Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,82
two of them fell through the open door, sprawling on the floor in the corridor, near the bottom of the stairs.
Drake swore as he saw the wooden door frame buckling further as the weight of the ruin above them shifted and the frame began to give way.
He dived through the opening just as the frame splintered and a huge slab of rock crashed down, barely missing his legs. The three of them scrambled backward, rising unsteadily, the corridor pitching around them. The slab seemed for a moment as if it would block the wine cellar from view, but then it tilted away from them, and they watched in astonishment as it fell into a hole where the floor of the wine cellar had been.
An entire section of the fortress above collapsed into the room and crashed through the floor, smashing it open in two places, rubble sliding down to half fill the gaping openness of the broad corridor beneath them.
Rubble shifted, and they coughed, covering their mouths and noses until the dust had begun to settle.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sully murmured, shining his flashlight across the holes in the shattered floor.
“We almost died,” Jada said, unsteady on her feet.
“Yeah,” Drake said. “On the other hand—”
Jada shone her light into the rubble and the ancient corridor below them. “Yeah. The labyrinth of Thera.”
“It better be,” Sully said. “Or we’ve done all this damage for nothing.”
“All we did was open a door,” Drake reasoned.
“Says Captain Dropkick,” Sully rasped.
“Guys, can we just find out if this is the labyrinth, please?” Jada asked.
Sully put an arm around her. “Come on, kid. You know we entertain you. It’s like going on a Mediterranean adventure with a couple of vaudeville stars.”
“Or the bickering brothers I never had,” Jada mused.
Drake crouched at the edge of the pit that had opened where the wine cellar had been moments before. Dust still lingered, a low cloud misting above the rubble. The huge piece of masonry that had been above the door made a sort of ramp down into the more treacherous wreckage, but the fortress had ceased its trembling. The rubble shifted a little, bits of rock sliding down to find a new resting place.
“Jada, can I ask you a question?” he said.
“Of course.”
Drake turned from the rubble and arched a mischievous brow. “Are you old enough to even know what vaudeville is?”
“Hey. Don’t knock vaudeville,” Sully protested.
“I’m not. I’m saying you’re old.”
Sully sat down beside him and slid his legs over the shattered edge of the floor. “I’m not old. I’m seasoned. And for your information, I wasn’t alive in the vaudeville era. I’ve just seen a lot of old movies.”
Drake smiled but said nothing more. He couldn’t really tease Sully about old movies because he loved them, too.
“Are we really doing this?” Jada asked.
For a second, Drake thought she was still talking about their bickering. Then he saw that she’d come up to stand behind him and Sully and was staring down into the pit. So much of the roof had come down that in places they could see the blue Aegean sky. But Drake was much less interested in what had been opened above than he was in what had been revealed below.
Sully pushed off the edge of the floor.
“Damn it, Uncle Vic, be careful!” Jada said.
Drake figured all three of them were holding their breath, but the huge slab of stone did not shift as Sully slid down it. When he reached the rubble, he waited as Drake slid down after him. The stone was warm under Drake’s steadying hands. At the bottom, he glanced up at Jada.
“This is really stupid,” she said as she sat down on the shattered edge of stone that had once been the wine cellar’s threshold.
Drake and Sully grinned at each other.
“We’ve never let that stop us before,” Drake said.
Jada slid the length of the slab, and Drake caught her at the bottom. The three of them exchanged weighted glances, none of them wanting to admit just how dangerous their next step would be. Under their feet was hundreds of tons of stone both from the part of the fortress that had given way and from the buckled floor of the wine cellar. But the opening at the far end of the debris called to them. There were secrets there, and that was what they’d come for. None of them would have turned back now.
They picked their way carefully across the rubble. Several times, the stone shifted under