Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,118
his heart began to hammer in his chest, an edge of panic gnawing at him. His body ached for open sky and fresh air the way it did when he went diving and stayed under the water too long, and he didn’t like being jammed into a place so vulnerable to attack with no way to defend himself.
When he heard the commotion ahead and below—the thump of boots and clatter of slides being racked back on assault weapons—his need to get out of that sharp-toothed tunnel only grew. He could hear the soldiers muttering, and when he glanced down, he realized he was almost there. Olivia had been right in front of him, and he saw her carefully extricating herself from the jagged rocks and stepping into an open chamber. Corelli and Henriksen and the mercenaries on point were already out of the tunnel.
“What is it?” Jada asked from behind him.
Below, he heard Olivia suck in a harsh breath, and he glanced down again, watching as she swung her flashlight around.
“Diyu,” she said, almost to herself.
“It’s hell,” Drake replied.
But it wasn’t until he reached the bottom safely and emerged into the chamber—a natural cave with jagged walls and a peaked ceiling like some kind of primeval chapel—that the reality of it struck him. There were stone altars with the carved faces of Chinese demons, and along one pitted wall, massive iron hooks had been driven into the rock face. The wall and floor were stained a horrid copper brown, caked with centuries of spilled blood and viscera. The place breathed with the anguish of tortured souls. If it was not quite an abattoir, it was the nearest to such a place Drake had ever entered.
“Oh, my God,” Jada said as she came in behind him.
Drake flinched at the sound of her voice. The other mercenaries came behind her, some of them voicing their own surprise but most too hardened to the worst cruelties of humanity to react. Drake hoped he never became so callous.
“Look at this,” Corelli said, pointing to a sacrificial altar.
Sluices had been carved around the edges of the table to carry blood away. It ran like a gutter down the side of the altar and across the floor, into a spill-off cut into the far wall, next to the cave’s exit.
Horrified as he was, Drake felt ice fill his veins as he remembered the map on the wall in the Chinese worship chamber on Thera.
“This is just one room,” he said. “There are others—maybe a lot of others.”
“Nate, look at this,” Jada said.
He turned to find her shining her flashlight on a wall painted with horrible images of demons and torture. There were hulking men with horns and brutish faces—Minotaurs—and a woman with a veil over her face who had to be Diyu’s version of the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Despite the Chinese characters painted on the wall and the difference in visual style, the most significant difference Drake noticed between these images and those they’d seen before had to do with the huge chalice or vase in the mistress’s hands. Seven slaves knelt in a semicircle before her as if awaiting an anointment. They were all reaching for the chalice, and she seemed to be extending it, as though willing to hand it over.
Henriksen and Olivia came up behind them. He glanced back at them and saw Olivia nod once, as if she’d just confirmed an earlier suspicion, and then she turned away, uninterested. Henriksen lasted only a moment longer before he, too, had moved on.
The mural hadn’t surprised them at all.
“Is that supposed to be Daedalus’s honey?” Drake asked.
“That was my thought,” Jada said.
Massarsky sidled up next to them. “Come on. We’re moving out.”
Drake spun to see that he was right; Perkins had ordered his people forward. Henriksen and Corelli were vanishing through the exit from the torture chamber already, and Olivia followed. Like the soldiers, she had her gun drawn and now held it at her side. He wondered if seeing this bit of Diyu had unnerved her. She didn’t seem easily shaken.
“Thanks,” Jada said.
Massarsky nodded, but he wasn’t paying any attention to them. He and Garza and a few others were covering the flank, which meant they couldn’t proceed until Jada and Drake got moving. Drake reached for his own weapon—a ten-millimeter Glock that carried fifteen rounds—and unsnapped the guard on the holster. He hesitated only a moment and then drew the gun.