Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,64

hard, the jar slipping into his lap, protected from breaking by the loose cotton of his shirt.

“Thera,” he said.

“Never heard of—” Sully began, but then his eyes lit up.

“Thera as in Santorini?” Drake asked.

Welch’s face had gone slack. Drake thought he’d had too much revelation and epiphany for a single day and his archaeology geek brain might have blown a circuit.

“I’ve been there,” Jada said. “It’s beautiful.”

Drake agreed. The whitewashed buildings and blue domes, the multicolored boats and shutters, the bells, the ocean, the wine. There was nothing about Santorini he did not love, though he’d been there only once. But he had a feeling Welch wasn’t thinking about vacation spots.

“Talk to us, Ian,” Drake prodded.

Welch looked up at him. “Daedalus built the third labyrinth on Thera.”

“Santorini,” Jada said, apparently trying to clarify that they were talking about the same place.

But Welch shook his head. “No.”

“The whole thing’s an active volcano,” Sully said.

“Right,” Jada said, snapping her fingers as she recalled. “There are a bunch of little islands that make up the rim. So you’re talking Thera before it exploded or whatever?”

Welch smiled. “Oh, yeah.”

Drake frowned, not sure what he was getting so excited about. In modern times, Thera was an archipelago, but really the string of islands formed a circle around the deepest spot in the Mediterranean. The islands were all that remained of the much larger Thera as it had been before the massive eruption in—he thought it was the fourteenth century B.C., but it might have been the fifteenth. He didn’t remember any lava flowing on Santorini, but he knew that some of the smaller islands in the archipelago had volcanic vents and were still active.

“Minoan civilization collapsed around the same time as the destruction of Thera,” Welch said.

Jada threw up her hands in frustration. “Well, that’s great. So if the third labyrinth was there, we’ve lost any clues we might’ve found in a volcanic eruption thousands of years in the past.”

“Maybe and maybe not,” Sully said quickly, jabbing at the air with his unlit cigar to emphasize the point. He turned to Welch. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Welch grinned. “I think I am.”

“Would the two of you stop talking in riddles!” Drake snapped. “It hurts my head.”

Sully arched an eyebrow and shook his head. “Oh, Nate, you’re going to kick yourself for not getting this one. You’ve been to Santorini. There’s only one archaeological dig going on there that’s of any consequence.”

“Yeah,” Drake said, shrugging, the beam of his flashlight bouncing on the wall. “Akrotiri.”

“Which was a Minoan settlement,” Welch said. “One that many modern scholars believe once went under a different name.”

Drake heard the strange rustling again but barely noticed. He stared at Welch and Sully and grinned.

“You can’t be serious.”

“It all fits, Nate,” Sully said.

Jada punched Drake in the arm to get his attention. When he shot her an angry look, she hit him again.

“Hit him!” Drake said, pointing at Sully.

“Tell me!” she demanded.

Drake gestured at the other two men. “These two—they think this language was lost because all of the people who spoke it were killed in that volcanic eruption. They think the third labyrinth was in Akrotiri, on Thera.”

“So?” Jada asked.

Drake smiled. “They’re talking about Atlantis.”

She hit him a third time. “I’m serious. Tell me.”

“Ow!” Drake shouted. “I just did.”

Jada turned to Sully. “Tell me he’s kidding.”

“You didn’t hear the stories about the dig at Akrotiri when you went to Santorini?” Sully asked.

“I went shopping and to the beach. I flirted with guys and drank too much ouzo and rode bicycles with my friends,” she said. “We didn’t have the kind of fun time I seem to have with you, Uncle Vic.”

“Sarcasm? Now?” Drake asked.

“Seems like it’s always time for sarcasm with you,” she said.

“Okay. That’s mostly true,” he replied. “But a lot of people think Akrotiri is what remains of Atlantis—that Atlantis was a branch of Minoan culture—the perfection of it, really. And whether that’s true or not, if the third labyrinth was on Thera, the only chance we have of finding any trace of it or any records of it would be in Akrotiri.”

Welch gazed at the jar, studying it closely. He spoke without looking up.

“It can’t be Akrotiri. They’ve been excavating there since the sixties and have they found any hint of a labyrinth? I don’t think so. If there’s any trace of it left, it has to be somewhere else on the caldera.”

The caldera—the cauldron—was how the locals referred to the part of the deep