Poseidon's Thread

A king commands a prison. An inventor discovers that the earth beneath the palace is older than anything he can design.

At Cnossos, King Minos orders Daedalus to create a place from which no prisoner can return: a labyrinth beneath the splendour of Crete, intricate enough to defeat reason and deep enough to conceal what the kingdom cannot acknowledge.

Daedalus has built his life upon the conviction that disorder can be mastered through measure, structure and intelligence. Yet as the work descends beneath the palace, he begins to understand that he is not imposing form upon empty ground. He is entering a darkness older than the king, older than the city, and perhaps older than the gods invoked above it.

Ariadne, daughter of Minos, has been raised within the disciplined logic of royal necessity. She knows what power requires, what silence preserves and what must be sacrificed so that Crete may continue. When Theseus arrives among the young Athenians sent as tribute, she recognises that the labyrinth cannot be overcome by courage or strength alone.

Against the machinery of kingship, vengeance and inherited violence, she places the most fragile of human instruments: a single thread.

Poseidon's Thread returns Ariadne, Theseus, Daedalus and the Labyrinth to a world in which myth is still lived as history, authority and fate. Moving between palace and underworld, sovereign command and private conscience, it examines the structures human beings build to contain what they fear-and the human bonds by which those structures are finally undone.

The first novel in The Children of Cronus.