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.
“We should get out of here,” he said.
Sully kept searching. In the far corner of the wine cellar, a long, jagged crack-several inches across at its widest-had opened in the ceiling. Drake followed the beam, walking over for a closer look. He didn’t like it at all.
“Do you hear that?” Sully asked.
They all paused to listen. Jada had given up her search behind the cask and now stood at rapt attention. At first, Drake couldn’t make out any particular sound. In the cellar of the abandoned fortress, all noise seemed so far away, and he expected the keening of the wind or some muffled cry or perhaps footfalls in the hallway. Then he realized that the sound Sully had heard existed on a different level, a low groaning that seemed to come almost from inside his own skull.
No. It’s not in your head. It’s coming up through you. And it was. The groaning, grinding noise traveled up his legs from the floor, his bones vibrating almost imperceptibly.
He stared at his feet, anxiety rising, but then he noticed something that distracted him from his alarm. The wine casks in the alcove right behind him had long since given up their contents, and a small river of wine must have flowed across the floor, leaving a dark bloody stain on the stone when it dried up. Drake followed the zigzag course of the trickling wine stain with his gaze and realized it ended against the back wall.
“Sully, give me your flashlight,” he said.
“Nate, we’ve gotta go,” Sully said.
“Just for a second.”
Sully complied, and Drake used the beam of the flashlight to follow the dry river of wine to the wall. The floor had been slightly canted at the time the casks gave way. But there was no large stain near the wall to indicate the wine had pooled there, which made no sense at all.
Drake dropped to his knees, following the wine with the light, and then he saw where the wine had gone. Along the seam where wall met floor, though the wine cellar was mostly carved out of the rock, a split had occurred at the juncture of floor and wall. The spilled wine had not puddled there because it had poured into that crack and down into the hill below.
“Look at this,” Drake said.
“Nate,” Jada said worriedly, studying the cracks Sully had found in the ceiling.
“Just for a second,” Drake insisted. “The wine went somewhere. I know it could just be a fissure, that it doesn’t necessarily mean Luka was right about the labyrinth being here, but-”
“Of course he was right,” Jada said. “I mean, fathers think they’re right about everything, but when it came to his research, mine didn’t like to guess. He would hypothesize, sure, but if we found that reference in the journal, it’s safe to assume there were other clues and bits of evidence he gathered that we don’t know about. Maybe there’s even stuff in the journal but we just don’t know how to interpret it.”
Sully went rigid. A second later, Drake felt the tremor that had frightened him.
“Know what?” Drake said. “If there’s a way down there, it isn’t from this room. I vote we-”
The crack was so loud that it shut him up. The whole room began to rumble, and that was enough for Drake.
“Go!” he shouted, shoving Jada ahead of him.
Drake led the way with Sully’s flashlight. Jada twisted as she ran, shining the flashlight above them, and Drake couldn’t keep himself from glancing up to see the long cracks racing across the ceiling, opening wide spaces between the rows of stones that had been laid there centuries ago.
The noise grew so loud that it drowned out his thoughts, and just as he was about to shout for Sully to run faster, the roof of the wine cellar started to cave in. A piece of stone hit his shoulder, and again he shoved Jada, but harder this time. She careened into Sully, and the 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.