The Lost Labyrinth (40 page)

What now?

His breath was whistling in his throat; a stitch jabbed in his side and at his bruised ribs. He got
down onto his knees then lay on his front and leaned out over the edge to examine the cliff-face beneath him for a manageable way down. What he saw could have been better, but it could have been worse too. The top third was almost sheer, but it was craggy enough to offer plentiful holds, even for an inexperienced climber like himself. Beneath that, it grew incrementally less steep to a slope of loose earth and shale that fed straight into the gorse.

He gave his legs a few moments more to recover, then he lay on his belly and grabbed some roots with either hand and swung his legs out over the edge, searching with his toes until they found crags and ledges strong enough to take his weight. He let go of one of the roots and took a grip of the cliff edge, then lowered himself further. He kept at it, not looking down, his progress frustratingly slow. But finally he reached the end of the first section, where the gradient relented a little. The face was still steep, but seemed to consist of bands of limestone that had weathered at different speeds, creating a series of giant steps cut by time and nature. It was an opportunity to make up some time. He turned around until he was facing outwards, then jumped down onto the ledge several feet beneath him, legs bent to cushion his landing. He stumbled a little but made sure to fall against the face and away from danger. He picked himself
up, wiped the grit from his palms, then looked down for another ledge to jump down to. This time, however, his ankle turned beneath him, and he stumbled the wrong way, forcing him straight into a third leap, then a fourth, his arms now flailing wildly for balance. He hit the lower slopes at such speed that it would have been suicide to try to stop, so he went with it instead, trusting to gravity and the skill of his quick feet, his legs pumping crazily, soil and loose grey stones cascading all around him, until finally he stumbled and tumbled and crashed like a bowling ball into the gorse, the thorns ripping his shirt to shreds, but acting like a safety net too, slowing and then stopping him.

He lay there for a moment, face down in the tangles, gathering his breath, assessing himself for injury. Every inch of him throbbed and stung and ached, but nothing felt broken or ruptured. He got gingerly to his feet, fought his way through the gorse and the creepers to the clearing. There was a gash in the rock-face. Light was coming from inside, along with the low chunter of a generator. He breathed in deep to steel himself, then got down onto his hands and knees and crawled inside.

The lamps were each connected by a short white flex to the main cable, noted Gaille, the junctions wrapped in balls of duct-tape to keep out moisture. They made eerie pockets of light in the darkness, coaxing ghosts and monsters from the walls, so that she suffered a sudden brief flashback to a forgotten childhood trauma, losing hold of her mother’s hand while walking with her through a fairground haunted house, giving her a horror of the darkness that had lasted for months.

She reached a new gallery, sparkling with seams of quartz and calcium, glanced almost instinctively upwards to see how high the chamber’s ceiling was; but the footing was too slick for such liberties, and her feet went from beneath her, so that she had to grab the wall and cling on. The moment
she let go again, however, she slipped once more, clapping her ankle against rock, grazing her skin, feeling the sharp pulse of drawn blood.

There were chalk-marks scrawled in French upon the wall.
Plumed head
, read one.
Ox-hide
, read another. Symbols from the Phaistos disc, discovered and marked up by Petitier, more evidence that the disc was a map designed to find and navigate through this place. But navigate to what? A low overhang forced her down onto hands and knees. She crawled through a cobweb veil, gossamer, flies and grit congealing in her hair.

A lamp was wasting its light by lying face-down against the left-hand wall. She turned it around to illuminate a large chamber with a ribbed roof and several shallow pits dug in the dirt floor. Several boxes of artefacts were stacked against the walls, votive offerings and what looked like fragments of bone. Caves had often been used as cemeteries by the ancients, one reason why so many of them had become sacred ancestral sites. An albino insect scurried for the darkness as she set the lamp back down, giving hints of a closed ecosystem in which everything fed off everything else.

She followed the orange cable up a hummock of loose rubble, an ancient rock-fall through which Petitier had burrowed a tunnel several metres long. She hoped that the far side would prove defensible, like the cave mouth had been, but the new
gallery opened up too gradually for an ambush. Again, Petitier had left abundant evidence of his excavations; despite everything, Gaille couldn’t help but notice how meticulous he’d been. He hadn’t simply charged around with a spade, looking for plunder, as she’d half expected. He’d taken great pains to—

Mikhail suddenly grunted behind her. She whirled around, heart in her mouth, expecting to see him almost upon her; but she was alone. Nothing but cave acoustics. The fright spurred her on, however. The cave forked in two ahead, with symbols carved into the rock above either passage, circled and chalked by Petitier. The orange cable led away down the left-hand passage, offering her a very Manichaean choice between light and dark. She was about to choose darkness, the better to hide, when it occurred to her that if Mikhail had taken the torch, he’d have too great an advantage. She headed left instead, came to a high rock shelf against which a wooden ladder was strapped with frayed white rope. She climbed it quickly, knelt down to untie it and pull it up after her, but the knots were damp and pulled so tight that she couldn’t work her fingernails into them, and then she heard Mikhail coming and it was too late.

She fled deeper into the caves, reaching the top of a sloped shelf of rock, so smooth it looked almost polished. She got onto her backside and
used her palms and heels as brakes as she slithered down to the foot, finding herself at the opening of a very different kind of passage, one that had been deliberately excavated out of the rock: its floor was level, its ceiling arched, and its walls were smoothed and inlaid with fragments of marble and precious stones. There were even substantial sections of surviving plaster, the paint upon them recently revived by Petitier, to judge from the basket of cleaning equipment upon the floor. To her left, a young man vaulted over a bull. To her right, three goddesses held up poppies, grapes, mushrooms and other gifts of the earth, while snakes weaved about their feet.

She walked along this corridor to the top of a staircase. But it didn’t lead her far. A great section of the roof and side-wall had collapsed, laying an impassable barrier of rubble across it. Petitier had leaned a short wooden ladder against the leftmost section of this accidental wall, and had dug a hole in its top corner, through which he’d fed the orange cable, so that a little light glowed weakly from the other side. She climbed the ladder, hoping she might somehow be able to squeeze and wriggle through, but the hole was too small—no bigger than was necessary to reach a camera and its flash attachment through, and take photographs. And again she realised that perhaps she’d misjudged Petitier: he hadn’t sought to address the conference
from fear of being caught, but because he was an archaeologist at heart, and he’d considered whatever lay behind this wall too important for him to tackle by himself. And so he’d stopped.

Scuffling and heavy breathing behind her. She turned to see Mikhail arriving at the far end of the passage, his shirt shredded, his powerful upper body revealed, the patchwork of crude tattoos, the Mauser slung over his shoulder, his hunting knife in his hand. She climbed back down the ladder, but there was nowhere left to run or hide. He must have realised she was trapped, for he came unhurriedly towards her, almost with a swagger. She stooped for a sharp and heavy stone, held it behind her back. He reached the top of the steps then sauntered down them, tucking his knife into his belt as he came. She waited until he was close and then swung the stone hard at his temple; but he must have been expecting it, for he caught her wrist easily and twisted it until she cried out and dropped the stone. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled her sharply sideways until she was off-balance, then he hauled her by it back up to the passage floor, where he threw her down and kicked her onto her back and stood astride her, pinning her wrists beneath his feet.

‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Let me go.’

He laughed at that, as though she’d only meant it as a joke. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this,’ he
told her, kneading the sideways bulge of his erection through his trousers. ‘I gave your boyfriend my word. I always keep my word.’

The lamplight stuttered a moment, as though the generator was running out of fuel. There was noise back along the way they’d come. Gaille turned her head sideways just in time to see a third person arrive at the far end of the passage, sledgehammer in his hand.

‘You!’ scowled Mikhail.

‘Yes,’ agreed Knox. ‘Me.’

It had been a mixed morning for the Intensive Care team. One of their charges had died; another had been returned to a general ward. As a result, the unit was empty except for Augustin and two nurses, so Claire felt free to unplug the headphones from the DVD player Nico had brought the day before.

She hadn’t watched it the night before; she’d had too much else on her mind. But this morning she’d already played it through twice. There was something compelling about it, though she wasn’t sure what. Not the words themselves, for even though they’d been written by Augustin, the technical language and obscure references mostly went
over her head. It was more to do with the way Knox had somehow captured Augustin’s qualities of voice, despite their different accents: his cadence, his metre, his trick of making listeners wait, the mischievous delivery of his punch-lines.

When this calamity had befallen Augustin, a treasonous internal voice had whispered to Claire that protocol didn’t compel her to stick by him, as she’d stuck by her father. He wasn’t blood, after all; they weren’t yet married. She could simply fly back to America and pretend this episode had never happened. But she knew now that wasn’t possible. When you gave your heart this completely to another person, it was no longer yours to take back.

On the DVD, Knox was nearing the end of his talk. She turned the volume up. It was a real comfort to listen to Augustin’s words, but this was what she truly enjoyed, the extraordinary ovation that would shortly greet its conclusion, the tribute it so clearly represented to the man she loved. Each time she played it, it made her heart swell.

Augustin’s left eyelash fluttered, delicate as a fly’s wing. Though it was one of the few times she’d seen him show even that much sign of life, she didn’t let it get her spirits up. His doctors had taken him off the barbiturates the night before, in the hopes that he might come out of the induced coma; but she was experienced enough with ICU
patients to know that such tics happened all the time.

She leaned closer, just in case, murmured his name and squeezed his hand. His eyelash fluttered again, then opened for a blink before closing once more. She watched transfixed, simultaneously terrified and charged with hope. Then both his eyes sprang open, bloodshot and perplexed, even alarmed. She stood and leaned over him so that he’d know she was there, that he was safe and loved and cared for. But it didn’t seem to do any good. His agitation increased, he slid his eyes to the side, he tried to speak.

‘Don’t talk,’ she pleaded, anxiety battling euphoria. ‘Just try to rest.’

He didn’t listen, his lips moved again, he muttered something that she couldn’t hear, because the applause had just started on the DVD, all that splendid thunder. She jabbed the button to silence it, put her ear back to Augustin’s mouth, and finally made out his words. ‘What’s that bastard Knox doing,’ he murmured, ‘delivering
my
talk?’

Gaille’s euphoria at seeing Knox was almost instantly extinguished as Mikhail grabbed his Mauser and turned it on him. Knox had no time
to reach him or even flee, so Gaille twisted her wrist free from beneath Mikhail’s foot, reached up and grabbed the Mauser’s strap and tugged down hard just as he fired, the bullet crashing into the rock floor and then ricocheting harmlessly away.

Knox seized the moment she’d bought him, charging down the passage with a full-throated roar, swinging the sledgehammer in a wild arc at Mikhail’s head, forcing him to use the Mauser as a staff to defend himself. It cracked and splintered in his hands, the barrel coming loose from the stock, yet still holding sufficiently to save him from the sledge, though his knees buckled and he stumbled backwards. He threw away the broken gun and grabbed the sledgehammer’s head instead, wrestling Knox for it, using his greater strength to swing Knox around and against the wall of rubble, tearing the hammer from him as he do so.

Mikhail took it by the shaft and went straight after him, swinging like a baseball batter aiming for the bleachers. Knox ducked in time and it slammed into the rubble behind him, dislodging some of the smaller stones that cascaded away down the other side, making Petitier’s hole a fraction bigger. Mikhail cursed and briefly let go of the shaft, his hands fizzing from the impact, then swung a second time. Knox tried to duck beneath it again, but Mikhail was expecting it and lowered his arc just enough for the head to clip Knox’s
temple as it passed, before smashing like a wrecking ball into the rock behind, sending more stones crashing, creating a thin but distinct gap at the top. With Knox dazed and down, Mikhail raised the sledgehammer for the kill, but Gaille thrust the Mauser’s splintered stock at his face, making him lose his footing on the scattered stone marbles, and fall backwards. She grabbed Knox’s hand and dragged him up and over the shrunken mound, then they were fighting their way through the rubble, pushing it aside as they went, scrambling down the other side, coughing and blinking from the thick dust.