if those markings were added later, when it no longer mattered if intruders could find their way?”

“After the Thera eruption?” Drake asked. “Why bother?”

“No, it makes sense,” Jada said, and he could see it pained her to admit that Henriksen had a point. “If we’re going on the theory that there even was a golden hoard and that Talos—or someone—supervised the