The Fire
Katherine Neville

To Solano

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologues

End Game

PART ONE Albedo

The White Land

The Black Land

The Pit

Black and White

The Charcoal Burners

The King’s Indian Defense

The Vessel

A Closed Position

The Veil

The Hearth

PART TWO Nigredo

The Return

The Chef

Tactics and Strategy

The Pyramid

The Queen Advances

The Middle Game

Two Women

Recalled to Life

The Key

Too Many Queens

The Four Seasons

PART THREE Rubedo

Fire in the Head

Jihad

The Question

The Original Instructions

The Ashes

The Flag

The Flight

The Cauldron

Ring of Fire

Shock and Awe

Return of the Eight

City of Fire

The Book of Balance

Publishing Note

Acknowledgments

The Fire

Also by Katherine Neville

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologues

In AD 782, the emperor Charlemagne received a fabulous gift from Ibn al-Arabi, the Moorish governor of Barcelona: a gold and silver, bejeweled chess set that today we know as the Montglane Service. The service was rumored to contain a secret of dark, mysterious power. All those obsessed with power were determined to obtain the pieces. In order to prevent this, the Montglane Service was buried for nearly a thousand years.

In 1790, at the dawn of the French Revolution, the chess set was exhumed from its hiding place, Montglane Abbey in the Basque Pyrenees, and the pieces were scattered across the globe.

This move launched a new round in a deadly game, a game that threatens – even today – to light the match that will set the world aflame…

End Game

The only goal in chess is to prove your superiority over the other guy. And the most important superiority, the most total one, is the superiority of the mind. I mean, your opponent must be destroyed. Fully destroyed.

– Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, world chess champion

Zagorsk Monastery, Russia

Autumn 1993

Solarin gripped his little daughter’s mittened hand firmly in his own. He could hear the snow crunch beneath his boots and see their breath rise in silvery puffs, as together they crossed the impregnable walled park of Zagorsk: Troitse-Sergiev Lavra, the Exalted Trinity Monastery of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, the patron saint of Russia. They were both bundled to the teeth in clothes they’d managed to forage – thick wool scarves, fur cossack caps, greatcoats – against this unexpected onslaught of winter in the midst of what should have been Zhensheena Lieta: the Women’s Summer. But the biting wind penetrated to the core.

Why had he brought her here to Russia, a land that held so many bitter memories from his past? When he was just a child himself, when Stalin had reigned, hadn’t he witnessed the destruction of his own family in the dead of night? He’d survived the cruel disciplines of the orphanage where he’d been left in the Republic of Georgia, and those long, bleak years at the Palace of Young Pioneers, only because they’d learned how very well the young boy, Aleksandr Solarin, could play chess.

Cat had begged him not to risk coming here, not to risk bringing their child here. Russia was dangerous, she’d insisted, and Solarin himself had not been back to his homeland in twenty years. But his wife’s biggest fear had always been not of Russia but of the game – the game that had cost them both so much. The game that, more than once, had nearly destroyed their life together.

Solarin was here for a game of chess, a critical game, the last game of the weeklong competition. And he knew it did not bode well that this, the final game, had suddenly been relocated to this particular location, so far from town.

Zagorsk, still called by its Soviet name, was the oldest of the lavras, or exalted monasteries, forming a ring of fortress-monasteries that had defended Moscow for six hundred years, since the Middle Ages, when, with the blessing of Saint Sergius, they had driven back the Mongol hordes. But today it was richer and more powerful than ever: Its museums and churches were packed with rare icons and bejeweled reliquaries, its coffers stuffed with gold. Despite its wealth, or perhaps because of it, the Moscow church seemed to have enemies everywhere.

It was only two years since the bleak, gray Soviet Empire had collapsed with a pouf – two years of glasnost and perestroika and turmoil. But the Moscow Orthodox Church, as if born again, had risen like a phoenix from the ashes. Bogoiskatelstvo – ‘the Search for God’ – was on everyone’s lips. A medieval chant. All the cathedrals, churches, and basi-likas around Moscow had been granted new life, lavished with money and a fresh coat of paint.

Even sixty kilometers out here in rural Sergiev Posad, Zagorsk’s vast park was a sea of newly refurbished edifices, their turrets and onion domes lacquered in rich, jewel-like colors: blue and cranberry and green, all splashed with gold stars. It was, thought Solarin, as if seventy-five years of repression could no longer be contained and had suddenly exploded in a confetti of feverish color. But inside the walls of these bastions, he knew, the darkness remained.

It was a darkness Solarin was all too familiar with, even if it had changed its hue. As if to reinforce this truth, guards were stationed every few yards along the high parapets and the interior perimeter of the wall, each wearing a black leather jacket with high collar and mirrored sunglasses, each with a bulging gun strapped beneath his arm and a walkie-talkie in hand. Such men were always the same, regardless of the era: like the ever-present KGB who’d escorted Solarin everywhere, back in the days when he himself had been one of the greatest of Soviet grandmasters.

But the men here, Solarin knew, were the infamous Secret Service belonging to the ‘Mafia Monks of Moscow,’ as they were called throughout Russia. It was rumored that the Russian church had formed a less-than-holy alliance with disaffected members of the KGB, Red Army, and other ‘nationalist’ movements. Indeed, that was Solarin’s very fear: It was the monks of Zagorsk who had arranged for today’s game.

As they passed the Church of the Holy Spirit and headed across the open court toward the Vestry, where the game would soon take place, Solarin glanced down at his daughter, Alexandra – little Xie – her small hand still grasping his. She smiled up at him, her green eyes filled with confidence, and his heart nearly broke with the beauty of her. How could he and Cat have created such a creature?

Solarin had never known fear – real fear – until he had a child of his own. Right now, he tried not to think of the armed and thuglike guards glaring down at them from atop each wall. He knew he was walking with his child into the lion’s den and he was sick at heart at the thought of it – but he knew it was inevitable.

Chess was everything to his daughter. Without it, she was a fish taken out of the water. Perhaps this was his fault, too – perhaps it was in her genes. And though everyone had opposed it – most especially her mother – he knew this would surely be the most important tournament of Xie’s young life.

Through it all, and through a week of abysmal cold, snow, and sleet, the awful tournament food – black bread, black tea, and gruel – Xie had remained undaunted. She seemed not to notice anything outside the domain of the chessboard itself. All week, she’d played like a Stakhanoviste, raking in point after point in game after game, a hod carrier stacking up bricks. In the week, she’d lost only one game. They both knew she must not lose another.

He’d had to bring her here, hadn’t he? It was only at this tournament – here at Zagorsk today, where the last game would take place – where his young daughter’s future would be decided. She must win today, this last game at Zagorsk. For they both knew that this was the game that could make Alexandra ‘Xie’ Solarin – who was not yet twelve – the youngest grandmaster of chess, male or female, in the history of the game.

Xie tugged her father’s hand and unwrapped her muffler so she could speak. ‘Don’t worry, Papa. I’ll beat him this time.’

The one she referred to was Vartan Azov, the young chess wizard from Ukraine, only a year older than Xie and the only player in the tournament so far to have defeated her. But he hadn’t really defeated Xie; Xie had lost on her own.

Against young Azov, she had played the King’s Indian Defense – one of her favorites, Solarin knew, for it allowed the valiant Black Knight (in the guise of her father and tutor) to leap to the front over the heads of the other pieces, and take charge. After a daring Queen sacrifice that brought murmurs from the crowd and gave her the center board, it appeared that Solarin’s fearlessly aggressive little warrior would – at the very least – go over the Reichenbach Falls and take young Professor Azov with her in a deathlike embrace. But it wasn’t to be.

There was a name for it: Amaurosis Scacchistica. Chess blindness. Every player had experienced it at one time in his career. They preferred to call it a ‘blunder’ – the failure to spot a truly obvious danger. Solarin had experienced it once, when really young. As he recalled, it felt like falling down a well, tumbling in free fall with no sense of which end was up.

In all the games Xie had ever played, it had happened to her only once. But twice, Solarin knew, was one time too many for a mistake like this. It could not happen again today.

Before they reached the Vestry where the game would take place, Solarin and Xie encountered an unexpected human barricade: a long line of drab women in threadbare over-clothes and babushkas, who had queued up in the snow awaiting the perpetual daily memorial services, outside the charnel house of the famous Troitsky Sobor – the Trinity Church of Saint Sergius, where the saint’s bones were buried. These pitiful creatures – there must have been fifty or sixty of them – were all crossing themselves in the compulsive Orthodox fashion, as if seized by a mass religious frenzy, as they gazed up at the portrait of Our Savior high on the outer church wall.

These women, as they moaned and prayed in the whirling snow, formed a barrier nearly as impenetrable as the armed guards posted high on the parapets. And in the old Soviet tradition, they refused to budge or part ranks to let anyone pass through their queue. Solarin could scarcely wait to get past them.

As he picked up his pace to skirt the long queue, over the women’s heads Solarin glimpsed the facade of the Art Museum, and just beyond, the Vestry and treasury, where they were headed for the game.

The museum’s facade had been festooned with a large, colorful banner displaying a painting and hand-printed words that announced, in Cyrillic and English: SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OF SOVIET PALEKH ART.

Palekh art were those lacquered paintings that often depicted scenes from fairy tales and other peasant themes. They’d long been the only primitive or ‘superstitious’ art acceptable to the Communist regime and they adorned everything in Russia, from miniature papier-mâché boxes to the walls of the Pioneers’ Palace itself, where Solarin – with fifty other boys – had practiced his defenses and counterattacks for more than twelve years. As he had had no access all that time to storybooks, cartoons, or films, the Palekh illustrations of these ancient tales had been young Aleksandr’s only access to the realm of fantasy.

The painting on this banner was one with which he was well acquainted, a famous one. It seemed to remind him of something important. He studied it carefully as he and Xie picked their way around the long line of zealously praying women.

It was a rendering of the most famous Russian fairy tale, the story of the Firebird. There were many versions that had inspired great art, literature, and music, from Pushkin to Stravinsky. This picture on the banner was the scene where Prince Ivan, hiding in his father the tsar’s gardens all night, finally sights the luminous bird that had been eating his father’s golden apples, and he tries to capture her. The Firebird escapes, leaving just one of her fabulous magical feathers in Ivan’s grasp.

This was the well-known work of Alexander Kotukhin that hung in the Pioneers’ Palace. He was one of the first generation of Palekh artists from the 1930s, who was said to have hidden secret messages within the symbols he used in his paintings that the State censors couldn’t always easily interpret – though the illiterate peasantry could. Solarin wondered what this decades-old message had meant, and to whom.

At last they reached the end of the long line of waiting women. As Solarin and Xie curved back to head toward the Vestry, a stooped old woman in a babushka and threadbare sweater and carrying a tin pail left her place in the queue and brushed past them – still crossing herself fervently. She bumped into Xie, bowed an apology, and continued across the yard.

When she’d passed, Solarin felt Xie tugging his hand. He glanced down to see his daughter extracting a small embossed cardboard placard from her pocket – a ticket or pass to the Palekh exhibit, for it bore the same picture as the banner.

‘Where did this come from?’ he asked, although he was afraid he knew. He glanced after the woman, but she’d vanished across the park.

‘That lady put it into my pocket,’ Xie was saying.

When he looked down again, his daughter had flipped over the card, and Solarin snatched it away. On the back was pasted a small illustration of a flying bird set inside an Islamic eight-pointed star, and three words were printed in Russian:

Reading these words, Solarin felt the blood pulsing in his temples. He glanced quickly in the direction the old woman had gone, but she seemed to have vanished. Then he saw something flicker at the far periphery of the walled fortress; emerging from the copse of trees, she was vanishing again around the far corner of the Tsar’s Chambers – a distance of more than one hundred paces.

Just before she disappeared, she turned to glance over her shoulder directly at Solarin, and he – who had been about to follow her – halted in shock. Even at this distance, he could make out those pale blue eyes, the wisp of silvery-blond hair escaping from her scarf. This was no old crone, but a woman of great beauty and infinite mystery.

And more. It was a face he knew. A face he had imagined he would never see again in this life.

Then she was gone.

He heard himself speak. ‘It cannot be.’

How could it be? People do not rise from the dead. And if they did, they would not look the same after fifty years.

‘Do you know that lady, Papa?’ Xie asked in a whisper so no one could hear.

Solarin dropped to one knee in the snow beside his daughter and tossed his arms about her, burying his face in her muffler. He felt like weeping.

‘For a moment she looked familiar,’ he said to Xie. ‘But I’m sure I do not.’

He squeezed her harder, as if he could wring her out. In all these years, he had never lied to his daughter. Not until now. But what could he tell her?

‘And what does her card say?’ Xie whispered in his ear. ‘The one with the flying bird?’

‘Apahsnah – it means “danger”’ Solarin told her, trying to pull himself together.

For God’s sake, what was he thinking? This was a fantasy brought on by a week of stress and bad food and miserable cold. He must be strong. He got to his feet and pressed his daughter’s shoulder between his fingers. ‘But perhaps the only danger here is of you forgetting your practice!’ He gave a smile that Xie did not return.

‘What do the other words say?’ she asked.

‘Byrihgyees pahzhar,’ he told her. ‘I think it’s just a reference to the firebird or phoenix in this picture here.’ Solarin paused and looked at her. ‘In English, it means, “Beware the fire.”’ He took a deep breath. ‘Now let’s go inside,’ he said, ‘so you can beat the pants off of that Ukrainian patzer!’

From the moment they entered the Vestry of Sergiev Lavra, Solarin knew something was wrong. The walls were cold and damp, depressing like everything else in the so-called Women’s Summer. He thought of the woman’s message. What did it mean?

Taras Petrossian, the dashing nouveau capitalist tournament organizer, in his expensive Italian suit, was handing a large wad of rubles as a pourboire to a skinny monk with a big ring of keys, who’d unlocked the building for the game. Petrossian, it was said, had made his fortune through under-the-table dealings in the several designer restaurants and nightclubs he owned. There was a colloquial word for it in Russian: blat. Connections.

The armed thugs had already penetrated the inner sanctum – they lurked everywhere in the Vestry, leaning conspicuously against the walls, and not just for warmth. Among other things, this low, squat, unobtrusive building served as the monastery’s treasury.

The glut of the medieval church’s gold and jewels were displayed on pedestals in brightly lit glass cases scattered around the floor. It would be hard to concentrate on chess, thought Solarin, with all this blinding glitter – but there was the young Vartan Azov, already seated beside the chessboard, his large dark eyes focused upon them as they entered the room. Xie left her father and went to greet him. Solarin thought – not for the first time – that he would like to watch Xie wipe the board with the arrogant brat.

He had to wipe that message from his mind. What did the woman mean? Danger? Beware the fire? And that face he could never forget, a face from his darkest dreams, his nightmares, his worst horrors –

And then he saw it. In a glass display case far across the room.

Solarin walked as in a dream across the wide-open floor of the Vestry and he stood looking down at the large glass case.

Within was a sculpture he had also thought he would never see again – something as impossible and as dangerous as the face of that woman he’d glimpsed outside. Something that had been buried, something long ago and far away. Yet here it was before him.

It was a heavy gold carving, caked with jewels. It portrayed a figure dressed in long robes and seated in a small pavilion with the draperies drawn back.

‘The Black Queen,’ whispered a voice just beside him. Solarin looked down to see the dark eyes and tousled hair of Vartan Azov.

‘Discovered only recently,’ the boy went on, ‘in the cellar of the Hermitage in Petersburg – along with Schliemann’s treasures of Troy. They say this once belonged to Charlemagne and was hidden – perhaps since the French Revolution. It may have been in possession of Catherine the Great of Russia. This is the first time it has been shown in public since it was found.’ Vartan paused. ‘It was brought here for this game.’

Solarin was blinded by terror. He could hear nothing further. They had to depart at once. For this piece was theirs – the most important piece of all those they had captured and buried. How could it be surfacing here in Russia, when they had buried it twenty years ago, thousands of miles away?

Danger, beware the fire? Solarin had to get out of this place and get some air, he had to escape with Xie right now, the game be damned. Cat had been right all along, but he couldn’t see the whole picture yet – he couldn’t see the board for the pieces.

Solarin nodded politely to Vartan Azov and crossed the room in a few swift strides. He took Xie by the hand and headed for the door.

‘Papa,’ said Xie in confusion, ‘where are we going?’

‘To see that lady,’ he said cryptically, ‘the lady who gave you the card.’

‘But what about the game?’

She would forfeit if she wasn’t there when they started the clocks. She would lose everything they had worked so long and hard for. But he had to know. He stepped outside, holding her hand.

From the top of the Vestry steps, he saw her across the park. The woman was standing at the gates, looking across the space at Solarin with love and understanding. He had been right about her. But then her look changed to one of fear, as she glanced up toward the parapet.

It was only another instant before Solarin followed her gaze and saw the guard, perched on the parapet high above, the gun in his hand. Without thinking, Solarin shoved Xie behind him for protection and glanced back at the woman.

‘Mother,’ he said.

And the next thing he saw was the fire in his head.

PART ONE Albedo

At the beginning of every spiritual realization stands death, in the form of ‘dying to the world.’…At the beginning of the work [‘The Albedo’ or ‘Whitening’] the most precious material which the alchemist produces is the ash…

– Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy

You must consume yourself in your own flame; how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Kaufmann translation)

The White Land

Pray to Allah, but hobble your camel.

– Sufi saying

Janina, Albania

January 1822

The odalisques, chambermaids of Ali Pasha’s harem, were crossing the icy footbridge through the marsh when they heard the first screams.

Haidée, the pasha’s twelve-year-old daughter, clutched the hand of the nearest of her three escorts – none of them older than fifteen – and together they peered into the darkness, afraid to speak or breathe. Across vast Lake Pambotis, they could make out the torches that flickered along the far shore, but that was all.

The screams came faster, harsher now – hoarse, panting cries, like wild animals barking to one another in the forest. But these were the cries of humans – and not those of hunters, but of the hunted. Male voices, raised in fear, blowing across the lake.

Without warning, a lone kestrel flapped up from the stiff cattails before the clustered girls, winging past them in silence, hunting its prey in the predawn light, and then the cries and the torches vanished as if swallowed by the fog. The dark lake lay in silvery silence – a silence more ominous than the cries that had gone before.

Had it begun?

Here on their floating wooden bridge, protected only by the thick marsh grasses that surrounded them, the odalisques and their young ward were unsure what to do: retrace their steps back to the harem on its tiny isle, or continue across the marsh to the steamy hamam, the bathhouse at the edge of the shore, where they’d been ordered – urgently, under pain of severe punishment – to deliver the pasha’s daughter before dawn. An escort would be waiting near the hamam, to bring her – on horseback, under cover of darkness – to her father.

The pasha had never issued such a command before. It could not be disobeyed. Haidée was dressed for the trek, in thick kashimir pantaloons and fur-lined boots. But her odalisques – frozen here in indecision upon the bridge – were trembling more from fear than from the cold, unable to move. Sheltered as she’d been in her twelve years, it was clear to young Haidée that these ignorant country girls would prefer the warmth and relative safety of their harem, surrounded by fellow slaves and concubines, to the icy winter lake with its dark and unknown dangers. In truth, she’d prefer it herself.

Haidée silently prayed for a sign of what those terrified screams had meant.

Then, as if in answer to her unspoken request, through the dark morning mist across the lake she could make out the fire that had flamed up like a beacon, illuminating the massive form of the pasha’s palace. Projecting into the lake on its spit of land, its crenellated white granite walls and pointed minarets shimmering in the mist, it seemed to rise from the waters: Demir Kule, the Iron Castle. It was part of a walled fortress, the Castro, at the entrance to the six-kilometer lake and it had been built to withstand the onslaught of ten thousand troops. In these past two years of armed siege by the Ottoman Turks, it had proven impregnable.

Just as impregnable was this strip of craggy, mountainous terrain – Shquiperia, the Eagle’s Country – a wild, unconquerable place ruled by a wild, unconquerable people who called themselves Toska – ‘coarse’ – after the rough, volcanic pumice that had formed this land. The Turks and Greeks called it Albania – the White Land – for those rugged, snowcapped mountains that protected it from attack by land or sea. Its inhabitants, the most ancient race in southeastern Europe, still spoke the ancient tongue – older by far than Illyrian, Macedonian, or Greek: Chimaera, a language comprehended by no one else on earth.

And the wildest and most chimaerical of these was Haidée’s father, red-haired Ali Pasha – Arslan, ‘the Lion,’ as he was called from the age of fourteen, when, alongside his mother and her band of brigands, he’d avenged his father’s death in a ghak, a blood feud, to recover the town of Tebelen. It would be the first of many such ruthless victories.

Now, nearly seventy years later, Ali Tebeleni – Vali of Rumelia, Pasha of Janina – had formed a sea power to rival Algiers and captured all the coastal towns down to Parga, once possessions of the Venetian Empire. He feared no power, east or west. He himself was the most powerful force in the far-flung Ottoman Empire, after the sultan in Constantinople. Too powerful, in fact. That was the trouble.

For weeks now, Ali Pasha had been sequestered, along with a small retinue – twelve of his closest supporters and Haidée’s mother, Vasiliki, the pasha’s favorite wife – in a monastery at the middle of the enormous lake. He was awaiting his pardon from the sultan, Mahmud II, in Constantinople – a pardon now eight days overdue. The only insurance against the pasha’s life was the hard, stony fact of Demir Kule itself. The fortress, defended by six batteries of British mortar, was also packed with twenty thousand pounds of French explosives. The pasha had threatened to destroy it, to blow it to the skies – along with all the treasures and lives within its walls – if the sultan’s promised pardon was not forthcoming.

Haidée understood that it must be for this very reason the pasha had ordered her to be brought to him, under cover of darkness, at this final hour. Her father needed her. She vowed to quell any fears.

But then in the deathly silence Haidée and her chambermaids heard a sound. It was a soft sound, but infinitely terrifying. A sound borne very close by, only meters from where they stood, sheltered here among the high grasses.

The sound of oars, dipping into the water.

As if with one thought, the young girls held their breath and focused upon that lapping sound. They could nearly touch its source.

Through the dense, silvery fog, they could just make out three longboats slipping past them in the waters. Each slender caique was rowed by shadowy oarsmen – perhaps ten or twelve shadows per boat, more than thirty men in all. Their silhouettes swayed rhythmically.

In horror, Haidée knew there could be no mistake where these boats were headed. There was only one thing that lay beyond the marsh – out there in the middle of the vast lake. These boats and their clandestine oarsmen were headed for the Isle of Pines, where the monastery lay: the island refuge of Ali Pasha.

She knew she must reach the hamam at once – she must reach the shore, where the pasha’s horseman was waiting. She knew just what those terrified screams had meant – what the silence, and the small beacon fire that followed it, must signify. They were warnings to those awaiting the dawn, those who were waiting on that isle across the lake. Warnings by those who must have risked their lives just to light such a fire. Warnings to her father.

It meant that the impregnable Demir Kule had been taken without a single shot. The brave Albanian defenders who had held out for two long years had been defeated, by stealth or treachery, in the dead of night.

And Haidée understood what that meant: These boats slipping past her were no ordinary ships.

These were Turkish ships.

Someone had betrayed her father, Ali Pasha.

Mehmet Effendi stood in darkness, high in the bell tower of the St Pantaleon monastery on the Isle of Pines. He held his spyglass, awaiting his first glimpse of dawn with uncustomary anxiety and trepidation.

Such anxiety was uncustomary to Mehmet Effendi due to the fact that he had always known what each next dawn, in a long succession of dawns, was going to bring. He knew such things – the unfolding of future events – with a sharp precision. Indeed, ordinarily he could time them to within the fragment of a moment. This was because Mehmet Effendi was not only – in his civil role – Ali Pasha’s chief minister, he was also the pasha’s chief astrologer. Mehmet Effendi had never been wrong in predicting the outcome of a maneuver or a battle.

The stars had not been out last night, and there’d been no moon to go by, but he hardly needed such things. For in these past few weeks and days, the omens had never been clearer. It was only their interpretation, right now, that still gave him pause. Though why should it? he chastened himself. After all, it was all in place, wasn’t it? Everything that had been foretold was coming to pass.

The twelve were here, weren’t they? All of them – not just the general, but the shaikhs, the Mürsits of the order – even the great Baba himself, who’d been brought here from his near-death bed, by litter-bearers, over the Pindus range of mountains, to arrive just in time for this event. This was the event that had been awaited for more than one thousand years, since the days of the caliphs al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid. All the right people were in place – and the omens, too. How could it possibly go wrong?

Waiting beside Effendi in silence was the general: Athanasi Vaya, head of the pasha’s armies, whose brilliant strategies had held the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mahmud II at bay these past two years.

To accomplish this, Vaya had employed the freebooting Klepht banditti to guard the high mountain passes against intrusion. Then he’d deployed Ali Pasha’s crack Albanian Palikhari troops, in Frankish-style guerrilla warfare and sabotage. At the end of last Ramadan, for instance, when Sultan Mahmud’s officers were inside Janina’s White Mosque at their Bairam prayers, Vaya had ordered the Palikhari to demolish the place by cannonade. The Ottoman officers, along with the mosque, had been reduced to charcoal. But Vaya’s real stroke of genius involved the sultan’s own troops: the Janissaries.

The degenerate Ottoman sultans – ensconced in their harems in the ‘Golden Cage’ of the Topkapi Palace at Constantinople – had always raised armies by imposing upon their outlying Christian provinces a levee called the Devishirme – the ‘Tax of Children.’ Each year, one in every five Christian boys was removed from his village, then taken to Constantinople, converted to Islam, and enrolled in the sultan’s armies. Despite the injunctions of the Qur’an against forcible conversion to Islam, or against selling Muslims into slavery, the Devishirme had existed for five hundred years.

These boys, their successors, and their descendants had grown into a powerful, implacable force that even the Sublime Porte at Constantinople could not control. The Janissary troops, when not otherwise employed, did not blanch at setting the capital city aflame, robbing civilians in the streets – nor even removing sultans from their thrones. The sultan Mahmud II had lost his own two predecessors to such Janissary predations. He’d decided it was time to put a stop to it.

But there was a twist to the plot – and it lay right here in the White Land. That problem was precisely why Sultan Mahmud had sent his armies here over the mountains, why they had laid siege to these lands for the past two years. Why their vast armies had been waiting outside the Castro to bombard the fortress of Demir Kule. But this problem also explained why they had not yet been successful – why the Janissaries had not demolished the fortress. And it was this problem that gave Chief Minister Mehmet Effendi and his companion more than a small bit of confidence tonight, as they stood here now, watching, in the bell tower of St Pantaleon, in the predawn light.

There was only one thing on earth that the all-powerful Janissaries truly venerated – something they had continued to revere, over all the past five hundred years of their military corps’ existence. This was the memory of Haji Bektash Veli – the thirteenth-century founder of the mystical Bektashi order of Sufi dervishes. Haji Bektash was the Pir of the Janissaries – their patron saint.

This was, in truth, why the sultan feared his own army so. Why he’d had to replenish the forces fighting here with mercenaries drawn from other pashiliks, elsewhere throughout his far-flung empire.

The Janissaries had become a true menace to the empire itself. Like religious zealots, they swore an oath of allegiance drenched with secret mystical codes. Worse, they swore allegiance only to their Pir – not to the house of Osman or its sultan, trapped in his Golden Cage on the Golden Horn.

I have trusted in God…(so began the Janissaries’ oath)

We are believers of old. We have confessed the unity of Reality. We have offered our head on this way. We have a prophet. Since the time of the Mystic Saints we have been the intoxicated ones. We are the moths in the divine fire. We are a company of wandering dervishes in this world. We cannot be counted on the fingers; we cannot be finished by defeat. No one outside of us knows our state.

The Twelve Imams, the Twelve Ways, we have affirmed them all: the Three, the Seven, the Forty, the light of the Prophet, the Beneficence of Ali, our Pir – the head sultan, Haji Bektash Veli…

It gave Mehmet Effendi and General Vaya relief to know that the greatest Bektashi representative here on earth – the Dede, the oldest Baba – had traveled over the mountains to be here tonight. To be present for the event they had all awaited. The Baba, who alone knew the true mysteries and what the omens might portend.

But despite all the omens, it seemed something may have gone wrong.

Chief Minister Effendi turned to General Vaya in the darkened bell tower of the monastery. ‘This is an omen I do not understand,’ he told the general.

‘You mean, something in the stars?’ General Vaya objected. ‘But my friend, you’ve assured us that all is well in that department. We’ve followed your astrological injunctions to the closest. It’s as you always say: Con-sider means “with the stars”; dis-aster means “against them”!

‘Furthermore,’ the general continued, ‘even if your predictions are completely wrong – if the Castro is destroyed, with its millions in jewels and thousands of barrels of powder – as you know, we are all Bektashis here, including the pasha! They may have replaced their leaders with the sultan’s men, but even they haven’t dared to destroy us yet, nor will they attempt it, as long as the pasha holds the “key” that they all covet. And do not forget – we also have an exit strategy!’

‘I fear not,’ said Mehmet Effendi, handing his spyglass to the general. ‘I cannot explain it, but something seems to have happened. There has been no explosion. The dawn is nearly here. And a small bonfire is burning, like a beacon, across the lake.’

‘Arslan’ Ali Pasha, the Lion of Janina, paced the cold, tiled floor of his monastery chambers. He’d never been so terrified in all his life – though not for himself, of course. He had no illusions about what would soon become of him. After all, there were Turks at the other side of the lake. He knew their methods all too well.

Well, he knew what would happen – his head on a pike, like his two poor sons who’d been foolish enough to trust the sultan. His head would be packed in salt for the long sea voyage, then brought to Constantinople, as a warning to other pashas who’d got themselves too far above their station. His head, like theirs, would be stuck on the iron prongs, high on the gates of the Topkapi Palace – the High Gate, the ‘Sublime Porte’ – to dissuade other infidels from rebellion.

But he was no infidel. Far from it, though his wife was a Christian. He was terrified for his beloved Vasiliki, and for little Haidée. He could not even bring himself to think of what would happen to them the very moment that he was dead. His favorite wife and her daughter – now there was something the Turks could torture him with – perhaps even in the afterlife.

He remembered the day he and Vasiliki had met – it was the subject of many a legend. She had been the same age then as Haidée was now – twelve years old. The pasha had ridden into her town that day, years ago, on his prancing, caparisoned Albanian stallion, Dervish. Ali had been surrounded by his broad-chested, long-haired, gray-eyed Palikhari troops from the mountains, in their colorful embroidered waistcoats, shaggy sheepskin capotes, armed with daggers and inlaid pistols tucked in their waist sashes. They were there for a punitive mission against the village, under orders from the Porte.

The sixty-four-year-old pasha himself had cut a dashing figure, with his ruby-studded scimitar in hand and, slung on his back, that famous musket inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver – a gift of the emperor Napoleon. That was the day – was it seventeen years ago already? – when young Vasiliki had begged the pasha to spare her life and her family’s. He’d adopted her and brought her here to Janina.

She’d grown up in splendor in his many palaces, their courtyards replete with splashing marble fountains, shady parks of plane trees, oranges, pomegranates, lemons, and figs, luxurious rooms filled with Gobelin carpets, Sevres porcelains, and Venetian glass chandeliers. He’d raised Vasiliki as his own daughter and loved her better than any of his own children. When Vasiliki was eighteen, and already pregnant with Haidée, Ali Pasha had married her. He’d never regretted that choice – until today.

But today, at last, he would have to tell the truth.

Vasia. Vasia. How could he have made such a mistake? It must be his age that explained it. What was he? He didn’t even know. Eighty something? His leonine days were over. He would not live to be much older. Of that, he was sure. It was too late to save himself, or even his beloved wife.

But there was something else – something that must not fall into the clutches of the Turks, something critical: something more important than life and death. That was why the Baba had come all this long, long way.

And that was why Ali Pasha had sent the boy to the hamam to collect Haidée. The young boy Kauri, the Janissary – a πεµπτoσ, a pemptos, a ‘fifth’ – one of those boys of the Devishirme, those one in every five Christian boys who’d been collected each year, over these past five hundred years, to replenish the Janissary ranks.

But Kauri was no Christian: He was Islamic from birth. Indeed, according to Mehmet Effendi, Kauri himself might be a part of the omen – perhaps the only one upon whom they could rely to complete this desperate and dangerous mission.

Ali Pasha only hoped to Allah that they were not too late.

Kauri, in a panic, hoped precisely the same.

He lashed the great black stallion ahead along the darkened lake shore, as Haidée clung to him tightly from behind. His instructions had been to bring her to the isle with as little fanfare as possible, under cover of darkness.

But when the pasha’s young daughter and her frightened maidservants arrived at the hamam and told him of the ships that were already rowing across the lake – Turkish ships – Kauri threw such precautions to the wind. He quickly understood, regardless of what his orders might have been, that as of this moment the rules had certainly changed.

The intruders were moving slowly, trying to remain silent, the girls had told him. Just to reach the isle, the Turks would have to cross a good four miles of water, Kauri knew. By circumventing the lake on horseback himself, to where Kauri had lashed down the small boat among the rushes at the far end, it would cut their own travel time in half – just what they needed.

Kauri had to reach the monastery first, before the Turks, to warn Ali Pasha.

At the far end of the enormous monastery kitchens, the coals blazed in the oçak, the ritual hearth beneath the sacred soup cauldron of the order. On the altar to the right the twelve candles had been lit – and, at center, the secret candle. Each person who entered the room stepped across the sacred threshold without touching the pillars or the floor.

At the room’s center, Ali Pasha, the most powerful ruler in the Ottoman Empire, lay prostrate, facedown upon his prayer rug, spread upon the cold stone floor. Before him on a pile of cushions sat the great Shemimi Baba, who had initiated the pasha so many years ago: He was the Pirimugan, the Perfect Guide of all Bektashis throughout the world. The Baba’s wizened face, brown and wrinkled as a dried berry, was suffused with an ancient wisdom attained through years of following the Way. It was said that Shemimi Baba was more than one hundred years old.

The Baba, still swathed in his hirka for warmth, was plumped upon his pile of cushions like a frail, dry leaf that had just floated down from the skies. He wore the ancient elifi tac, the twelve-pleated headdress given to the order, it was said, by Haji Bektashi Veli himself, five hundred years ago. In his left hand, the Baba held his ritual staff of mulberry, topped with the palihenk, the sacred twelve-part stone. His right hand rested upon the recumbent pasha’s head.

The Baba looked about the room at those who were kneeling on the floor around him: General Vaya, Minister Effendi, and Vasiliki, the soldiers, shaikhs and Mürsits of the Bektashi Sufi order, as well as several monks of the Greek Orthodox Church, who were the pasha’s friends, Vasiliki’s spiritual guides – as well as their hosts, these many weeks, here upon the isle.

To one side sat the young boy, Kauri, and the pasha’s daughter, Haidée, who had brought the news that had prompted the Baba’s call for this meeting. They’d stripped off their muddy riding cloaks and, like the others, performed their ritual ablutions before entering the sacred space near the holy Baba.

The Baba removed his hand from Ali Pasha’s head, completing the blessing, and the pasha arose, bowed low, and kissed the hem of the Baba’s cloak. Then he knelt along with the others in the circle surrounding the great saint. Everyone understood the severity of their situation, and all strained to hear Shemimi Baba’s critical next words:

‘Nice sirlar vardir sirlardan içli,’ began the Baba. There are many mysteries, mysteries within mysteries.

This was the well-known Doctrine of the Mürsit – the concept that one must possess not just a shaikh or teacher of the law – but also a mürshid or human guide through the nasip, the initiation, and through the following ‘four gate-ways’ to Reality.

But Kauri thought in confusion, how could anyone imagine such things at this moment, with the Turks perhaps only moments away from the isle? Kauri glanced surreptitiously at Haidée, just beside him.

Then, as if the Baba had read these private thoughts, the old man suddenly laughed aloud: a cackle. All those in the circle looked up, surprised, but another surprise was just to come: The Baba, with much effort, had planted his mulberry stick in the pile of pillows and hoisted himself ably to his feet. Ali Pasha leapt up at once and was rushing to help his aged mentor, but he was whisked away with a flutter of the old man’s hand.

‘Perhaps you wonder why we are speaking of mysteries like this, when we have infidels and wolves nearly at our door!’ he exclaimed. ‘There is only one mystery we need speak of at this moment, just before dawn. It is the mystery that Ali Pasha has guarded for us so well for so long. It is the mystery that itself has now placed our pasha here on this rock, the very mystery that brings the wolfish ones here. It is my duty to tell you what it is – and why it must be defended by all of us here, at any cost. Though those of us in this room may find different fates before this day is over – some of us may fight to the death or be captured by the Turks for a fate that may prove worse than death – there is only one person, here in this room, who is in a position to rescue this mystery. And thanks to our young fighter, Kauri, she has arrived here just in time.’

The Baba nodded with a smile at Haidée, as the others all turned to look at her. All but her mother, Vasiliki, that is – who was looking across at Ali Pasha with an expression that seemed to mingle love, trepidation, and fear.

‘I have something to tell you all,’ Shemimi Baba went on. ‘It is a mystery that has been handed down and protected for centuries. I am the last guide in the long, long chain of guides who have passed this mystery on to their successors. I must tell the story swiftly and succinctly, but tell it I must – before the sultan’s assassins arrive. You must all understand the importance of what we are fighting for, and why it must be protected, even unto our deaths.

‘You all know one of the famous hadis or reputed sayings of Muhammad,’ the Baba told them. ‘These famous lines are carved above the threshold of many Bektashi halls – words that are attributed to Allah Himself:

I was a Hidden Treasure, therefore was I fain to be known, therefore I created creation, in order that I should be known…

‘The tale that I am about to tell you involves another hidden treasure, a treasure of great value, but also great danger – a treasure that has been sought for more than one thousand years. Only the guides, over the years, have known the true source and meaning of this treasure. Now I share this with you.’

Everyone in the room nodded: They understood the importance of the message that the Baba was about to impart to them, the very importance of his being here. No one spoke as the old man removed the sacred elifi tac from his head, set it down in the pillows, and shed his long sheepskin cloak. He stood there amid the cushions dressed only in his simple woolen kaftan. And leaning upon his mulberry staff, the Baba began his tale…

The Tale of the Guide

In the year of the Hegira 138 – or by the Christian calendar, AD 755 – there lived, at Kufa, near Baghdad, the great Sufi mathematician and scientist, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan of Khurasan.

During Jabir’s long residence in Kufa, he wrote many scholarly scientific treatises. These included his work The Books of the Balance, the work that established Jabir’s great reputation as the father of Islamic alchemy.

Less known is the fact that our friend Jabir was also the dedicated disciple of another resident of Kufa, Ja’far al-Sadiq, the sixth imam of the Shi’a branch of Islam since the death of the Prophet and a direct descendant of Muhammad, through the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima.

The Shi’as of that sect did not then accept any more than they do today the legitimacy of the line of caliphs forming the Sunni Islamic sect – that is, those who were friends, companions, or relatives, but not direct descendants, of the Prophet.

The town of Kufa itself had remained, for hundreds of years since the Prophet’s death, a hotbed of unrest and rebellion against the two successive Sunni dynasties that had meanwhile conquered much of the world.

Despite the fact that the caliphs of nearby Baghdad themselves were all Sunnis, al-Jabir openly and fearlessly – some say foolishly – dedicated his mystical alchemical treatise, The Books of the Balance, to his famous guide: the sixth imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq. Jabir went even further than that! In the book’s dedication, he expressed that he was only a spokesperson for al-Sadiq’s wisdom – that he had learned from his Mürsit all the ta’wil – the spiritual hermeneutics involved in the symbolic interpretation of hidden meaning within the Qur’an.

This admission in itself was enough to have destroyed Jabir, in the eyes of the established orthodoxy of his day. But ten years later, in AD 765, something even more dangerous happened: the sixth imam, al-Sadiq, died. Jabir, as a noted scientist, was brought to the court at Baghdad to be official court chemist – first under the caliph al-Mansur, then his successors, al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid, famous for the role he played in The Thousand and One Nights.

The orthodox Sunni caliphate was noted for rounding up and destroying all texts of any sort that might ever suggest to anyone that there was another interpretation of the law – that there might be a separate, mystical descent of meaning or interpretation of the sayings of the Prophet and of the Qur’an.

As a scientist and Sufi, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan, from the moment of his arrival at Baghdad, lived in fear that his secret knowledge would vanish once he was no longer alive to protect and share it. He thrashed about for a more permanent solution – some impermeable way to pass on the ancient wisdom in a form that could neither be easily interpreted by the uninitiated nor easily destroyed.

The famous scientist soon found exactly what he was seeking – in a most uncanny and unexpected fashion.

The caliph al-Mansur had a favorite pastime: something that had been brought to the Arab world during the Islamic conquest of Persia a century earlier. It was the game of chess.

Al-Mansur called for his noted alchemist to create a chess service forged from uniquely created metals and compounds that could only be produced through the mysteries of alchemical science, and to fill this set with stones and symbols that would be meaningful to those acquainted with his art.

This command was like a gift to al-Jabir, directly from the archangel Gabriel himself – for it would permit him to fulfill the request of his caliph and at the same time to pass on the ancient and forbidden wisdom – right beneath the noses of the caliphate.

The chess service – which took ten years and the help of hundreds of skilled artisans to produce – was completed and presented to the caliph at the Festival of Bairam, in AH 158 – or AD 775, ten years after the death of the imam who had inspired its meaning.

The service was magnificent: It measured a full meter on each side, the squares comprised of what appeared to be a shimmering, untarnishable gold and silver, all studded with jewels, some the size of quails’ eggs. All those in the court of the ’Abbasid dynasty at Baghdad were astonished by the marvels before their eyes. But unknown to them, their court chemist had encoded a great secret – one that would remain secret, even down until today.

Among these mysteries that al-Jabir had encoded into the chess set, for example, were the sacred numbers thirty-two and twenty-eight.

Thirty-two represents the number of letters in the Persian alphabet – these were codes that Jabir had embedded in the thirty-two silver and gold pawns and pieces of the service. Twenty-eight, the number of letters in the Arabic alphabet, was represented by codes that were carved into the twenty-eight squares around the circumference of the board. These were two of the many keys used by the father of alchemy, to pass on to initiates in every subsequent age. And each such clue represented a key to a part of the mystery.

Al-Jabir gave his masterful creation a name: he called it the Service of the Tarik’at – that is, it was the key to the Secret Way.

The Baba seemed weary when he completed his story, but he was unbowed.

‘The chess set I have spoken of still exists today. The caliph al-Mansur soon realized that it contained some sort of mysterious power, for many battles broke out surrounding the service – some within the ’Abbasid court itself, at Baghdad. Over the next twenty years, it changed hands several times – but that is another, and longer, story. Its secret was at last protected – for until recent times, it had lain buried for one thousand years.

‘Then, only thirty years ago, at the dawn of the French Revolution, the service surfaced in the Basque Pyrenees. It has now been scattered abroad in the world, and its secrets are exposed. It is our mission, my children, to return this great masterpiece of initiation to its rightful owners: to those for whom it was initially designed, and for whom its secrets were intended. This service was designed for the Sufis, for we alone are the keepers of the flame.’

Ali Pasha stood and helped the Baba to his seat in the deep cushions.

‘The Baba has spoken, but he is weary,’ the pasha told the group. Then he held out his hands, for little Haidée and for Kauri, who sat beside her. The two young people came to stand before the Baba, who motioned them to kneel. Then he blew upon their heads, one after the other: ’Hu-Hu-Hu.’ The üfürük cülük – the blessing of the breath.

‘In Jabir’s day,’ said the Baba, ‘those who were engaged in alchemical research called themselves the Blowers and the Charcoal Burners, for these were secret parts of their sacred art. That is where many of our terms come from, in our sacred art today. We are sending you, by a secret route, to our friends in another land – they are also known as the Charcoal Burners. But now, time is of the essence, and we have something of value to send with you, which Ali Pasha has protected for thirty years—’

He paused, for there were shouts from above, coming from the sealed upper rooms of the monastery. General Vaya and the soldiers raced toward the door to the steps.

‘But I see,’ said the Baba, ‘that we have no more time.’

The pasha had reached within his robes in haste, and now he handed the Baba something that looked like a large, heavy black lump of coal. The Baba handed this to Haidée, but he addressed himself to Kauri, his young disciple.

‘There is an underground route out of this building, which will deliver you near to your skiff,’ the Baba told him. ‘You may be detected by others, but as children you will be unlikely to be apprehended. You are going to cross the mountains by a special route, to the coast, where a ship will be awaiting your arrival. You will travel north by directions I give you – you will seek a man who will lead you to those who will protect you. He knows the pasha well, from many years past, and he will trust you – that is, once you have given him the secret code that he alone will understand.’

‘And what is the code?’ asked Kauri, anxious to take off quickly, as the sounds of hammering and splintering wood proceeded from the floors above.

But the pasha interrupted. He had pulled Vasiliki to his side, with one arm protectively around her shoulders. Vasiliki had tears in her eyes.

‘Haidée must reveal to this man who she really is,’ the pasha told them.

‘Who I am?’ said Haidée, glancing in confusion at her parents.

Vasiliki spoke for the first time – she seemed in some sort of pain. She now took both of her daughter’s hands in her own, as they still held the large lump of coal.

‘My child,’ she addressed Haidée, ‘we have kept this secret for many years, but now, as the Baba has explained, it is our only hope, as well as yours.’ She paused, for her throat had choked on the final words. It seemed she could not go on, so the pasha intervened once more.

‘What Vasia means, my darling, is that I am not your true father.’ When he saw the look of horror on Haidée’s face, he added quickly, ‘I married your mother out of my great love for her, almost as a daughter, for I am greatly her senior in years. But when we married, Vasia was already expecting you – by another man. It was impossible for him to marry her, as it still remains. I know this man. I love him and trust him, and so does your mother, as well as the Baba. It has been a secret, kept in agreement by all of us – against this day when it might be necessary to reveal it at last.’

Kauri had grasped Haidée’s arm with great strength, for it appeared that she might faint.

‘Your true father is a man who possesses both wealth and power,’ the pasha went on. ‘He will protect you – and will protect this as well, when you show him what you bring.’

Haidée felt a dozen emotions warring within her. The pasha not her father? How could this be? She wanted to scream, tear her hair, cry – but her mother, weeping over her hands, was also shaking her head.

‘The pasha is right. You must go,’ Vasiliki told her daughter. ‘Your life is at risk if you remain longer – and it is too dangerous for any but the boy to go with you.’

‘But if the pasha is not – then who is my father? And where is he? And what is this object we are bringing to him?’ Sudden anger was helping her to recover a bit of her strength.

‘Your father is a great English lord,’ said Vasiliki. ‘I knew him well, and I loved him – he lived here with us at Janina, in the year before your birth.’

She could not go on, so the pasha continued.

‘As the Baba said, he is our friend and is connected with those who are our friends. He lives on the great canal at Venice. You can reach him by boat within a few days. You can easily find his palazzo – his name is George Gordon, Lord Byron.

‘You will bring him the object you hold in your hands, and he will protect it with his life, if necessary. It is disguised in carbon, but beneath is the most valuable chess piece from the ancient Service of the Tarik’at created by al-Jabir ibn Hayyan. This special piece is the veritable key to the Secret Path. It is the piece we know today as the Black Queen.’

The Black Land

Wyrd oft nereth unfaegne eorl, ponne his ellen deah. (Unless he is already doomed, fortune is apt to favor the man who keeps his nerve.)

– Beowulf

Mesa Verde, Colorado

Spring 2003

Before I’d even reached the house, i knew something was wrong. Very wrong. Even though on the surface it all seemed picture-perfect.

The steep, sweeping curve of drive was blanketed deep in snow and lined with stately rows of towering Colorado blue spruce. Their snow-covered branches sparkled like rose quartz in the early-morning light. Atop the hill, where the driveway flattened and spread out for parking, I pulled up my rented Land Rover in front of the lodge.

A lazy curl of blue-gray smoke rose from the moss rock chimney that formed the center of the building. The rich scent of pine smoke pervaded the air, which meant that – although I might not be warmly welcomed after all this time – at least I was expected.

To confirm this, I saw that my mother’s truck and jeep were sitting side by side in the former horse stable at the edge of the parking area. I did find it odd, though, that the drive had not yet been plowed and there were no tracks. If I were expected, wouldn’t someone have cleared a path?

Now that I was here at last, in the only place I’d ever called home, you would think I could finally relax. But I couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong.

Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon – patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge – with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.

Each female descendant had lived here at one time or another, including my mother and me. So what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I ever come here without this sense of impending doom? I knew why, of course. And so did my mother. It was the thing we never spoke about. That’s why – when I had finally left home for good – my mother understood. She’d never insisted, like other mothers, that I come back for familial visits.

That is, not until today.

But then, my presence today hadn’t exactly been by invitation – it was more of a summons, a cryptic message that Mother had left on my home phone back in Washington, D.C., when she knew very well I’d be off at work.

She was inviting me, she said, to her birthday party. And that, of course, was a big part of the problem.

You see, my mother didn’t have birthdays. She’d never had birthdays.

I don’t mean she was concerned about her youth or appearance or wished to lie about her age – in fact, she looked more youthful each year.

But the strange truth was, she didn’t want anyone outside our family even to know when her birthday was.

This secrecy, combined with a few other idiosyncrasies – like the fact that she’d been in hermetic retreat up on top of this mountain for the past ten years – ever since…the thing we never spoke about – all went far to explain why there were those who may have perceived my mother, Catherine Velis, as a pretty eccentric duck.

The other part of my current problem was that I hadn’t been able to contact my mother for an explanation of her sudden revelation. She’d answered neither her phone nor the messages I’d left for her here at the lodge. The alternate number she’d given me was clearly not right – it was missing some final digits.

With my first true inkling that something was really wrong, I took a few days off work, bought a ticket, caught the last flight into Cortez, Colorado, in a tizzy, and rented the last four-wheel-drive vehicle in the airport lot.

Now, I left the engine running as I sat here for a moment, letting my eyes graze over the breathtaking panoramic view. I hadn’t been home in more than four years. And each time I saw it afresh, it smacked the wind out of me.

I got out of the Rover in knee-deep snow and let the engine run.

From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus, which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain, one of the four sacred mountains created by ‘First Man’ and ‘First Woman.’

Together with Sisnaajinii (white mountain, or Mount Blanca) in the east, Tsoodzil (blue mountain, or Mount Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid (yellow mountain, or San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah – ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.

And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: ‘Four Corners,’ the only place in the United States where four states – Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona – come together at right angles to form a cross.

Long before anyone ever thought to draw dotted lines on a map, this land was sacred to everyone who ever walked across it. If my mother was going to have her first-ever birthday party in the nearly twenty-two years I had known her, I could understand why she wanted to have it here. Regardless of how many years she had lived abroad or away, like all the women in our family she was part of this land.

For some reason, I knew that this connection with the land was somehow important. I knew that was why she had left a message so strange to bring me to this spot.

And I knew something else, even if no one else did. I knew why she’d insisted I come here today. For today – April fourth – actually was my mother, Cat Velis’s, birthday.

I yanked my keys from the ignition, grabbed my hastily packed duffel bag from the passenger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-year-old front doors. These huge doors – two massive slabs of heart pine ten feet high, cut from ancient trees – were carved in bas-relief with two animals that seemed to be coming right at you. On the left, a golden eagle soared straight at your face. And from the right door burst an angry, upright female bear.

Despite the weathering of these carvings, they were fairly realistic-looking – with glass eyes and real talons and claws. The early twentieth century had loved clever inventions, and this one was a doozy: If you pulled the bear’s paw, her jaw dropped open to reveal very real and frightening teeth. If you had the nerve to stick your hand into her mouth, you could twist the old-fashioned door chime, to alert those within.

I did both, and waited. But even after a few moments, there was no response. Someone must have been inside – the chimney was active. And I knew from practice that stoking that fire pit took hours of tending and a Herculean effort to haul the wood. But with our hearth, which was capable of receiving a log of fifty caliper inches, a fire could have been laid days ago and still be burning.

My situation suddenly dawned upon me: Having flown and driven a few thousand miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn’t have a key.

My alternative – wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window – seemed a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still couldn’t get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no car tracks, ski tracks – not even deer tracks – anywhere near the house.

So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Mother’s number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart sank:

‘I can be reached at…’ and she rattled off the same number she’d left on my D.C. phone – still missing the very last digits! I stood before the door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go from here?

And then I remembered the game.

My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat and author, Ladislaus Nim. He’d been my best friend in my childhood, and though I hadn’t seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed he would never have one in his house. Telephones, no – but Uncle Slava loved puzzles. He’d written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach him, they always knew it wasn’t real – it must be some kind of encrypted message. That was his delight.

It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn’t even good at deciphering such messages herself, and she couldn’t invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.

More unlikely still was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As far as I knew, she hadn’t talked to my uncle in years, not since…the thing we never spoke about.

Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.

I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she’d gone.

I phoned her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she’d left there, for all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first.

‘I can be reached at 615-263-94…’ my mother’s recorded voice said.

My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad.

I’d been provided eight numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But as with Uncle Slava’s puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to do with phones. Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those two numbers themselves were my hidden message.

It took about ten minutes to figure it out – much longer than when I was running neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up with: 61–52–63–94.

If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with each two-digit square number, starting with the square of four. That is, the product of four, five, six, and seven, when multiplied by themselves, resulted as follows: 16–25–36–49.

The next number in the sequence – and the missing number – was 8. So the missing last two digits of the series were the square of 8 – that is, 64. In the real puzzle, of course, if you reversed the number, the answer would have been 46 – but that wasn’t it.

I knew – and so did my mother – that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the number of squares on a chessboard, with eight squares on each side.

In a nutshell – that was the thing we never talked about.

My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of chess – even to permit it into her house. Since my father’s death (the other thing that we never talked about), I was forbidden to play the game – the only thing I’d ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to become autistic.

My mother was so opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I’d never been able to follow her logic – if indeed, it was logic – to my mother’s mind, chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.

But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday, by leaving that cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the game.

I timed it: It took me twenty-seven minutes and – since I’d left the engine running – a gallon of hog-guzzling gas until I had figured out how to get inside.

By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house. Except there was one in the barn. On a lockbox. The keys to the cars were kept there.

Would I be justified in saying ‘Duh’?

I switched off the Rover, plowed through the snow to the barn – and voilà! – a few tumblers dropped, the door to the lockbox opened, and the door key appeared on a chain. Back at the house, it took a moment to recall that the key was inserted into the eagle’s left claw. Then the ancient doors groaned open a crack.

I scraped my boots on the rusty old fireplace grille we kept beside the entrance, shoved open the heavy front doors of the lodge, and slammed them shut behind me, causing a flurry of sparkling snowflakes to sift through the slanted morning light.

Within the dim interior light of the mudroom – an entry not much bigger than a confessional that kept the cold winds out – I kicked off my dripping boots and pulled on a pair of the fuzzy sheepskin aprés-ski booties that always sat there atop our frozen-food locker. When I’d hung up my parka, I opened the inner doors and stepped into the vast octagon, warmed by the giant log that was burning in the central hearth.

The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising to the moss rock chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on – but there was our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played on.

The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.

Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony: bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional cracking of fire from the log.

I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the snow: except for mine, there was not one print to be seen anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest trace.

But how had she done it?

It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into thin air.

A jarring noise broke the silence: A telephone was ringing. I dashed down the steep, twisted stair and snatched the receiver from atop Mother’s British campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.

‘Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this godforsaken spot?’ came the throaty voice, tinted with a bit of British accent, of a woman I knew only too well. ‘And for that matter, where on earth are you? We’ve been driving around this wilderness for what seems days!’ There was a pause, when she seemed to be speaking aside to someone else.

‘Aunt Lily?’ I said.

For it was surely she – my aunt, Lily Rad – my first chess mentor and still one of the top women grandmasters in the game. Once, she’d been my mother’s best friend, though they hadn’t touched base in years. But what was she doing calling here now? And driving around – what on earth did that mean?

‘Alexandra?’ said Lily, confused. ‘I thought I was phoning your mother. What are you doing there? I thought you and she weren’t…on the best of terms.’

‘We’ve reconciled,’ I said hastily, not wanting to open that can of worms again. ‘But Mother doesn’t seem to be here right now. And where exactly are you?’

‘She’s not there?! You can’t be serious,’ Lily said, fuming. ‘I’ve come all the way from London just to see her. She insisted! Something about a birthday party – God knows what that means. As for where I am right now, it is anyone’s guess! The satellite positioning system on my automobile keeps insisting that I’m in Purgatory – and I’m fully able to accept that judgment. We haven’t seen anything resembling civilization for hours.’

‘You’re here? In Purgatory?’ I said. ‘That’s a ski area – it’s less than an hour from here.’ But it seemed crazy: The top female British-American chess champion came from London to Purgatory, Colorado, to attend a birthday party? ‘When did mother invite you?’

‘It wasn’t so much an invitation as an edict,’ Lily admitted. ‘She left the news on my cell phone, with no means to reply.’ There was a pause. Then Lily added, ‘I adore your mother – you know that, Alexandra. But I could never accept—’

‘Neither could I,’ I said. ‘Let’s drop it. So how did you know how to find her?’

‘I didn’t! Good God, I STILL DON’T! My car’s by the road someplace near a town that promotes itself as the next stop from Hell; there’s no edible food; my driver refuses to budge without being given a pint of vodka; my dog has disappeared into some…dune of snow – chasing some local rodent…AND – I might add – I have had more trouble locating your mother by phone, this past week, than the Mossad had in tracking down Dr Mengele in South America!’

She was hyperventilating. I considered it was time to intervene.

‘It’s okay, Aunt Lily,’ I told her. ‘We’ll get you here. As for food, you know I can whip something up. There’s always plenty of tinned food here and vodka for your driver – we can put him up, too, if you like. I’m too far away, it would take too long to reach you. But if you’ll give me your satellite coordinates, I’ve a friend quite near there who can escort you here to the lodge.’

‘Whomever he may be, bless him,’ said my aunt Lily, not a person normally given to gratitude.

‘It’s a she,’ I said. ‘And her name is Key. She’ll be there in half an hour.’ I took down Lily’s mobile number and left a message at the airstrip to arrange for Key to pick her up. Key had been my best friend since childhood, but she’d be more than surprised to learn that I’d turned up here with no warning after all this time.

As I hung up the phone, I saw something across the room that I hadn’t noticed before. The top of Mother’s parlor grand piano – which was always raised, in case she got the urge to play – had been lowered flat. Atop was a piece of paper with a round, dark weight set upon it. I went over to look, and I felt the blood flooding into my brain.

The paperweight was overt enough: Propped on a metal key ring, to keep it from rolling, was the eight ball from our billard table. The note itself was definitely from my mother; the code was so simplistic that no one else could have invented it. I saw how hard she’d worked to communicate cryptically, clearly with no help.

The note, in large print, read:

WASHINGTON

LUXURY CAR

VIRGIN ISLES

ELVIS LIVES

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

The Elvis part was simple: my mother’s last name – Velis – was spelled two different ways to show it was from her. As if I needed that helpful clue. The rest was a lot more upsetting. And not because of the code.

Washington was, of course, ‘DC’; Luxury Car was ‘LX’; Virgin Isles was ‘VI.’ Together, in Roman numerals (as they clearly were), their numeric value was:

D = 500

C = 100

L = 50

X = 10

V = 5

I = 1

Tally them up, and it’s ‘666’ – the Number of the Beast from the apocalypse.

I wasn’t worried about that Beast – we had plenty of those protecting us, scattered about the lodge as our animal totems. But for the first time, I was truly worried about my mother.

Why had she used this hackneyed pseudomillennial ruse to grab my attention? What about the paperweight on top – another standard bunkum, ‘Behind the eight ball’ – what on earth did that mean?

And what should one make of that old alchemical drivel, ‘As above, so below’?

Then, of course, I got it. I removed the eight ball and the bit of paper, setting them on the keyboard music stand, and I opened the piano. Before I could set the strut in place, I nearly dropped the lid.

There, inside the hollow body of the instrument, I saw something I thought I would never, ever see again inside my mother’s house as long as she lived.

A chess set.

Not just a chess set – but a chess set with a game set up, a game that had been partially in play. There were pieces here that had been removed from the field of play and were set out upon the keyboard strings at either side – black or white.

The first thing I noticed was that the Black Queen was missing. I glanced over at the billiard table – good heavens, Mother, really! – and saw that the missing queen had been placed in the rack where the eight ball was supposed to be.

It was something like being drawn into a vortex. I began to feel the game in play. Good Lord, how I had missed this. How had I been able to leave it behind me? It was nothing like a drug at all, as people sometimes said. It was an infusion of life.

I forgot the pieces that were off the board or behind the eight ball; I could reconstruct everything from the patterns that were still there. For several long moments, I forgot my missing mother, my aunt Lily lost in Purgatory with her chauffeur, her dog, and her car. I forgot what I’d sacrificed – what my life had become against my will. I forgot everything except the game before me – the game cached away like a dark secret, in the belly of that piano.

But as I reconstructed the moves, the dawn arose through the high glass windows – just as a sobering realization dawned within my mind. I could not stop the horror of this game. How could I stop it, when I had replayed it over and over again in my mind these past ten years?

For I knew this game quite well.

It was the game that had killed my father.

The Pit

Mozart: Confutatus Maledictum – how would you translate that?

Salieri: ‘Consigned to the flames of woe.’

Mozart: Do you believe in it?

Salieri: What?

Mozart: The fire that never dies, burning you forever.

Salieri: Oh, yes…

– Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

Deep in the pit of the hearth, the fire spilled over the sides of the giant log like liquid heat. I sat on the moss rock fireplace ledge, and I gazed down mindlessly. I was lost in a daze, trying hard not to remember.

But how could I forget?

Ten years. Ten years had passed – ten years during which I’d believed I had managed to repress, to camouflage, to bury a feeling that had nearly buried me, a feeling that emerged in that splinter of a second just before it happened. That frozen fragment of a moment when you still think that you have all of your life, your future, your promise before you, when you can still imagine – how would my friend Key put it? – that ‘the world is your oyster.’ And that it will never snap shut.

But then you see the hand with the gun. Then it happens. Then it’s finished. Then there is no present anymore – only the past and future, only before and after. Only the ‘then,’ and…then what?

This was the thing we never spoke of. This was the thing I never thought about. Now that my mother, Cat, had vanished, now that she’d left that murderous message lodged in the bowels of her favorite piano, I understood her unspoken language, loud and clear: You must think about it.

But here was my question: How do you think of your own small, eleven-year-old self, standing there on those cold, hard marble steps in that cold, hard foreign land? How do you think of yourself, trapped inside the stone walls of a Russian monastery, miles from Moscow and thousands of miles from anyplace or anyone you know? How do you think of your father, killed by a sniper’s bullet? A bullet that may have been intended for you? A bullet that your mother always believed was intended for you?

How do you think of your father, collapsing in a pool of blood – blood that you watch in a kind of horror, as it soaks into and mingles with the dirty Russian snow? How do you think of the body lying on the steps – the body of your father as his life slips away – with his gloved fingers still clinging to your own small, mittened hand?

The truth of the matter was, my father wasn’t the only one who had lost his future and his life that day, ten years ago, on those steps in Russia. The truth was, I had lost mine, too. At the age of eleven, I’d been blindsided by life: Amaurosis Scacchistica – an occupational hazard.

And now, I had to admit what that truth really was: It wasn’t my father’s death or my mother’s fears that had caused me to give up the game. The truth was –

Okay. Reality check!

The truth was, I didn’t need the truth. The truth was, I couldn’t afford this self-examination right now. I tried to squash that instant rush of adrenaline that had always accompanied any glimpse, however brief, into my own past. The truth was: My father was dead and my mother was missing and a chess game that someone had set up inside our piano suggested it all had plenty to do with me.

I knew this lethal game that still lurked there, still ticking away, was more than a gaggle of pawns and pieces. This was the game. The last game. The game that had killed my father.

Whatever the implications of its mysterious appearance here today, this game would always remain etched with acid in my mind. If I’d won this game, back in Moscow, ten years ago, the Russian tournament would have been mine, I’d have made the grade, I would have been the youngest grandmaster in history – just as my father had always wanted. Just as he’d always expected of me.

If I had won this Moscow game, we’d never have gone to Zagorsk for that one final round, that ‘overtime’ game – a game that, due to ‘tragic circumstances,’ was destined never to be played at all.

Its presence here clearly carried some message, like my mother’s other clues, a message that I knew I must decipher before anyone else did.

But there was one thing I knew, above all: Whatever this was, it was no game.

I took a deep breath and stood up from the hearth, nearly conking my head on a hanging copper pot. I yanked it down and slapped it atop the nearby sideboard. Then I went to the parlor grand, unzipped the bench cushion, gathered all the pieces and pawns from the piano strings, and dumped them into the pillow sack along with the board. I left the piano lid propped open as it usually was kept. I zipped up the lumpy pillow and shoved it into the sideboard.

I’d nearly forgotten the ‘missing’ Black Queen. Plucking her from the triangular rack of balls on the billiard table, I put the eight ball back in its proper place. The pyramid of colored balls reminded me of something, but at the moment I couldn’t think what. And perhaps it was my imagination, but the queen seemed slightly weightier than the other pieces, though the circle of felt on the base seemed solid enough. But just as I thought to scratch it off with my thumbnail, the phone started ringing. Recalling that my aunt Lily was about to descend, with chauffeur and yappy dog in tow, I shoved the queen in my pocket along with the bit of paper containing my mother’s ‘encryption,’ dashed to the desk, and caught the phone on the third ring.

‘You’ve been keeping secrets from me’ came the liquid voice of Nokomis Key, my best friend since our youth.

Relief flooded through me. Though we hadn’t spoken in several years, Key was the only person I could think of who might actually figure out a way to solve the quandary I found myself in at this moment. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle Key’s feathers. She’d always been able to solve problems with that same ingenious and ironic detachment in a crisis that Br’er Rabbit possessed. Right now, I hoped she could pull this particular rabbit out of the hat – or in my case, the briar patch – one more time. That’s why I’d asked her to meet Lily and bring her here to the house.

‘Where are you?’ I asked Key. ‘Did you get my message?’

‘You never told me you had an auntie,’ Key said in reply. ‘And what a babe! I found her along the roadside, accompanied by a dog of unidentifiable genetic origin, surrounded by stacks of designer luggage, and plowed into a snowdrift in a quarter-million-dollar car that would do James Bond proud. Not to mention the younger “companion” who looks like he could pull down that much cash each week himself, just by sauntering along the Lido clad in a thong bathing suit.’

‘You’re referring to Lily’s chauffeur?’ I said, astonished.

‘Is that what they call them these days?’ Key laughed.

‘A gigolo? That doesn’t sound much like Lily to me,’ I said.

Nor did it sound like any of a long procession of rigidly formal drivers that my aunt had always employed. Not to mention that the Lily Rad I’d known since my infancy was far too preoccupied with her international image as the Queen of Chess to waste her time, her energy, or her wads of cash on keeping a man. Though I admit, the rest of the Lily scenario – the car, the dog, and the luggage – all rang true.

‘Believe me,’ Key was saying with customary assurance. ‘This guy’s so steamy, he has smoke coming out of his nostrils. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” And your auntie sure looks like she’s been “rode hard and put away wet.”’

Key’s addiction to slogans and colloquialisms was exceeded only by her favorite topic: heavy metal, the kind you drive.

‘But that car in the snowdrift,’ she informed me, practically panting, ‘it’s a Vanquish – Aston Martin’s flagship limited edition.’ She began rattling off numbers, weights, gears, and valves until she caught herself and realized just whom she was talking to. Simplifying it for the mechanically impaired, she added: ‘That monster cruises at a hundred and ninety miles per hour! Enough horses to pull Ophelia from here to China!’

That would be Ophelia Otter – Key’s favorite bush plane, and the only machine she trusted to get into those remote sites where she did her work. But knowing Key, if unfettered, she could go on talking horsepower for hours. I had to rein her in, and fast.

‘So where are they now, the motley crew and their car?’ I pressed, with no small amount of urgency. ‘When I last heard from Lily, she was on her way here for a party – that must’ve been an hour ago. Where is she?’

‘They were hungry. So while my crew’s digging out the car, your aunt and her sidekick are watering and foddering at the Mother Lode,’ Key said.

She meant a restaurant just off the track, which specialized in wild game, and I knew the place well. They had so many horns, antlers, and other cartilaginous display on the walls there that walking through the room without paying attention was as dangerous as running with the bulls at Pamplona.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, my impatience bubbling over. ‘Just get her here.’

‘I’ll have them at your place within the hour,’ Key assured me. ‘They’re just watering the dog now, and finishing their drinks. The car’s another matter, though: It’ll have to be shipped to Denver for repairs. Right now, I’m at the bar, and they’re still at the table, thick as thieves, whispering and sipping vodkas.’ Key snorted a laugh into the phone.

‘What’s so funny?’ I said, in irritation at this further delay.

Why did Lily – never a drinker – require a booze infusion at ten in the morning? And what about her chauffeur? Though, in fairness to him, it appeared he wouldn’t have much left to be chauffeuring around, if the car was that badly damaged. I confess, I had trouble visualizing my flamboyant, chess-playing aunt, with her de rigueur flawless manicure and exotic clothes – brunching atop the peanut-shell-and-beer-encrusted floors of the Mother Lode, nibbling away at their trademark fare of possum stew, rattlesnake steak, and Rocky Mountain Oysters – the Colorado euphemism for deep-fried bulls’ balls. The image boggled the brain.

‘I don’t get it,’ Key added sotto voce, as if reading my thoughts aloud. ‘I mean, nothing against your auntie – but this guy is pretty hot stuff, like an Italian film star. The staff and the clientele all stopped talking when he walked in, and the waitress is still drooling on her shirtfront. He’s dripping with as many furs as your aunt Lily is, not to mention the designer gold trim and custom-made clothes. This guy could get any babe. So pardon me – can you clarify – exactly what draws him to your aunt?’

‘I guess you were right all along,’ I agreed with a laugh. ‘He’s attracted to her figure.’ When Key said nothing, I added: ‘Fifty million.’

I hung up to the sound of her groans.

I realized that I probably knew Lily Rad better than anyone else could know such an eccentric; despite the difference in our ages, we had much in common. For starters, I knew I owed Lily everything. It was Lily, for instance, who had first discovered my chess abilities when I was only three years old. Who had convinced my father and my uncle that these leanings of mine should be developed and exploited – over my mother’s irritated, and eventually angry, objections.

It was this bond with Lily that made my phone conversation with Key seem so odd. Though I hadn’t seen my aunt in a number of years – and she had also dropped out of the chess world – I found it hard to swallow that a person who’d been an older sister to me, as well as mentor and mother, could suddenly be lobotomized by hormones over some good-looking hunk. No, something was wrong with this picture. Lily just wasn’t the type.

Lily Rad had long earned a reputation as the Elizabeth Taylor of chess. With her voluptuous curves, jewels, furs, designer cars, and cash liquidity bordering upon the obscene, Lily had single-handedly brought glamour to professional chess; she’d filled that enormous black hole of Soviet lassitude – all that remained back in the seventies after Bobby Fischer had departed the game.

But Lily wasn’t all just panache and pizzazz. People had flocked to her games in droves, and not only to observe her cleavage. Thirty years ago, in her chess-playing prime, my aunt Lily had boasted an ELO rating approaching that of the more recent Hungarian chess whizzes, the Polgar sisters. And for twenty of those years, Lily’s best friend and coach – my father, Alexander Solarin – had honed her brilliant defenses and helped keep her star soaring high in the chess empyrean.

After my father’s death, Lily had returned to her former chess coach and mentor: the brilliant chess diagnostician and historian of the ancient art of the game, who happened also to be Lily’s grandfather and her only living relative, Mordecai Rad.

But then, on the morning of her fiftieth birthday, the lights were suddenly and surprisingly extinguished on Lily’s chess marquee.

On the morning of her birthday, so the story goes, Lily was running a bit late for her breakfast appointment with her grandfather. Her chauffeur had pulled the limo from her apartment building out onto Central Park South, and he’d managed to maneuver deftly through the thick morning traffic, down the West Side Highway. They had just passed Canal Street when, up ahead in the sky, they saw the first plane hit the first tower.

Thousands of cars screeched to a halt, the highway in instant gridlock. All drivers were staring up at that long, dark plume of smoke, unfolding like the tail of a big, black bird – a silent omen.

In panic, in the backseat of the limo, Lily tried desperately to tune her TV to the news – any news – but she flipped through the channels in vain. Everything was static. She was going mad.

Her grandfather was at the top of that building. They had an appointment to meet at nine o’clock, at a restaurant called Windows on the World. And Mordecai had a special treat for Lily, something that he wanted to reveal to his only descendant on this special day, her fiftieth birthday: September 11, 2001.

In a way, Lily and I were both orphans. We’d each lost our closest relative, the person who had done the most to train us in our chosen field. I had never questioned for a moment why Lily had closed up her vast apartment on Central Park South that very same week of her grandfather’s death, why she’d packed a single bag – as she later wrote me – and headed for England. Though she bore no great love for the British, Lily had been born in England, her late mother was English, so she carried dual citizenship. She just couldn’t face New York. I’d barely heard a word from her since. Until today.

But at this moment, I knew that the one individual I desperately needed to see – perhaps the only person who knew all the players in our lives, the only one who might hold the key to my mother’s disappearance, perhaps even to those cryptic messages that seemed somehow related to my father’s death – was Lily Rad.

I heard a phone ringing.

It took me a moment to realize this time it wasn’t the desk phone, it was the cell phone in my trouser pocket. I was surprised it even worked in this remote region of Colorado. In fact, I’d only given out this number to a handful of people.

I yanked the phone from my pocket and read the incoming caller ID: Rodolfo Boujaron, my boss back in Washington, D.C. Rodo would just be arriving for work at his famous restaurant, Sutalde, to learn that the chickadee he believed had been working his night shift had flown the coop.

But in all fairness to myself, if I’d ever had to ask my boss’s permission first, I would likely never have gotten any time off at all. Rodo was a workaholic who thought everyone else should be, too. He liked to keep 24/7 surveillance on all his employees, because ‘the fires must always be stroked,’ as he’d say in that accent, so thick you could cut it with a meat cleaver.

At this moment, however, I was in no mood to deal with Rodo’s rantings, so I waited until I saw the voice message sign pop on my phone screen, then I listened to what he’d recorded:

‘Bonjour, Neskato Geldo!’

That was Rodo’s nickname for me in his native Basque – ‘Little Cinder Girl’ – a reference to my job as a firebird: the person who stokes the coals.

‘So! You are sneaking away in the dead of the night and leaving me to discover Le Cygne this morning, in your place! I hope she will not produce the…aruatza. How you say? The œuf? If she makes the mistake, it’s you who cleans it up! You abandon your post with no warning – for some boum d’anniversaire – so Le Cygne tells me. Very well. But you MUST return back here at the ovens before Monday, to make the new fire. So ungrateful! You will please recollect why you even have a job: that it was I who rescued you from the CIA!’

Rodo clicked off – he was clearly lathering himself into one of his typical Basque-Hispano-French snits. But his blathering wasn’t quite as bizarre as it sounded, once you learned to read Rodo’s multi-lingo-isms:

The ‘Cygne’ – the swan – whom he’d suggested might lay an egg on the night shift during my absence was my colleague, Leda the Lesbian, who’d happily agreed to pinch-hit for me, if necessary, until my return.

When it came to maintaining those huge wood ovens for which the restaurant Sutalde was known (hence its name in Basque: ‘The Hearth’), Leda – as glamorous as she appeared when on display (as she often was) – was no slouch back in the kitchens, either. She swung a mean shovel; she knew the difference between hot ashes and embers. And she preferred taking over my Friday night solo hitch on the graveyard shift, to her customary cocktail-hour duties on the floor of the restaurant, where overjazzed and overpaid male ‘K Street lobbyists’ were always hitting on her.

When it came to Rodo’s comment about gratitude, however, the ‘CIA’ that he’d ‘rescued me from’ was not the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. government, but merely the Culinary Institute of America in rural New York – a training ground for master chefs, and the only school I’d ever flunked out of. I’d spent a fruitless six months there just after high school. When I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to study at any college, my uncle Slava felt I should prepare myself to get a job in the only other thing I’d ever known how to do, besides chess – something that Nim had trained me in himself when I was young. That was cooking.

In short order, I’d found the CIA atmosphere a bit like storm trooper boot camp: endless classes in accounting and business management, memorizing vast repertoires – of terminology more than of technique. When I’d dropped out in frustration, feeling I was a failure in everything I’d ever done, Slava urged me into an underpaid apprenticeship – no dropouts, cop-outs, time-outs, or waffling permitted – at the only four-star establishment in the world that specialized exclusively in open-hearth cuisine: that is, cooking with live coals, embers, ash, and fire.

But now, almost four years into my five-year contract, if I took a good hard look in the mirror I had to confess that I’d turned into as much of an isolated loner – even living smack in the midst of Our Nation’s Capital – as my mother was, here in hermetic retreat atop her very own Colorado mountain.

In my case, I could explain it away with ease: After all, I was contractually tied to the obsessively slave-driving schedule of Monsieur Rodolfo Boujaron, the restaurateur-entrepreneur who’d become my boss, my mentor, even my landlord. With Rodo standing over me these past four years, cracking the proverbial whip, I’d had no time for a social life.

In fact, my all-consuming job at Sutalde, that my uncle had so prudently locked me into, now provided me exactly the same structure – the practice, the tension, the time clocks – that had been woefully lacking in my life ever since my father had died and I’d had to abandon the game of chess. The task of preparing and maintaining the fire for a full week of cooking each week required all the diligence of minding an infant or tending a flock of young animals: You couldn’t afford to blink.

But if that mirror told me the unblinking truth about myself, I’d have to admit that my job, these past four years, had provided me a lot more than structure or diligence or discipline. Living with the fire as I did – looking into those flames and embers day after day so I could manage their height and heat and strength – had taught me a new way of seeing. And thanks to Rodo’s recent vituperous rantings, I’d just seen something new: I’d seen that my mother might have left me another clue – one that I ought to have noticed the very moment I walked in the door.

The fire. Under the circumstances, how could it be here at all?

I hunkered down beside the hearth for a better look at the log in the pit. It was a seasoned white pine of at least thirty caliper inches – a log that would burn faster than a denser hardwood from a broadleaf tree. Though it was clear that my mother, as a mountain girl, knew plenty about building fires, how could she have created this fire without prior planning – not to mention without loads of assistance?

In the hour or so I’d been here, no one had applied fresh kindling, enlivened the embers with a bellows or blowpipe – nothing to speed the intensity of the heat. Yet this fire was a pretty mature one with flames six inches high, which meant that it had been burning for three hours. Given the steady, even nature of the flame, somebody had stayed around tending this fire for well over an hour until it was really established.

I checked my watch. This meant that my mother must have vanished from the lodge even more recently than it had first appeared – perhaps only half an hour before I’d arrived. But if so – vanished to where? And was she alone? And if she – or they – had departed by a door or a window, why were there no tracks, other than mine, in the snow?

My head was aching from this cacophany of clues that all seemed to lead toward nothing more than background noise. But then, yet another sour note leapt out at me: Just how had my boss Rodo known that I’d left to attend a ‘boum anniversaire,’ as he called it – a birthday party? Given Mother’s lifelong reluctance about even mentioning her birth date, I’d told no one why I was leaving or where I was going – not even Leda the Swan, as Rodo’s message said. No matter how contradictory things might appear, I knew there must be a theme to my mother’s disappearance hidden here somewhere. And there was one more place that I hadn’t yet searched.

I plunged my hand into my pocket and grabbed the wooden chess queen I’d rescued from the billiard table. With my thumbnail, I scraped off the bottom circle of felt. Within the hollowed-out queen, I saw that something hard and firm had been inserted. I jimmied it out: a tiny bit of cardboard. I took it over to the window light and pried it open. When I read the three words printed there, I nearly fainted.

Beside it were the faded traces of the phoenix – just as I remembered from that bleak, awful day at Zagorsk. I remembered that I’d found it in my pocket then, too. The bird seemed to be flying up to heaven, enshrined in an eight-pointed star.

I could scarcely breathe. But before I could come to grips with anything – before I could fathom what in God’s name this might mean – I heard the sound of a car horn outside.

I looked out the window and saw Key’s Toyota pulling up into the snowy parking space, just behind my car. Key emerged from the driver’s side, followed by – from the backseat – a man dressed in furs who helped out my aunt Lily, similarly attired. All three of them were headed straight for the front door.

In panic, I shoved the cardboard back into my pocket, along with the chess piece. I raced to the mudroom; the outer doors were just swinging open. Before I could speak, my eyes flashed past the two women – right to the ‘gigolo’ of my aunt Lily.

As he stepped over the threshhold, he was shaking loose snow from the high fur collar of his coat. His eyes met mine, and he smiled – a cold smile, a smile filled with danger. It was no more than an instant before I understood why.

Standing there before me, in my mother’s isolated mountain retreat, as if we two were completely alone in time and space, was the man who had killed my father.

The boy who had won the Last Game. Vartan Azov.

Black and White

It is here that the symbolism of black and white, already present in the squares of the chess board, takes on its full value: the white army is that of light, the black army is that of darkness…each of which is fighting in the name of a principle, or that of the spirit and darkness in man; these are the two forms of the “holy war”: the “lesser holy war” and the “greater holy war,” according to a saying of the prophet Mohammed…

In a holy war it is possible that each of the combatants may legitimately consider himself as the protagonist of Light fighting the darkness. This again is the conse-quence of the double meaning of every symbol: what for one is the expression of the Spirit, may be the image of dark “matter” in the eyes of the other.

– Titus Burckhardt, The Symbolism of Chess

Everything looks worse in black and white.

– Paul Simon, Kodachrome

Time had stopped. I was lost.

My eyes were locked with those of Vartan Azov – dark purple, nearly black, and bottomless as a pit. I could see those eyes as they gazed at me across a chessboard. When I was a child of eleven, his eyes hadn’t frightened me. Why should they terrify me now?

Yet I could feel myself slipping down – a kind of vertigo, as if I were sliding into a deep, dark hole where there was no way out. Just as I’d experienced so many years ago, in that one awful instant in the game when I’d understood what I had done. I could feel my father then, watching me from across that room as I had slowly plummeted into psychological space, out of control, falling and falling – like that boy with wings who’d flown too near the sun.

Vartan Azov’s eyes were unblinking now, as always, as he stood there in my mudroom looking over the heads of Lily and Nokomis, looking directly at me as if we were completely alone, as if there were only the two of us in the world, in an intimate dance. With the black-and-white squares of a chessboard in between. What game had we been playing then? What game were we playing now?

‘You know what they say,’ Nokomis announced, breaking the spell as she tilted her head toward Vartan and Lily. ‘Politics makes strange bedfellows.’

She’d kicked off her boots, tossed off her parka, yanked off her cap – releasing that waterfall of black hair that tumbled to her waist – and she was marching from the mudroom past me in her stocking feet. She plopped down on the hearth wall, shot me a wry smile, and added, ‘Or perhaps the motto of the United States Marine Corps?’

‘‘Many are called but few are chosen’?’ I guessed gamely, knowing my friend’s compulsive predilection for epigrammatizing. I actually felt relieved, for once, to play her game. But she could tell by my face that something was not as it seemed.

‘Nope,’ she said with raised brow. ‘ ‘We’re just looking for a few good men.’ ‘

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Lily as she stepped into the room. She had stripped to her skintight ski outfit, which clung to every curve.

‘Consorting with the enemy,’ I suggested, indicating Vartan. I grabbed Lily by the arm, took her aside, and hissed, ‘Have you blanked out all of the past? What were you thinking, bringing him along? Besides, he’s young enough to be your son!’

‘Grandmaster Azov is my protégé,’ Lily announced indignantly.

‘Is that what they’re calling them these days?’ I cited Key’s earlier observation.

Pretty unlikely, since Lily and I both knew that Azov’s ELO ranking was two hundred points higher than hers had ever been.

‘He’s a grandmaster?’ said Key. ‘Grandmaster of what?’

I let that pass, since Mother had eradicated all mention of chess from our family vocabulary. Lily remained undaunted – though she was about to unload some further unexpected information to my already overloaded brain.

‘Please don’t blame me for Vartan’s presence here,’ she informed me calmly. ‘After all – your mother invited him! All I did was to give him a ride!’

Just as I was recovering from that broadside, a small, damp rodent – about four inches tall and sporting soggy, fuchsia hair ribbons – came barreling into the room. The disgusting beast flew into the air and leapt into Aunt Lily’s waiting arms. It lapped her face with its equally bright pink tongue.

‘My darling Zsa-Zsa,’ said Aunt Lily, cooing at the beast, ‘you and Alexandra haven’t been introduced! She would love to hold you for a moment, wouldn’t she?’ And before I could protest, she’d palmed the writhing thing off to me.

‘I’m afraid I’m still searching for a line for this one,’ Key admitted, watching our doggie display with amusement.

‘How about “Familiarity breeds contempt”?’ I quipped. But I should never have opened my mouth: The revolting dog tried to stick its tongue beween my teeth. I tossed it back to Lily in disgust.

While we three were playing patty-cake, my archnemesis Vartan Azov had likewise removed his furs and stepped into the room. He was dressed all in black, a turtleneck sweater and slim trousers, with a simple gold neck chain that cost more than any chess tournament winnings I’d ever heard of. He ran his hand through his unruly mop of black curls, as he was gazing around at the totem carvings and sweeping expanse of our family lodge.

I could certainly see why his appearance had stopped traffic at the Mother Lode. Apparently, over the past decade my erstwhile opponent had been working out with something more physically strenuous than a chessboard. But pretty is as pretty does, as Key might say. His good looks didn’t make his presence here – most especially under these circumstances – any more palatable to me. Why on earth would my mother invite here the very man whose last appearance in our lives had heralded the end of my chess career and resulted in my father’s death?

Vartan Azov was crossing the room directly to where I stood beside the fire – there seemed to be no avenue of escape.

‘This is a remarkable house,’ he said, in that soft Ukrainian accent – a voice that had always seemed so sinister when he was a boy. He was looking up toward the skylights filled with rosy light. ‘I’ve not seen anything like it anywhere. The front doors – the stonework, these carved animals looking down upon us. Who built it all?’

Nokomis answered; it was a well-known tale in these parts.

‘This place is legendary,’ she said. ‘It was the last joint project – maybe the only joint project – between the Diné and the Hopi. They’ve been fighting turf wars over the outside cattle and oil intruders ever since. They built this lodge for Alexandra’s ancestor. They say she was the first Anglo medicine woman.’

‘My mother’s great-grandmother,’ I added, ‘a real character, by all accounts. She was born in a covered wagon and stayed on to study the local pharmaceuticals industry.’

Lily rolled her eyes at me, as if to suggest it must’ve been mainly hallucinogenic mushrooms, if the decor was any indication.

‘I can’t believe it,’ my aunt chimed in. ‘How could Cat have been holed up here all these years? Charm is one thing, but what about the amenities?’ She strolled around the room with Zsa-Zsa wriggling beneath her arm, and with one bloodred-lacquered fingernail she left a trail through the furniture dust. ‘I mean, the important questions. Where’s the nearest beauty salon? Who picks up and delivers the laundry?’

‘Not to mention where’s the so-called kitchen,’ I agreed, motioning to the hearth. ‘Mother is not exactly prepared for entertaining.’ Which only served to make this birthday boum all the stranger still.

‘I’ve never met your mother,’ Vartan commented, ‘though naturally, I was a great admirer of your father. I would never have imposed upon you like this, but I was so honored when she offered her invitation to stay here—’

‘Stay here?’ I said, nearly choking on the words.

‘Cat insisted that we must stay here at the house,’ Lily confirmed. ‘She said there was plenty of room for everyone, and that there were no decent hotels nearby.’

Right on both counts – unfortunately for me. But there was another problem, as Lily was quick to point out.

‘It seems that Cat still hasn’t returned from her outing. That isn’t like her,’ she said. ‘After all, we’ve dropped everything to come here. Has she left any inkling that might explain why she invited us all, and then left?’

‘Nothing conspicuous,’ I said evasively. What else could I say?

Thank God I’d had the presence of mind to stash that lethal game in the pillow sack before Vartan Azov landed on my doorstep. But Mother’s encrypted note atop the piano, along with the hollow black queen and her contents, were still burning a hole in my pocket. Not to mention my brain.

How could a cardboard plaque suddenly surface here when, so far as I knew, it was only seen by my father and me ten years ago and thousands of miles away? In the shock and pandemonium following my father’s death at Zagorsk, I’d hardly thought of that strange woman and the message she’d handed me just before the game. Then later, I’d assumed the card had disappeared, just as she had. Until now.

I needed to get Vartan Azov out of the way – and quickly – so I could broach some of these issues with my aunt. But before I could think how, I saw that Lily had halted before the British campaign desk and set Zsa-Zsa down on the floor. She was following with her fingertips the trail of wire that led from the telephone to a hole in the side of the desk. She yanked at the drawer, to no avail.

‘Those damned drawers always stick,’ I told her from across the room. But my heart was churning again: How could I not have thought of something so obvious first? Inside that drawer was my mother’s rustic answering machine. I went over as Lily pried the drawer open with a letter opener. This certainly wasn’t my choice of audience to listen to Mother’s private tape, but beggars can’t be choosers, as Key would say.

Lily glanced up at me and pushed the Play button. Vartan and Nokomis came over to join us at the desk.

There were the two messages I’d left from D.C., then a few from Aunt Lily – in her case, moaning about having to make a trip into the ‘Wasteland,’ as she referred to Mother’s remote mountain hideaway. I was in for a few unpleasant surprises, starting with another ‘birthday invitee’ – a voice that, unfortunately, I knew only too well:

‘Catherine, dearest,’ came the affected, upper-class accent of our nearest neighbor (which is to say, five thousand acres away), Rosemary Livingston – a voice rendered perhaps even more abrasive than usual by the scratchy tape.

‘How I HATE the idea of missing your WONDERFUL soiree!’ Rosemary oozed. ‘Basil and I shall be away. But Sage will be thrilled to come – with bells on! And our new neighbor says to tell you that he can make it, too. Toodle-oo!’

The only proposition less pleasant than spending time with the boring, officious billionaire Basil Livingston and his status-hunting wife, Rosemary, was the idea of being forced to pass even an instant more time with their pretentious daughter, Sage – the professional prom queen and emerita Pep Club president – who had already tortured me through six years of grammar school and high school. Especially a Sage, as Rosemary had mentioned, ‘with bells on.’

But at least it sounded like we had a brief respite before her descent upon us, if the planned party was to be a soiree and not an afternoon gig.

My big question was why the Livingstons had been invited at all, given my mother’s strong distaste for how Basil Livingston had raked in his several fortunes – mostly at civilization’s expense.

In brief, as an early venture capitalist, Basil had deployed his control of OPM (Other People’s Money) to buy up huge chunks of the Colorado Plateau and turn it over to oil development – including lands that were contested as sacred by the local Indian tribes. These were some of the turf wars that Key had alluded to.

As for inviting this ‘new neighbor’ that Rosemary had mentioned – what on earth was Mother thinking? – she’d never fraternized with the locals. This birthday bash was starting to sound more and more like the makings of an Alice in Wonderland party: Anything might crawl out from under the nearest teacup.

And the next message – the unfamiliar voice of a man with a German accent – only served to confirm my worst fears:

‘Grüssgott, mein Liebchen,’ the caller said. ‘Ich bedaure sehr…Ja – please excuse – my English is not so good. I hope you will be understanding of all of my meanings. This is your old friend Professor Wittgenstein, from Vienna. I am in great surprise to learn of your party. When did you plan it? I hope you will receive the gift I sent in time for the important day. Please open it at once so that the contents do not spoil. I regret that I cannot come – a true sacrifice. For my absence, my only defense is that I must attend the King’s Chess Tourney, in India…’

I felt that old danger signal coming on again, as I pushed the machine’s Pause button and glanced up at Lily. Fortunately, she seemed, for the moment, completely at sea. But it was clear to me that there were a few too many dangling key words here – the most obvious, of course, being ‘chess.’

As for the mysterious ‘Professor Wittgenstein of Vienna,’ I wasn’t sure how long it had taken Mother to catch on, or how quickly Lily would guess. But, accent or no, it had taken me exactly twelve seconds to ‘understand all of his meanings’ – including who the caller actually was.

The real Ludwig von Wittgenstein – the eminent Viennese philosopher – had by now been dead for more than fifty years. He was famous for his incomprehensible works like the Tractatus. But more to the purpose of this message were the two obscure texts that Wittgenstein had privately printed and given to his students at Cambridge University in England. These were in two small notebooks bound with paper covers – one colored brown and the other blue – which were ever thereafter called ‘The Blue and Brown Books.’ Their main topic was language games.

Lily and I were acquainted, of course, with someone who was an obsessive devotee of such games, and who’d even published a tractatus or two of his own, including one on the subject of these very Wittgenstein texts. The clincher was that he was also born with the genetic idiosyncrasy of one blue eye and one brown one. This was my uncle Slava: Dr Ladislaus Nim.

I knew that this tersely worded phone message in disguised voice from an uncle who never used phones must contain some critical kernel of meaning, which likely only my mother would understand. Perhaps something that had caused her to depart the house before any of her eclectic assortment of guests arrived.

But if it was so upsetting or even dangerous, why would she leave the message on the machine instead of erasing it? Furthermore, why would Nim allude to chess, a game that Mother despised? A game she knew nothing whatever about? Given the clues he had left, what else could it all mean? It seemed this message wasn’t meant just for my mother – it must also be intended for me.

Before I could think further, Lily had hit the Play button on the answering machine again, and I got my answer:

‘But as for lighting the candles on your cake,’ the voice I now knew as Nim’s said, in that chilling Viennese accent, ‘I suggest it is time to hand the lighted match to someone else. When the phoenix rises again from the ashes, take care, or you might get burnt.’

‘BEEP BEEP! END OF TAPE!’ screeched the creaky answering machine.

And thank God, because I really couldn’t stand to hear any more.

There could be no mistake – my uncle’s passion for ‘language games,’ all those cleverly calibrated code words like ‘sacrifice,’ ‘King’s Tourney,’ ‘India,’ and ‘defense’…No, this message was inextricably connected with whatever was going on here today. And missing his point might prove just as final, as irrevocable, as making that one fatal move. I knew I had to get rid of this tape right now, before Vartan Azov, standing just beside me – or anyone else – had the chance to figure out the connection.

I yanked the cassette from the answering machine, went over to the fire, and tossed it in. As I watched the Mylar and its plastic casing bubble and melt into the flames, the adrenaline started to pound behind my eyes again, like a hot, pulsing ache, like staring into a fire that was far too bright.

I squeezed my eyes shut – the better to see inside.

That last game I’d played in Russia – the dreaded game that my mother had left for me here, only hours ago, inside our piano – was a variation universally known in chess parlance as the King’s Indian Defense. I’d lost that game ten years ago, due to a blunder arising from a risk I’d taken much earlier in the game – a risk I should never have taken, since I couldn’t really see all the ramifications of where it might lead.

What was the risk I’d taken in that game? I had sacrificed my Black Queen.

And now I knew, beyond doubt, that whoever or whatever had actually killed my father ten years ago – somehow my Black Queen sacrifice in that game was connected. It was a message that had come back to haunt us. At this moment, something had become as clear to me as the black-and-white squares on a chessboard.

My mother was in truly serious danger right now – perhaps as grave as my father’s ten years ago. And she had just passed that lighted match to me.

The Charcoal Burners

Like all other associations, the Carbonari, or charcoal-burners, lay claim to a very high antiquity… Similar societies arose in many mountainous countries, and they surrounded themselves with that mysticism of which we have seen so many examples. Their fidelity to each other and to the society was so great that it became in Italy a proverbial expression to say ‘On the faith of a Carbonaro.’…In order to avoid all suspicion of criminal association, they employed themselves in cutting wood and making charcoal… They recognized each other by sign, by touch, and by words.

– Charles William Heckethorn, The Secret Societies of All Ages & Countries

Among the secret societies of Italy none was more comprehensive in its political objectives than that of the Carbonari. In the early 1820s they were more than just a power in the land, and boasted branches and sub-societies as far afield as Poland, France and Germany. The history of these “Charcoal-burners”, according to themselves, started in Scotland.

– Arkon Daraul, A History of Secret Societies

But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one.

– Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto X

Viareggio, Italy

August 15, 1822

It was the heat of the dog days. here under the blazing Tuscan sun, on this isolated stretch of beach along the Ligurian coast, the pebbled sands formed a griddle so intense that already now, at mid-morning, one could bake pané upon its surface. In the distance across the waters, the isles of Elba, Capraia, and little Gorgona arose like shimmering apparitions from the sea.

At the center of the crescent of beach, enfolded by its high surrounding mountains, a small group of men had assembled. Their horses could not bear the scalding sands and had been left within a nearby copse of trees.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, waited apart from the others. He’d seated himself upon a large black rock lapped by the waves – ostensibly so that his famous Romantic profile, immortalized in so many paintings, would be silhouetted to best advantage against the backdrop of the glittering sea. But in fact the hidden deformity of his feet since birth had nearly prevented Byron, this morning, from leaving his carriage at all. His pale white skin, which earned him the nickname ‘Alba,’ was shaded by a broad straw hat.

From here, unhappily, he had excellent vantage to observe each detail of the dreadful scene unfolding on the beach. Captain Roberts – master of Byron’s ship, the Bolivar, which lay at anchor in the bay – oversaw the preparations of the men. They were building a large bonfire. Byron’s aide-de-camp, Edward John Trelawney – called ‘the pirate’ for his wild, darkly handsome looks and eccentric passions – had now set up the iron cage that served as a furnace.

The half-dozen Luccan soldiers attending them had exhumed the corpse from its temporary grave – hastily dug where the body had first washed up. The cadaver scarcely resembled a human being: The face had been picked clean by fish, and the putrefied flesh was stained a dark and ghastly indigo color. Identification had been made by the familiar short jacket with the small volume of poetry in the pocket.

Now they placed the body into the furnace cage, atop the dry balsam boughs and driftwood they’d gathered from the beach. Such cadres of soldiers were a necessary presence at any such exhumation, Byron had been informed, to ensure that the proper immolation procedures were followed against the yellow fever from the Americas that was now rampaging along the coast.

Byron watched as Trelawney poured the wine and salts and oil on the cadaver. The roaring flame leapt up like a biblical pillar of God into the stark morning sky. A single seagull circled high above the flaming column, and the men tried to chase it away with cries as they flapped their shirts into the air.

The heat of the sands, inflamed by the fire, made the atmosphere around Byron seem unreal – the salts had turned the flames strange, unearthly colors; even the air was tremulous and wavy. He felt truly ill. But for a reason known only to himself, he could not leave.

Byron stared into the flames, disgusted as the corpse burst open from the intensity of the heat and its brains, pressed against the red-hot bars of the iron cage, seethed and bubbled and boiled, as if in a cauldron. It could just as well be the carcass of a sheep, he thought. What a nauseating and degrading sight. His beloved friend’s earthly reality was vaporized into white-hot ash before his very eyes.

So this was death.

We are all dead now, in one way or another, Byron thought bitterly. But Percy Shelley had drunk enough of death’s dark passions to last a lifetime, hadn’t he?

These past six years, throughout all their peregrinations, the lives of the two famous poets were inextricably entangled. Beginning with their self-imposed exiles from England – which had been undertaken in the same month and year, if not for the same reasons – and throughout their residence in Switzerland. Then Venice, which Byron had quit over two years ago; and now his grand palazzo here in nearby Pisa, which Shelley had departed only hours before his death. They’d both been stalked by death – hunted and haunted, nearly sucked down themselves into the long, cruel vortex that had begun to spin in the wake of their individual escapes from Albion.

There was the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, six years ago, when Shelley ran off to the Continent with the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, now his wife. Then the suicide of Mary’s half sister, Fanny, who’d been left behind in London with their cruel stepmother when the lovers had escaped. This blow was followed by the death of Percy and Mary’s little son, William. And just last February, the death in Rome from consumption of Shelley’s friend and poetic idol, ‘Adonais’ – the young John Keats.

Byron himself was still reeling from the death, only months ago, of his five-year-old daughter, Allegra – his ‘natural’ child by Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire. A few weeks before Shelley’s death by drowning, he’d told Byron that he’d witnessed an apparition: Percy had imagined he’d seen Byron’s little dead daughter beckoning to him from the sea, beckoning him to join her beneath the waves. And now this ghastly end for poor Shelley himself:

First the death by water; then the death by fire.

Despite the suffocating heat, Byron felt a terrible chill as he replayed in his mind the scene of his friend’s last hours.

In the late afternoon of July 8, Shelley had departed Byron’s grand Palazzo Lanfranchi at Pisa and had raced to his small boat, the Ariel, moored just down the coast. Against all advice or common sense, with no warning to anyone, Shelley had cast off at once and had sailed into the darkening belly of a coming storm. Why? thought Byron. Unless he was being pursued. But by whom? And to what end?

Yet in hindsight, this seemed the only plausible explanation – as Byron had now understood for the first time, only this morning. Byron had suddenly seen, in a flash of comprehension, something he should have seen at once: Percy Shelley’s mysterious death by drowning was no accident. It had to do with something – or was sought by someone – aboard that ship. Byron now had no doubt that when the Ariel was raised from her watery grave, as she soon would be, they’d see that she had been rammed by a felucca or some other large craft, intent upon boarding her. But he also guessed that whatever had been sought had not been found.

For, as Byron had realized only this morning, Percy Shelley – a man who’d never believed in immortality – might have managed to send one last message from beyond the grave.

Byron turned toward the sea so that the others, preoccupied by the fire, would not notice when he surreptitiously fished from his wallet the thin volume that he’d managed to keep hold of: Shelley’s copy of John Keats’s last poems, published not long before Keats’s death in Rome.

This waterlogged book had been found on the body, just as Shelley had left it: shoved within the pocket of his short, ill-fitting schoolboy’s jacket. It was still turned open and marked at Shelley’s favorite poem by Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion,’ about the mythological battle between the Titans and those new gods, led by Zeus, who were soon to replace them. After the famous mythological battle, which every schoolboy knew, only Hyperion, the sun god and last of the Titans, still survives.

This was a poem that Byron had never much cared for – and that Keats himself hadn’t even liked enough to finish. But it seemed to Byron significant that Percy had taken pains to keep it on his person, even at his death. He had surely marked this one passage for a reason:

Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;

His flaming robes streamed out behind his heels,

And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire…

On he flared…

At this premature end to a poem that was destined always to remain unfinished, the sun god seems to set himself aflame and whisk into oblivion in a ball of his own incandescence – rather like a phoenix. Rather like poor Percy, immolated there upon the pyre.

But most critical was something that none of the others seemed to have noticed when the book was found: At just the spot where Keats had laid down his pen, Shelley had taken his own up, and had carefully drawn a small mark at the side of the page – a kind of intaglio, with something printed inside. The ink was badly faded from the long exposure to the salt seawater, but Byron was sure he could still make it out by closer examination. That was why he had brought it here with him this morning.

Ripping the page loose from the book, Byron slipped the volume away again and carefully studied the small drawing his friend had made at the edge. Shelley had drawn a triangle, which enclosed three tiny circles or balls, each in a different colored ink.

Byron knew these colors well, for several reasons. First, they were his own – the colors of his matrilineal Scots family heraldry, which went back to before the time of the Norman Conquest. Though that was merely an accident of birth, it hadn’t helped his sojourn in Italy that Lord Byron had always displayed these colors proudly upon his enormous carriage, a vehicle patterned after that of the deposed, deceased emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. For as Byron should know better than anyone, in secret or in esoteric parlance these particular colors signified far more.

The three spheres that Shelley had drawn in the triangle were colored black, blue, and red. The black stood for coal, which signified ‘Faith.’ Blue symbolized smoke, meaning ‘Hope.’ And red was flame, for ‘Charity.’ Together, the three colors represented the life cycle of fire. And further – depicted as they were here, within a triangle, the universal symbol for ‘Fire’ – they stood for the destruction by fire of the old world as prophesied by Saint John in the Book of Revelation, and the coming of a new world order.

This very symbol – these tricolored orbs within an equilateral triangle – had also been chosen as the secret insignia of an underground group that intended to carry out that same revolution, at least here in Italy. They called themselves the Carbonari – the Charcoal Burners.

In the aftermath of twenty-five years of French revolution, terror, and conquest that had nearly shattered all of Europe, there was only one rumor more frightful than rumors of war. And that was the rumor of internal insurrection, of a movement from within – one that might demand independence from all external overlords, from all imposed rule of any kind.

During these past two years, George Gordon, Lord Byron, had shared the same roof with his married Venetian mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, a girl half his age who’d been exiled from Venice, along with her brother, her cousin, and her father – but minus the cuckolded husband.

These were the notorious Gambas – the ‘Gambitti,’ as they were called in the popular press – highly placed members of the Carbonaria, the very group that had sworn eternal enmity to all forms of tyranny – though it had failed in its attempted coup, during last year’s Carnival, to drive the Austrian rulers from Northern Italy. Instead, the Gambas themselves had been exiled from three Italian cities in succession. And Byron had followed them to each new encampment.

This was the reason why Byron’s every contact, whether in person or in writing, was now being assiduously tracked by, and reported to, the official overlords of all three parts of Italy: the Austrian Habsburgs in the north, the Spanish Bourbons in the south, and the Vatican itself in the central Papal States.

Lord Byron was the secret capo of the Cacciatori Mericani – ‘The Americans,’ as the popular, populist branch of the underground society was known. He’d financed from his own private funds the weapons, shot, and powder of the recent abortive Carbonari insurrection – and more.

He’d supplied his friend Ali Pasha the new secret weapon to use in his rebellion against the Turks – the repeating rifle – which Byron had had designed for him in America.

And Byron was now funding the Hetairia ton Philikon, or Friendly Society – a secret group that supported the thrust to drive the Ottoman Turks from Greece.

Lord Byron was surely everything that the imperialist dragons had most cause to fear – an implacable foe of tyrants and their reigns. The powers understood that he was exactly the ferment such an insurrection wanted. And he was rich enough that, if necessary, he could also water it from his own well.

But in the past year all three of these nascent insurrections had been brutally repressed, severed at the jugular – sometimes literally. Indeed, after Ali Pasha’s death seven months ago, it was told, he’d been buried at two different locations: his body at Janina, his head at Constantinople. Seven months. Why had it taken him so long to see it? Not until this morning.

It was nearly seven months since Ali Pasha’s death, and still no word, no sign…At first, Byron had assumed there’d been a change in plan. After all, much had changed in the past two years while Ali was isolated at Janina. But the pasha had always vowed that if he were ever at risk, he would find Byron by any means, via his Secret Service – which was, after all, the vastest and most powerful such organization ever forged in history.

If this were to prove impossible, then in the pasha’s final hours on earth, he would destroy himself inside the great fortress of Demir Kule – along with his treasure, his followers, and even the beloved and beautiful Vasiliki – before letting anything fall prey to the Turks.

But now Ali Pasha was dead, and by all reports the fortress of Demir Kule had been seized intact. Despite Byron’s repeated attempts to discover any news of the fate of Vasiliki or the others who’d been taken to Constantinople, there was as yet no word. Nor had Byron received the object that was intended to be protected by himself and by the Carbonaria.

Percy’s book of poems seemed to hold the only clue. If Byron had read correctly, only half of his message was contained in the triangle he’d drawn. The other part was the poem itself: the passage Percy had marked in Keats’s ‘Fall of Hyperion.’ Putting those two clues together, the full message would read:

The old Solar God will be destroyed by a far more dangerous flame – an eternal flame.

If this was correct, then Byron had grasped at once that it was he himself who had most to fear. He must act, and quickly. For if Ali Pasha was dead without the promised bombast – if there was no word from survivors who’d been closest to him – Vasiliki, his advisers, his Secret Service, the Bektashi sheikhs – if Percy Shelley had been pursued from Byron’s Pisan palazzo and driven into that storm, to his death – all this could mean just one thing: Everyone believed that the chess piece had reached its appointed destination, that Byron had received it – everyone, that is, except whoever had escaped from Janina.

And what had become of the missing Black Queen?

Byron needed to get away and think, and to lay a plan before the others arrived aboard his ship with Percy’s ashes. It might already be too late.

Byron crumpled in his hand the page containing the message. Adopting his customary expression of detached disdain, he rose from his seat and limped painfully across the hot sands to where Trelawney still tended the fire. The dark, wild features of the ‘Cockney Corsair’ were blackened further by soot from the blaze, and with those flashing white teeth and trailing mustachios, the man appeared more than slightly mad. Byron shuddered as he tossed the crumpled paper indifferently into the flame. He made sure that the paper had caught and burned before turning to speak to the others.

‘Don’t repeat this farce with me,’ he said. ‘Let my carcass rot where it falls. This Pagan Paean to a dead poet, I confess, has quite undone me – I need a bit of a sea change, to cleanse my mental image of this horror.’

He went back to the shore – and with a quick nod toward Captain Roberts to confirm their prior agreement to meet afterward on the ship, Byron tossed his wide-brimmed hat aside, stripped off his shirt, and dove into the sea, cutting through the waves with strong and powerful strokes. The water was warm as blood already at mid-morning; the sun scalded ‘Alba’s’ fair skin. He knew it would be a short mile swim to the Bolivar – nothing to a man who’d already swum the Hellespont, but a long enough one that it would let him clear his mind to think. But though the rhythm of his strokes, the salt water lapping over his shoulders, helped to calm his agitation, his thoughts kept returning to one thing: No matter how he tried – and wildly improbable though it might seem – there was only one person Byron could think of to whom Percy Shelley’s message might refer, one individual who might hold the critical clue to the fate of Ali Pasha’s missing treasure. Byron himself had never met her, but her reputation preceded her.

She was Italian by birth – a wealthy widow. Beside her vast riches, Lord Byron knew that his own considerable fortune would pale by comparison. She had once been world renowned, though she now was living in semi-isolation here in Rome. But in her youth, it was said that she’d bravely fought on horseback with guns for the liberation of her land from foreign powers – just as Byron and the Charcoal Burners were essaying to do right now.

Despite this woman’s personal contributions to the cause of freedom, however, it was she who’d given birth to the world’s last Titan-like ‘solar god’ – as Keats had described it: Her son was an imperial tyrant whose short-lived reign had terrorized all of Europe, and then swiftly burned itself out. Like Percy Shelley. In the end, this woman’s son had succeeded only in replanting the virulent seed of monarchy back into the world in force. He’d died barely one year ago, in anguish and obscurity.

As Byron felt the sun burning into his naked skin, he strove harder through the teeming waters to reach his ship. If he was right, he knew he had little time to lose in order to set his plan in motion.

And it was no small irony to Byron that, had this son of the Roman widow lived, today, August 15, would have been his birthday – a day commemorated throughout Europe, in his behalf, those past fifteen years until his death.

The woman whom Lord Byron believed might hold the key to locating the missing Black Queen of Ali Pasha was Napoleon’s mother: Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte.

Palazzo Rinuccini, Rome

September 8, 1822

Here [in Italy] there are as yet but the sparks of the volcano, but the ground is hot and the air sultry…there is a great commotion in people’s minds, which will lead to nobody knows what… The “king-times” are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.

– Lord Byron

It was a warm and balmy morning, but Madame Mère had arranged to have all the fires flickering in the hearths throughout the palazzo, candles lit in each room. The costly Aubusson carpets had all been brushed, the Canova sculptures of her famous children had all been dusted. Madame’s servants were attired in their finest green-and-gold livery and her brother, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, would soon arrive from his nearby Palazzo Falconieri to help greet the guests to whom she always opened her home on this one day each year. For today was an important day in the holy calendar, a day that Madame Mère had vowed she would never ignore and always honor: the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.

She’d been performing this ritual for more than fifty years – ever since she had taken her vow to the Virgin. After all, hadn’t her favorite son been born on the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven? That weak little baby whose birth had come so suddenly and unexpectedly early, when she – young Letizia, only age eighteen – had already lost two previous infants. So she’d made a vow on that day to Our Lady that she would always honor Her birth without fail, and that she would consecrate her children to the Blessed Virgin.

Though the child’s father had insisted upon naming the new infant Neapolus after an obscure Egyptian martyr instead of Carlo-Maria, as Letizia herself would have preferred, Letizia had made sure to christen all her daughters with the prenom of Maria: Maria Anna, who would later be known as Elisa, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany; Maria Paula, called Pauline, the Princess Borghese; and Maria Annunziata, later called Caroline, Queen of Naples. And they called her Madame Mère – Our Lady Mother.

The Queen of Heaven had indeed blessed all the girls with health and beauty, while their brother, later known as Napoleon, had given them wealth and power. But none of it was to last. These gifts had all dissipated, just like those roiling mists she still could recall surrounding her native isle of Corsica.

Now, as Madame Mère moved through the flower-filled, candlelit rooms of her vast Roman palazzo, she knew that this world would not last either. Madame Mère knew, with a palpitating heart, that this tribute to the Virgin today might prove to be her last in a very long time. Here she was, an old woman left nearly alone, her family all dead or scattered, dressed in perpetual mourning attire and living in an environment so alien to her, surrounded only by transitory things: wealth, possessions, memories.

But one of those memories may have suddenly come back to haunt her.

For only this morning Letizia had received a message, a hand-delivered note from someone whom she had neither seen nor heard from in all these many years, throughout the rise and fall of the Bonaparte Empire – not since Letizia and her family had departed the wild mountains of Corsica nearly thirty years ago. It was from someone whom Letizia had come to believe, by now, must be dead.

Letizia slipped the note from the bodice of her black mourning dress and read it again – perhaps for the twentieth time since she’d received it this morning. It was not signed, but there could be no mistaking who had written it. It was written in the ancient Tifinagh script, the Tamasheq tongue of the Tuareg Berbers of the deep Sahara. This language had always been a secret code used by only one person in communiqués with her mother’s family.

It was for this reason that Madame Mère had sent urgently for her brother the cardinal to arrive here at once before the other guests. And to bring the Englishwoman along with him – that other Maria who’d just recently returned to Rome. Only these two might be able to help Letizia in her dreadful plight.

For if this man whom they called the Falcon had indeed arisen as if from the dead, Letizia knew precisely what she herself would be called upon to do.

Despite the warmth of the many fires in her chambers, Letizia felt that all too familiar chill from the depths of her own past as she read the fateful lines once more:

The Firebird has arisen. The Eight return.

Tassili n’Agger, The Sahara

Autumn Equinox, 1822

We are immortal, and do not forget, We are eternal, and to us the past Is, as the future, present.

– Lord Byron, Manfred

Charlot stood on the high mesa, surveying the vast red desert. His white burnoose flapped about him in the breeze like the wings of a large bird. His long hair floated free, the color of the coppery sands that stretched before him. Nowhere on earth could one find a desert of this precise hue: the color of blood. The color of life.

This inhospitable spot, high on a cliff in the deepest Sahara, a place where only wild goats and eagles chose to live. It had not always been so. Behind him on the fabled cliffs of the Tassili were five thousand years of carvings and paintings – burnt sienna, ocher, raw umber, white – paintings that told the story of this desert and those who had peopled it in the mists of time, a story that was still unfolding.

This was his birthplace – what the Arabs called one’s watar, or homeland – though he had not been here since he was a babe in arms. Here was where his life had begun, Charlot thought. He was born into the Game. And here, perhaps, was where the Game was destined to end – once he had solved the mystery. That’s why he had returned to this ancient wilderness, this tapestry of brilliant light and of dark secrets: to find the truth.

The desert Berbers believed he was destined to be the one to solve it. His birth had been foretold. The oldest Berber legend spoke of a child born before his time, with blue eyes and red hair, who would possess the Second Sight. Charlot closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of this place, sand and salt and cinnabar, evoking his own most primal physical memories.

He’d been thrust into the world early – red and raw and screaming. His mother, Mireille, an orphan of sixteen, had fled her convent in the Basque Pyrenees and journeyed here across two continents, into the deep desert, to protect a dangerous secret. She had been what they called a thayyib, a woman who had known a man only once: his father. Charlot’s birth, here on the cliffs of the Tassili, was midwifed by an indigo-veiled Berber prince with blue-tinted skin, one of the ‘blue men’ of the Kel Rela Tuareg. This was Shahin, the desert falcon, who was to serve as parent, godparent, and tutor for this chosen child.

Across the vast desert before him now, as far as Charlot could see, the silent red sands shifted as they had for untold centuries, moving restlessly, like a living, breathing thing – sands that seemed a part of him, sands that erased all memory…

All but his own, that is. Charlot’s terrible gift of remembering was always with him – even the memory of those things that had not yet come to pass. When he was a child, they had called him the Little Prophet. He’d foreseen the rise and fall of empires, the futures of great men, like Napoleon and Alexander of Russia – or like that of his true father, whom he’d only met once: Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand.

Charlot’s memory of the future had always been like an unstoppable wellspring. He could foresee it, though he might not be able to change it. But of course the greatest gift could also be a curse.

To him, the world was like a chess game, where each move that one made generated a myriad of potential moves – and at the same time revealed an underlying strategy, as implacable as destiny, that drove one relentlessly onward. Like the game of chess, like the paintings on the rock, like the eternal sands – for him, the past and the future were always present.

For Charlot had been born, as it was foretold, beneath the gaze of the ancient goddess, the White Queen, whose image was painted in the hollow of the great stone wall. She’d been known across all cultures and throughout all times. She hovered above him now like an avenging angel, carved high on the sheer stone cliff. The Tuareg called her Q’ar – ‘the Charioteer.’

It was she, they said, who had spangled the nighttime sky with glittering stars. And she who had first set the Game upon its adamantine course. Charlot had journeyed here from across the sea to lay his eyes upon her for the first time since his birth. It was she alone, they said, who might reveal – perhaps only to the chosen one – the secret behind the Game.

Charlot awakened before dawn and tossed off the woolen djellaba he’d used as a cover against the open night air. Something was terribly wrong, though he couldn’t yet sense what it was.

Here in this spot – a difficult four-day hike over treacherous terrain from the valley below – he knew he was well protected. But there was no hiding from the fact that something was amiss.

He rose from his makeshift bed for a better view. Away to the east, toward Mecca, he could make out the thin ribbon of red that ran across the horizon, portending the sun. But he did not yet have enough light to make out his surroundings. As he stood there in the silence atop the mesa, Charlot heard a sound – only meters away. First, a soft footstep on gravel, then the sound of human breathing.

He was terrified to make a false step, or even to move.

‘Al-Kalim – it is I,’ someone whispered – though there was no one within miles to hear.

Only one man would address him as Al-Kalim: the Seer. ‘Shahin!’ cried Charlot. He felt the strong, firm hands press his wrists – the hands of the man who’d always been mother and father, brother and guide.

‘But how have you found me?’ said Charlot. And why had Shahin risked his life to cross the seas and the desert? To come through this treacherous canyon by night? To arrive here before dawn? Whatever had brought him to this place must be urgent beyond imagining.

But more important: Why hadn’t Charlot foreseen it?

The sun broke over the horizon, licking the rolling dunes in the distance with a warm pink glow. Shahin’s hands still firmly grasped Charlot’s in his own, as if he could not bear to let him go. After a long moment, he released Charlot and drew back his indigo veils.

In the rosy light, Charlot could see the craggy, hawklike features of Shahin for the first time. But what he saw in that face actually frightened him. In the twenty-nine years of his life, Charlot had never seen his mentor betray any emotion at all, under any circumstance, much less the emotion that Charlot could see written on Shahin’s face right now, which terrified him: pain.

Why could Charlot still not see inside?

But Shahin was struggling to speak: ‘My son…’ he began, nearly choking on the words.

Although Charlot had always thought of Shahin as his parent, this was the first time that the elder man had ever addressed him in this fashion.

‘Al-Kalim,’ Shahin continued, ‘I would never ask you to use that great gift that was bestowed upon you by Allah, your gift of the Vision, if this were not a matter of the gravest importance. A crisis has occurred that has driven me to cross the sea from France. Something of great value may have fallen into evil hands, something I learned of only months ago…’

Charlot, with fear gripping his heart, understood that if Shahin had come for him here in the desert with such urgency, the crisis must be grave indeed. But Shahin’s next words were more shocking still.

‘It has to do with my son,’ he added.

‘Your…son?’ repeated Charlot, fearing that he’d not heard correctly.

‘Yes, I have a son. He is greatly beloved,’ Shahin told him. ‘And like you, he was chosen for a life that is not always ours to question. From his earliest years, he has been initiated into a secret order. His training was nearly complete – ahead of its time, for he is only fourteen years old. Six months ago, we received word that a crisis had occurred: My son had been sent upon an important mission by the highest shaikh – the Pir of his order – in an attempt to help avert this crisis. But it seems that the boy has never arrived at his destination.’

‘What was his mission? And what was his intended destination?’ Charlot asked – though he realized, in a state of panic, that this was the first time he’d ever had to ask such a question. Why didn’t he already know the answer?

‘My son and a companion in this mission were bound for Venice,’ Shahin answered, though he was looking at Charlot strangely, as if the same question had just struck him, too: How could Charlot not know?

‘We have reason to fear that my son, Kauri, and his companion were abducted.’ Shahin paused, then added, ‘I have learned that they had in their possession an important piece of the Montglane Service.’

The King’s Indian Defense

[The King’s Indian Defense] is generally considered the most complex and most interesting of all the Indian Defenses… Theoretically, White ought to have the advantage because his position is freer. But Black’s position is solid and full of resource; a tenacious player can accomplish miracles with this defense.

– Fred Reinfeld, Complete Book of Chess Openings

Black will…allow White to create a strong pawn centre and proceed to attack it. Other common features are Black’s attempts to open the black-squared long diagonal and a pawn storm by Black’s King-side pawns.

– Edward R. Brace, An Illustrated History of Chess

The silence was broken by the sound of splintering wood.

I glanced across the room from where I stood by the hearth and saw that Lily had disconnected Mother’s answering machine and pulled the spaghetti of wires from the drawer; they were splayed across the campaign desk. With Key and Vartan looking on, she was using the dagger-shaped letter opener to pry the stuck drawer all the way out of the desk. From the sound of it, she was deconstructing the thing.

‘What are you doing?’ I said in alarm. ‘That desk is one hundred years old!’

‘I hate to destroy an authentic souvenir of British colonial warfare – it must mean so much to you,’ my aunt said. ‘However, your mother and I once found some objects of immeasurable value hidden in drawers that were jammed just like this one. She must have known something like this would set off a few bells for me.’ She went on hacking in frustration.

‘That campaign desk is awfully flimsy to keep anything of value,’ I pointed out. It was just a lightweight box with drawers, on collapsible legs or ‘horses’ – of the sort British officers hauled by pack mules on campaigns through treacherous mountain regions from the Khyber Pass to Kashmir. ‘Besides, for as long as I can recall, that drawer has always jammed.’

‘Time to unjam it, then,’ Lily insisted.

‘Amen to that,’ Key agreed, grabbing up the heavy stone paperweight lying on the desk and handing it to Lily. ‘You know what they say: “Better late than never.”’

Lily grasped the rock weight and swung it down onto the drawer with force. I could hear the soft wood splintering further, but she still couldn’t yank the drawer all the way out.

Zsa-Zsa, crazed by all the noise and excitement, was squeaking frantically and bouncing around everyone’s legs. She sounded something like a colony of rats going down at sea. I picked her up and tucked her under my arm, squishing her into temporary silence.

‘Permit me?’ Vartan offered Lily politely, taking the tools from her hands.

He stuck the letter opener between the desk and the side of the drawer and hammered it with the paperweight, jimmying it until the soft wood cracked loose from the drawer’s base. Lily gave one good tug on the handle and the drawer was released.

Vartan held the damaged drawer in his hands and studied the sides and base, while Key knelt on the floor and stretched her arm back into the open hole as far as she could reach. She felt around inside.

‘There’s nothing there that I can touch,’ Key said, tipping back on her haunches. ‘But my arm won’t reach all the way to the back.’

‘Permit me,’ Vartan repeated, and he set down the drawer and squatted beside her, sliding his hand back into the open cavity of the desk. He seemed to take quite a long time feeling around. At last, he withdrew his arm and looked up at the three of us with no expression as we stood there expectantly.

‘I can’t find anything back there,’ Vartan said, standing up and brushing the dust from his sleeve.

Maybe it was my natural suspicion or just my jangled nerves, but I didn’t believe him. Lily was right. Something could be hidden there. After all, these desks might’ve had to be lightweight for transport – but they also had to be secure. For decades, they’d been used to carry battle plans and strategies, messages with secret codes from headquarters, field units, and spies.

I palmed off Zsa-Zsa to Lily once more and yanked open the other drawer of the campaign desk, rummaging around inside until I found the flashlight we always kept there. Brushing Key and Vartan to one side, I bent forward and swept the flashlight around, exploring inside the desk. But Vartan was correct: There was nothing in there at all. So what had made that drawer stick all these years?

I picked up the damaged drawer from the floor where Vartan had put it, and I looked it over myself. Though I saw nothing amiss, I shoved the answering machine and tools aside and I set the drawer atop the desk, pulling out the other drawer to dump out its contents. Comparing the two side by side, it seemed that the rear panel of the damaged drawer was slightly higher than that of the other drawer.

I glanced at Lily, still holding the wriggling Zsa-Zsa. She nodded to me as if to confirm that she’d known all along. Then I turned to confront Vartan Azov.

‘It seems there’s a secret compartment here,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I noticed it earlier. But I thought it best that I should not mention it.’ His voice was still polite, but his cold smile had returned – a smile like a warning.

‘Not mention it?’ I said, in disbelief.

‘As you’ve said yourself, that drawer has been – do you say, stuck? – for a very long time. We’ve no idea what is hidden there,’ he said, adding with irony, ‘maybe something valuable – like battle plans left from the Crimean War.’

This wasn’t entirely implausible, since my father had actually grown up in the Soviet Crimea – but it was highly unlikely. It wasn’t even his desk. And though I was as nervous as anyone about looking inside that secret compartment, I’d had about enough of Mr Vartan Azov’s high-handed logic and steely glances. I turned on my heel and headed for the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Vartan’s voice shot after me like a bullet.

‘To get a hacksaw,’ I tossed over my shoulder, and kept on moving. After all, I reasoned, I could hardly deploy Lily’s rock-smashing technique. Even if the contents had nothing to do with Mother, there might be something fragile or valuable tucked away in that panel.

But Vartan had crossed the room, swiftly and silently, and was suddenly there beside me, his hand on my arm, propelling me toward the door right into the mudroom. Inside the cloistering closet he slammed the inner doors shut and leaned against them, blocking any exit.

We were jammed there together in the tiny space between the food locker and the coat hooks that were laden with enough fur and down-stuffed parkas, I could feel the static electricity plastering my hair to the wall. But before I could protest this preemption, Vartan had grasped me by both arms. He spoke quickly, under his breath so no one outside could hear.

‘Alexandra, you must listen to me, this is extremely important,’ he said. ‘I know things you need to know. Crucial things. We must speak – right now – before you go about opening any more cupboards or drawers around here.’

‘We have nothing to talk about,’ I snapped, with a bitterness that surprised me. I extracted myself from his grasp. ‘I don’t know what on earth you’re doing here – why Mother would even invite you—’

‘But I know why she asked me,’ Vartan interrupted. ‘Though I never spoke with her, she didn’t have to say it. She needed information – and so do you. I was the only other person there on that day, who may be able to provide it.’

I didn’t have to ask what he meant by there – or what the day in question was. But this hardly prepared me for what came next.

‘Xie,’ he said, ‘don’t you understand? We must speak about your father’s murder.’

I felt as if I’d been socked in the stomach; for a moment my wind was gone. No one had called me Xie – my father’s preferred nickname for me, short for Alexie – in the ten years since my chess-playing youth. Hearing it now, coupled with Your father’s murder, made me feel completely disarmed.

Here it was again, that thing we never spoke about, the thing I never thought of. But my suppressed past had managed to penetrate the crushing, suffocating space of the mudroom and was staring me in the face with that horrid Ukrainian sangfroid. As customary, I retreated into complete denial.

‘His murder?’ I said, shaking my head in disbelief – as if that would somehow clear the air. ‘But the Russian authorities maintained at the time that my father’s death was an accident, that the guard on that roof shot him in error, believing that someone was absconding with something valuable from the treasury.’

Vartan Azov had suddenly turned his dark eyes upon me with attentiveness. That strange purple gleam was burning from within, like a flame being blown alive.

‘Perhaps your father was escaping the treasury with something of great value,’ he said slowly, as if he’d just spotted a hidden move, an oblique opening he’d previously overlooked. ‘Perhaps your father was leaving with something whose value he himself might have only just grasped at that moment. But whatever did happen on that day, Alexandra, it is certain to me that your mother would never have asked me to come all this distance just now – to this remote spot, along with you and Lily Rad – unless she believed, as I do, that your father’s death ten years ago must be directly related to the assassination of Taras Petrossian, just two weeks ago, in London.’

‘Taras Petrossian!’ I cried aloud, though Vartan silenced me with a swift glance toward the inner doors.

Taras Petrossian was the rich entrepreneur and business mogul who, ten years ago, had organized our Russian chess tourney! He’d been there, that day at Zagorsk. I knew very little more than this about the man. But at this moment Vartan Azov – arrogant bastard or no – suddenly had my full attention.

‘How was Petrossian killed?’ I wanted to know. ‘And why? And what was he doing in London?’

‘He was organizing a big chess exhibition there, with grandmasters from every country,’ Vartan said, one eyebrow slightly raised, as if he’d assumed I would already know that.

‘Petrossian fled to England several years ago with plenty of money, when the corrupt capitalist oligarchy he’d created in Russia was seized, along with that of many others, by the Russian state. But he hadn’t completely escaped, as he might have imagined. Just two weeks ago, Petrossian was found dead in his bed, in his posh hotel suite in Mayfair. It’s believed he was poisoned, a tried-and-true Russian methodology. Petrossian had often spoken out against the Siloviki. But the arm of that brotherhood has a very long reach for those whom they wish to silence—’

When I seemed confused by the term, Vartan added, ‘In Russian, it means something like “The Power Guys.” The group who replaced the KGB just after the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, they’re called the FSB – the Federal Security Bureau. Their members and methods remain the same; only the name has changed. They are far more powerful than the KGB ever was – a State unto themselves, with no outside controls. These Siloviki, I believe, were responsible for your father’s murder – after all, the guard who shot him was surely in their employ.’

What he was suggesting seemed crazy: KGB gunmen with poison up their sleeves. But I could feel that awful chill of recognition begin to creep into my spine again. It had been Taras Petrossian, as I now recalled, who’d relocated that last game of ours outside of Moscow, to Zagorsk. If he’d now been assassinated, it might give more credence to my mother’s fears all these years. Not to mention her disappearance, and the clues she’d left that pointed to that last game. Perhaps she had been right in her suspicions all along. As Key might say, ‘Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.’

But there was something more that I needed to know, something that didn’t make sense.

‘What did you mean a moment ago,’ I asked Vartan, ‘when you said that my father might have been “escaping the treasury with something of value” – which only he might understand?’ Vartan smiled enigmatically, as if I’d just passed some important esoteric test.

‘It didn’t occur to me myself,’ he admitted, ‘until you mentioned the “official” explanation of your father’s death. I think it likely that your father was leaving the building that morning with something of enormous value, something that others could only intuit might be in his possession, but which they could not see.’ When I looked mystified, he added: ‘I suspect he was leaving the building that morning with information.’

‘Information?’ I objected. ‘What sort of information could possibly be so valuable that someone would want to kill him?’

‘Whatever it was,’ he told me, ‘it must have been something which apparently he could not be permitted to pass along to anyone.’

‘Even assuming my father did get information about something as dangerous as you’re suggesting, how could he possibly have discovered it so quickly there at the Zagorsk treasury? As you yourself know, we were only inside that building for a few brief minutes,’ I pointed out. ‘And during that entire time, my father spoke to no one who could have given him such information.’

‘Perhaps he spoke to no one,’ he agreed. ‘But someone did speak to him.’

An image of that morning, which I’d so long suppressed, had begun to form in my mind. My father had left me for a moment, that morning at the treasury. He’d crossed the room to look inside a large glass case. And then someone went over and joined him there –

‘You spoke to my father!’ I cried.

This time, Vartan didn’t try to silence me. He merely nodded in confirmation.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I went and stood beside your father as he was looking into a large display case. Inside that glass case, he and I saw a golden chess piece covered with jewels. I told him it had just been newly rediscovered in the cellars of the Hermitage at Petersburg, along with Schliemann’s treasures of Troy. It was said that the piece had once belonged to Charlemagne and perhaps to Catherine the Great. I explained to your father that it had been brought to Zagorsk and put on display for this last game. It was just at that moment when your father suddenly turned away, he took you by the hand, and you both left that place.’

We had fled outside onto the steps of the treasury, where my father had met his death.

Vartan was watching me closely now as I struggled to keep from betraying all those dark and long-repressed emotions that were, to my great regret, surfacing. But something still didn’t jibe.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I told Vartan. ‘Why would someone want to kill my father just to prevent him from passing on dangerous information, when everyone seems to have known all about this rare chess piece and its history – including you?’

But no sooner had these words escaped than I knew the answer.

‘Because that chess piece must have meant something completely different to him than it did to anyone else,’ Vartan said with a flush of excitement. ‘Whatever your father recognized when he saw that piece, his reaction was surely not what those who were observing him had expected, or they would never have brought it to be displayed there at that game. Though they might not have guessed what your father had discovered, he had to be stopped before he could tell anyone else who might understand!’

The pieces and pawns certainly seemed to be massing at center board. Vartan was on to something. But I still couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

‘Mother always believed that my father’s death was no accident,’ I admitted, leaving out the small detail that she’d also imagined that the bullet might have been intended for me. ‘And she always believed that chess had something to do with it. But if you’re right, and my father’s death is somehow linked with Taras Petrossian’s, what would connect it all to that chess piece at Zagorsk?’

‘I don’t know – but something must,’ Vartan told me. ‘I still remember the expression on your father’s face that morning as he stared into the glass case at that chess piece – almost as if he didn’t hear a word I was saying. And when he turned away to go, he didn’t look at all like a man who was thinking about a chess game.’

‘What did he look like?’ I asked with urgency.

But Vartan was looking at me as if he were trying to make sense of it himself. ‘I’d say he looked frightened,’ he told me. ‘More than frightened. Terrified, though he quickly hid it from me.’

‘Terrified?’

What could possibly have frightened my father so much after only a few quick moments inside that treasury at Zagorsk? But with Vartan’s next words, I felt as if someone had plunged an icy blade into my heart:

‘I can’t explain it myself,’ Vartan admitted, ‘unless, for some reason, it might have meant something significant to your father that the chess piece in that glass case was the Black Queen.’

Vartan opened the doors and we reentered the octagon. I could hardly tell him what the Black Queen meant to me. I knew that if everything he’d just told me was true, then my mother’s disappearance might well be connected to the deaths of both my father and Petrossian. We might all be in danger. But before I’d gone three paces, I stopped in my tracks. I’d been so riveted by Vartan’s private revelations that I’d completely forgotten about Lily and Key.

The two of them were down on the floor in front of the campaign desk with the empty desk drawer between them, as nearby Zsa-Zsa drooled on the Persian rug. Lily had been saying something privately to Key, but they both stood up as we came in; Lily was clutching what looked like a sharp steel nail file. I saw bits of splintered wood scattered here and there.

‘Time waits for no man,’ said Key. ‘While you two have been cloistered in there – taking each other’s confessions or whatever you were up to – look what we’ve found.’

She waved something in the air that looked like a piece of old, creased paper. As we approached, Lily regarded me with gravity. Her clear gray eyes seemed oddly veiled, almost like a warning.

‘You may look,’ she admonished me, ‘but please don’t touch. No more of your extravagant impulses around that fire. If what we’ve just discovered in that drawer is what I believe it may be, it is extremely rare, as your mother would surely attest if she were here. Indeed, I suspect this document may be the very reason she’s not here.’

Key carefully opened the brittle paper and held it up before us.

Vartan and I leaned forward for a better look. On closer observation, it seemed to be a piece of fabric – so old and soiled that it had stiffened with age like parchment – upon which an illustration had been drawn with a sort of rusty-red solution that had bled across the fabric in places, leaving dark stains, though the figures could still be made out. It was the drawing of a chessboard of sixty-four squares where each square had been filled with a different strange, esoteric-looking symbol. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was supposed to mean.

But Lily was about to enlighten us all.

‘I don’t know how or when your mother may have obtained this drawing,’ she said, ‘but if my suspicions are correct, this cloth is the third and final piece of the puzzle that we were missing nearly thirty years ago.’

‘Piece of what puzzle?’ I asked, in extreme frustration.

‘Have you ever heard,’ said Lily, ‘of the Montglane Service?’

Lily had a story to tell us, she said. But in order to tell it before other guests might arrive, she begged me not to ask questions until she had told it all, without distractions or interruptions. And in order to do so, she informed us, she needed to sit upon something other than the floor or a rock wall – all that seemed available in our cluttered but chair-less lodge.

Key and Vartan trooped up and down the spiral stairs, collecting cushions, ottomans, and benches until Lily was now ensconced with Zsa-Zsa in a pile of plumpy pillows beside the fire, with Key perched on the piano bench and Vartan on a high library stool nearby, to listen.

Meanwhile, I’d set myself the task I did best: cooking. It always helped clear my mind and at least we’d have something for everyone to eat if others showed up as announced. Now I watched the copper kettle hanging low over the fire, the handfuls of freezedried vittles that I’d foraged from the food locker – shallots, celery, carrots, chanterelles, and beef cubes – as they plumped up in their broth of stock, strong red wine, splashes of Worcestershire, lemon juice, cognac, parsley, bay and thyme: Alexandra’s time-tested campfire Boeuf Bourguignonne.

Letting it bubble away for a few hours as I stewed in my own juices, I reasoned, might be just the recipe I needed. I confess, I felt I’d had enough shocks in one morning to last me at least until supper. But Lily’s confession was about to top that pile.

‘Nearly thirty years ago,’ Lily told me, ‘we all made a solemn vow to your mother that we would never again speak of the Game. But now, with this drawing, I know that I must tell the story. I think that’s what your mother intended, too,’ she added, ‘or she would never have hidden something so critically important here in that jammed desk drawer. And though I’ve no idea why she would dream of inviting all those others here today, she would never have invited anyone on such a significant a date as her birthday unless it had to do with the Game.’

‘The game?’ Vartan took the words from my mouth.

Although I was surprised to learn that Mother’s obsession about her birthday might have something to do with chess, I still figured that if it was thirty years ago, it couldn’t be the game that killed my father. Then something occurred to me.

‘Whatever this game was that you were sworn to secrecy about,’ I said to Lily, ‘is that why Mother always tried to keep me from playing chess?’

It wasn’t until this last that I recalled that no one outside of my immediate family had ever known that I’d been a serious chess champion, much less about our longtime family altercations over it. Key, despite a raised brow, tried not to look too surprised.

‘Alexandra,’ said Lily, ‘you’ve misunderstood your mother’s motives all these years. But it isn’t your fault. I’m extremely sorry to confess that all of us – Ladislaus Nim and I, even your father – agreed it was best to keep you in the dark. We truly believed that once we’d buried the pieces, once they were hidden where no one could find them, once the other team was destroyed, then the Game would be over and done with for a very long time, perhaps forever. And by the time you were born, and we’d discovered your early passion and skill, so many years had passed that we all felt sure you would be safe to play chess. It was only your mother who knew differently, it seems.’

Lily paused and added softly, almost as if speaking to herself, ‘It was never the game of chess that Cat feared, but quite another Game: a Game that destroyed my family and may have killed your father – the most dangerous Game imaginable.’

‘But what Game was it?’ I said. ‘And what kind of pieces did you bury?’

‘An ancient Game,’ Lily told me, ‘a Game that was based upon a rare and valuable bejeweled Mesopotamian chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne. It was believed to contain dangerous powers and to be possessed of a curse.’

Vartan, just beside me, had firmly grasped my elbow. I felt that familiar jolt of recognition, something triggered in the recesses of my mind. But Lily hadn’t finished.

‘The pieces and board were buried for a thousand years within a fortress in the Pyrenees,’ she went on, ‘a fortress that later became Montglane Abbey. Then during the French Revolution the chess set – by then called the Montglane Service – was dug up by the nuns and scattered for safekeeping. It disappeared for nearly two hundred years. Many sought to find it, for it was believed that whenever these pieces were reassembled the Service would unleash an uncon-trollable power into the world like a force of nature, a force that could determine the very rise and fall of civilizations.

‘But in the end,’ she said, ‘much of the Service was reassembled: twenty-six pieces and pawns from the initial thirty-two, along with a jewel-embroidered cloth that had originally covered the board. Only six pieces and the board itself were missing.’

Lily paused to regard each of us in turn, her gray eyes resting at last upon me.

‘The person who finally succeeded, after two hundred years, in this daunting task of reassembling the Montglane Service and defeating the opposing team was also the individual responsible for its reinterment, thirty years ago, when we thought the Game had ended: your mother.’

‘My mother?’ It was all I could muster.

Lily nodded. ‘Cat’s disappearance today can mean only one thing. I suspected it when I first heard her telephone message inviting me here. It now appears that this was only the first step in drawing us all out on center board like this. Now I fear that my suspicions were right: The Game has begun anew.’

‘But if this Game ever really existed, if it was so dangerous,’ I protested, ‘why would she risk setting it in motion again, as you’re saying, by inviting us here?’

‘She had no choice,’ said Lily. ‘As in all chess games, it’s White that must have made the first move. Black can only counter. Perhaps her move would be the sudden appearance of the long-sought third part of the puzzle that your mother has left here for us to find. Perhaps we’ll discover some different clues to her strategy and tactics—’

‘But Mother’s never played chess in her life! She hates chess,’ I pointed out.

‘Alexandra,’ said Lily, ‘today – Cat’s birthday, the fourth day of the fourth month – is a critical date in the history of the Game. Your mother is the Black Queen.’

Lily’s tale began with a chess tourney she’d attended with my mother thirty years ago, the first time she and my mother had met my father, Alexander Solarin. During a recess in that match, my father’s opponent had died under mysterious circumstances, which later proved to be murder. This seemingly isolated event, this death at a chess game, would be the first in an onslaught that would soon sweep Lily and my mother into the vortex of the Game.

For several hours, as we three sat in silence, Lily recounted a long and complex story that I can only summarize here.

The Grandmaster’s Tale

One month after that tourney at the Metropolitan Club, Cat Velis departed New York upon a long-planned consulting assignment in North Africa for her firm. A few months later Mordecai, my grandfather and chess coach, sent me to Algiers to join her.

Cat and I knew nothing of this most dangerous of all games in which we ourselves, as we soon discovered, were mere pawns. But Mordecai had long been a player. He knew that Cat had been chosen for a higher calling and that when it came to close maneuvers, she might need my help.

In the Casbah of Algiers, Cat and I met with a mysterious recluse, the widow of the former Dutch consul to Algeria, and a friend of my grandfather, Minnie Renselaas. The Black Queen. She gave us a diary written by a nun during the French Revolution that recounted the history of the Montglane Service and the role that this nun, Mireille, had played in it. Mireille’s diary later proved vital to understanding the nature of the Game.

Minnie Renselaas enlisted Cat and me to penetrate deep into the desert, to the Tassili Mountains, and retrieve eight of the pieces she’d buried there. We braved Saharan sand-storms and pursuit by the secret police, as well as a vicious opponent, the ‘Old Man of the Mountain,’ an Arab named El-Marad who, we soon discovered, was the White King. But at last we found Minnie’s pieces hidden in a cave in the Tassili protected by bats. We clawed in the rubble to extract the eight pieces.

I shall never forget the moment when I first saw their mysterious glow: a King and a Queen, several pawns, a Knight, and a camel, all of a strange gold or a silvery material, and caked with uncut jewels in a rainbow of colors. There was something otherworldly about them.

After many travails, at last we returned with the pieces. We reached a port not far from Algiers, only to be seized by the same dark forces still pursuing us. El-Marad and his thugs kidnapped me, but your mother brought reinforcements to my rescue; she struck El-Marad on the head with her heavy satchel of chess pieces. We escaped and brought the bag of pieces to Minnie Renselaas in the Casbah. But our adventure was far from over.

With Alexander Solarin, Cat and I escaped from Algeria by sea, pursued by a dreadful storm, the Sirocco, that nearly tore our ship apart. During months of boat repairs on an island, we read the diary of the nun Mireille, which enabled us to solve some of the mystery of the Montglane Service. When our ship was ready, we three crossed the Atlantic by sea and arrived in New York.

There we discovered we had not left all the villains behind in Algeria, as we’d hoped. A group of scoundrels lay in wait – my mother and my uncle among them! And another six pieces had been hidden in those jammed drawers in a secretary in my family’s apartment. We defeated the last of the White Team and captured these extra six pieces.

At my grandfather’s house in Manhattan’s Diamond District, we all assembled: Cat Velis, Alexander Solarin, Ladislaus Nim – all of us players on the Black Team. Only one was missing, Minnie Renselaas herself, the Black Queen.

Minnie had left the Game. But she’d left something behind as a parting gift for Cat: the last pages of the nun Mireille’s diary, which revealed the secret of the marvelous chess set. It was a formula that, if solved, could do far more than create or destroy civilizations. It could transform both energy and matter and much, much else.

Indeed, in Mireille’s diary she stated that she had worked alongside the famous physicist, Fourier, in Grenoble to solve the formula herself, and she claimed she had succeeded in 1830, after nearly thirty years. She possessed seventeen pieces – more than half of the set – as well as the cloth, embroidered with symbols, that had once covered the board. The bejeweled chessboard itself had been cut into four pieces and buried in Russia by Catherine the Great. But the Abbess of Montglane, herself imprisoned in Russia soon thereafter, had secretly drawn it from memory on the lining of her abbatial gown, in her own blood. This drawing Mireille also now possessed.

But though Mireille had only had seventeen pieces of the Montglane Service back then, we ourselves now had twenty-six, including those of the opposing team and others that had been buried for many years, as well as the cloth that covered the board – perhaps enough to solve the formula, despite its clear dangers. We were only missing six of the pieces and the board itself. But Cat believed that by hiding the pieces for once and all where no one could ever find them, she could stop this dangerous Game.

As of today, I believe we’ve learned she was mistaken.

When Lily had finished her story, she looked drained. She arose, leaving Zsa-Zsa sacked out like a wet sock in the pile of pillows, and she crossed the room to the desk where the soiled piece of fabric lay open to expose its illustrated chessboard, a painting that we now understood had been drawn, nearly two hundred years ago, in abbatial blood. Lily ran her fingers over the strange array of symbols.

The air in the room was filled with the rich scent of bubbling beef and wine; you could hear the log cracking from time to time. For a very long time, nobody spoke.

At last, it was Vartan who broke the silence.

‘My God,’ he said, his voice low, ‘what this Game has cost you all. It is hard to imagine that such a thing ever existed – or that it might really be happening again. But I don’t understand one thing: If what you say is true – if this chess service is so dangerous; if Alexandra’s mother already owns so many pieces of the puzzle; if the Game has begun again and White has made its first move, but nobody knows who are the players – what would she gain by inviting so many people here today? And do you know what is this formula she spoke of?’

Key was looking at me with an expression suggesting she might already know.

‘I think the answer may be staring us in the face,’ said Key, speaking for the first time. We all turned to look at her, as she sat there beside the piano.

‘Or at least, it’s cooking our dinner,’ she added with a smile. ‘I may not know much about chess, but I do know a lot about calories.’

‘Calories?’ said Lily in astonishment. ‘Like the kind you eat?’

‘There’s no such thing as a calorie,’ I pointed out. I thought I could see where Key might be going with this.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but I beg to differ,’ said Lily, patting her waist. ‘I’ve packed on a few of those nonexistent “things” in my time.’

‘I’m afraid I do not understand,’ Vartan chimed in. ‘We were talking about a dangerous game of chess where people were killed. Now are we discussing food?’

‘A calorie isn’t food,’ I said. ‘It’s a unit of thermal measure. And I think Key here may have just resolved an important problem. My mother knows that Nokomis Key is my only friend here in the valley, and that if I ever had a problem she’d be the first and only one I would turn to, to help resolve it. That’s Key’s job, she’s a calorimetrician. She flies into remote regions and studies the thermal properties of everything from geysers to volcanoes. I think Key’s right. That’s why my mother built this fire: as a big, fat, calorie-laden clue.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Lily. Looking more than exhausted, she went over and swept Key aside. ‘I need to recline for a moment on some of my thermal properties. What on earth are you two talking about?’

Vartan looked lost as well.

‘I’m saying that my mother is underneath that log – or at least, she was,’ I told them. ‘She must have had the tree placed here months ago, on removable props, so when she was ready she could exit through the stone air shaft under the floor and light the fire from below. I think the shaft may vent to a cave just downhill.’

‘Isn’t that a rather Faustian exit?’ said Lily. ‘And what does it have to do with the Montglane Service or the game of chess?’

‘It has nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘This isn’t about a chess game – that’s the whole point, don’t you see?’

‘It has to do with the formula,’ Key pointed out with a smile. This was, after all, her area of expertise. ‘You know, the formula you told us the nun Mireille worked on in Grenoble, with Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The same Fourier who was also the author of The Analytic Theory of Heat.’

When our two brilliant grandmasters sat there like lumps, staring at us with blank expressions, I figured it was time to clarify.

‘Mother didn’t invite us all here and then leave us in the lurch because she was trying to make a clever defense in a chess game,’ I told them. ‘As Lily said, she’s already made her move by inviting us here and leaving that piece of cloth right where she hoped Lily might find it.’

I paused and looked Key in the eye. How right she was – it was time to get cooking, and all those clues Mother had left now seemed to fall into place.

‘Mother invited us here,’ I said, ‘because she wants us to collect the pieces and solve the formula of the Montglane Service.’

‘Did you ever discover what the formula was?’ Key repeated Vartan’s question.

‘Yes, in a way – though I’ve never believed it myself,’ said Lily. ‘Alexandra’s parents and her uncle seemed to think it possible that it was true. You may judge for yourselves from what I’ve already told you. Minnie Renselaas claimed it was true. She claimed she was leaving the Game because of the formula created two hundred years ago. She claimed that she, herself, was the nun Mireille de Remy who’d solved the formula for the elixir of life.’

The Vessel

Hexagram 50: The Vessel

The Vessel means making and using symbols as fire uses wood. Offer something to the spirits through cooking it… This brightens the understanding of the ear and eye and lets you see invisible things.

– Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching

I hid the drawing of the chessboard inside the piano and shut the lid until we could figure out what to do with it. My compadres were unloading their luggage from Key’s car, and Lily had just taken Zsa-Zsa outside in the snow. I stayed indoors to finish cooking our dinner. And to think.

I’d raked the ashes and stuffed more kindling beneath the huge log. As I stirred the Boeuf Bourguignonne, the liquid bubbled away in the copper kettle hanging from its hook above the fire. I added a splash of burgundy and stock to thin the broth.

My mind was bubbling pretty actively, too. But instead of clarifying something within my mental vessel, the bubbling seemed only to have congealed into a lumpy mass at the bottom of the pot. After hearing Lily’s tale and its outcome, I knew I had too many ingredients interacting with one another. And each new idea only seemed to ignite more questions.

For instance, if there really was such a powerful formula as this longevity elixir that some nun had been able to solve nearly two hundred years ago, then why hadn’t anyone done it since – namely my parents? While Lily had indicated that she’d never believed the whole story herself, she claimed that the others had. But Uncle Slava and my parents were all professional scientists. If their team had put together so many pieces of the puzzle, why would they hide them instead of trying to solve it themselves?

But it seems, as Lily told us, that no one knew where the pieces of the Montglane Service had been buried and who had buried them. As the Black Queen, my mother was the only one who knew to which of the four she’d assigned each piece for hiding. And my father alone, with his prodigious chess memory, was the one she allowed to know where the pieces were actually hidden. Now that my father was dead and my mother was missing, the trail was cold. The pieces could likely never be found again.

Which led to my next question: If Mother really wanted us to solve this formula now, thirty years later – and if she was passing the torch to me, as all indications seemed to suggest – then why had she hidden all the pieces so no one could ever find them? Why had she failed to include some kind of map?

A map.

On the other hand, maybe Mother had left a map, I thought, in the form of the drawing of that chessboard and those other messages I’d already retrieved. I touched the chess piece that still lay concealed in my pocket: the Black Queen. Too many clues pointed to this one piece. Especially Lily’s story. Somehow she must tie it all together. But how? I knew I needed to ask Lily one more critical –

I heard tramping and voices in the mudroom. I hung my soup ladle on an overhead hook and went to help with the bags. I instantly wished I hadn’t.

Lily had picked up Zsa-Zsa from the snow, but couldn’t get back inside. Key wasn’t exaggerating when she’d mentioned on the phone my aunt’s pile of designer luggage: valises were piled everywhere, even blocking the inner door. How had they ever fit all this into one simple Aston Martin?

‘How did you bring all this over from London? The Queen Mary?’ Key was asking Lily.

‘Some of these can’t go up the spiral stairs,’ I pointed out. ‘But we can’t leave them here.’

Vartan and Key agreed to haul only those that Lily had designated as most critical up the stairs. They’d remove the excess bags to the spot of my choosing: under the billiard table, where no one would trip over them.

The moment they’d departed the mudroom with the first load, I crawled over the piles of bags, pulled Lily and Zsa-Zsa inside, and shut the outer doors.

‘Aunt Lily,’ I said, ‘you told us that no one but my father knew where each of the pieces was hidden. But we do know a few things. You know which pieces you buried or hid yourself, and Uncle Slava does, too, with his own. If you could remember which pieces your team was missing at the end, then we’d only have to figure out my parents’ two parts of the puzzle.’

‘I was only given two of the pieces myself to hide,’ Lily admitted. ‘That leaves twenty-four pieces for the others. But only your mother knows if they each got eight. For the six missing pieces, I’m not sure after all these years that my memory is perfect. But I think I recall that we were missing four White pieces: two silver pawns, a Knight, and the White King. And the two Black pieces were a gold pawn and a Bishop.’

I paused, not certain that I’d heard correctly.

‘Then…the pieces that Mother captured and that you all buried or hid included everything else except those six?’ I said.

If Vartan’s story was true, there was one piece that must have been missing from the cache they’d buried thirty years ago. He’d seen it, alongside my father, at Zagorsk. Hadn’t he?

Vartan and Key were coming back down the spiral stairs at the end of the room. I couldn’t wait – I had to know now.

‘Your team possessed the Black Queen?’ I asked her.

‘Oh yes, that was the most important piece of them all, according to Mireille’s diary,’ said Lily. ‘The Abbess of Montglane took it to Russia herself, along with the chessboard she’d cut into parts. The Black Queen was in the possession of Catherine the Great, then seized by her son Paul on the empress’s death. Finally it was passed to Mireille by Catherine’s grandson, Emperor Alexander of Russia. Cat and I found it among Minnie’s cache in that Tassili cave.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked her, my voice weakening along with my grip on the situation.

‘How could I forget, with all those bats in that cave?’ said Lily. ‘My memory might not be perfect about the missing pieces, but I held the Black Queen in my own hands. It was so important, I feel sure your mother must have buried that piece herself.’

My temples were throbbing again, and I felt that same churning in my stomach. But Key and Vartan had just arrived for another haul of bags.

‘You look as if you’ve just seen the proverbial ghost,’ Key said, regarding me strangely.

She could say that again. But it was a real one: the ghost of my dead father at Zagorsk. My suspicions were back in full gear. How could Vartan’s and Lily’s versions of the Black Queen both be true? Was this part of my mother’s message? One thing was sure: The Black Queen in my pocket wasn’t the only one ‘behind the eight ball.’

As I was thinking this over, my ears were assaulted by the deafening clamor of the fire-engine bell ringing just above the front door. Vartan stared up at it in horror. Some visitor, undaunted at the prospect of having his hand bitten off by the bear outside, had reached into its maw and twisted our unique front-door chime.

Zsa-Zsa started yapping hysterically at the noisy bell. Lily retreated with her into the lodge.

I shoved aside a few bags and stood on tiptoe to peer out through the eagle’s glass eyeballs. There on our doorstep was a massed gaggle of folks in hooded parkas and furs. Though I couldn’t see faces, their identities weren’t to be a mystery for long: Across the snowy expanse I glimpsed with sinking heart the BMW parked just beside my car. It was sporting vanity plates that read SAGESSE.

Vartan, from behind, whispered in my ear. ‘Is it someone you know?’

As if anyone we didn’t know well would ever make the trek to this place.

‘It is someone I’d like to forget I know,’ I told him, sotto voce. ‘But it does seem to be someone who’s been invited.’

Sage Livingston wasn’t a girl who might graciously accept cooling her heels on the front doorstep, especially if she’d arrived with an entourage. With a sigh of resignation I threw open the doors. I was in for yet another unpleasant surprise.

‘Oh no – the Botany Club.’ Key took the words out of my mouth.

She meant the botanically named Livingstons, all of them – Basil, Rosemary, and Sage – a family of whom Key liked to quip: ‘If they’d had more children, they’d have called them Parsley and Thyme.’

But in my youth, they’d never seemed much of a joke. Now they were one more puzzle on my mother’s invitation list.

‘Darling! It’s been truly forever!’ gushed Rosemary, as she swept into our constricted mudroom before the rest.

Sporting dark glasses and swathed in her extravagant, hooded lynx cape, Sage’s mother looked even more youthful than I’d remembered. She briefly enfolded me in her cloud of endangered animal skins and bussed me with an ‘air kiss’ at either cheek.

She was followed by my old archnemesis, her flawlessly perfect ash-blond daughter, Sage. Sage’s dad, Basil, due to the clear constrictions of our broom-closet entry chamber, lagged with another man just outside the door – no doubt our ‘new neighbor’ – a craggy, sun-leathered chap in jeans, sheepskin jacket, western boots, and hand-blocked Stetson. Alongside the haughty Basil with his silvery sideburns and haute couture Livingston women, our new arrival seemed somewhat out of place at this ball.

‘Aren’t we expected to come inside?’ Sage demanded by way of cheery greeting, though it was the first time we’d laid eyes on each other in years.

She glanced past her mother toward the inner doors where Key stood, and raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow as if astonished she should find her here. There’d been little love lost over the years between Nokomis Key and Sage Livingston, for a variety of reasons.

No one seemed about to remove wet togs or to introduce me to our external guest. Vartan parted the wall of hanging coats and furs, stepped over some luggage, and addressed Rosemary with a charm I didn’t know chess players possessed.

‘Please permit me to remove your wrap,’ he offered in that soft voice I’d always regarded as sinister. Under these close conditions, I realized it might be interpreted slightly differently in a boudoir.

Sage herself, a longtime collector of designer men as well as clothes, shot Vartan a meaningful look that might bring a bull elephant to its knees. He didn’t seem to notice, but offered to take her coat as well. I introduced them. Then I squeezed past this intimate threesome, heading outside to greet the two men. I shook hands with Basil.

‘I thought you and Rosemary were out of town and couldn’t make it,’ I mentioned.

‘We changed our plans,’ Basil replied with a smile. ‘We wouldn’t have missed your mother’s first birthday party for the world.’

And just how did he know that it was?

‘So sorry, we seem to be here earlier than expected,’ Basil’s companion said as he peered into the luggage-and-coat-jammed entryway.

He had a warm gravelly voice and was much younger than Basil, perhaps in his mid-thirties. Pulling off his leather gloves, he tucked them beneath his arm and took my hand in both of his. His palms were firm and calloused from hard work.

‘I’m your new neighbor, Galen March,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’m the person your mother convinced to buy Sky Ranch. And you must be Alexandra. I’m so glad Cat invited me today so I could meet you. She’s told me a good deal about you.’

And nothing at all about you, I thought.

I thanked him briefly and headed back to help clear a path for the new arrivals.

Things just got stranger and stranger. I knew Sky Ranch well. Well enough to wonder why anyone would ever dream of buying it. It was the last and only private parcel in these parts. Over twenty thousand acres, with a price tag of at least fifteen million dollars, it spread across mountaintops between the reservations, national forest, and our family lands. But it was all bleak rock high above timberline, with no water and air so thin you couldn’t raise herds or grow crops. The land had sat idle for so many decades that locals called it Ghost Ranch. The only buyers who could afford it today were those who could exploit it in other ways – ski areas or mineral rights. And these wouldn’t be the sort that my mother would ever welcome to her neighborhood, let alone to her birthday party.

Mr Galen March’s story deserved investigation, but not right now. Since I couldn’t postpone the inevitable forever, I invited Basil and Galen to enter. With the men in my wake, I elbowed my way through the mudroom past Vartan Azov and the doting Livingston ladies, grabbed up a few more valises for Key to stash beneath the billiard table, and went back inside to stir my pot of stew.

No sooner had I set foot inside than I was confronted by Lily.

‘How do you know these people? Why are they here?’ she hissed.

‘They were invited,’ I told her, mystified by her closed expression. ‘Our neighbors, the Livingstons. I was only expecting their daughter, Sage – you heard the message. They used to be social muckety-mucks back East, but they’ve lived out here for years. They own Redlands, their ranch just near here, on the Colorado Plateau.’

‘They own a good deal more than that,’ Lily informed me under her breath.

But Basil Livingston had just arrived to join us. I was about to introduce him when Basil surprisingly bowed over Lily’s hand. When he stood, his distinguished face seemed also to have taken on a tight mask.

‘Hello, Basil,’ said Lily. ‘What brings you so far from London? As you see, Vartan and I had to leave rather suddenly ourselves. Oh, and tell me, were you able to continue the chess tournament after the dreadful death of your colleague, Taras Petrossian?’

A Closed Position

A position with extensive interlocked pawn chains and little room for manœuvre by the pieces. Most men will still be on the board and most of the pieces will be behind the pawns creating a cramped position with few opportunities for exchanges.

– Edward R. Brace, An Illustrated Dictionary of Chess

The sun sets early in the mountains. By the time we’d gotten the guests and luggage moved inside, a silvery glow was all that still sifted through the skylights above, casting the animal carvings overhead into sinister silhouettes.

Galen March seemed to be quite taken with Key the moment he met her. He offered to help and followed her around, pitching in as she turned on the lamps around the octagon, threw a fresh bedsheet over the billiard table, and drew up the stools and benches all around it.

Lily explained my mother’s absence to the newcomers by claiming a family crisis, which, technically, it really was. She lied to the others, saying Cat had phoned with apologies and the wish that we’d enjoy ourselves in her absence.

Since we lacked the necessary number of wineglasses, Vartan filled some teacups with vodka from the tray on the sideboard and some coffee cups with hearty red wine. A few sips seemed to loosen everyone up a bit.

Taking our seats around the table, it was clear we had too many players to sort things out – a party of eight: Key and Lily and Vartan, the three Livingstons, myself and Galen March. With everyone looking a bit uneasy, we raised our cups and glasses in toast to our absent hostess.

The only thing we all appeared to have in common was my mother’s invitation. But I knew well from my experiences in chess that appearances can be deceiving.

For instance, Basil Livingston had been unconvincingly vague with Lily about the role he’d so recently played at that chess tournament in London. He was just a silent partner, he said, a financier; he’d hardly even known the late tournament organizer, Taras Petrossian.

But Basil did seem to be on a first-name basis with both Lily and Vartan Azov. How well did he know them? How likely was it to have been mere coincidence that all four of them, including Rosemary, had been in Mayfair two weeks ago, on the very day that Taras Petrossian was killed?

‘Do you enjoy chess?’ Vartan was asking Sage Livingston, who’d seated herself as closely as possible beside him.

Sage shook her head and was about to reply when I jumped up and suggested that I start serving dinner. The thing was, no one in this group except Vartan and Lily knew about my life as the little queen of chess. Or why I’d quit.

I went around the makeshift dining table, dishing up boiled potatoes, tiny peas, and the Boeuf Bourguignonne. I preferred this vantage point: Moving around the table, I could listen in and read the expressions of the others without focusing attention on myself.

Under the circumstances, this seemed an absolute necessity. After all, it was my mother herself who’d invited them all here today. This might be my only opportunity to observe these seven all together. And if even a part of Vartan’s revelations were true, someone here might have played a part in my mother’s disappearance, my father’s death, or Taras Petrossian’s murder.

‘So you finance these chess tournaments?’ Galen March commented to Basil across the table. ‘An unusual hobby. You must like the game.’

Interesting choice of words, I thought, as I ladled up Basil’s stew.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘This Petrossian chap arranged that tournament. I knew him through my venture capital firm, based in Washington, D.C. We finance all sorts of business ventures around the world. When the Berlin Wall fell, we helped former Iron Curtain folks – entrepreneurs like Petrossian – get on their feet. During glasnost, perestroika, he owned a chain of restaurants and clubs. Used chess as a publicity stunt, I think. When Putin’s troops cracked down on capitalists – oligarchs, they called them – we helped him move his operation farther west. Simple as that.’

Basil took a bite of his Bourguignonne as I moved on to Sage’s plate.

‘So you mean,’ Lily said drily, ‘that it was really Petrossian’s interest in Das Kapital, not in the Game, that got him killed?’

‘The police said those rumors were quite ungrounded,’ Basil shot back, ignoring her other implications. ‘The official report said Petrossian died of heart failure. But you know the British press with their conspiracy theories,’ he added, sipping his wine. ‘They’ll likely never stop questioning even Princess Diana’s death.’

At the mention of the ‘official report,’ Vartan had slipped a guarded sideways glance at me. I didn’t need to guess what he was thinking. I ladled some extra peas onto his plate and moved on to Lily, just as Galen March chimed in again.

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