Mostly, it revealed emptiness and shadow. But there was a lamp-stand over to one side, so Burke made his way to it and lighted the lamp.
Now, for the first time, he checked his watch.
Eleven thirty five. Less than half an hour till Knossos met its doom.
It raised a new problem: what was his own best course now? To stay here? To go seek out the Minotaur as first planned? Or to drop back through the open manhole he now spotted over in one corner, and put his trust in flight?
That last idea--it had much to commend it. For one thing, almost any manhole where he might come up, save only this one, would put him in a position to keep a whole skin and escape the palace, even without the thread of Daedalus to guide him.
For another, any attempt on his part now to slay the Minotaur was doomed to failure in advance. Obviously. Theseus had made off with the Smith & Wesson. Without it, or equivalent, no one could hope to meet the monster and live.
Lamp in hand, Burke went over to the manhole and sat down on the edge, legs dangling, in preparation for the drop into the drainage tunnel below.
Only then, as he momentarily hesitated there, bracing himself, his mind turned to the one subject he most wished to avoid.
It had to come, of course. He'd known it all along. You couldn't ignore a woman in a moment of crisis such as this one--not when she meant as much to you as Ariadne did to him.
So, what would happen to her, if he dropped down through this manhole into the sewer?
Answer: she'd die. In less than half an hour she'd die, without note, in the destruction of this strange, gleaming palace men called Knossos.
And nothing he, Dion Burke, or anyone else, could do would save her, so long as the Minotaur lived.
Now the question became, did he care about escaping, living, if he had to do it alone, without his lovely Ariadne?
Burke forced himself to hesitate on that one. He didn't want to react to it hastily, or casually, or emotionally, or without due thought and consideration.
The only difficulty was, a man's feelings weren't something he could put on or take off at will, like a suit of clothes. They were part of him, incorporated into every cell of meat and blood and bone and tissue.
And there was the answer to his basic question: win or lose, live or die, he'd leave Knossos only with Ariadne at his side.