Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (9 page)

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 her 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 imagination
, 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.

Fiona’s grasp of the Siletz tribal language had led, not only to her acquaintance with Diotrephes, but also to the upheavals that had destroyed her former life, and inadvertently given her a new one as Jack Sigler’s adopted daughter. She was now the only person alive who spoke the Siletz language, and according to Diotrephes, she was the perfect candidate for mastering the Mother Tongue.

Unfortunately, there was no Rosetta Stone for that ancient language. Fiona’s interest in linguistic studies was a direct result of Diotrephes’s desire to unravel the mystery of the Mother Tongue. It was no exaggeration to say that she had a gift for learning languages, but she was no closer to understanding it now than she had been at the start. She could see fragments of that original tongue sprinkled throughout modern languages in the same way that certain words in English could be traced to Latin roots, but trying to rebuild a language that had not been spoken for thousands of years was like trying to guess what a completed jigsaw puzzle might look like after finding a few random pieces underneath the couch.

She stared at the letters but their meaning was lost on her. “This doesn’t make any sense. Alexander didn’t know how to speak the Mother Tongue. So why would he put this here?”

“Maybe he knew more than he let on. Or maybe he was able to figure out some of it, the way you figured out how to read the Phaistos script.” With his knowledge of the Herculean Society’s inner workings, Pierce knew as much about the Mother Tongue from an academic perspective as Fiona did, even if he couldn’t speak any of it. “Ten bucks says that speaking these words will unlock our back door.”

“I have no idea what it says.”

When it came to ancient languages, Pierce was fluent in Greek and Latin, but those were languages that could be taught. While there were traces of Mother Tongue in many modern languages, teasing them out was less about knowledge and more about intuition. It was a gift. And not his. But Fiona...she might be the only person alive who had actually spoken—and forgotten—a few phrases. But that was four years ago. “If anyone can figure it out, it’s you.”