“Your father had figured that part out, I think.”
“Why do you say that?” Olivia asked.
Drake ignored her, opened the book, and leaned over to show Jada a page where Luka had titled one maze drawing “The Labyrinth of Anygod.”
Jada’s eyes were bright as she lifted her gaze. “He knew.” She looked at Olivia and Corelli and then turned to Henriksen. “Daedalus went to the kings and high priests with the labyrinth design and claimed he could make them all as much gold as they could ever want. And he promised them that the labyrinth would be the perfect treasury, a place for them to store their own gold where it could never be stolen.”
“And then he stole it,” Drake said, grinning. “The lovable bastard.”
“You can’t know that,” Olivia sniffed.
“Sure we can,” Drake said. “It makes sense. Dionysus, Poseidon-Sobek? The crocodile god? Daedalus would dedicate his labyrinth to whichever god was best loved where he wanted to build. Real estate developers do basically the same thing every damn day.”
Olivia and Henriksen studied each other a moment, and then Henriksen nodded. Once again, Drake felt sure they were hiding something. Not all of this stuff about Daedalus, because he sensed their excitement about the revelations that Yablonski’s translations had turned up. But they had a piece of the puzzle they weren’t sharing.
“It could be,” Olivia said.
“What else did your supergeek turn up?” Drake asked.
Corelli hit another key. More of the flowers that had been a part of the design throughout the labyrinth under the fortress and the Minotaur.
“There are about a dozen flowers this could be,” Corelli said. “The research team thinks it’s most likely something called false hellebore or white hellebore. They’re poisonous.”
Drake had been wondering why he’d take an interest until Corelli mentioned poison, and then he saw the thug’s eyes light up. The information had stuck with him because he had a fascination with ways to hurt and kill people. Drake had met his kind before and didn’t like the unpredictable quality they brought to the table.
Olivia typed a couple of things. Images flashed by, ending with the large painting of the Chinese hell-Diyu-that they’d found in the chamber.
“Obviously the labyrinth on Thera was begun later than the other three,” Olivia said. “It may be that Daedalus was moving his hoard from one to the next, abandoning the kingdoms he had duped. By the time the construction of the worship chambers on Thera had begun, he had obviously found a new sucker and a location where he could break ground on a fourth labyrinth. It would’ve been under construction while the labyrinth on Thera was still being completed.
“By the time of the eruption on Thera-which destroyed the Minoan offshoot colony there-”
“Atlantis,” Drake put in just to irritate her.
“-the fourth labyrinth was being built in a place called Yiajiang in southern China,” Olivia continued. “Yiajiang was a tiny settlement that grew and later became known as Yecheng.”
“It doesn’t really ring a bell,” Drake said.
Olivia turned to Henriksen. “Today we know it as the city of Nanjing.”
“That’s nuts,” Drake said. “I’ve been to Nanjing. The original city wasn’t built until-what, fifth century B.C. That’s a thousand years after Thera exploded.”
Olivia nodded. “That was my first reaction, too. But Yablonski confirms there were tribal settlements in the area all through that period. And would you care to guess what myth is consistent with every one of those settlements?”
Drake sat back in his chair, letting it sink in. He glanced at the hideous painting on the screen.
“Diyu.”
“You’re not as dumb as you look,” Corelli muttered.
Henriksen had his phone out. He punched a couple of keys, and a moment later he was barking orders. It took Drake a minute to realize that he must have a whole new batch of hired thugs either already in China or on their way and had just instructed them to rendezvous in Nanjing. A second later, Henriksen hit an intercom switch and the pilot answered. Henriksen gave him their new destination and then signed off, turning his attention back to the conversation.
“The gold was on Thera during the eruption,” Jada said, eyes narrowed as she worked it out. “Had to be. The labyrinth there was unstable but only partially destroyed. Once they’d finished the fourth labyrinth, they would’ve moved Daedalus’s hoard there. But what about Daedalus?”
Olivia clicked past several other images and stopped on one of the ceremonial jars, which showed the Mistress of the Labyrinth, a Minotaur, and what Drake realized was a funeral pyre.
“They burned him?” Drake asked.
“He died,” Olivia said. “His nephew, Talos, finished the design for the fourth labyrinth and altered it considerably. Beneath the painting of Diyu in the chamber, it is written that Talos wanted an army of slaves to build the labyrinth for him, and that would require overseers and protectors.”
“The Minotaur was supposed to be the protector,” Drake said.
“Of the labyrinth, yes,” Olivia replied. “But the Minotaur would’ve been like a guard dog. They’d have selected the biggest, most frightening warrior they could find.”
“So, not Corelli, then,” Drake said.
Corelli made a rude gesture but said nothing.
“Talos wanted what Yablonski translated as ‘Protectors of the Hidden Word,’ ” Olivia finished.
Henriksen looked at her. “Tell me about Diyu. What did the research team find?”
Olivia glanced at her laptop screen. “According to the myth-as opposed to the writings we found-the labyrinth was ruled by Yan Luo, sort of a god himself. Yablonski’s translations confirm that the Chinese worship chamber was dedicated to Yan Luo, the king of hell. On Thera, Daedalus had started to expand more with the idea of underground, multilevel labyrinths, and that matches up with the myth of Diyu, which was a maze of levels and chambers where souls were supposed to be brought and punished for their earthly sins. Once they had redeemed themselves, they could be given the Drink of Forgetfulness and return to the world, or so they were promised.”
Drake felt something unlocking in his mind, tumblers clicking into place. Jada must have sensed a change in him, because she gave him an odd look.
“Nate? What is it?” she asked.
Corelli, Olivia, and Henriksen were all looking at him. The airplane’s engine seemed louder than ever. Sudden turbulence shook them hard enough that his teeth clacked together, and it felt like the plane veered to the right. Drake chalked it up to the pilot correcting their course for Nanjing.
“Daedalus’s nephew wanted slaves. The people believed in hell. What if that’s the reason they chose this location and the reason they changed the design? What if they built hell and then abducted people, maybe drugged them and pulled them down there and made them think they were in Diyu? Who knows, maybe there really was some kind of Drink of Forgetfulness. When they grew too old to be useful, they’d drug them again and return them to the surface.”
Drake glanced around, the plane taking a bounce that jarred his knees against the underside of the table. He grimaced, then threw up his hands.
“Am I crazy?”
Henriksen frowned and cast a dark look toward the front of the plane, apparently irritated at the pilot. But then he turned back to Drake.
“That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds,” he said.
Jada rolled her eyes. “Everything about this is far-fetched. But all the pieces fit together too neatly not to be true.”
“Nanjing has a long history of stories about people vanishing. Three Jin princes and their courts went missing in the third century. During the Ming Dynasty, when Nanjing was the capital of China, hundreds of thousands of workers were brought in to rebuild the city, and there were stories that a demon lived under the old city gates and would eat the workers if it caught them out at night. Many of them supposedly vanished.”