Droppings, Pierce realized. Bear-elk scat.
That stopped him. The creature was here, somewhere. It had retreated to its lair, maybe to lick its wounds, maybe to die in the darkness, but it was between Pierce and the people he loved. Maybe he would need the weapons after all.
He tried to creep down the passage, but stealth was not one of the suit’s selling points. No matter how carefully he lowered his feet, his steps sounded like an anvil dropping on concrete.
Abandoning the sneaky approach, he set out at a jog, pounding down the passage, each footfall ringing through the suit like a pile-driver impact. He kicked through more litter, pulverizing fragments of bone and discarded antlers.
The part of him that was both a scientist and a scholar of mythology, regretted that there was not time to make a more thorough examination. Hercules had walked here once, fought another guardian of the Underworld gates. Not a mythological monster with supernatural abilities living in some kind of netherworld, where the laws of physics did not apply, but a hybrid animal living in a strange closed ecosystem. The bear-elk was evidently the latest creature to occupy that niche, but how did it survive? What did it eat? Were there others like it down here?
He would probably never get the answer to those questions. The job of the Herculean Society was to make sure that such mysteries remained unsolved. When he got Gallo and Fiona to safety, he would have to take steps to ensure that no one ever returned.
The passage opened into a vast cavern with walls that burned like magma. As Pierce swept the chamber with his headlamp, he spotted movement off to the left and froze when the reflected light showed a pair of glowing green eyes.
The bear-elk.
The creature remained perfectly still, a deer in the headlights. A deer with the temper of a territorial grizzly bear. It could, if it chose to, stomp him into oblivion…or peel open the suit like a sardine can. Yet, it did not move. Perhaps it remembered its previous encounter with TALOS. The animal was curled up, protecting its wounds. Pierce did not doubt that the grenade had done some serious damage—burns, broken bones, perhaps internal injuries as well.
“You made it.”
The voice—Kenner’s voice—almost made Pierce jump, which might have proved either comical or disastrous given the circumstances. Pierce turned slowly and searched for the source. He found Kenner a moment later, near the center of the cavern, with one hand holding a flashlight aimed back in Pierce’s direction. The other hand was gripping Fiona’s arm.
She stared dully into the darkness, conscious but limp in his grasp, her legs folded up beneath her, unable to support her own weight any longer. Pierce recognized the signs of severe dehydration and diabetic ketoacidosis, no doubt exacerbated by the extreme heat. Gallo stood nearby, looking defeated.
“As promised, Herr Doktor,” Kenner went on. “The Well of Monsters.”
He thinks I’m Tyndareus.
Kenner’s tone was triumphant but grudging. He hadn’t been prepared to share his discovery, but he knew better than to challenge his benefactor. Without replying, Pierce backed away from the bear-elk before turning to join the others. He was still twenty feet away when his headlamps revealed Echidna.
In Greek mythology, Echidna was described as both a serpentine creature and a beautiful woman. From what he knew of Kenner’s quest and his own experience with how the mythology of Hercules’s labors had been distorted over the millennia, Pierce had assumed that Echidna would be some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon: a pool of chemicals or a bubbling pot of primordial soup.
It was none of those things, and yet in a way, it was all of them.
The cavern was split by a wide fissure—thirty or forty feet across and at least a hundred feet long—filled to the brim with what looked like molten stone. In reality, it was a transparent liquid—probably a solution of water and dissolved minerals—reflecting the glowing red of the chamber’s walls. Dotting its surface but mostly concentrated at the edges, were clumps of what looked like vegetation. They resembled clusters of water lilies floating on the surface of a pond, except these were a coal black. They were plants of some kind, adapted to using thermal and chemical energy instead of sunlight. They probably formed the base of the underground food chain, but as strange as they were, the floating organisms were the least interesting thing in the pool.