Easier to run
Chapter 21
Lara was still dangling about ten feet up in the air when the line went slack.
Limbs flailing, she plummeted.
Normally her reflexes would have been fast enough. She would have been able to break-fall and roll. But, concussed and drugged, she was off her game. At least a flash of sense triggered like an airbag. It stopped her from bracing out with her hands, and potentially snapping her wrists.
So it was her ribs and left hip that impacted first.
From those two points radiated white blinding pain. Magnesium meets oxygen.
She could hear DuPont laughing as Natla roared at him, their voices simultaneously in her earpiece and echoing down from the cavern entrance. She hadn't meant to cry out – she didn't want to give that French bastard the satisfaction – but she did, howling and hiccupping with pain.
She lay there on the stone, just like a voting offering with its throat freshly slit, twitching in a halo of glow sticks that might as well have been blood.
She was back on Yamatai. Drunk and disorientated with agony. Over and over. In that first cave with the rebar. In the wolf trap on the forest floor. In the Oni's slaughterhouse. In the foul-smelling shantytown. And finally in that rusted helicopter when she accepted the inevitability of what she had to do to herself.
She wasn't even sure why she did it, but she rolled. An instant later a climbing axe landed exactly where she'd been curled. It sparked as metal struck stone.
Again she rolled. Back towards the pick as a pistol dropped, and clattered directly next to her. Those Croft instincts meant she'd avoided a broken nose but they had also driven her back onto her injured side.
She fingered her ribs and yelled again. Broken, definitely broken. Her breath was shuddering with her entire body.
Sam's voice screeched into her earpiece, "Lara? Are you okay? Lara?!"
Lara could only grit her teeth. "Nnnngh."
Her former friend insisting to someone up top, "She's hurt."
"Bullshit," DuPont responded, the laughter leaked out of his voice. "She's faking."
Sam continued to argue. "For fuck sake, she's really hurt. Natla, we need to – "
There was a smack, a yelp from Sam and finally a thud.
Lara's eyes widened. Anxiety surged past agony on her emotional priority scale. "What's happening up there? Sam? Sam?!"
Natla's voice replied, ice cold, directly into the microphone. "I suggest you get up, Lara."
"What have you done to her? Sam?!"
Natla's was the only response. Again, "Get up."
Using her shaking arms, Lara pushed herself into a kneel. Straightening out her torso felt impossible, so she tried to delay the inevitable by drawing the pistol and axe to her. The latter she could attach to one of the carabiners on her belt. The former, well, she missed her thigh holsters. She tucked the Colt M1911 into her belt instead and began the struggle to detach her harness. Bent double, her hands trembling the whole time, she unscrewed and unclipped herself.
Eventually she let a roar drive her upright.
"I'm up, I'm up," she gasped.
When the only response was silence, she snarled, "Let me know she's alright. Fuck, Natla!"
Sam's voice. "Lara." Her voice sounded shaky and raspy. "'It's okay. I'm… good."
"Sa – "
Natla interrupted, cool and composed as usual. "Try not to die, Lara. You know what will happen to your girlfriend if that occurs."
With that warning, the communications from above severed.
Lara was left standing in the silence of the cavern. She realised she was still quivering. But it wasn't from the flame kindling her side. It stemmed from a combination of adrenalin and anger; an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. She was Natla's puppet. That woman and her men delighted in dancing Lara around, swinging her into the walls of the marionette theatre with curtains the same colour as her blood. Yet there was nothing she could do about it.
Damn them all to hell.
To fight a wave of prickly lightheadedness, she let her gaze settle on her feet. Her right knee was already scraped and bleeding; exactly why she would never choose such a ridiculous, impractical outfit for herself.
Scowling, she flicked on her backpack's flashlight and took her first step outside the reassuring glow of the circle.
The going was both easy and challenging.
Easy in that the route was relatively clear. She had to do a bit of clambering where the rock had shifted vertically over the centuries, but there was no confusion as to the direction she had to head. No side trails veering off the main path; no alcoves or clefts that she needed to investigate. This subterranean Sacred Way was disconcertingly unobstructed.
Her body though provided its own obstacles. Every breath she took was like expanding her ribcage into a brand. She wasn't drawing in enough air, and had to keep leaning against the nearest wall. Every so often she'd get too close and her side would connect with the stone. When that happened, she'd hiss and lose herself for a moment in a blistering haze.
Dr Stone's voice pierced through the agony. "Lara, listen, there are painkillers in your pack."
In a heartbeat, the Englishwoman had shrugged out of her backpack, and was rummaging inside. She ripped open the Velcro binding the medical kit. Bandages, ointment, waterproof Band-Aids, tablets and a couple of little metal cases.
It was like Stone was looking over her shoulder. "There, in the tin on the far right."
Lara opened it to find three white plastic tubes. Some kind of jet injector.
"What you need to do – "
Lara's body wouldn't wait. She popped the cap off a tube and jabbed the applicator into her thigh. She pushed a spongy button on the side. Within 30 seconds all discomfort had receded from her consciousness.
She slumped back against the rock. It was good stuff. She may even have moaned at the relief, she wasn't sure.
She wasn't sure of much actually. Stone was talking but her words weren't making any sense. It didn't matter. The most important thing was still clear in Lara's mind. Her task. Everything was swimming around her but she knew what she had to do.
She dismissed Stone with a slurred, "No," pulled her backpack on and righted herself.
She stumbled forward, down the path. There was nowhere else to go.
It was cool under the earth, to the point of chilly, but she felt hot. She was dimly aware of how damp her shirt was under her pack. When she reached up to wipe her face, her glove came away wet.
"Lara?" It was Sam. "Are you okay? What do you see? The visuals are starting to get really choppy up here."
"Nothing. I see nothing. Some shattered pottery, amphora, hydria; remnants of pillars, Doric, but nothing else. Just rock."
There was no sign of the other archaeologists who had come down before her. She strained her ears for any sound. There was only silence, and darkness beyond the reach of her flashlight.
She'd staggered a further dozen feet when the aural feed began to stutter and hiss in her ear.
"You're breaking up."
Sam responded in staccato. "La – La – can't hear – losing – La – "
The comms went dead.
"Sam? Natla?" The Englishwoman retreated several steps in case the signal would return. Nothing. She had to hope her walking corpse of an employer was sensible and wouldn't punish Sam for something beyond her control.
In the off chance they could still hear her, Lara muttered, "It's all good down here. I'm carrying on."
As she turned her head, something darted in the periphery of her vision.
She didn't even need to think about it. The Colt was instantly in her palm and pointed in the direction of the movement.
As she advanced towards the site of the disturbance, her free hand unclipped the climbing axe from her belt. She would have preferred a second pistol, but a close combat backup weapon was good too. She kept it clenched at her hip so she'd have momentum if she needed to swing it.
Except there was no threat. Lara progressed until the toe of her boot struck a wall. She was standing before a huge piece of stone; man-size, black and semiprecious she suspected, although her geology knowledge was nearly non-existent. Another thing to add to the Useful Skills for a Self-sufficient Loner list.
What she did know was that it was highly unusual. She'd never heard of anything like this in a Greek temple.
The stone had been polished to reflection quality. It was filthy though, coated in centuries of dust. Her flashlight had simply caught a segment where the filthy skin was marginally thinner.
Returning her pistol to her belt, she reached out and wiped a patch clean.
Her battered, ghost-white self gazed back at her as if it was trapped deep within the stone. She looked dazed; lost; completely off her game. The question was how much of it was the consequence of her concussion or simply her body's reaction to Natla keeping her drugged, neutered and complicit. Then again, how much of her lethargy was the after-effect of her misguided, draining encounter with Sam?
Something glinted at her from waist height and she rubbed her palm over the stone. It revealed a line of Ancient Greek letters shallowly carved. Her grasp of the language was rusty but she instantly recognised the inscription – one of three self-reflective sayings intended for those seeking an audience with the Pythia
Know thyself.
"I wish I still did," she murmured.
She pushed away from the stone and trudged down the path once more.
After another five minutes of trudging forward into nothingness, she solved one mystery at least.
There was no mistaking that smell. Dead flesh.
It wasn't as pungent as it had been on humid Yamatai, or any of the tropical destinations where she had encountered – or, more often than not, created – lifeless bodies. It was, however, still the scent of decay.
She had her pistol out again by the time her flashlight finally illuminated the corpse, curled legs bent against the bottom of a wall like the figure was nuzzling into it. It wasn't Basil Panagakos, but another man, also evidently Greek. Another of Natla's flunkies under duress, no doubt.
Lara realised why the man's body looked so oddly dark when she was only a few feet away. His throat had been sawn through to his spinal cord, sending a curtain of blood down his front to form a sticky puddle around him. It was horrendous.
Her advance down the passageway slowed dramatically then as she wondered what could have caused such an injury. A booby trap? Some kind of immortal guardian?
An image of weathered samurai armour flashed behind her eyes and she shuddered at the thought of the second option.
Please let it be a trap.
She found Basil Panagakos then.
The high ceilinged path terminated before a wall that stretched off into the shadows. The wall had been carved like a temple front, complete with columns, entablature, and a battered frieze and pediment, evidently depicting some of Apollo's greatest deeds. Except the building wasn't freestanding and assembled. It had been sculpted out of a single piece of stone; a cliff or mountain face. It was all simply decoration to mask the entrance to an unassuming natural cave.
Paedophile Panagakos lay splayed on the handful of rudimentary, cracked stylobate leading to the entrance.
Lara paused to examine his bloated corpse. Teeth clenched and eyes wide, he'd died in agony. Judging by his ruptured eye balls and heavily bruised throat, he'd been strangled.
Some kind of supernatural guardian was looking more and more likely. Bollocks.
She was wary of entering the cave with her flashlight on. It painted a bullseye for anyone watching her. But the alternative was stumbling straight into a crevice or spike pit. And no one was coming for her if that happened.
Tightening her grip on both weapons, she stepped inside.
It turned out she didn't need to worry about attack, at least not immediately anyway. The tunnel was just narrow enough for a single person. She had to turn sideways and bend to squeeze through some of the narrower points.
The further she progressed, the sweeter and heavier the air became. She felt her head start to swim all over again, and she clutched at the walls to either side of her. If the route hadn't been so confined she knew she would have become completely disorientated. She should have insisted on a gas mask before she descended.
She was busy trying to shake some sense back into her skull when she realised there was a soft glow ahead. She switched off her flashlight and crept closer.
The tunnel opened into a rectangular cavern about 60 foot in length. Again it was natural rock with a few man-made embellishments. Each side was studded with a half dozen openings, every one flanked by two Doric columns, carved out of the stone. Equidistant between each doorway was a burning brazier set on a marble pedestal. It was these that provided the room's subtle light source.
Of greatest concern to Lara were the side tunnels, disappearing into darkness. The rest of the space was open and empty. Except for the far side of the cavern. There, seated, was a single hunched figure, bare feet peeking out from the bottom of mottled grey robes.
"You can enter…" it announced in stilted English. "…Lara Croft."
After the hours of oppressive subterranean silence, the voice, a woman's, sounded too loud, too powerful for such a shrunken frame. It was a large as the cavern, and Lara, startled, cringed away from it.
"Lara Croft, come near," the voice repeated.
The Englishwoman didn't understand her body's reaction. Normally she could rely on herself to respond physically with steel confidence no matter what she was feeling. Right then, though, she was trembling. Could whatever was in the room have some kind of control over her? Could it pierce straight through the cool disdain and disinterest she had come to wear like armour?
Lara stepped out from the tunnel into the open space.
The earth was unsteady under her boots. Veined with cracks and fissures, it fragmented under her feet like eggshell with certain steps. And in random spots the ground was more significantly split. Pitch blackness gaped up at her.
While she navigated the terrain, the hooded figure repeated, "Draw closer."
The closer she got, the more Lara could discern of the figure. Bundled in a threadbare peplos, it held a branch of withered laurel leaves in one hand and a bowl of water in the other. Most noticeably, it – she – sat on a tripod directly in front of another yawning fissure. Lara could actually see the vapours snaking out of the cleft like hypnotised cobras, undulating and shimmering.
It was too easy to lose herself in observing the dance; the air was most intoxicating here – suffocating almost.
It was the figure that snapped her out of the trance. When the archaeologist was several feet away, it restated her name. "Lara Croft."
The oracle raised her head to reveal herself as a teenage girl, maybe fifteen. Her delicate features ensured that she would always be declared pretty, but the effect was offset by her red-ringed eyes and skin as corpse-white as the men outside the temple entrance. Her wavy black hair had once been set in a braid wound around her head and knotted at the back of her neck, in keeping with the common ancient style. Except part of it had tumbled out of the knot and hung loose and unbrushed over her shoulder.
This Pythia had seen better days.
"You seek my advice?" she asked, her facial expression completely neutral. Then her head jolted to the side. "Ladybird."
Her father's nickname for her, spoken in her father's voice.
The effect shook Lara to her core like the earthquake that had swallowed this temple. A part of her control fractured, and from it, just like natural gasses, gushed anger, fear and even – she had to admit – exhilaration. Dad.
Wide-eyed, Lara advanced a step. "What did you say?"
The oracle started to trill in her own voice. It was heavily accented and too high pitched but Lara recognised what she was singing.
"Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your companions gone. All except one, her name is… Sam. She crept under the frying pan."
Was this all some kind of trick? Using her loved ones; her deepest desires to rattle her. What was this?
The oracle answered her. "I see the way you look at me, Lara Croft. I assure you this is all real, by the power of Apollo." The girl twitched and suddenly she was speaking in the Englishwoman's voice. "The line between our myths and truth is fragile and blurry…"
"Yes. Yes it is." Lara swallowed. She couldn't explain it, but this was really happening.
The Pythia remained stiff in her seat. "Why do you seek me, Lara Croft?"
"I – I need your help. I need to know where the Aegis of Athena is."
"You do not want to know when you are going to die?"
She almost laughed. "No."
"You receive one question; one answer. Do you not wish to know what you must do so that you and Sam can be together? How to make that possible?" She switched to Sam's voice, "Lara, I love you so much. Babe, please..."
Lara gritted her teeth. She couldn't handle these games right now. "No."
"What about your parents?"
The breath snagged in Lara's throat. As tense as she felt, her muscles tightened even further.
"Do you not wish to know the truth of their fate? That was your greatest desire once."
It was. All those years of clutching her pillow to her and trying to pretend she was snuggled in Amelia and Richard's arms – at bedtime and before dawn, when she inevitably woke heart-racing and wet-cheeked, either from sweat or tears. The loss of her parents had been the source of all her bad dreams until the nightmares of Yamatai superseded that particular torment.
She scowled, "It is too late for that. I seek only the Aegis." She added hastily, and considerably more politely, "Please."
Face still blank, the Pythia went silent.
A minute passed before she murmured, "Very well…"
Her gaze settled on Lara's weapons, still clenched in her fists. "Your intentions are peaceful?"
"Oh. Yes, of course. Sorry." She returned her pistol and axe to her hip. At the same time her eyes travelled to the side openings. Her hands continued to hover inches from her belt.
The oracle recognised her hesitancy. "You are safe here."
"Thank you."
"Approach, Ladybird."
Lara continued to advance across the room. Eventually only the fissure – three foot across – divided her from the Pythia.
There was another of those giant black mirror stones set right behind the girl. This one was in peak polished condition. The angle of the reflection made it look like Lara was standing directly behind the oracle. A loyal servant; to the girl, to Natla.
Just then, the Pythia spoke. "Like all supplicants, you must prove yourself worthy, Lara Croft."
"How do I do that?"
"Know thyself."
"What does tha – ?"
Lara's mirror self raised its pistol.