by Frey, James
“What’s the name of this place?” I ask Oswald Brecht. The scientist is walking ahead of me, humming to himself. After years spent in a Soviet prison, he is now a free man, thanks to me and Ariadne, and he seems excited to be out of there.
“It has no name,” he says. “Not officially. The people who showed it to us call it yildiz erkekler şehir, the city of the star men.”
Hearing him say yildiz, the woman who is leading us turns and flashes a smile. Her name is also Yildiz. She’s very old. Ancient. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody told me that she’d helped Noah load the animals onto his ark. Her face is a nest of wrinkles, her eyes cloudy, her mouth toothless. Her hair is white and her body is bent. Yet she walks as quickly as any of us.
“Yildiz,” she says. She points to the sky, which like her eyes is also gray and cloudy. “Star.”
Ahead of her is a girl of 12 or 13. Her name is Kelebek, and she’s skinny as a laundry line and serious as Warren Spahn standing on the pitcher’s mound facing a batter. Her dark eyes watch everything, and I haven’t seen her smile once since we met her six hours ago. She’s related to Yildiz in some way that I haven’t quite figured out yet. She calls her “grandmother,” but this doesn’t seem likely given the great difference in their ages.
“I was surprised to find her still living,” Brecht says to me in a low voice, nodding at Yildiz. “She was one of the guides when we first came here, in the summer of 1944. I did not expect to find her again. We are lucky.”
We found Yildiz in a Turkish city called Malatya, where Brecht had directed us so that we could look for a guide who knew this part of Cappadocia. Too much time had passed since his last visit here for him to remember how to find this place again on his own, and anyway he had been brought here and returned by an SS military escort, and so had only a vague recollection of where it was. When he admitted this, I worried we might not find the city at all. But then he discovered Yildiz sitting in the same shop where he had last seen her, selling cups of tea. Kelebek was with her. The girl spoke English well enough that, between that and the Turkish that we know, negotiations were undertaken and an agreement reached for them to escort us here.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I ask Ari, who is walking beside me. I really want to take her hand and hold it, but we’ve decided it’s best to keep our feelings for each other to ourselves. Well, Ari has decided, and I’m going along with her, although really I would kiss her right in front of everyone and not care what any of them think about it.
She shakes her head. “It’s beautiful. It reminds me of the wildest parts of Greece, but even stranger.”
“It’s kind of like the badlands of North Dakota,” I tell her. “We did a session there when I was training. I felt like I was on another planet.”
“The landscape was formed by volcanos,” Brecht tells us. “Over the centuries, wind and rain wore away the deposits, leaving these towers behind.”
“It is not the only place like it,” Ott says, as if he’s seen a million of these cities. I shoot him a look, but he’s too busy drinking from the flask of water he’s carrying to notice.
“That is so,” says Brecht. “There are a number of these underground cities scattered throughout Cappadocia.”
“Underground?” I say, looking at the rock towers that go up.
“These so-called fairy towers are spectacular,” says Brecht. “But the truly remarkable parts are underground. The rock is fairly easy to dig away, and the cities extend to great depths beneath the surface, in some instances hundreds of meters.”
“Who built them?” I ask.
Brecht smiles. “That depends who you ask. Most archaeologists will tell you they were built by early Christians, to be used as places of refuge from persecution. And many of the underground cities do feature churches, some with beautiful frescoes painted inside them. But this place is different.”
“Different how?” Ari asks.
Brecht raises his eyebrows and grins like an excited kid. “It’s best to show you.”
We keep walking. We have been traveling for several days, ever since we left Moscow after springing Brecht from Taganka Prison. The journey has been a difficult one, made more difficult, at least for me, by the presence of Karl Ott. Since he betrayed us in Moscow, attempting to turn us over to Charles Kenney in exchange for a reward, I have been even more suspicious of him than I was to begin with. Kenney himself is another worry. Claiming to be working for my own council, he turned out to be a rogue operative who had somehow found out about Endgame and decided he could make a profit by doing business with the lines. But which lines he made contact with, and what kind of deals he made with them, we don’t know. And since I pushed him off the roof of a building, he can’t tell us.
I don’t really want Ott with us at all. We needed him in Moscow, where his connections helped us get into Taganka Prison, and he helped us because we were also supposed to be freeing his father. Unfortunately, his father was killed in the attempt, and Ott turned on us. At first, he wanted to return to France on his own to check on his family. He was worried that someone else looking for the weapon might harm them or kidnap them to use as a bargaining chip. If I didn’t think he might be running back to try to make another deal with someone else, I might have let him go. Then, after Brecht said he wanted to see his daughter again and make sure she and his grandson were safe, I thought we might all be going back to France. And since his daughter was married to my brother and his grandson is my nephew, I get being worried about them. But Endgame doesn’t stop so you can check in on your family, so after some back and forth Ari and I convinced them that finding the second set of weapon plans would be the best way to make sure they got to see their loved ones again. The plan now is that once we find what we’ve come for, we’ll go back to France and figure out our next moves.
So all of us are still together, although uneasily. Even though Kenney is dead, we don’t know what information he might already have relayed back to the Minoans. Nor do we know if it is true that the Minoans, or someone else with whom Kenney was working, have taken Lottie and Bernard. Since we have no way of contacting them, we can’t know for certain. We may be racing against a clock we cannot see. All we can do is hope that we’ve made the right choice.
One thing that I am not at all surprised about is that the Minoans have put a price on Ari’s head. I’m sure Kenney wasn’t lying about that. What worries me more is that Cassandra didn’t make an appearance in Moscow. I’d have thought that once she knew where Ari and I were going, she would have made it a point to come after us. Since we haven’t seen her, that means that she either didn’t arrive in time to confront us, or that she has another plan. One way or another, I sense that we will meet again, and soon.
“If people know about this place, why hasn’t it been studied like the other underground cities?” Ari asks.
“It’s thought to be unlucky,” Brecht answers. “Although people still reside in many of the underground cities, this one was abandoned centuries ago. The locals avoid it, and as you saw, there are no populated towns for many kilometers in every direction. That is not by accident. They fear this place. They say it’s cursed.”
“Cursed?” Ari says. “How so?”
“It’s said that if anyone disturbs the secrets hidden here, he will suffer greatly.”
“Just like in The Mummy,” I say.
Yildiz turns again. “Boris Karloff!” she says, and gives me a thumbs-up. I return the gesture, and she cackles happily. Kelebek, watching us, scowls.
“Rather like that, yes,” says Brecht. “Well, more like the real-life Lord Carnarvon, who financed the expedition to find Tut’s tomb and died shortly after it was opened.”
“Carnarvon died from a mosquito bite, not a curse,” Ott says, snorting. “I suppose Hollywood didn’t find that interesting enough.”
I ignore him. “But you’ve already opened this particular place, haven’t you?” I ask Brecht.
“Yes and no. We did
a bit of excavation. But we were … interrupted.”
I stop walking, which forces Ari and Ott to stop as well. Brecht turns and looks at us. Ahead of him, Yildiz and Kelebek keep going. “What?” Brecht says, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Despite the cold, he is sweating.
“What have you not told us?” I say.
“Nothing,” he says. “I told you that the second half of the weapon plans are here.”
“Yes,” I say. “And do you know where, exactly, they are?”
“No,” he admits. “Not exactly.”
Ari and I look at each other. Ott curses. Hearing him, Yildiz and Kelebek stop and wait to see what is happening.
“You might have mentioned this earlier,” I tell Brecht.
“I told you the truth in Moscow,” he says. “Just not, perhaps, the whole of it.”
“What makes you so sure the plans are here, then?” Ott asks, voicing what we are all wondering.
“Information gathered at the site where the first set of plans was found,” he says. “There was a map. It showed the location of this city, as well as details of the underground rooms.”
This is better news. “And you recall the details of this map.”
“Regrettably, it was destroyed,” he says. “Shortly after we arrived here to begin our search.”
“Destroyed?” Ari says.
“By one of the other guides,” Brecht explains. “He claimed he was doing it to prevent us from causing a disaster. He was shot for his troubles, but the damage was done. The map was gone.”
“And there was no copy?” I say.
“None. And no further work was done.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“The tide of the war was turning against our employers,” Brecht explains. “All available minds and bodies were recalled to Germany in an attempt to defend what remained of the Reich.”
“Then how are we going to find the plans now?” Ari says.
“By doing what archaeologists and adventurers have done since the first robber broke into the first tomb,” Brecht says. “Following the clues.”
My heart sinks. “You’ve had four days to tell us this.”
“If I had, you wouldn’t have come,” he says. “And I couldn’t risk losing my daughter and grandson.”
This I understand—although he’s wrong. Even if he’d told us that we were coming on an expedition with no guaranteed outcome, I would have come. Ari and I have agreed that we need to do whatever we can to make sure the weapon doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Next to me, Ari makes a noise suggesting she is less than happy with this new revelation. I put my arm around her. She tenses for a moment, then relaxes against me. “Come on,” I say. “It will be like a Tintin adventure.”
“You know the Tintin books?” She sounds surprised.
“How do you think I learned French?” I say. Then I address Brecht. “Where do we start?”
“Up there,” he says, pointing to one of the rock towers.
We begin walking again, following Yildiz as she climbs a flight of steep steps carved out of the rock and passes through a small doorway. She enters easily, but most of us have to duck to avoid striking our heads on the lintel. Inside, another set of stairs curls up the side of the tower. Yildiz is mounting them, with Kelebek behind her. Brecht follows her, then Ari, then Ott. I bring up the rear. We slowly rise up the tower, our speed dictated by Yildiz’s pace, corkscrewing around and around until we empty out into a small chamber at the very top. Narrow windows spaced around one half of the room let in light and air. The other wall space is taken up by a series of crude paintings. I examine them along with the others. There is a central figure painted in white and blue. It is humanoid in shape, but without discernible features. Around it are many smaller figures, painted in brown and yellow.
“They look as if they’re worshipping it,” I say. “Is it a god?”
Yildiz says something in her language. Kelebek says, “It is one of the star men.”
I look at Ari, and an unspoken question passes between us: Does she mean the Makers?
Yildiz says something more, and again Kelebek translates. “The stories say the star men first came many centuries ago. They brought with them secrets that they shared with the people here. They taught them to build cities.”
“Has she ever seen one?” I ask.
Kelebek says something to Yildiz. Yildiz shakes her head and replies.
“No,” Kelebek says. “She says she is not that old. They stopped coming long before that. But she has seen lights. When she was a girl. Lights from their ships in the heavens.”
I don’t contradict the old woman. Perhaps she has seen lights. Many people have. I doubt very much they belonged to spaceships of any kind.
“Why are we looking at this?” Ott asks, sounding impatient.
“We’re looking at this,” Brecht says, walking to another part of the painting. He points to another group of brown-and-yellow figures. Some of them are holding what appear to be weapons, which are aimed at one of the tall blue-and-white figures. Yellow light appears to be bursting from the weapons and surrounding the taller figure.
Yildiz speaks.
“The people turned against the star men,” Kelebek says. “They called them demons and killed them with the star men’s own weapons. But then they turned against one another as well, arguing about what should be done with the weapons and the other technology the star men left behind. Many died. And so some of them who were wiser than the others destroyed the weapons to stop the fighting.”
Again Yildiz says something. Her voice never wavers, as if she has told the story many times before.
“But two of the people—sisters—hid what was left of the weapons, each putting some of the parts in a secret place known only to her,” Kelebek translates. “Along with the instructions for building it. In case it should be needed again. One of the sisters was our ancestor, and her story has been passed down from mother to daughter until now.”
“I believe one set of pieces was hidden in the other city, where we found the first set of plans,” Brecht tells us when Kelebek is finished. “I believe the second set is here, hidden somewhere below.”
“But how do we find it without a map?” Ott says.
“A map would be helpful, yes,” Brecht says. “But perhaps we don’t need one. Before the map was destroyed, I was able to identify one point of interest, what I believe is a door. But I couldn’t figure out how to open it.”
“And now you have?” I ask.
“I had a lot of time to think while I was in Taganka,” Brecht says. “And it occurred to me that the answer might be right in front of us. Do you have the box with the pieces?”
I nod. We’ve brought it with us, and I’m carrying it in a pack on my back. Now I set the pack down, open it, and remove the box.
“Open it, please,” Brecht says.
I unlatch the lid and raise it. Inside, the pieces of the weapon rest inside their compartments. Brecht comes over and looks at them, then takes one out.
“All this time, we thought these were pieces of the weapon,” he says. “But I think this one may be more than that.”
“What do you think it is?” I ask.
Brecht turns the piece in his fingers. “I believe it is a key.”
Ariadne
“You believe it is a key?”
I look at Brecht, who is gazing at the piece in his hand with a peculiar expression. I wonder what he’s thinking. Myself, I am thinking that we might have come a long way for nothing. I hope I am wrong.
Brecht holds the key up as if it’s a holy relic. “I do,” he says. “Of course, we won’t know until we put it in the door.”
“Which is where?” Boone asks him. He sounds impatient, and I can tell he is annoyed. As am I. Brecht has just made our mission even more difficult.
Brecht points a finger toward the floor. “Down there,” he informs us. “In the underground city.”
Boone sighs weari
ly. “Don’t tell me,” he says. “You’re not sure exactly where it is.”
Brecht shrugs. “I have an idea,” he says. “The map was not entirely specific, so we might have to try a number of possibilities.”
Suddenly I feel very weary. These are questions Boone and I should have asked before we even began the journey here. That we didn’t is worrying to me. It suggests that we are losing our edge as Players. Or perhaps we are afraid to admit that we are running out of options, and are hoping that if we only keep moving forward, everything will be all right. More and more, I am finding it difficult to separate my personal feelings from what I should do as a Player of Endgame. Then I remind myself that as far as my line is concerned, I am not a Player anymore. Now I am Playing for myself alone, or perhaps for myself and Boone. Maybe even for humanity itself. But to what end? I still don’t know. But something keeps me Playing. I want to win, even if I don’t know what winning means anymore.
“I know where it is.”
We all look at the girl, Kelebek. She is standing beside the old woman.
“The door,” she says, in case we have not understood her meaning. “I know where it is.”
Yildiz says something in rapid-fire Turkish. I don’t understand all of it, but I get that she’s telling the girl to be quiet. She sounds almost fearful. Kelebek silences her with a curt nod of her head, then says, “My friends and I have spent many hours here. I can take you to the door.”
“You play here?” Brecht says. “Despite the legends?”
“I am not afraid of legends,” Kelebek says.
Brecht laughs. “Brave girl,” he says. “Very well, then. Let’s be on our way.”
Kelebek shakes her head. “It is getting dark,” she says. “We must wait until morning.”
“What difference does it make?” Ott asks. “Underground it’s always dark. We’ll have to use flashlights whether it’s day or night.”
“We won’t,” the girl says. “You’ll see. Tomorrow. Tonight, we camp.”
She doesn’t wait for a reply from any of us, but turns and walks out of the room and down the stairs. Brecht laughs again. “I suppose we have no choice,” he says, and starts off after Kelebek.