Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,41

of them, and then a second appeared and set the tahini and pita on the table. Drake would have rather had nachos, but as hungry as he was, the sesame paste and soft bread would do just fine.

“All right,” Drake said before taking a bite. “Tell us about Daedalus and the three labyrinths.”

Welch sipped his water. “That’s the biggest thing to come out of the dig so far. How much do you already know?”

Drake chewed, trying to swallow so he could reply. Jada jumped in.

“My father talked about his work a lot,” she said. “The way I understand it, he believed that Daedalus was an actual person, not a mythological character, and that he designed not only the labyrinth at Knossos—as most stories tell it—but also two others, including the one you’re excavating right now.”

Welch nodded all through her statement. “Oh, there’s no doubt about it now. Look, most scholars will agree that the most enduring myths eventually prove to have had some real-life antecedent. The ancient Greeks, for instance, believed that the Trojan War had taken place and that Troy was an actual place. In modern times, historians had basically decided the whole thing had been made up, that it was just a story, right up until a German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann actually discovered the ruins of Troy in 1870. So much for the people who dismiss myth as just stories.

“The thing about ancient Greece is that the people who tried to write the histories tended to pull from a variety of sources. A Mycenaean ruler might be confused with a figure in some older Phoenician story, and two pieces of truth might get jammed together, through oral tradition and exaggeration and superstition, into something else. My job as an archaeologist is to try to unravel the threads that time has wound together.”

Drake glanced at Sully, whose attention was on the other guests and the waitstaff. To someone who didn’t know him, he would look bored and disinterested, just a guy hungrily anticipating his dinner instead of a guy ready for a fight. Sully had Luka’s journal and maps stuffed into the rear waistband of his pants, right next to his gun. They had agreed it would be unwise to leave it back at the hotel, but Drake felt constantly aware of its presence among them. More than anything, it explained why Sully was so on guard. But Welch didn’t seem put off by Sully’s ignoring him at all.

“All right, so—Daedalus?” Drake asked.

“He was real?” Jada said.

Welch took a breath, reached up and removed his glasses, and began to clean them with the hem of the tablecloth.

“In the late Bronze Age, there was an inventor and builder considered to be one of the cleverest men in the world. Stories were told about him in many languages and cultures under many different names, but the one that seems to have stuck is Daedalus. He was a craftsman, an artisan, and the labyrinth of Knossos was long considered his greatest achievement.

“There is a great deal of disagreement in academic circles about whether or not the palace discovered at Knossos in the 1870s is actually the labyrinth Daedalus designed,” Welch went on, replacing his glasses and reaching for his water glass. He looked intent now, lost in the history inside his mind. “The structure contains thousands of interlocking rooms, but many, myself included, have maintained that it was not the labyrinth itself, that the actual maze was located somewhere nearby.”

The waiter arrived, interrupting him, and they all gave their orders. Welch waited only moments after the waiter’s departure, eager now that his story had begun.

“What you have to understand is that our current excavation—the labyrinth of Sobek—essentially proves that theory. The main palace of Crocodilopolis, the Temple of Sobek, has been a given for decades. But the labyrinth is a separate structure, not far from the temple. The Cretan labyrinth at Knossos must have been the same.”

Drake shook his head. “Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “You’re saying they’ve never found the labyrinth at Knossos? The one with the Minotaur? King Minos, the whole thing?”

Welch smiled, scraping a bit of tahini onto a piece of pita. “Amazing, isn’t it? This stuff is legend, but it gets mixed up in the public consciousness. People don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. So here’s what is real.”

He took a bite, chewed a few times, and swallowed, barely conscious of the action.

“The palace at Knossos is there. But an English gentleman, Sir Arthur