Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,57
to the Mistress of the Labyrinth. So while the paintings and tablets in the worship chamber indicate that the honey was brought to her as an offering—as does the jar we found—these tablets tell a different story.”
Welch took the tablet from her and studied it, surprise dawning on his features.
“What does it say?” Jada asked.
“We’d wondered, my friends,” he said, turning to them with a smile. “And now we know. The honey may have been brought to the mistress, but the offering wasn’t for her. She—I’m not sure if this indicates that she served it, as with a meal, or administered it in some medical fashion to the protector of the labyrinth.”
“That one says something like ‘protector,’ ” Melissa said. “But the other tablet is explicit. The protector was a monster, hidden from the cult of Sobek, known only to those who dared the ‘secret heart’ of the labyrinth and who would never return because the monster would kill them.”
“I take it the ‘monster’ has horns?” Sully asked.
“Like a bull,” Melissa said, nodding happily. “Yes, it does.”
While they continued to marvel over the tablets and translate certain bits, Drake turned to the other side of the antechamber. A single stone block had given way, but given that each one weighed about fifteen hundred pounds, putting it back in place would be a great deal of work. Sand from above had filled in that corner of the room, and he saw the brushes and other implements that Melissa and Guillermo had been using to free the tablets and other artifacts that had been discovered in this antechamber. The walls were covered with glyphs and paintings here as well, but what drew Drake’s full attention was the vase caught in the packed sand.
Melissa and Guillermo had unearthed about half the vase. It was intricately painted, and he knew that without a doubt, the contents of the labyrinth would constitute one of the greatest historical finds of the modern era—perhaps the greatest. The vase was incredibly well preserved.
He picked up a brush and took a closer look. A figure had been partially revealed—that of the Mistress of the Labyrinth, he thought, since it matched the figure on the base of the altar in the worship chamber. She held a jar or chalice in front of her, proffering it to someone whose hands were visible, though the rest of the other figure was covered with sand.
Drake had a pretty good idea who that other figure must be.
He started to brush at the vase. Some of the sand was tightly packed, and though he was careful, he had to brush a bit more vigorously. He needed a little elbow grease, so he leaned his knees against the piled sand, which had remained undisturbed for thousands of years.
“Hey, dude, get away from there,” the grad student Guillermo said angrily, ducking his head back into the antechamber.
Melissa turned to stare at him in annoyance. Drake smiled and held up his hands.
“No harm done. But I think I found—”
The sand gave way. He started to tumble forward and caught himself by planting his hands on either side of the vase, feeling triumphant because he hadn’t damaged it. Triumphant for half a second before the vase and all the sand around it dropped as if sucked into the floor.
Drake let out a yell as he fell after it, spilling into a shaft.
Hands grabbed his legs, then his belt. As the sand sifted around him, trying to suck him down, whoever had hold of him prevented him from falling into the shaft after the vase and the granite block it had sat on and at least a few other tablets that he glimpsed before they were swallowed by the darkness below. He heard something crack and knew he had just broken a piece of history.
“Whoops!” he said.
“You stupid son of a bitch!” Melissa snapped. “What did you think you were doing?”
“Helping?”
The upper half of Drake’s body still hung down inside the shaft. The hands started to pull him out. In the dim reflected light from the bulbs strung in the antechamber, he saw a painting on the wall of a figure that he could not mistake for any other.
“Guys?” he said. “You’re gonna want to take a look at this.”
“What did you find?” Ian Welch asked.
Drake grunted as they dragged him out, and he turned over, lying on the sandy floor, to find them all staring at him. But when he spoke, his focus was on Jada.