The Eight: The Fire Part 2

'The Baba has spoken, but he is weary,' the pasha told the group. Then he held out his hands, for little Haidee 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 frk clk 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 Haidee, 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 s.h.i.+p 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.

'Haidee must reveal to this man who she really is,' the pasha told them.

'Who I am?' said Haidee, 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 Haidee, '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 Haidee'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 Haidee'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.'

Haidee 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 ca.n.a.l 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 la.s.s. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and ma.s.sive tree trunks c.h.i.n.ked 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 compa.s.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Dine call Dibe 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 Dinetah 'Home of the Dine,' 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 pa.s.senger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-year-old front doors. These huge doors two ma.s.sive 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 gla.s.s 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 h.e.l.l 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: 61526394.

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: 16253649.

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 nutsh.e.l.l 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 voil! 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 apres-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 ma.s.sive 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 a.s.sortment 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 part.i.tioned sleeping s.p.a.ce. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed the receiver from atop Mother's British campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.

'Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this G.o.dforsaken 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, I STILL DON'T! My car's by the road someplace near a town that promotes itself as the next stop from h.e.l.l; 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!'