Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  9

  Kenner jumped at the noise of the pistol discharging in the enclosed space. He had known it was coming, but the noise was much louder than he had expected.

  At almost the same instant as the shot, the room went dark. Pierce’s light had gone out. Kenner dropped to the ground and caught a glimpse of movement in the paltry beam of his own light.

  The gun thundered again, and again, as Rohn pumped shot after shot into the darkness, where Pierce had stood. Kenner waited until the noise stopped, and then a few seconds more before raising his head and playing his light around the room. The air was filled with smoke and the stink of sulfur, but through the haze, he saw the big man heading for one of the exit openings.

  “Stop!”

  Rohn turned, his already unbearable visage twisted with disgust. “They’re getting away.”

  “You missed?”

  “No.” The reply was immediate, defensive. “I don’t think so. But a wounded animal can run for many miles before dying.”

  Kenner felt an unexpected surge of emotion. He had known all along that Rohn intended to kill Pierce and the girl, and while he found the prospect distasteful, he had come to terms with it. Sacrifices had to be made sometimes. Now, he felt a measure of relief. This was a better outcome. Not as cold-blooded. “Let them go. They’ll never make it out of here.”

  “How do you know that? They know how to read the signs.”

  Kenner frowned. Rohn was right. The connection between the Disc and the correct path through the Labyrinth had been easy enough to figure out, and he had pictures of the Disc to help him navigate. “Which way?”

  Rohn pointed to one of the exits. Kenner swept the floor with his light, hoping to see tell-tale drops of blood—there were none. Then he moved the beam up to shine on the walls beside the passage. As expected, there was a Phaistos glyph, but it did not match any of the combinations on the Disc. “This is not the right way,” he said, then he moved quickly around the perimeter, checking the other exits until he found one that matched the character stamped in the center of the reverse-side of the artifact.

  “Here. This way will take us out.”

  Rohn jabbed his gun into the passage Pierce and Fiona had used. “What about them?”

  “Forget them. The Labyrinth will take care of them. And we’ll close the door on the way out. Even if they find their way back here, they’ll never be able to leave.”

  The big man growled his displeasure but complied. Kenner suspected his reluctance had less to do with uncertainty about Pierce’s fate and more to do with Rohn’s belief that he had failed. Missing his targets at such close range must have been a bitter pill. Kenner wanted only to be done with it all: out of the bizarre iron maze and back to civilization, where he could exploit what he had just discovered.

  He allowed himself a satisfied grin as he trekked down the passage to the next junction. Pierce had no idea how significant the Labyrinth’s treasures were. He had not even recognized Queen Hippolyte’s belt, much less studied the image engraved upon it.

  Pierce had always been a dreamer, an idealist. For him, archaeology was some kind of game, an intellectual puzzle. The man had no sense of how to leverage his discoveries into something more meaningful—wealth, influence, power. Pierce could have written his ticket seven years earlier when he had found the Argo manifest, but he had chosen to share it with only a few colleagues, instead of telling the world and launching his career as a celebrity archaeologist and TV star. And that was only the tip of an iceberg of opportunities that he could have seized.

  Kenner had parlayed the mere knowledge of the document’s existence into a more discreet kind of success. He had been paid a hefty finder’s fee and a lucrative annual retainer simply to keep an eye on Pierce, in hopes that the archaeologist might stumble upon something even more impressive. For six years, Kenner had done just that, watching Pierce from a distance, following his movements, reporting everything back to his benefactor, the same man who had sent Rohn to join him on Crete.

  From the outset, it had been clear that Pierce was continuing his search for the historic Hercules. Equally obvious, the investigation was connected to a series of global upheavals and natural disasters, though Kenner could not tell to what extent Pierce had been involved in some of those situations.

  One clear picture that had emerged was that the Herculean Society, the faceless conspiracy about which Pierce had once speculated, was very real. Moreover, Kenner was now certain that Pierce was working for them. Pierce’s decision to visit Crete after the strange discovery in the Cave of Zeus was the opportunity Kenner had been waiting for. He could expose both Pierce and the Society, and cash in on the subsequent revelations.

  What he had found in the Labyrinth had surpassed his wildest expectations. Rohn’s employer would be very pleased, and the man’s gratitude was not something Kenner regarded lightly.

  He was barely conscious of the journey out of the maze. The only time he paid any attention to their route was at the various crossroads, where he had to select the correct passage onward. It was only near the end that anxiety crept in to darken his mood. In his eagerness to follow Pierce, it had not occurred to him to think about the possibility that the exit from the Labyrinth might be buried, just as the entrance had been until recently. He did not share this thought with Rohn, who trudged along behind him, watching to see if Pierce was following them.

  Ultimately, neither man had cause to worry. The sequence of turns indicated by the Disc brought them to another stairwell like the one that had brought them to the trophy room. As before, a magnetically regulated descent delivered them into a new chamber facing the maze entrance. They had come full circle.

  After they emerged into the cave, Kenner reached for the Phaistos Disc, intending to seal the passage, but Rohn stopped him.

  “Not yet,” the big man said. He pressed his pistol into Kenner’s hands. “Wait here. If they come out, shoot them.”

  Kenner blanched. “Where are you going?”

  Rohn did not answer. Instead, he jogged away, leaving the uncomprehending Kenner to stand vigil at the open door. A few minutes later, Rohn returned bearing a canvas satchel. He went directly to the opening and re-entered the maze, but quickly came back out without the bag.

  “Now we go,” he told Kenner, extending an open hand to reclaim his sidearm.

  Kenner parted with it happily. “What did you leave in there?” he asked, as he pried the Phaistos Disc loose from the rolling door.

  “Semtex. We have ten minutes.”

  Kenner did not need to ask for an explanation. The Phaistos Disc was the only key to the Labyrinth, but there were other ways to get through locked doors, and Pierce was certainly resourceful enough to figure something out. At the very least, Rohn’s bomb would cave in the entrance, blocking the way to the door, but there was a very good chance that the entire maze of passages worming back and forth under the mountain would be collapsed by the blast, pulverizing anyone still inside.

  “Tough break,” Kenner muttered with a shrug, and then he followed Rohn out of the cave.

  10

  Fiona lay in the darkness, half-crushed beneath Pierce’s weight, holding her breath. Pierce did not seem to be breathing either, and as much as she wanted to believe that he was just trying to remain quiet, she knew better.

  How many shots had there been? Four? Five? More? It seemed impossible that the ugly gunman, Rohn, had missed that many times.

  She struggled to recall exactly what had happened. The room had plunged into darkness, and she had felt someone—it could only have been Pierce—grab hold of her, almost lifting her off her feet. That was when the shooting had started.

  All was quiet now. She lay motionless, pinned down and immobilized by Pierce’s—don’t say it, don’t even think it—dead weight.

  Voices drifted toward her, Kenner and Rohn discussing what to do next, then silence again.

  “Uncle George?” The question was barely a whisper. Despair had stolen h
er voice.

  A low hissing sound issued from the darkness. “Shhh.”

  Fiona’s heart leapt, but she stifled a squeal of joy. Pierce was still alive. Just as quickly her relief was dampened by other possibilities. What if Pierce was injured? What if the killer came after them? There was nothing she could do but hope and wait.

  Finally, Pierce stirred and rolled off her. She took that as a cue to break the silence. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not hurt, if that’s what you mean,” he replied, with palpable anger. “But I’m not okay. Not by a long shot.”

  A light flashed on, blindingly bright after such a long time in the dark. Fiona raised a hand to provide some shade and braved the stinging brilliance to get a look at him. For a moment, she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Then, despite everything they had just gone through and the crisis they were still facing, she burst out laughing.

  Pierce glowered at her from beneath the regal mane of the Nemean Lion, which he wore as Hercules once had, if the legends were to be believed. After a few seconds, his expression softened. He turned, playfully showing off the long cloak of lion skin like a runway model, and he joined her in laughter.

  Fiona understood now how they had survived the barrage of gunfire at almost point blank range. In the instant before Rohn had pulled the trigger, Pierce had flicked off his light and pulled the lion skin over him like a blanket. The legendary creature’s skin was evidently as impervious to bullets as it had been to swords and arrows in Hercules’s time. Pierce had then scooped Fiona up and headed into the nearest passage.

  That, Fiona realized, had probably been the most dangerous part of his desperate plan. The odds were against it being the correct route out of the Herculean trophy room, which meant that they were no longer in the ‘safe’ part of the Labyrinth. Though they had gone less than a hundred yards, Fiona was not sure which direction to go now. And even if they managed that, she doubted that Kenner and Rohn would leave the door open.

  But they were still alive, and that was better than nothing.

  “A dead lion,” she murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something I heard once. ‘Better to be a live dog, than a dead lion.’ It seemed appropriate given the circumstances.”

  He nodded, approving. “It’s from the Bible. Ecclesiastes, chapter nine. ‘To him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.’ Loosely paraphrased: Where there’s life, there’s hope. We’re a couple of lucky dogs who are still alive because of a dead lion.” He turned around and pointed down a passageway. “I’m pretty certain that’s the way back to the center. From there, we can follow the Phaistos markings to the exit. If Kenner and his ugly friend are waiting for us… Well, we’ll figure something— Wait. The papyrus in the chest. The Heracleia. The Greeks didn’t develop their alphabet until the eighth century BC. So that document couldn’t have been written until about six hundred years after the Disc was buried in the ruins of Phaistos palace.” Pierce considered this for a moment. “Alexander might have had another way to open the door. A duplicate key.”

  Fiona shook her head. “But no one knew about the door. It was covered up long before the Greeks started coming here. Alexander came here later, maybe hundreds of years later.”

  Pierce rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “A back door, then. The Labyrinth wasn’t originally built to hide these treasures. That came later, after the main entrance was covered up.”

  “If you’re right, we still have to find it.”

  “Let’s get back to the trophy room,” Pierce said. “Maybe there’s a clue.”

  Pierce, still wearing the Nemean Lion’s skin, led the way back to the central chamber. As expected, Kenner and Rohn were long gone. Pierce made a cursory check of the other display tables, identifying several of the relics, many of which were clearly from later periods in history, but there was nothing that indicated which path led to the hypothetical back door.

  He turned his attention to the symbols that marked each passage, hoping to find a similarly anachronistic marker. “These appear on the Disc, but they’re not in the right place.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Focus,” he said. “Forget about everything else. Tell me what you see.”

  She furrowed her brow in thought. “If this really is some kind of literacy test, then the glyphs that lead out should form words. Even though we don’t speak the language, there’s going to be a logic to the way the symbols are used. In English, certain letters are frequently used together, while others almost never are.”

  “Go on,” he said, smiling. She was on the right track.

  “Some of the symbols appear with a lot more frequency. Like Wheel of Fortune. People always start with the high frequency letters? R, N, S, T, L, and E. Even though we can’t read this language, we should be able to see the difference between real words and nonsense combinations.”

  Pierce grinned. “Well done. I knew there was a reason I brought you along.” He handed her the flashlight. “Now, keep your eyes peeled for traps.”

  Fiona stared at the glyph, feeling the weight of responsibility. Their survival depended on her. If she was wrong, they would wander the maze until they dropped from exhaustion, or worse, got killed by some ancient booby trap.

  “We should mark our trail,” Pierce said. “In case we have to backtrack. Like Theseus, trailing Ariadne’s thread.” He held up a massive lion forepaw and squeezed it, extending the razor sharp black claws. He scratched a single vertical line on the iron wall beneath the glyph. “That should do the trick.”

  Grateful for the safety net, Fiona ventured into the passage.

  When they arrived at each junction, she studied the choices, looking for the one that matched a word on the Disc or was consistent with the internal logic of the ancient Minoan language. They didn’t encounter any traps or dead ends, but it was impossible to know if they were on the right track. Navigating the passages was like being in an ‘old school’ arcade game, where winning a level simply took you to the next battleground, identical in every respect, except harder. Each decision was a gut check, and as they pushed deeper into the unknown, she felt the cumulative weight of all those choices. Either she was leading them to safety, or they were already hopelessly lost. Yet, with each hard decision, she felt her confidence growing. She was getting it. She was going to beat this game.

  Then the uniformly cramped iron walls gave way to native rock. A few steps further, the winding tunnel led out onto a rusty iron bridge spanning an open fissure with nearly vertical walls.

  Fiona shone her light across the gap, which she judged to be about thirty feet wide. She saw a ledge on the far side, wide enough to walk on, stretching in either direction beyond the reach of the light. But there did not appear to be any openings in the far cave wall. She glanced back at Pierce. “Did we make a wrong turn?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. It wouldn’t make any sense to build a bridge that goes nowhere.”

  “Maybe the bridge is a trap. Get halfway across and then—click! Going down in a hurry.”

  Pierce studied the metal span for a moment. “I don’t think it’s rigged to fail. Now, whether it will hold up after all this time…” He gave a helpless shrug. “Stay here.”

  “What? I don’t think—”

  Pierce was already in motion, walking cautiously out onto the bridge. Each step generated an ominous creak, but the bridge held. Fiona held her breath, willing the metal to remain intact just a few minutes longer. Pierce stepped onto the ledge at the other side and then waved her on.

  “Take it slow,” he warned. “But if you think it’s starting to go, run like hell.”

  Fighting the urge to simply run across, Fiona took a step onto the bridge, then another. She could feel it vibrating beneath her, could almost see flakes of oxidized metal crumbling away with each footfall.

  Halfway.

  The bridge groaned and started swaying… Just my i
magination, she told herself.

  The ledge was just ten feet away now.

  Close enough.

  She launched herself forward, but the extra force generated by the attempt punched a hole clean through the walkway. Her toe caught on the edge, and she pitched forward. Her knee struck the deck, the impact crumbling the metal like a stale potato chip. In her mind’s eye, she saw the entire bridge disintegrating under her as she struggled to get back to her feet—

  Pierce caught one of her outstretched arms and yanked her the rest of the way off the bridge. He held her upright, which was good, because her legs felt like overcooked spaghetti noodles. “I said, take it slow,” he chided. “You all right?”

  She glanced back at the bridge, which to her complete astonishment, looked pretty much unchanged. “Uh, huh.”

  He waited until she had both feet firmly planted, then let go and directed her attention to the wall. “Take a look at this.”

  She took a deep breath, her heart still pounding like a jackrabbit’s, and shone the flashlight where Pierce indicated. There was something carved into the wall, but it was not Phaistos script.

  “You know what that is, don’t you?” Pierce said.

  She nodded slowly, still not quite able to believe what she was seeing. “It’s the Mother Tongue.”

  The reason for Fiona’s initial encounter with the Herculean Society and the man who called himself Alexander Diotrephes, was her knowledge of the old and almost completely forgotten language of the American Indian Siletz tribe. It was a Salish dialect with several unique components that, if Diotrephes was to be believed, could be traced back to the original human language, what he called ‘the Mother Tongue.’ It was a manner of speech that transcended mere words, and could affect matter in seemingly magical ways. Diotrephes had also called it ‘the Language of God.’

  With it, Moses had commanded the elements, unleashing deadly plagues against Egypt, and parting the waters of the Red Sea. Many centuries later, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel had used his knowledge of the Mother Tongue to animate a clay effigy of a man—a golem—to protect Jews living in the ghettos of Prague. Such incidents were exceptional. Very few people living even knew there was one original language. Although all languages could be traced back to it, the oldest tongues that were the closest descendants of the Mother Tongue—like the language of the Siletz—were nearly extinct.