Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth (25 page)

They had eight hours before the taxi driver returned—if he returned. Drake figured that gave them plenty of time to explore the ruins. If the labyrinth was there and there was a way in, they would find it. And if they came up empty-handed, he could always call and try to get the taxi driver to return sooner, though he worried that they could end up with a lot of walking ahead of them.

Drake unzipped his pack and took inventory, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything vital: water, fruit, and cheese from the hotel, rope, flashlight, gun. They all carried the same essential supplies, but Drake hoped they wouldn’t be down there long enough to require the use of anything but the flashlights.

“Nice place,” Sully muttered, looking up at the fortress. “We should convert it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

“I feel like I’m in some Greek version of
Dracula
,” Jada said, gazing up at the fortress. “We’ve got the remains of a castle and the little village of people who stare at you as you go by. All we’re missing is a Greek Dracula.”

“That’d be just our luck,” Sully sighed, and started walking.

“Good thing there’s no such thing as vampires,” Jada replied, setting off after him.

Drake said nothing. He slipped his backpack on and started walking.

“Wait, there
aren’t
, right?” he heard Jada ask.

“Not that we’ve ever run across,” Sully admitted. “And we’ve seen some wild stuff. Sometimes stories are just stories. Vampires are absurd, anyway. They’re always better dressed than everyone else, right? But they’re up all night killing people and drinking blood, and half the time they live in graves and crypts or whatever. Yeah, these are not creatures well versed in the laundry arts. Stupid. Who believes that crap?”

Drake smiled. Laundry. He could always trust Sully to find the practical angle.

Jada and Sully caught up with him. Sully patted his pockets in search of a cigar but apparently had left his last one behind in the hotel. He’d managed to remember his gun but not a cigar. Drake almost suggested it might be his subconscious trying to make a statement about smoking but decided not to antagonize his friend.
Don’t poke the bear
, Sully had often said when Drake was younger. As rules went, it was a smart one.

They began by making a complete circuit of the fortress, following the perimeter and examining the places where the walls had crumbled. The medieval stone structure had begun to collapse like a sand castle in some places, eroded by entropy, but in others the walls remained standing strong. They found only a handful of places where crevices had formed in the exterior of the ruin, and none of them yielded evidence of anything beneath the structure.

In the most dangerous places, haphazard attempts had been made to block off entry. There were signs and in one place a piece of railing that looked new enough to be a recent effort, but if so the village or the island had run out of money before it could be completed. A twelve-foot stretch of metal railing with nothing on either side of it would do little to keep inquisitive visitors away. It slowed Drake and his friends not at all.

At the rear of the fortress they encountered a partially collapsed doorway. Wooden supports had been put in place to prevent more of the stone above the door from falling, and makeshift wooden doors had been put in place to block the entrance. Once upon a time, the wood might have been strong and new, but the arid weather and sea air had dried and weakened it. A chain looped through the door handles, but it took Drake three kicks to smash the doors open, one of the handles tearing right out of the wood.

And they were in.

“Now let’s see what we can find before the police show up,” Jada suggested.

Sully pushed the doors closed, then dragged a couple of heavy blocks of broken masonry over to keep them from swinging inward.

“Do they even have cops here?” he asked.

“Maybe not in the village, but on the island?” Jada said. “Yeah.”

“This is as remote as you can find on Santorini,” Drake said. “I’m guessing there aren’t a ton of cell phones. And no matter what weird looks we got on the way up here, they must see the occasional tourist checking this place out. They’re more likely to think we’re idiots than thieves or vandals or something.”

“So we’re relying on them thinking we’re just American fools?” Sully asked.

Drake shrugged. “Pretty much.”

“It’s probably a safe bet,” Sully agreed after thinking about it for a second. “But if we’re out here long enough,
someone
will get the police to check on us or come looking themselves.”

“Then stop talking and get to work,” Jada said, smiling.

Sully snapped off a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

For more than an hour, they explored the courtyard and the rooms of the fortress. Some were completely shattered and full of debris, and Drake tried not to wonder what was beneath the rubble. If what they sought had been closed off by the earthquake, it would take a lot more than bare hands to uncover it.

Other rooms were well preserved but empty, dust on the floor a reminder of the unsteadiness of the whole structure. The wind off the Mediterranean gusted powerfully from time to time. When it whistled over the hill and through the cracks in the walls, it seemed to make the very foundations shiver.

The second and third hours found them peering beneath fallen stairs and investigating darkened alcoves. Throughout the fortress there were cracks in the walls, and in some places the floor had given way. They treaded carefully there, warily creeping through rooms Drake wouldn’t ever have dared to enter by choice. They all carried their guns, and Sully and Jada each had one of the industrial flashlights they’d stashed in their duffels before boarding the ship from Egypt. Sully’s kept flickering, the battery threatening to die, but so far it worked well enough.

Many of the breaks in the walls and floor opened into jagged nooks, and they examined those holes carefully, searching for any indication that there might be more open space below. In one of the less damaged corners of the fortress, Drake found a doorway with stairs leading downward.

“Jada, I need a light,” he called.

She and Sully abandoned their searches to join him, shining their flashlight beams down into the dark of the old stone stairwell. One part of the left-hand wall had fallen in, but Drake started down, careful not to get ahead of the pool of illumination. They managed to pick their way over the debris on the stairs and found a bit of hallway at the bottom. Only a bit, however, as the corridor to the left had been entirely blocked by a rockfall from above. The ceiling had given way there, and whatever lay in that direction was closed to them.

The right-hand side held much more promise.

If the door had been made of metal, they’d never have gotten through. The earthquake had shifted and buckled the frame enough that the lintel pressed down on the door from above. The whole frame seemed off kilter, slanted to the left, and the door was tightly jammed within the new angles of the frame, squeezed from the top and sides. But the pressure had been enough to split the wood down the middle. The boards were thick planks, but they had splintered and now the two sides of the door were held together only by thin iron bands on the top and bottom.

“I’m a little worried the whole thing’s going to come down on top of us if we try to break through,” Jada said.

Drake and Sully studied the doorway. Sully ran his fingers along the top of the broken door, where the ceiling pressed down onto it.

“I can’t promise you it won’t,” he said.

Drake scoffed. “Come on. You think this piece of wood is holding up the thousands of tons of rock above us?”

“No,” Sully said, frowning as he looked at the door. “But if it’s what kept the doorway from collapsing—”

He shrugged—“Ah, screw it”—and put all his weight behind a kick that made the wood shriek and dust sift down from above. Sully kicked the door twice more in rapid succession and then winced, backing away. He massaged his knee.

“You all right, old man?” Drake asked, smiling.

“Why don’t you give it a shot, wise guy?” Sully growled.

“I would’ve been happy to if you’d let me know before you started unleashing all your righteous kung-fu fury on the mean old door.”

Sully sighed heavily and stood, preparing to kick the door again. Jada covered her mouth, trying not to let him see her laugh.

“All right, grumpy,” Drake said. “Let me give it a shot before we end up having to carry your geriatric butt out of here.”

“My geriatric butt is still young enough to knock you unconscious,” Sully warned. Then he stretched his leg, still trying to work the kinks out of his knee. “But yeah. Have at it.”

Drake smiled, knowing it was a cocky grin but unable to help himself. He stared at the door, determined, and shot a hard kick at the split in the wood. It shrieked, the crack widening, but the thin iron straps were not going to give so easily. The impact on the door had shot up his leg hard enough to rattle his teeth, but he wasn’t going to let Sully know that. Drake kicked again, and it might have been that the stone lintel shifted a little, or it might have been the door frame. It was hard to tell.

He glanced at Jada, wondering if she was right to be concerned. If they hadn’t run out of fortress to search, he would have suggested that they keep looking, but this room was their dead end. If they found nothing beyond the door, they would have to start over. Drake would go over the various chambers and sublevels of the fortress even more carefully, and Jada would go with Sully into the village to start asking around about the earthquake and what might have been on the hill before the fortress was built.

“This is turning out to be a waste of a day,” he said.

Jada had her hair back in a ponytail, and when she frowned and crossed her arms, she looked like someone’s recalcitrant teenage daughter.

“Are you giving up?” she asked.

“Nah,” Drake said, deciding this was not the moment to suggest they call the taxi back and head somewhere for a drink. He slid the gun from the back of his waistband and handed it to her. “Hang on to that for a second, will you?”

As she took it, he drew a deep breath, glanced at the door, then ran at it. Even as he launched himself off the ground, he knew what a stupid idea it was. Trying to be Action Man always ended in bruised ribs and a bruised ego. His regret lasted a millisecond, and then his feet struck the crack in the door and it burst inward in a shriek of metal and wood.

Drake tried to put a hand down to break his fall but still rapped his knee hard when he struck the ground. He grimaced, sucking air between his teeth, and got up slowly, massaging the same knee Sully had been nursing a minute before.

“You’re no Bruce Lee,” Sully muttered.

“I got the damn door open,” Drake countered, dusting off his trousers.

“Do you two ever not bicker like children?” Jada asked.

Drake and Sully exchanged a look, and then both of them grinned.

“Not really,” Sully said.

“It’s always his fault,” Drake said. “I’m innocent.”

Sully rolled his eyes. “How is it I’ve let you tag along with me so many times over the years?” he asked, stepping through the wreckage of the door, shining his flashlight around a room that had been closed up for more than half a century.

“You? I’m the one who lets you tag along. But that’s going to change, trust me. Grumpy old man with stinky cigars.”

“Enough with the cigars,” Sully called back to them, his voice echoing off the walls of what seemed like a fairly large room.

“I agree,” Jada whispered to Drake. “Enough with the cigars.”

“I heard that,” Sully said.

“Good,” she shot back.

Jada handed the gun back to Drake, who returned it to his waistband as they followed Sully through the shattered door. As they passed over the threshold, Drake looked up at the buckled frame. He said nothing to Jada, but he didn’t like the look of it. The split door had been acting as a massive support beam, just as she had feared. Grit sifted down from cracks in the stone above the ruptured wooden frame. But it was only a single room and the last one open to them. If they left without examining it, they would always wonder.

“Suddenly I’m thirsty,” Sully said, waving his flashlight around.

As Jada swept her light across the ceiling and then aimed it forward, Drake understood the joke. They were in a medieval wine cellar. Unlike the rest of the fortress, this room had been carved right out of a section of ancient stone, part of the hilltop. The curved ceiling was built of stone blocks, and arched alcoves lined the walls. Old casks were stacked in several of the alcoves, but over time the wood had dried so badly that the seals had opened and the wine had long since drained away and evaporated, leaving only stains and a dull but distinctive odor.

“Nice. How come I don’t have one of these?” Drake asked.

No one answered. Jada and Sully had both begun searching the room. He figured they were checking the alcoves for secret passages, since there was no obvious sign of cracks or breaks in the cavern floor. The fortress had been built eons after the labyrinth would have been abandoned, but if this was the location of Daedalus’s third maze, it was entirely possible that whoever had built the fortress would have known about the labyrinth and constructed some kind of hidden access. And given that the wine cellar had been carved out—or plugged into an existing split in the rock—it made sense that if there were any kind of access, it would be through here. But with a single circuit of the room, half in darkness since he didn’t have a flashlight, Drake could tell that the builder of the fortress had given this room only one purpose, and that was storing wine.

“Guys, this isn’t the place,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Sully allowed.

But Jada kept looking, trying to haul a cask out of the way so she could shine her light behind it.

“Jada,” Drake began.

“Hang on,” she said.

He shoved his hands into his pockets. If she wanted him to wait, he would wait. She had more riding on solving this puzzle than he did. Drake glanced at Sully, who had started to examine the ceiling with his flashlight. There were cracks there that Drake hadn’t noticed upon entering, and he didn’t like the look of them at all.