Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,124
pretty much the devil when this all started, I guess you’re not what we expected, either,” Drake said. “But we don’t have time for group therapy, Tyr. I’m going to bet there are still some spooky ninja guys—”
“And girls,” Jada put in.
“Yeah, I noticed that,” Drake said. “My point is, no matter how many Protectors of the Hidden Word were killed by Perkins’s goon squad, I doubt they’re all dead. If I was calling the shots, I’d have held some of my people back. They’ve got Sully and Ian Welch somewhere, and maybe others. Never mind the gold. There could be one or two right around the next turn. So we’re not going another step until you tell us what it is you’ve been holding back.”
Henriksen frowned. Jada aimed her flashlight at his eyes, and he squinted, turning away.
“Come on,” she said. “No more secrets. If the three of us are going to make it through till morning, we need to work together.”
Several seconds ticked by in the silence of the torture chamber. Its gruesomeness struck Drake anew, and he became more impatient than ever to be gone from there, to find the heart of the labyrinth and make an end to things.
“Tyr—”
“Knossos,” Henriksen said.
Drake shrugged. “What about it?”
“The labyrinth there is in ruins,” Henriksen went on, his gaze shifting from Drake to Jada. “But I’ve had theories about Minos for years, and I’ve had teams going through the ruins, doing small excavations, all through museums and universities but with my people running it. One of those excavations turned up the wreckage of a chamber.”
“A worship chamber,” Jada said, her voice low.
Henriksen nodded. “I brought your father in after my people had translated fragments of several tablets and the writing on a shattered sacramental jar we had recovered. I had been keeping track of progress at Crocodilopolis for a while, but once your father confirmed my suspicions that Daedalus had designed both the labyrinth at Knossos and the one in Crocodile City, it became my priority. I’d hoped to find a complete worship chamber there, and of course we found even more than that.”
“But there are things you knew already,” Drake said, studying his face. “Things you learned from the fragments from Knossos.”
“Bits and pieces. Suppositions,” Henriksen said. “The first Mistress of the Labyrinth was Ariadne herself. Her beauty and gentleness kept the Minotaur calm—”
“There’s no such thing—” Jada began.
“But there was!” Henriksen snapped. “You don’t understand.”
He took Drake’s flashlight and shone it upon the wall, where a gruesome painting in the ancient Chinese style represented the Mistress of the Labyrinth tipping a cup of honey into the mouth of a slave whose back was streaked with scars from the lash. Others awaited the same communion. One of them, off to the right, was hunched over, having already received the cup. Horns jutted from his head, and his features were contorted, almost savage.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Drake rasped, staring. “The honey? What, it turned them into monsters?”
“Not with horns,” Henriksen said, waving his disbelief away. “Those were an affectation, something to frighten the others, I think, and to perpetuate the legend that Daedalus had so carefully built. The skeleton we examined in the labyrinth of Sobek—the one you found on the stairs under the altar—had the horns of an actual bull. They were probably tied to his head with some kind of leather strap.
“There are conditions that could explain many of the Minotaur’s legendary features. The chemical composition of the honey might have triggered hypertrichosis, causing the growth of thick, shaggy hair all over their bodies, their faces included. I also suspect they attained their monstrous size through slave labor and the honey’s activation of the pituitary gland’s growth hormones. It’s even possible that one or two grew cutaneous horns, prompting the legend to begin with and leading Daedalus and his inner circle to use fake horns to perpetuate the monstrous image of the Minotaur in order to keep people too terrified to attempt to explore the labyrinth. But the key element is strength and aggression. Savagery. Perhaps an edge of lunacy.”
Jada’s flashlight beam wavered. “What are ‘cutaneous horns’? Is that even something real?”
“They’re not actual horn. In rare cases, people have seemed to grow horns on their heads or faces or hands, but it’s a buildup of keratotic material, like hair or fingernails. Sometimes there’s cancer involved …” Henriksen waved the topic away. “This is not important.”
“Agreed,” Drake said. “And it’s pretty gross. How the hell do they