Chapter One — Beneath the Mountain
The mountain closed behind them before sunset, though Nathan Drake had no sky by which to prove it. He knew because Professor Harcourt's lamp had consumed a little less than half its oil since breakfast, because Petru had complained of hunger twice, and because the men who had entered the mountain talking with the careless confidence of men expecting to leave it again had gradually fallen quiet. Taken together, those things suggested they had been underground for perhaps seven hours. Nathan mentioned this almost absently while stepping over a black ribbon of water running across the passage, and Thomas Ward, the constable chained to his wrist, gave him the peculiar look he had been giving him since the expedition began.
Ward asked whether Nathan had actually been measuring Harcourt's lamp. Nathan told him no, he had only been looking at it, which Ward pointed out sounded remarkably like measuring. Nathan could not see the distinction Ward was trying to make. The amount of oil remaining was visible; remembering how much there had been that morning required no special effort. Ward eventually made a quiet noise through his nose and stopped pursuing the subject. Nathan had come to understand that this was how the constable ended conversations when Nathan had somehow made them unpleasant without knowing why.
There were twelve of them beneath the mountain, their lamps stretching through the passage as separate islands of yellow light. The tunnel had been descending for most of the day. In places the slope was so gentle that Nathan noticed it only in the strain behind his calves; elsewhere they had to brace themselves against wet stone and move sideways. Dampness coated everything. Water gathered beneath their boots and clung to the walls in silver threads, while the air carried the sour odour of wool that had failed to dry after three days of rain outside. Sweat, tobacco and lamp oil hung beneath it. Nathan disliked the smell, but he found the men more interesting.
He had learned all of them quickly. Samuel Mercer favoured his right leg whenever they descended because something old and poorly healed troubled the left knee. Arthur Hargreaves touched his spectacles when telling a polite lie. Professor Malcolm Harcourt had the beginnings of arthritis in the first two fingers of his right hand and concealed it whenever the labourers were watching. Petru prayed when anxious, his brother Anton swore, William Pike talked too much, and Robert Mallory laughed.
Mallory laughed at almost everything. He laughed when something was funny, when something frightened him, when he had embarrassed himself, and sometimes for no reason Nathan had yet identified. His voice travelled easily through the tunnel now as he called forward that if Mercer complained about his pack much longer Ward might put him in irons beside Drake. Several of the men laughed. Nathan did too.
Ward glanced sideways. "You find that amusing?"
Nathan said that he did.
"You are the reason the joke works."
Nathan considered this and admitted that Ward was probably right. That only made Mallory laugh harder. He declared from behind them that he rather liked Nathan, to which Nathan replied that he probably did not. What Mallory liked, Nathan explained, was that insulting him failed to provoke anger. That was not quite the same as liking him.
The laughter died awkwardly. Mallory studied him for a moment before grinning again and declaring that there was something wrong with him. Nathan agreed.
Ward gave him a long look after that. He told Nathan that he might occasionally make an effort to sound less like himself. Nathan asked what that meant, and Ward, after several seconds of visible frustration, decided not to explain.
Nathan genuinely did not understand.
That was part of what made the others uneasy around him. It was not simply the iron cuff or the fact that he was a convicted murderer. Murder itself was easy enough for men to understand. Rage, jealousy, money, revenge, drink—there were motives people could place inside themselves and recognise. Nathan had killed three men, and the Crown had spent months trying to decide why. His explanation had been accurate and, according to the newspapers, horrifyingly inadequate. The first man intended to kill him. The second had attempted to assist the first. The third remained a threat afterward. Nathan had described each death at trial with roughly the same emotional weight he might have given to explaining why a rotten beam had to be replaced.
The newspapers called him heartless. Doctors preferred words with more syllables.
Nathan disagreed with both descriptions. He possessed feelings. He enjoyed music. He disliked the cold. Repeated questions irritated him. He experienced fear. When his dog died when he was fourteen, he had cried until his head hurt. What seemed absent was something more subtle. Other people did not occupy the same place in Nathan's mind that they occupied in one another's. He could like people. He could become accustomed to them and even attached to them. Yet some instinct others seemed to possess—the instinct that another human life mattered simply because it belonged to another human being—had never appeared in him with the same strength.
To Nathan, people arrived first as collections of observable facts. Height. Weight. Age. Health. Temperament. Intelligence. Useful skills. Predictable behaviour. Only later did he remind himself that those collections had mothers, wives, favourite meals, childhood memories and private humiliations.
He knew other people considered this wrong.
He had become quite good at concealing it.
Usually.
Mallory had discovered the problem on their second night outside the mountain, when he told a story beside the fire about a railway worker who had once been trapped beneath a wagon. The man had screamed for nearly an hour before they freed him. Nathan's first question had been whether the leg was salvageable. Mallory stared at him as though he had answered in another language, and Nathan, believing clarification would help, explained that a limb crushed for that length of time could make removing the weight suddenly dangerous if circulation was not controlled.
That had not helped.
The story travelled through the camp by morning. After that, nobody sat beside Nathan by accident.
The irony was that Harcourt needed him more than anyone else in the expedition.
They were beneath the mountain because of several carved fragments recovered almost fifty years earlier. The markings upon them had resisted every serious attempt at translation. Scholars had spent decades treating them as an alphabet. Nathan solved the first sequence in six days.
He would not have called it translation.
It was a structural problem.
The markings represented relationships between ideas rather than sounds, with depth, spacing and repetition altering meaning. Every scholar before him had tried to read the inscriptions horizontally. Nathan turned the rubbing sideways.
After that, the pattern became obvious.
Harcourt had come to the prison personally with copies of the fragments beneath his arm. Nathan remembered the professor asking whether the markings referred to a settlement. Nathan told him no. Harcourt proposed a tomb. No. A religious site. Again, no. Eventually his patience thinned and he demanded to know what Nathan believed they meant.
Nathan had pointed at one symbol scholars had translated as house. It did not mean house. It meant inside. Another did not mean death, but something closer to stillness. The mark described as god seemed more accurately translated as above.
By the time Nathan rearranged the pages across the prison table, Harcourt had stopped interrupting.
Nathan remembered enjoying that.
The closest coherent sentence he could make from the sequence had been simple enough:
BELOW IS INSIDE. ABOVE IS STILL. DO NOT OPEN BETWEEN.
Harcourt stared at it for almost a minute. Then he asked whether Nathan would like to leave prison for a while.
Nathan said yes.
That was how a convicted murderer came to be descending beneath an unnamed mountain in 1898 with an iron cuff around his wrist and Thomas Ward attached to the other end of the chain. Ward had been chosen because he was believed capable of restraining Nathan should the need arise.
Nathan had privately decided within ten minutes of meeting him that he could not.
He saw no reason to tell Ward that.
The expedition continued downward.
Mallory eventually began talking about his daughter, Emily. She had recently lost one of her front teeth and refused to let her mother throw it away. Apparently she carried the tooth everywhere in a small tin. Nathan remarked that this was not particularly unusual; children often retained shed teeth, hair and occasionally fingernails as objects of personal significance. Pike wanted to know why Nathan knew anything about children keeping fingernails. Nathan said he had read about ritual retention of body matter.
Mallory laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. He accused Nathan of possessing a talent for making ordinary things sound dreadful.
Nathan was still considering whether that accusation made sense when Mallory took a folded sheet of paper from inside his coat and showed it to Mercer. Nathan looked despite himself. The paper bore a child's drawing in coloured pencil: a house, four people, and an animal probably intended to be a horse despite possessing five legs. One figure was much taller than the others.
Mallory noticed him looking and handed it over.
Nathan studied it. He identified the tallest figure as Mallory immediately, not because of any resemblance but because the other figures had been arranged around it. The child, he explained, appeared to regard Mallory as the central figure of the household.
The remark changed Mallory's expression. Nathan noticed without understanding why.
"That's a nice way of saying it," Mallory murmured.
Nathan told him he had not been attempting to be nice.
"I know," Mallory said, carefully folding the drawing again. "That almost makes it nicer."
Nathan did not know how to answer.
Ward looked at him strangely afterward.
Nathan asked why.
Ward said it was nothing.
Nathan disliked that response because it usually meant something.
He was considering pressing the matter when the floor trembled.
The sensation was faint enough that the others continued walking. Nathan stopped so abruptly that the chain between himself and Ward snapped tight. Ward turned with immediate irritation, but Nathan was already crouching. He pressed his fingertips against the damp stone.
Nothing.
Then it came again.
A slow vibration passed through the mountain. It was not the sharp impact of falling rock or the distant echo of a footstep. It felt deeper than that, a movement carried through too much stone to have a clear source.
Harcourt came back when he saw them stopped. Nathan told him something had moved.
Mallory laughed behind them and remarked that they were inside a mountain, but Nathan scarcely heard him. He was looking upward.
Harcourt asked how far away the movement had been.
Nathan did not know.
The answer changed the professor's face.
Nathan tried to explain that the stone transmitted the vibration too efficiently to judge direction or distance. As he spoke, a thread of dust slipped from the ceiling past Harcourt's shoulder.
Everyone saw it.
Ward immediately told them to move.
The first crack came from somewhere behind.
It sounded distant at first, like a rifle fired in another room. A second followed. Then a third. Each was deeper than the last, and as the sound moved toward them the men began running without anyone giving the order.
Panic made the narrow tunnel dangerous. Mercer struck his shoulder against the wall. Pike almost lost his lamp. One of the labourers fell, and Anton dragged him upright by the collar before the men behind could trample him. Ward pulled Nathan forward through the chain and shouted at him to move faster, while Nathan attempted to point out that three people occupied the space directly in front of him.
The ceiling split before he could finish.
Stone came down in a roar.
Everything became noise and yellow light whipping wildly through dust. Someone screamed. Harcourt shouted something Nathan could not hear. Mallory was somewhere behind them. Nathan felt a rock strike between his shoulders hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs, and he stumbled.
Ward caught him.
Nathan looked up.
A slab of stone was dropping above the constable.
He seized Ward's coat and threw both of them sideways just before the slab struck the ground.
Ward stared at the place where he had been standing, then at Nathan. He managed to mutter something about Nathan having a good eye.
Nathan told him the slab had been falling for almost two seconds.
Ward swore at him and told him to accept the compliment.
Then the mountain truly began to collapse.
It did not come down all at once. The destruction chased them. Sections of ceiling failed one after another, each impact sending fresh clouds of dust through the passage. A lamp shattered behind Nathan. Another went dark. Someone began praying. One of the younger labourers cried out for his mother.
Nathan remembered that voice.
He would remember it for reasons that surprised him later.
The man sounded terribly young.
The final collapse struck with enough force to extinguish every remaining lamp.
Darkness swallowed them.
Nathan stopped because running blind inside a collapsing tunnel would only produce bodies. Ward struck him from behind. Someone hit the wall. Something heavy crashed farther back.
Then the mountain became silent.
For several moments Nathan could hear nothing except breathing and coughing. Somebody was sobbing quietly. Another man spat grit from his mouth.
Ward called Nathan's name from somewhere close by.
Nathan answered.
Ward asked whether he was hurt.
Nathan moved his shoulders carefully and decided the injury to his back was painful rather than serious.
Then Ward began calling names.
One by one the men answered.
Hargreaves.
Harcourt.
Mercer.
Petru.
Anton.
Pike.
Collins.
Mallory.
The rest.
All twelve.
A match flared briefly, failed, then another caught. Ward's face emerged first from the darkness, followed by his hands and the brass lamp beneath them as the wick finally took flame. The expedition slowly reappeared.
They looked as though the mountain had already tried to bury them.
Dust had turned every face grey. Blood ran from Hargreaves's scalp. Mercer's lip was split. One labourer had torn both knees from his trousers. Mallory leaned against the wall and saw Nathan looking.
"Still alive, murderer?"
Nathan told him apparently so.
Mallory smiled weakly. "Shame."
Nathan almost laughed, but pain turned it into a cough.
For a little while relief moved among them. It was not happiness. It was the temporary gratitude of men who had expected to die and had not yet done so.
Ward ruined it when he walked back toward the collapse.
The passage was blocked less than fifty yards behind them.
Mercer was the first to understand the consequences. Their tools were back there. So was most of the food. The blasting powder. The larger packs. Everything intended to get them safely out again.
He moved toward the rubble instinctively, but Ward stopped him. The ceiling above the collapse had cracked in half a dozen places. Nathan could see immediately that the visible blockage was only part of the problem. The weight above had shifted. Even if they somehow removed the stones before them, disturbing the wrong section would bring more of the mountain down.
Nathan said so.
He explained that whoever stood nearest would probably die first.
Mercer looked at him with sudden anger.
Nathan knew from the expression that he had chosen the wrong words again.
Mercer demanded to know why Nathan spoke as though they were animals in a trap.
Nathan replied that he had only described what would happen.
Ward told him to stop talking.
Harcourt, perhaps sensing that another minute of this would produce a different kind of disaster, reminded them that the old survey showed another opening somewhere on the southern side of the mountain.
Mercer asked what happened if the survey was wrong.
Harcourt did not answer.
Nathan did.
"Then we probably die."
Every man looked at him.
Nathan realised almost immediately that he had made the same mistake twice.
He attempted to reformulate the sentence, but Hargreaves began laughing before he could manage it.
It was not ordinary laughter. It was exhausted and frightened and just barely under control. Ward joined him. Then Harcourt covered his face. Soon even Mercer was laughing, though he looked almost furious with himself for doing it.
Nathan laughed too.
He did not entirely understand why.
Perhaps because the alternative was worse.
He remembered that.
Facts came easily.
People required study.
They rested beside the collapse and divided whatever food remained on their persons. Damp bread, salt beef, a little cheese, brandy in several flasks. Ward allowed Nathan a swallow.
Across from them, Mallory unfolded his daughter's drawing and checked it for damage.
Nathan watched him smooth the paper over his knee.
He asked why Mallory kept looking at it.
Mallory said because he missed his family.
Nathan pointed out that he had been away only twelve days and asked whether duration mattered.
Mallory regarded him with something almost like pity.
"You really don't know how people work, do you?"
Nathan objected to that. He knew quite a lot about how people worked.
"That," Mallory told him, "is exactly the problem."
Nathan knew how lungs worked. He knew how blood worked. He could tell when a man's knee hurt from the way he shortened a stride. Mallory asked whether Nathan had already decided which of them would win in a fight.
"Ward."
The answer came immediately.
Ward looked offended.
Mallory laughed. "You didn't even think."
"I already had."
"You see? But ask you why a father looks at a picture of his children and suddenly you're lost."
Nathan looked down at the drawing.
"Yes."
The admission surprised Mallory enough to quiet him.
Nathan understood the mechanism of attachment. Familiar images activated memory. Memory reinforced emotion. That much was obvious. What Nathan did not understand was why Mallory repeatedly looked at something that made him visibly sad.
Mallory folded the paper slowly.
"Because the hurt reminds me they're real."
Nathan thought about that long after the others had begun preparing to move.
When they continued deeper, Mallory took the remaining coil of rope from Mercer. Nathan asked why, and Mallory said Mercer's knee was bothering him.
Mercer immediately looked at Nathan.
"How do you know about my knee?"
Nathan explained that Mercer shortened his left stride whenever the ground sloped downward.
Mercer stared at Ward. "Does he watch all of us like this?"
Ward said yes.
Nathan began to deny it, then realised that Ward was probably correct.
Nobody found that reassuring.
The tunnel narrowed until they were forced into single file. At times they turned sideways to squeeze through gaps in the stone. Elsewhere they crawled beneath low shelves and passed the packs from one man to the next. Fatigue gradually replaced terror. Shoulders hurt. Boots rubbed skin raw. Petru snapped when Anton stepped on his hand and Anton suggested that he stop placing his hand beneath other men's feet.
Harcourt cursed when the cracked lens of his spectacles finally fell out.
Behind them, Mallory hummed.
Three notes.
A pause.
Two more.
The last always slightly flat.
Nathan learned the tune quickly and disliked it not long afterward.
He was thinking about asking Mallory to stop when he noticed the wall.
There were lines in the stone.
At first they resembled tool marks, though they were too smooth. They ran parallel before dividing into thinner grooves, all of them shallow and unnaturally regular.
Harcourt became interested immediately.
Nathan touched one of the channels.
There were no chisel scars. No abrasion. No evidence anything had cut into the stone at all.
The rock seemed almost to have formed around the grooves.
Harcourt asked whether they were natural.
Nathan said no.
The professor seemed pleased.
Nathan was not.
They moved on.
After several minutes Nathan became aware that something had changed.
He listened.
Boots.
Breathing.
Clothing against stone.
Buckles shifting.
Water dripping.
No humming.
Nathan glanced back. Several men followed behind him, though the bend hid the rear of the line.
He assumed Mallory had finally tired of the tune.
They reached a narrow underground stream later and stopped to refill their bottles.
Mercer rolled his shoulder and called back to Mallory to return the rope.
No answer.
He called again.
Still nothing.
Nathan felt cold before anyone else seemed to understand why.
Everyone turned.
Pike was there.
Collins.
Petru.
Anton.
The labourers.
No Mallory.
For several seconds nobody moved.
It was as though the absence itself required time to become comprehensible.
Mercer asked where he was.
Pike thought Mallory had been ahead.
Collins insisted he had been behind.
Another man said he had heard him only minutes earlier.
Hargreaves shouted Mallory's name into the passage.
The echo returned.
Nothing else.
They went back.
At first there was no real terror in it. Men got separated. Men stopped to rest. Men wandered the wrong way. Nathan produced explanation after explanation as they retraced their steps. Mallory might have fallen. He might have found another passage. He might have returned for something.
One possibility vanished after another.
There had been no cry.
No blood.
No side passage.
No sound of a fall.
No place for a grown man to go.
They searched farther.
Men began shouting.
Nathan joined them.
The feeling growing inside him was not merely fear. It was outrage at something being impossible.
Robert Mallory could not disappear.
Matter did not stop existing because nobody was looking at it.
Bodies went somewhere.
People required space.
There had to be a process.
They reached the place where they had rested after the collapse.
Mallory was not there.
His daughter's drawing was.
It lay beside the wall.
Nathan recognised the five-legged horse immediately.
Hargreaves picked up the paper.
Mercer's face changed when he saw it.
"He wouldn't leave that."
Nathan nearly explained that people frequently abandoned important possessions during moments of panic.
Then he looked at Mercer.
Something in the man's expression made Nathan keep the thought to himself.
That act of restraint felt strangely difficult.
Mercer repeated that Mallory would never leave the drawing.
Nathan searched for something useful to say.
"Then he didn't mean to."
Mercer looked at him.
Nathan could not tell whether it was correct.
But Mercer did not become angry.
They searched all the way back to the collapse.
Nothing.
No Mallory.
No rope.
No blood.
No torn clothing.
Nathan crouched and studied the floor. The dust had been destroyed by their earlier panic, but some impressions survived. Hargreaves had fallen near the wall. Mercer had crossed the same patch twice. Someone had dragged a pack.
Mallory had sat near a projection of stone.
Nathan recognised the worn heel of his boot.
After that the tracks dissolved into everyone else's.
Ward stood over him.
"Well?"
Nathan stared at the ground for a long time.
"I don't know."
The words tasted wrong.
Ward noticed.
So did Mercer.
Nathan had not said them once since the expedition began.
Mercer seemed almost angry that Nathan could not give him an answer.
"You always know."
Nathan looked at him.
For once, there was nothing to say.
They searched until tired men began making mistakes. They pushed their lamps into cracks. They shouted into gaps too narrow for a child. They returned to the stream. They searched the walls.
Nothing.
Eventually Ward ordered them onward.
Mercer refused.
"We don't leave him."
His voice cracked.
Nobody argued when he insisted Mallory was alive.
Perhaps nobody wanted to.
Hargreaves promised that they would find the southern opening and bring help.
Mercer asked how long that would take.
No one knew.
"His children are waiting for him."
Hargreaves said softly that he knew.
Mercer's control finally broke.
"He gave me the rope because my knee hurt."
Nathan answered before thinking, explaining that Mallory had probably realised the additional weight would aggravate Mercer's injury.
The look Mercer gave him made Nathan wish he could take the sentence back.
"That is what you think?"
Nathan stared at him.
"No."
The right words did not come naturally.
His eyes fell to the drawing in Mercer's hand.
"He knew you were hurting."
Mercer went still.
Nathan forced himself to continue.
"He carried it because you were his friend."
Something softened in Mercer's face.
"Yes."
Nathan nodded.
He understood perhaps less than Mercer wanted him to.
But not nothing.
Eleven men continued downward.
Nathan counted them constantly afterward.
He never said the numbers aloud.
He simply watched where each man stood whenever the tunnel narrowed and checked again whenever someone moved beyond the light.
Ward eventually noticed.
"You think one of us took him?"
Nathan said no.
Ward asked what he did think.
Nathan told him he did not know.
"Stop saying that like you're tasting poison."
"I dislike not knowing."
Ward watched him for a moment before asking whether he was afraid.
Nathan could have lied.
He did not.
"Yes."
Ward seemed surprised.
Nathan looked behind them into the dark.
"Whatever happened to Mallory violated several things I considered reliable."
"Such as?"
Nathan thought about it.
"That people require somewhere to go."
Ward's expression tightened.
"That is a very Drake way of saying you don't want anyone else disappearing."
Nathan considered the translation.
"Yes."
They stopped only when exhaustion forced them to.
The chamber they chose was low and narrow. Ward liked it because there were no cracks large enough for a man to hide inside and nowhere above them that something could crouch unseen.
No one commented on the thought.
Three lamps were placed in the centre.
Everyone gathered near them.
No one sat at the edge of the light.
Mercer kept Mallory's daughter's drawing on his knees.
For a while nobody spoke.
Then Pike began talking about home.
His mother kept hens. Anton hated hens. Petru revealed that Anton had been chased by a goose as a child, which produced the first weak laughter anyone had managed since Mallory vanished.
The conversation wandered from there.
Food.
Beds.
Women.
Sunlight.
Ordinary things that had become impossibly distant.
Nathan listened.
At some point he realised he was watching their faces.
Not studying them.
Not looking for weakness.
Simply watching.
That was unusual enough for him to notice.
Mercer eventually unfolded the drawing again.
"I told Robert he was a fool for bringing it. Said it'd get ruined."
He ran one thumb across the crease.
"He said Emily would ask if he'd carried it the whole way."
Hargreaves sat beside him.
Mercer looked down at the paper.
"I told him to take the rope."
Nathan understood before Mercer finished what the man was doing to himself.
He said the rope had not caused Mallory to disappear.
Mercer laughed without humour.
"You can't know that."
Nathan admitted he could not. Then he pointed out that had Mercer carried the rope instead, Mallory would still have been walking through the same tunnel.
"There is no evidence it mattered."
Ward rubbed his face.
Nathan recognised the mistake.
He tried again.
"You didn't send him away."
Mercer's eyes filled.
Hargreaves placed an arm around him.
The man bent forward and began to cry.
Nathan watched.
Ward leaned close enough that only he could hear.
"Don't stare."
Nathan asked why.
"Because he's crying."
"I know."
"Then give him some dignity."
Nathan looked away.
Another rule.
He stored it with the others he had collected through his life.
Do not examine an injury before asking whether the injured person is in pain.
Do not explain probabilities of death to people waiting for someone they love.
Do not stare at grief.
Do not tell a mother that her dead child can no longer know she is mourning.
That last lesson had cost him dearly.
Nathan closed his eyes.
He was tired.
More tired than he wanted Ward to know.
Eventually he slept.
He woke without understanding why.
The lamps had burned low.
The chamber was dim, the surrounding darkness thicker than before. Ward remained awake beside him, revolver resting across his knees. Petru whispered into clasped hands. Harcourt slept with his mouth open.
Mercer had Mallory's drawing beneath one palm.
Nathan lay still.
Something had awakened him.
At first he thought it had been movement.
Then he heard the tune.
Three notes.
A pause.
Two more.
The final note slightly flat.
Nathan opened his eyes fully.
The humming came from the tunnel behind them.
Ward had heard it too.
They looked at one another without speaking.
Mercer woke moments later.
Nathan watched recognition enter his face.
"Robert?"
The humming stopped.
Mercer scrambled upright.
Ward grabbed him before he reached the tunnel.
"That was him."
Ward told him to stay where he was.
"You heard him!"
"I heard something."
Mercer shouted Mallory's name into the passage.
Nothing answered.
He struggled against Ward.
"He's alive!"
Nathan rose, the chain pulling Ward's arm sideways.
Mercer looked at him.
"You heard it."
Nathan wished he had not asked.
He had heard Mallory humming that melody for hours. He knew the rhythm. He knew the pause. He knew that the last note always fell slightly flat.
"Yes."
Hope appeared on Mercer's face so quickly that Nathan almost felt ill.
He nearly said more.
Nearly explained that reproducing a man's voice did not require being the man.
Ward saw the words forming and looked sharply at him.
Nathan kept them to himself.
Perhaps that was another rule.
Mercer called again.
"Robert?"
The darkness did not answer.
Nathan listened.
He was good at listening.
He could separate breathing from running water, leather from stone, cloth from the shifting body beneath it.
There was no movement beyond the chamber.
No footstep.
No breath.
Nothing.
Yet the tune had been exact.
Not approximately Mallory.
Not similar to Mallory.
Exact.
The same rhythm.
The same misplaced final note.
Nathan felt something unfamiliar move through him as he understood the significance.
Whatever had made that sound had not merely heard Robert Mallory humming.
It had remembered him.
Ward noticed something change in Nathan's face and quietly asked what was wrong.
Nathan looked into the tunnel.
"Nothing."
It was a lie, though not a particularly good one.
For once, his mind offered no explanation capable of making the world orderly again.
Only one observation remained.
Something beneath the mountain had listened closely enough to Robert Mallory to reproduce him.
Nathan Drake had spent most of his life looking at people as collections of patterns—voices, habits, weaknesses, movements, predictable responses—and for the first time in his life he felt genuine revulsion at the thought of something else doing the same.
Only whatever lived beneath the mountain had apparently learned one lesson Nathan never had.
How to make a man disappear first.
..
The accusation began because Mallory disappeared for less than a minute.
He had done nothing more dramatic than step beyond the nearest bend to relieve himself, but the expedition had been beneath the mountain long enough that ordinary things no longer remained ordinary. When Mallory failed to answer the first time Mercer called his name, the effect upon the others was immediate. Mercer was on his feet before the echo died. Harcourt had already lifted one of the lamps toward the passage, straining to see beyond the weak circle of yellow light, and Petru had begun whispering beneath his breath in the rapid, familiar cadence of prayer.
Then Mallory appeared around the bend, fastening his coat and wearing an expression of mild confusion.
The entire chamber seemed to exhale at once.
He stopped when he saw them staring.
"What?"
Nobody answered.
Mallory looked from Mercer to Harcourt, then to Ward, understanding slowly dawning across his face.
"Oh, for God's sake."
Anton laughed first, although there was too much relief in it to sound genuinely amused. Pike cursed Mallory for frightening them, and Ward informed him that from then onward nobody went anywhere alone—not ten paces, not around a corner, not even to piss. Mallory rolled his eyes at the indignity but offered no real argument.
Nathan watched the men settle again.
Fear had begun changing them.
The alterations were small enough that Nathan suspected most of the others had not consciously noticed them yet, but once observed they were difficult to ignore. Petru now kept his knife across his lap whenever they stopped. Mercer had stopped sitting with his back toward passages. Hargreaves checked the lamps so often that twice Nathan had seen him inspect one only minutes after doing so already. Ward slept lightly, when he slept at all.
Edwin Cole had begun watching Nathan.
Cole was one of the hired men, and Nathan knew less about him than most. He placed the man somewhere between thirty-eight and forty. He had powerful shoulders, part of the smallest finger missing from his left hand and pale ridges of scar tissue across both palms. Those scars, together with the instinctive manner in which he examined fractures in the ceiling before stepping beneath them, suggested years spent in a quarry.
He had disliked Nathan from the beginning.
That was not unusual.
Nathan had been disliked by enough people that simple hostility rarely interested him anymore. Cole was different because his hostility had begun to change. During the first days it had been little more than disgust, the ordinary distaste of a man forced to share food and sleeping space with a convicted murderer. After the mountain began behaving strangely, disgust became suspicion.
Now suspicion was becoming decision.
Nathan recognised decision very well.
Cole sat opposite him with his elbows upon his knees, staring openly at the iron cuff around Nathan's wrist. Nathan watched him for several seconds before asking what he wanted.
Cole did not look away.
He spat into the dust.
He had been wondering, he said, why they were continuing to take the risk.
Harcourt sighed before Cole had even finished. Apparently this was not the first time the man had expressed the thought, though Nathan had not been present for the others.
Cole gestured toward Nathan.
Why, he wanted to know, was Drake still with them?
Nathan briefly looked down at himself, wondering whether the question had actually been directed toward him. Harcourt answered instead, reminding Cole that Nathan was the only person among them capable of understanding the inscriptions for which they had entered the mountain in the first place.
Cole dismissed that almost immediately. Harcourt had shown him the translations, certainly, but he could not read those either.
"That does rather illustrate the problem," Harcourt muttered.
Under normal circumstances Mallory would have laughed.
He did not.
Cole leaned forward until the lamplight caught the dampness across his forehead. They were trapped underground, he said. Men were disappearing—or almost disappearing—and none of them knew what lived in the tunnels around them. Yet every night they chose to sleep within arm's reach of a man who had already killed three people.
Ward reminded him that Nathan remained chained to his wrist.
Cole's attention moved briefly toward the constable.
"And that makes you immortal, does it?"
Ward's expression hardened. "No."
"Then what happens when he decides he wants your pistol?"
Nathan said nothing.
He watched Cole instead.
The man's breathing had accelerated despite his sitting still. His right hand rested near the knife at his belt, not touching the hilt but never more than a few inches from it. His eyes moved once toward Ward's revolver, then to Nathan's throat, then finally to the shackle joining Nathan to the constable.
Nathan understood what was happening before Cole himself had entirely accepted it.
Edwin Cole wanted to kill him.
Not immediately.
Possibly not even consciously yet.
But the possibility had become permissible.
That was usually the important part.
Nathan had learned that people imagined violence was decided at the moment it occurred. In his experience, it usually began much earlier. A man first had to allow himself to consider killing another human being. Once the act became conceivable—once necessity, fear or anger made it acceptable—the distance between imagination and action became considerably shorter.
"You think I'm responsible for what happened to Mallory."
Cole's gaze snapped toward him.
He did not say yes. Instead he said that five minutes earlier everyone had believed another man had vanished, while Nathan had remained sitting quietly and studying them.
Nathan corrected him.
"I was studying you."
The temperature of the chamber seemed to fall.
Ward turned slowly toward him.
"Nathan."
Nathan ignored the warning. Cole's pupils enlarged whenever the disappearances were mentioned. His hand had remained within six inches of the knife since they stopped. He had looked toward Ward's pistol eleven times.
Cole's face changed as Nathan spoke.
The anger remained, but Nathan could see what lay beneath it now.
Fear.
"You counting?"
"No."
"Then how do you know?"
"I noticed."
Cole stood.
Ward rose immediately.
The chain between them pulled Nathan to his feet as well.
Mallory moved before anyone else, placing himself between the two men.
That was enough, he said.
Cole rounded on him. Did Mallory truly intend to defend Nathan?
Mallory shook his head. Defending Drake and stopping Cole from behaving like an idiot were not necessarily the same thing.
Cole reminded him that Nathan had killed three men.
Mallory said he was perfectly aware.
"And you trust him?"
Mallory looked over his shoulder at Nathan.
"No."
Nathan appreciated the honesty more than he probably should have.
Mallory went on before Cole could seize upon the answer. He trusted Ward. He trusted Harcourt. More importantly, he trusted his own eyes enough to know that Nathan had not left Ward's chain since they entered the mountain.
Cole's jaw tightened.
"You don't know what he's capable of."
"No," Mallory said. "Neither do you."
"He doesn't think like us."
The words shifted the attention of the entire chamber toward Nathan.
Nathan felt it rather than saw it.
Cole pointed at him.
"Look at him. He watches us like livestock."
Nathan disliked being pointed at, though that seemed less important than the silence that followed.
Nobody immediately disagreed.
Hargreaves looked down.
Petru avoided Nathan's eyes.
Even Mallory hesitated.
Cole noticed.
His confidence grew.
They had all seen it, he insisted. Whenever somebody became frightened or hurt, Nathan watched. He examined expressions, movements and reactions as though the men around him were curiosities arranged for study. Cole recalled seeing him watch Mercer grieving over Mallory's daughter's picture.
Nathan pointed out that he had not been taking notes.
Cole stared at him.
"That isn't the point."
Nathan knew that.
He also knew saying so would accomplish nothing.
Cole looked around at the others as though he were finally speaking aloud something they had all been too afraid to admit. None of them knew how many days remained before they found another exit. They did not know what was stalking the tunnels or whether anything was stalking them at all. They knew almost nothing.
Except one thing.
They had brought something dangerous inside with them.
Nathan.
Mallory's expression hardened before Cole finished.
"No."
Cole frowned. "No what?"
"We're not doing this."
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to."
Mallory stepped closer to him. Cole had been staring at Nathan since the previous day, he said, with the unmistakable look of a man deciding whether to crush another man's skull while he slept.
Silence fell across the chamber.
Nathan looked at Mallory.
So he had noticed as well.
Cole's hand moved.
Barely.
Ward's hand settled upon his revolver.
"Don't."
Cole froze.
Mallory shook his head. They were frightened. He was frightened. Every man in the chamber was frightened. That did not give them permission to begin murdering one another simply because killing something they understood was easier than admitting that none of them understood what was happening.
Cole looked past him toward Nathan.
"He would."
Nathan answered before considering whether answering was wise.
"If I thought killing you was necessary, yes."
Mallory closed his eyes.
"Christ alive."
Cole gave a sharp, humourless laugh and looked around as though Nathan had just proven the entire argument for him.
Nathan frowned.
"You were asking whether I would."
"I did not ask you anything."
"No, but—"
Ward seized Nathan's sleeve.
"Stop helping."
Nathan stopped.
Mallory stared at him with an expression Nathan had not seen from him before. Not fear exactly. Frustration, perhaps, bordering upon despair.
"You know, just once you might try lying."
Nathan considered that.
"I do lie."
"That was not comforting."
Nathan almost smiled.
Cole did not.
Eventually the man sat down.
One by one the others followed.
The conversation was deliberately moved elsewhere, but Nathan knew the matter had not ended. Cole watched him throughout the remainder of their rest, always when he thought Nathan's attention was elsewhere.
Later, when the lamps were turned low and the exhausted expedition attempted to sleep, Nathan remained awake longer than usual.
Not because of the mountain.
Because he was waiting for Edwin Cole.
He disliked himself slightly for being correct.
There was no true night beneath the earth, but eventually they had begun calling the hours of sleep night because language required something to call them. By then the chamber had grown almost completely silent. Ward slept beside Nathan with one arm folded beneath his head. Mallory lay several feet away. Harcourt had curled beneath his coat.
Cole rested on the opposite side of the circle.
Nathan watched his breathing.
At first it remained shallow and irregular.
Then it deepened.
His shoulders loosened.
His body became still.
Nathan waited a little longer before allowing his own eyes to close.
He did not sleep deeply.
Prison had cured him of that.
The first thing he felt was a hand closing over his mouth.
The second was the weight of another body dropping across his chest.
Nathan's eyes opened.
Cole was above him.
The man's face was little more than a shadow against the low light of the dying lamp.
There was a knife in his right hand.
Nathan did not think of betrayal.
He did not think of fear.
His mind discarded everything that was not immediately useful.
Distance.
Weight.
Angle.
Cole drove the knife downward.
Nathan twisted his head and shoulder aside.
The blade struck stone beside his face.
The sound was remarkably small.
Ward stirred.
Cole slammed his forearm across Nathan's mouth and reached back for another strike. Nathan caught the attacking wrist.
For several seconds the struggle remained almost silent.
Cole was stronger.
Nathan had already known that.
Strength was only useful when correctly applied.
Cole had placed too much of his weight forward.
Nathan drove his shackled wrist upward.
The chain connecting him to Ward snapped taut.
Ward woke as Nathan rolled beneath Cole's centre of gravity.
The constable began to speak, but Cole shoved him sideways before the words formed.
Nathan pulled again.
The chain slid across Cole's body.
Everything became confused.
Boots scraped across stone. Ward shouted. Cole grunted through clenched teeth. Nathan smelled sweat and old wool and the metallic scent of the knife.
The blade fell from Cole's hand.
It struck the floor beside Nathan's bedding.
That sound woke Mallory.
He opened his eyes and for several seconds could not understand what he was seeing.
Nathan had manoeuvred himself behind Cole.
The chain ran across the man's throat, one end drawn through Nathan's hands, the other still attached to Ward.
Cole clawed at it.
His face had darkened.
"Nathan!"
Mallory scrambled upright.
Ward was already pulling at the chain from the other side.
"Let him go!"
Nathan heard them.
He understood the words perfectly.
He simply did not obey immediately.
Cole was still fighting.
A few seconds earlier the man had held a knife inches from Nathan's face.
Cole had meant to kill him.
There was no uncertainty left in that observation.
Something inside Nathan became very calm.
Cole struck at the chain with both hands.
Once.
Again.
Then with less force.
Then hardly at all.
"Nathan!"
Mallory's voice reached him differently that time.
Nathan released the pressure.
Cole collapsed.
Ward ripped the chain away and shoved Nathan backward hard enough that his shoulder struck the wall.
"What the hell are you doing?"
Nathan scarcely heard him.
He was looking at Cole.
The man did not move.
Mallory dropped beside him and rolled him onto his back.
The face told them before anything else did.
Nevertheless Mallory pressed two fingers against the side of his throat.
He waited.
Nothing.
For several seconds the chamber remained silent.
Then everyone began speaking at once.
Petru shouted something Nathan could not understand. Harcourt demanded a lamp. Pike scrambled backward until his shoulders struck the wall. One of the labourers began swearing at Nathan.
Ward seized Nathan by the front of his coat and slammed him against the stone.
"You killed him."
Nathan looked past Ward toward Cole's body.
"Yes."
Ward's fist tightened in his coat.
"He was down."
"No."
"You had him."
"He was still fighting."
"You could have stopped!"
Nathan looked back at him.
"I did."
Ward's expression changed.
Nathan realised the problem with his answer after he had already given it.
Mallory still knelt beside Cole.
When Nathan looked toward him, there was horror on his face.
Not only horror at the dead man.
Horror at Nathan.
That hurt.
The sensation surprised him enough that for a second he paid more attention to it than to Ward.
"He tried to kill me," Nathan said.
Mallory's gaze moved to the knife.
It lay beside Nathan's bedding.
The position mattered.
Nathan watched Mallory reconstruct the attack almost as he himself would have done. The knife. The marks where Cole's fingers had pressed against Nathan's mouth. The cut newly gouged into the stone beside his head. Cole's body.
Mallory understood.
Some of the horror left his face.
Not enough.
"You saw," Nathan said.
Mallory swallowed.
"Yes."
"He had the knife."
"I know."
"He was trying to kill me."
"I know."
Nathan waited.
Mallory did not give him the answer he expected.
He did not say that Nathan had done what was necessary.
He did not say Cole had brought the outcome upon himself.
Instead he looked at Cole's body and said quietly, "You kept pulling."
Nathan frowned.
"He was still dangerous."
"He was dying."
"He was still moving."
Mallory looked at him.
And there it was again.
The distance.
Nathan had encountered it throughout his life, but somehow it felt larger now.
To Nathan, the sequence was straightforward.
Cole had attempted to kill him.
Nathan had prevented it.
The threat had ended when Cole became incapable of continuing.
There was a clean logic to it.
Mallory saw something different.
He saw a frightened man who had become desperate enough to make a terrible decision. A man who might have had a wife somewhere above the mountain. Children. Brothers. Friends. A home.
Nathan realised with sudden discomfort that he knew none of those things about Edwin Cole.
He knew the missing finger.
The quarry scars.
The old break in his nose.
His approximate weight.
The slight weakness in his left shoulder.
Nothing else.
"He was afraid of me," Nathan murmured.
Mallory gave a tired, bitter laugh.
"Yes."
Nathan looked down at Cole's face.
"He was right to be."
Mallory did not answer.
Something twisted beneath Nathan's stomach.
It was not regret for surviving.
He could not regret that.
It was narrower and far more difficult to identify.
"I didn't want him to do it."
Mallory looked at him again.
Nathan struggled to arrange his thoughts into something another person might understand.
He could describe the attack perfectly. He could explain the angle of Cole's knife, the mistakes in his stance, the transfer of weight that had allowed Nathan to overturn him. He could reproduce every movement.
None of that mattered.
"I knew he was thinking about killing me."
Mallory became very still.
"You knew?"
"Yes."
"And you said nothing?"
"I wasn't certain he would do it."
Mallory stared at him.
"You spent an hour explaining how you could read every twitch in the man's face."
"That is not certainty."
"You could have told Ward."
Nathan glanced toward the constable.
Ward was still standing nearby, pale with anger.
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
Nathan opened his mouth.
Then stopped.
For perhaps the first time that night, he understood that the truth would be worse than silence.
He had wanted to know.
That was the answer.
He had wanted to see whether Cole would cross the distance between fear and action.
Nathan had noticed the progression and become interested in it. Disgust had become suspicion. Suspicion had become fear. Fear had become intent. He had watched the stages develop with the fascination he might have given a complicated mechanism.
Somewhere during that observation, he had ceased remembering that the mechanism was a man.
Mallory understood anyway.
Nathan saw the moment recognition entered his face.
His anger seemed to disappear.
What replaced it was worse.
"Oh, Nathan."
Nathan looked away.
"I didn't think he would be stupid enough to try it while I was awake."
Mallory recoiled slightly.
Nathan regretted the sentence almost as soon as he heard it.
Ward swore beneath his breath.
Hargreaves sat heavily against the wall.
Petru crossed himself.
After that, nobody looked at Nathan quite the same way.
Not even Mallory.
Perhaps especially Mallory.
They wrapped Edwin Cole in a spare blanket.
There was nowhere to bury him. The floor was solid stone, and no one wished to carry a corpse farther into the mountain. Eventually they found a shallow recess in the rear of the chamber and placed him there.
Harcourt spoke a few words.
Nobody knew whether Cole had been religious.
Petru prayed for him anyway.
Nathan stood apart.
Ward had shortened the chain between their cuffs until there was barely enough length for Nathan to move comfortably.
Nathan did not complain.
When the prayers ended, nobody seemed eager to sleep again.
Mallory eventually settled beside one of the lamps, watching the flame as it weakened.
Nathan remained on the opposite side of the chamber.
For a long time neither spoke.
Then Mallory said quietly, "You frightened me."
Nathan looked toward him.
Mallory did not return the look. His eyes stayed on the lamp.
"Not because you killed him."
Nathan waited.
"Because when you realised he was dead, you looked surprised that we were angry with you."
Nathan considered denying it.
He decided not to.
"I was."
Mallory rubbed both hands across his face.
"That's what I mean."
Nathan looked at the stone between his boots.
After a while he said that Cole would have killed him.
Mallory nodded.
"I know."
"Would you rather I had let him?"
That finally made Mallory turn.
"No."
Nathan knew his confusion must have been visible because Mallory sighed.
"That's the problem, Nathan. You keep thinking there are only two choices. Kill him or let him kill you."
Nathan said nothing.
Mallory looked toward the shape beneath the blanket at the rear of the chamber.
"Most of us spend our whole lives trying to find something in between."
Nathan carried those words with him when they moved again.
He carried Cole as well, though not physically.
The dead man remained wrapped in the recess behind them as the expedition gathered what little equipment remained and continued deeper into the mountain.
Nathan counted automatically.
Ten men besides himself.
He counted again.
Not because he feared losing track of them this time.
Not entirely.
For the first time since entering the mountain, Nathan understood that whatever waited beneath them was not the only thing capable of becoming dangerous.
The mountain had frightened them.
Fear had turned Edwin Cole into something else.
And somewhere between recognising that transformation and watching it reach its conclusion, Nathan had discovered something considerably more troubling.
He was not outside that process.
None of them were.
...
The following day was worse, largely because for most of it nothing happened.
After Edwin Cole's death, they had all expected the mountain to do something.
Nathan could see the expectation in the way the others moved. Every scrape of a boot against stone made Ward's hand drift toward his revolver. Whenever one of the lamps sputtered, somebody glanced over a shoulder. A stumble that would once have drawn a curse or a laugh now made three men turn at once, faces pale in the lamplight.
Yet the tunnels remained empty.
There were no distant voices, no humming in the rock and no figures waiting at the edge of sight. There was only stone: wet, black and apparently without end.
They continued downward because there was nowhere else to go.
The passage wound through the mountain in long descending slopes that soon made every man's knees ache. At times it opened into chambers so vast their lamps could not find the ceilings; at others it narrowed until they were forced to turn sideways and drag their packs through after them. The air remained damp and stale, carrying the smell of old earth, lamp smoke and men who had been underground far too long.
Nobody spoke unless they needed to.
Cole's death had done that.
His absence seemed to walk among them. Nathan noticed how rarely the others looked at him now unless there was some practical reason to do so. Whatever suspicion Cole had voiced before disappearing had not died with him.
Ward had shortened the chain between their wrists as well. Nathan could no longer extend his arm fully without pulling the constable off balance. It made climbing irritating and descending worse, but he did not complain. He understood perfectly well why Ward had done it.
Understanding did not make him like it.
At one point the chain slipped between two rocks and caught hard enough to jerk Nathan backward.
Ward looked over his shoulder.
"Leave it."
"It is wedged."
"I can see that."
Nathan crouched, worked the iron from between the stones and stood again. Ward waited without helping.
Mallory was watching from several paces behind them.
Nathan noticed, of course.
"You keep doing that."
Mallory looked exhausted enough that even suspicion seemed to require effort. "Doing what?"
"Watching me when you think I won't notice."
"I've learned you notice everything."
Nathan brushed dirt from his hand. "Not everything."
Mallory's expression changed slightly.
Nathan knew exactly what he meant.
Cole.
He looked away and began walking again.
For nearly half an hour that was the last thing either of them said.
When the tunnel eventually widened, Mallory moved up alongside Nathan and Ward. "You sleep at all?"
"A little," Nathan said.
Mallory glanced at Ward.
"Not much," the constable admitted.
Mallory nodded as though he had expected nothing else.
He looked terrible.
They all did.
Their coats had dried stiff with old sweat and stone dust. Men who had entered the mountain clean-shaven now carried several days of dark growth across their jaws. Harcourt's spectacles had cracked across one lens and been repaired with thread, leaving them permanently crooked on his nose. Petru had wrapped one foot in cloth after a blister burst inside his boot, and his limp was becoming more obvious by the hour.
Nathan suspected several of them were developing fevers.
He had not mentioned it.
He was learning when information ceased to be useful.
Mallory looked toward the lamps ahead. "How much oil?"
Ward said nothing.
The silence answered for him.
Mallory turned to Nathan instead.
Nathan knew, naturally. He had counted the remaining tins twice.
"Perhaps another two days if we keep only three lamps burning when we stop."
Ward's mouth tightened.
"And while we're walking?" Mallory asked.
"Less."
"How much less?"
Nathan hesitated.
Mallory gave him a humourless smile. "Don't spare my feelings now."
"A day."
The smile vanished.
Nathan reconsidered. "Perhaps a little more."
They walked several steps without speaking.
At last Mallory looked forward again.
"Well."
It was all he said.
Oil, unfortunately, was not their only problem. The wicks were proving worse.
Several had frayed so badly they gave more smoke than flame. Harcourt had taken to trimming the charred ends with a small pair of scissors and turning usable sections over when he could. They had spare wick, but nowhere near enough.
Nathan had calculated how many hours of light remained if they continued descending at their present pace. Then, because his mind would not leave the matter alone, he calculated the food. After that came the water, followed by their rate of physical decline.
He stopped calculating when the numbers began agreeing with one another.
At what they believed to be midday—although the word had become almost meaningless underground—they stopped beside a pool fed by a thin stream of water running from the wall.
It looked clear enough.
Petru immediately knelt and began unscrewing his bottle.
Nathan caught his wrist.
"No."
Petru stared at him. "What?"
Nathan crouched and lowered the lamp.
For several seconds he said nothing.
Petru followed his gaze.
A steady trail of droplets was falling from the wall into the pool. Nathan could hear them striking the surface.
But the surface was perfectly still.
There should have been ripples.
There were none.
Each droplet touched the black water and simply disappeared.
Petru's hand slowly withdrew.
Mallory came closer. "What is that?"
"I don't know."
"You've started saying that considerably more often since we came down here."
Nathan continued looking at the pool.
"Yes."
Mallory considered the answer, then quietly stepped away.
Nobody drank.
Several hours later, Harcourt found the carvings.
For a short while, they gave something back to him.
He had spent most of the day walking with his head bowed, occasionally touching the breast pocket where he kept the old survey as though assuring himself it was still there. When his lamp caught the first marks in the wall, he stopped so abruptly that Hargreaves walked straight into him.
"There."
Harcourt raised the lamp.
Deep lines had been cut into the stone.
They were not letters, or at least not from any alphabet Nathan recognised. The cuts were deliberate, though—too regular and too carefully arranged to have formed naturally.
Nathan stepped closer.
For perhaps ten minutes, they became an expedition again.
Harcourt forgot his exhaustion. Hargreaves began firing questions at nobody in particular. Ward raised the lamp higher. Even Mallory crowded forward.
Nathan studied the design without touching it.
Three vertical cuts.
A circle.
Beneath that, something branching like roots or antlers.
Another circle farther down.
Harcourt looked at him expectantly. "Well?"
Nathan frowned.
"I need time."
"You've seen something similar?"
"No."
"Nothing at all?"
"No."
Harcourt's disappointment was so immediate that it was almost childish.
Nathan continued studying the wall, because although the symbols themselves meant nothing to him, something about them felt wrong.
Not the shapes.
Their position.
He took Ward's lamp and walked farther down the tunnel.
There were more carvings.
Then more again.
Every one of them sat at roughly the same height.
Nathan returned.
Ward watched him. "What?"
Instead of answering, Nathan lifted the lamp beside Harcourt's head, then lowered it until the markings were clearly visible.
They sat almost a foot above the professor's eye level.
Harcourt frowned. "So?"
Nathan looked up toward the ceiling.
"Whoever carved these was taller than us."
Mallory's face tightened. "How much taller?"
Nathan judged the distance in silence.
"Considerably."
Nobody asked him to be more precise.
They moved on.
Some time later, the passage narrowed again.
That was where they lost the next two men.
There was no warning.
No tremor ran through the walls. No humming sounded from deeper in the mountain. No lamp guttered out at some convenient moment.
Nathan was walking near the front beside Ward. Harcourt and Hargreaves followed them, then Mallory, then Petru and Anton. The remaining labourers were behind.
The tunnel was wide enough to walk normally but narrow enough that they had been stretched into a single line.
By then they had developed a ritual of checking one another.
A glance over the shoulder.
A name called.
A muttered response.
Every few minutes.
Nathan had counted them perhaps thirty paces earlier.
Everyone had been present.
Then Mallory said something about stopping.
Ward turned. "What?"
"I said wait."
Mallory was looking behind him.
Nathan felt the change before anyone said another word.
It was only a small silence, but not the ordinary silence of exhausted men.
There was something missing from it.
Mallory lifted his lamp.
"Petru?"
Petru was there.
Anton too.
Behind them, however, the passage was empty.
Mallory stared.
"Where are they?"
Petru turned around.
Nathan watched the colour leave his face.
"Thomas?"
Nothing.
"George?"
No answer.
Ward pushed past Nathan, dragging the chain between them.
"What happened?"
Petru's mouth worked before sound came out. "They were there."
"Where?"
"Behind me."
"When?"
"Just now."
"That tells me nothing."
"They were there!" Petru shouted.
Anton twisted around and called both names into the tunnel.
His voice travelled backward into the darkness.
Nothing answered.
Mallory raised the lamp as high as he could.
The passage behind them was empty for as far as the light reached.
There were no branches.
No cracks large enough for a man.
No broken sections of wall.
Nothing.
Ward walked backward perhaps twenty paces. Nathan followed because the chain gave him little choice, with Mallory close behind.
"Thomas!" Ward called.
Silence.
"George!"
Nothing.
Nathan crouched.
The floor was damp enough to hold prints.
There were dozens of them.
He found his own boot marks, Ward's, then Mallory's. He followed the confusion backward until he identified two separate trails belonging to the missing men.
Both sets of footprints came toward the group.
And then stopped.
Nathan remained very still.
Ward noticed his expression. "What?"
Nathan did not answer.
He brought the lamp closer to the ground.
The prints were unmistakable.
Two men had walked along the tunnel.
Neither had turned around.
Neither had stepped sideways.
Neither had been dragged.
Their footprints simply ended in the middle of the passage.
Mallory saw them.
"No."
Nathan looked around.
Solid wall to the left.
Solid wall to the right.
Ceiling perhaps eight feet overhead.
Stone beneath their boots.
Mallory backed away.
"No. No."
Anton shouted again.
"Thomas!"
Petru joined him.
"George!"
Then the others began shouting as well. Suddenly everyone was moving, voices colliding in the confined space until individual words became impossible to distinguish.
Ward ordered them to stay together.
Nobody listened.
Mallory started toward the darkness. "We have to go back."
Ward caught his shoulder. "They can't be far."
"There is nowhere for them to be!"
Mallory tore himself free.
"That doesn't mean they're gone!"
Nathan remained beside the footprints.
His thoughts had begun moving too quickly.
He could feel the familiar process starting.
The prints ended.
That was impossible.
Therefore either the evidence was incomplete or one of his assumptions was wrong.
A hidden opening?
No. The walls were continuous.
A trap beneath the floor?
No depression. No seam.
Taken upward?
Nothing on the ceiling.
Dragged?
No disturbance in the mud.
He stood and examined the rock overhead anyway.
Nothing.
Around him, the others continued shouting.
Harcourt kept insisting there had to be a passage. Hargreaves was demanding everyone stop moving because they were destroying the remaining tracks. Petru had begun crying. Anton had drawn his knife and was waving it into the darkness as though daring whatever had taken the men to come back for him.
Ward finally fired his revolver into the ceiling.
The crack was so violent that Nathan felt it in his teeth.
Everyone stopped.
"Enough!"
Ward's voice echoed down both directions of the tunnel.
The revolver in his hand was trembling.
Nathan saw it.
"Stay together."
This time nobody argued.
Ward turned to him.
"Well?"
Nathan looked around.
That was the peculiar thing.
They were all looking at him.
Even now.
Even after Cole.
Even after everything that had happened.
They looked at Nathan because Nathan was the man who usually knew things. He was the one who found meaning in marks other men missed. He knew when water was wrong before anyone drank it. He could estimate depth from the pressure in his ears and distance from the quality of an echo.
They distrusted him.
Some of them plainly feared him.
Yet when the world stopped making sense, they still expected Nathan to explain it.
He looked down at the footprints.
Then into the empty tunnel.
"I don't know."
No one moved.
Harcourt stared at him. "What do you mean?"
Nathan looked back at him. "I mean I don't know."
"There must be something."
"Yes."
"Then what?"
"I cannot see it."
Harcourt stepped closer. "You always see it."
Something in Nathan snapped.
"Well, I don't now."
The answer came out much sharper than he intended.
Harcourt recoiled.
Nathan immediately regretted it.
He rubbed a hand over his face. "I am sorry."
That seemed to unsettle Harcourt more than the anger.
Nathan rarely apologised.
Mallory was staring at the vanished tracks.
"One moment they were there."
Petru nodded.
His lips trembled.
"I heard Thomas breathing."
Nathan turned toward him.
Petru's eyes were wet.
"He had bad lungs. Always made noise when we climbed."
Nobody interrupted.
"I heard him." Petru pointed behind himself. "He was right there."
His voice broke.
"Then he wasn't."
Anton put an arm around his brother.
Without discussing it, the surviving men drew closer together.
Nobody wanted space between them anymore.
Hargreaves counted.
Then counted again.
Eight.
Nathan repeated the count in his head.
Ward.
Harcourt.
Hargreaves.
Mallory.
Petru.
Anton.
Richard Bell.
Nathan.
Eight.
He disliked the number immediately.
They searched anyway.
Of course they did.
For what may have been hours, they walked back and forth along the tunnel. They returned all the way to the carved wall. They shouted the missing men's names until their voices grew hoarse. They inspected every foot of stone and ran their hands over sections of wall that looked no different from the rest.
Nothing.
No blood.
No torn cloth.
No boot.
No dropped button.
The men had not left anything behind.
They had simply ceased to accompany the group.
Eventually Richard Bell sat down with his back against the wall.
"I can't."
Ward turned. "We need to keep moving."
Bell shook his head.
"I can't."
"You can."
"No."
His voice was calm.
That frightened Nathan more than shouting would have.
Bell looked at the lamp in Ward's hand. Its flame had already begun to sink.
"We aren't getting out."
Nobody answered.
Bell gave a quiet laugh, and there was no amusement in it.
"We all know it."
"Shut up," Anton said.
Bell looked at him. "You know it too."
"Shut your bloody mouth."
"The entrance is buried."
"Shut up."
"We don't know where the other opening is."
Anton stepped forward, but Petru caught his arm.
Bell continued in the same exhausted voice.
"Men disappear while we're looking at them."
"We weren't looking."
Mallory said it so quickly everyone turned toward him.
Bell frowned. "What?"
"We weren't actually looking at them."
Mallory swallowed.
"No one saw it happen."
Bell considered that, then nodded.
"All right."
His gaze travelled around the group.
"So we only die when nobody happens to be looking."
"Stop," Hargreaves said quietly.
Bell did.
For a while.
They made camp not because they had found a good place for it, but because none of them had enough strength left to continue.
It was hardly a chamber at all, merely a section of tunnel where the walls widened enough to sit without blocking one another. Ward ordered them to sleep in a circle with their backs facing inward, so that every man would be looking toward a different portion of the darkness.
Nobody liked the idea.
Nobody offered a better one.
Harcourt opened the lamp kit.
Nathan happened to be watching his hands when the professor removed a small wooden box and lifted the lid.
Harcourt went still.
Ward noticed immediately.
"What?"
Harcourt did not answer.
Ward crouched beside him.
Inside the box were the spare wicks.
Nathan did not need to count them.
He already had.
Four usable lengths remained.
One was badly frayed. Another had been soaked by something leaking from a broken bottle in the pack.
Harcourt touched the remaining pieces with absurd care.
"That's all?" Mallory asked.
Harcourt nodded.
The silence that followed seemed worse than screaming.
Ward examined the lamps.
"We use one."
No one objected.
Three flames became two.
Then one.
The darkness drew in around them.
Nathan had never quite understood how small a group of men could become until eight of them were gathered around a single lamp beneath a mountain.
The light illuminated their faces from below, deepening the shadows beneath their eyes and making every cheek appear hollow. The walls vanished beyond fifteen feet or so. Everything outside that circle of light might as well have ceased to exist.
Nathan sat beside Ward.
The chain between their wrists lay loose on the floor.
Ward no longer kept it short.
Perhaps he was simply too tired.
Or perhaps, after Cole, he had accepted that Nathan Drake was no longer the most dangerous thing in the mountain.
Harcourt divided what remained of the food.
Nobody complained about the portions.
There was not enough food left to make complaining worthwhile.
A piece of bread.
A little salt meat.
Water.
Nathan chewed slowly.
Across from him, Bell left his bread untouched.
Mallory noticed.
"Eat."
Bell looked down at it. "Why?"
"Because you'll need your strength tomorrow."
Bell gave him a tired smile.
"For what?"
Mallory opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Bell placed the bread beside his boot.
After a while, Petru took it.
Nobody judged him.
Nathan found himself watching the lamp.
A small black swelling had formed at the end of the wick. It would need trimming soon.
Nathan knew almost exactly how long it had left.
He wished he did not.
Ward noticed where he was looking.
"How bad?"
Nathan glanced at him.
"The light?"
Ward nodded.
Nathan could have lied.
Mallory had once told him he ought to learn how.
He looked around the circle.
Harcourt had his eyes closed and was leaning against Hargreaves. Petru and Anton sat shoulder to shoulder. Bell stared at nothing. Mallory was watching Nathan, waiting.
Nathan decided not to say the numbers aloud.
"We should conserve it."
Ward's jaw tightened.
"That bad?"
"Yes."
Mallory breathed out through his nose.
"Well."
Nathan had begun to hate that word.
They used it whenever there was nothing useful left to say.
Well.
As though some sentence might naturally follow that made things better.
None ever did.
For a while they sat in silence.
Then Bell spoke.
"My mother is alive."
No one answered immediately.
Hargreaves eventually looked over. "Yes?"
Bell nodded.
"Seventy-one."
His eyes remained on the lamp.
"Lives in Kent."
Mallory shifted slightly. "She know you're here?"
"Yes."
Bell rubbed his hands together.
"Told her I'd bring her something back."
"What?"
"I don't know."
For the first time that evening, something resembling a smile crossed his face.
"She likes useless things."
Mallory smiled faintly in return. "My Emily does."
Bell nodded.
"Mother has a shelf full of them. Stones. Bits of coloured glass. There's a little Roman coin she's convinced is genuine, though I'm almost certain it's false."
Nathan listened.
Bell kept talking, not because anyone had asked him to, but because somewhere along the way it had become desperately important that another living person know these things.
"She'll wait for me."
The smile disappeared.
Nathan felt something heavy settle in his chest.
Bell looked around at them.
"Someone should tell her."
Nobody promised they would.
A promise like that required believing one of them was going home.
Bell understood.
He lowered his head.
After a while Petru began talking about his father. Anton interrupted twice to correct parts of the story. Hargreaves mentioned a sister who lived in London. Harcourt spoke of a house he had spent fifteen years complaining about and then, with visible embarrassment, admitted that he wanted very badly to see it again.
Mallory spoke about Margaret.
Then Emily.
Then James, who apparently wanted a wooden horse for Christmas and had been very particular about what colour it ought to be.
The conversation made its slow way around the circle.
Home.
Families.
People who had no idea that eight men were sitting beneath a mountain quietly deciding, without ever saying so directly, who might have to carry messages for the dead.
Nathan remained silent.
Eventually Mallory looked at him.
"What about you?"
Nathan blinked. "What?"
"Anyone waiting?"
Nathan considered the question.
"No."
Mallory's expression softened.
"No one?"
"My parents are dead."
"Brothers?"
"No."
"Sisters?"
"No."
"A woman?"
Nathan almost laughed.
"No."
Mallory continued watching him.
Nathan shifted uncomfortably. "What?"
"Nothing."
"That is never true when people say it."
Mallory managed a weak smile.
"Maybe you're learning."
Nathan looked back toward the lamp.
He had nobody waiting for him.
He had known that when they entered the mountain.
Until tonight, he had never considered it particularly important.
Now, surrounded by men grieving people who did not yet know they had lost them, he found himself wondering why the fact suddenly seemed unbearable.
Harcourt shifted beside Hargreaves.
"How far down are we?"
Every face turned toward Nathan.
Again.
Nathan shut his eyes for a moment and thought.
The pressure in his ears.
The length and angle of the slopes.
Their rate of descent.
The approximate distance travelled.
"More than a thousand feet."
Bell laughed softly.
Nobody asked why.
Hargreaves looked toward Harcourt. "The old survey didn't go this deep."
"No," Nathan said.
"So we're beyond it."
"Yes."
"Meaning?"
Nathan looked at Harcourt.
The professor already understood.
The map was useless.
Harcourt slowly reached into his coat and removed the folded survey.
For three days he had protected that piece of paper as though it were scripture.
Now he set it beside the lamp.
Then, after a moment, pushed one corner into the flame.
Ward instinctively reached toward it.
He stopped himself.
The old paper caught slowly.
A line of black spread across the ink, eating through measurements and notes made by men who had believed the mountain could be understood. The sheet curled in on itself.
Nobody tried to save it.
Harcourt watched fifty years of surveying burn.
"It was useless."
There was no anger in his voice.
Nathan watched the flame brighten briefly.
"No."
Harcourt glanced at him.
Nathan nodded toward the burning paper.
"It got us this far."
Harcourt stared at him.
"Was that meant to be comforting?"
Nathan considered the question seriously.
"Yes."
A tired laugh escaped Mallory.
Hargreaves followed.
Even Harcourt smiled.
It lasted only a few seconds.
But it was there.
The survey burned away.
The lamp remained.
One small flame.
Eight men.
Nathan listened to their breathing.
By now he could tell them apart without looking.
Ward breathed through his nose.
Harcourt wheezed faintly.
Petru's breathing caught every few minutes when he began to drift off and frightened himself awake.
Mallory sighed often.
Bell hardly moved at all.
Nathan wondered whether whatever existed beneath the mountain could distinguish them just as easily.
The thought made his stomach tighten.
He stared toward the darkness beyond the lamp.
For the first time since entering the mountain, curiosity was beginning to lose its hold on him.
He still wanted to know what was happening.
Of course he did.
That part of him had not changed.
But something else had begun growing beside it, something far less tidy and far less useful.
He wanted Mallory to see his daughter again.
He wanted Bell's mother to receive whatever useless stone her son had meant to bring home.
He wanted Petru and Anton to keep arguing.
He wanted Hargreaves to complain about his spectacles.
He even wanted Ward to continue insulting him.
Nathan frowned at the thought.
These were inconvenient desires.
They contributed nothing to solving their situation. They offered no route out and no answer to the impossible things occurring around them.
Yet they existed all the same.
Mallory noticed him looking around the circle.
"What?"
Nathan hesitated.
Then he said, "I think Bell is right."
Whatever small warmth the conversation had created vanished.
Ward stared at him.
"About what?"
Nathan looked at the lamp.
Its flame was already lower than it had been a few minutes earlier.
"We probably aren't going to make it out."
Nobody told him to shut up.
That was how Nathan knew they had all reached the same conclusion.
Petru covered his face.
Harcourt closed his eyes.
Bell simply nodded.
Mallory watched Nathan for several seconds, then dragged himself across the floor and sat beside him.
Nathan turned his head.
Mallory leaned back against the stone.
"If we're going to die, Drake, perhaps try not to sound so bloody pleased about being correct."
Nathan frowned. "I am not pleased."
"I know."
Mallory closed his eyes.
"That was a joke."
Nathan realised a moment too late.
"Oh."
Ward laughed weakly.
Nathan looked from him to Mallory.
Then, despite himself, he began laughing as well.
It was quiet laughter.
Exhausted and frightened and slightly absurd.
For several minutes, eight men sat together beneath the mountain and allowed themselves to pretend that it was enough.
The lamp continued burning lower.
Nobody spoke about tomorrow.
Beyond the edge of the light, the tunnels waited.