Part 17 (1/2)

”Or north?” Skarda asked.

”Maybe!” Excitement animated her voice. ”So we have air on top, fire on the two points under it. And then here, the lower tip on the left is earth and the one on the right is water.”

Skarda traced a finger over the pentagram shape on the Tablet. ”What are these?” He was pointing at faint letters, smaller than the rest of the text, below the bottom arms of the pentagram.

She shook her head in frustration. ”I don't know. They're not part of the main text. The words translate to 'marching soldiers'. Whatever that means.”

His face changed with a new thought. Getting up, he crossed to the railing of the terrace and stared out over the city. The sky was gilded green and gold, the horizon littered with purple stratus clouds, their edges flushed rosy-pink by the dying sun. Golden light glinted off the broken dome of St. Peter's.

Suddenly he laughed out loud. He snapped his fingers and swung around. ”We're looking for a map, right?”

For a brief moment Flinders frowned, staring at him, then realization hit her like a blow. She stared at him as if she were reading his mind. ”Yeah...a map!”

Watching them, April suddenly grinned. ”The symbols...” she said. ”They're points on a map!”

”Right,” he acknowledged. ”But it still leaves us in the dark. The world's a big place. Where do we start?”

”Well, here's goes another long shot,” Flinders said, her voice quickening. ”We know that Alexander took the Tablet with him on his conquests. What if he himself figured out the pentagram symbols, just like we did-only he knew where to look on the map? And what if he used the information to find the source of the isomer ore? There's another story that a youth named Balinas found the Tablet hidden in a cave in Tyana, in Cappadocia-the same Balinas referred to in the Kitab Balaniyus al-Hakim fi'l-`Ilal translation. But what if it wasn't the actual Tablet that he found, which we now know Alexander carried with him until he died, but instead was the place where the Atlanteans mined the isomer?”

Skarda grinned, getting caught up in her enthusiasm. ”Where is Cappadocia?”

”In modern-day Turkey.”

”Which borders the Black Sea,” April said.

”Curiouser and curiouser,” he said. ”We need a map.”

___.

Ten minutes later Skarda spread out the map of Turkey he'd had brought up from a tourist shop in the hotel lobby. Beside him, Flinders studied the topography of the central Anatolian plateau.

”Okay...” she said. ”Here's Nigde, and just to the south is Kemerhisar, where the ruins of Tyana are, about three miles south of town. The problem is, the entire area is riddled with caves and underground caverns. So how do we fit the pentagram to locate the right spot?”

He frowned in concentration. ”And what's our scale? The size of the pentagram could be small or it could be huge.”

April leaned forward, tapping a finger on two points on the map. ”What are these?” She was looking at what were clearly mountains, at an equal distance east and west of an imaginary line running straight north of Tyana.

”That's Mt. Erciyes and Mt. Hasan. Mt. Erciyes is the highest mountain in central Anatolia. They're extinct volcanoes.”

Skarda straightened, exchanging a glance with April.

Flinders looked up, catching their expressions. Then her jaw dropped. ”Fire!”

Laying a square of acetate over the map, Skarda sketched in the symbols for fire over the two volcanoes. ”Okay. Now we have the scale,” he said. Quickly he sketched in the shape of a pentagram with thirty-six degree angles, then positioned the acetate again. ”Okay...we have 'Air' at the top, meaning up or north. Then fire for the volcanoes. Then here at the bottom is 'Earth'. What can that be?”

”Maybe some kind of natural hill?” April suggested.

”Could be. A commonly-known landmark maybe. And the last symbol is 'water'. But there's no water there.”

”Maybe a well?” Flinders said. ”Or a dried-up river?”

Skarda nodded. ”Okay...then where is the isomer?” He jabbed his finger at the map. ”I'll bet it's right here. Right at the center of the pentagram.”

Flinders peered. ”It looks like it's straight north of the ruins of Tyana.”

”What about the 'marching soldiers'?” April asked.

He turned to her and grinned. ”Maybe we'll find out when we get there.”

THIRTY-FOUR.

Cappadocia, Turkey IT was early in the morning when they took an Alitalia flight from Rome to Instanbul's Ataturk Airport where Skarda haggled with a dealer to buy a used Land Rover for cash with no paperwork. Through one of OSR's contacts, April tracked down an ex-pat Army sergeant in the city who was running a profitable business selling surplus weapons. She filled the trunk with a case containing a stripped-down Steyr AUG-CSL a.s.sault rifle, an RPG-76 Komar grenade launcher, a Glock 9mm pistol, and a dual-sheath chest rig for carrying twin Fusion Fulcrum throwing knives. Now, almost four hundred miles east of Istanbul and the dazzling blue waters of the Aegean they were driving through an ochre-colored, flat plateau of volcanic tufa scarred by the folds of deep valleys and vast ravines that from their far vantage point looked like waves frozen in time. In the distance, undulating folded mountains coruscated with the colors of amber, rose, and gold in the s.h.i.+fting light, backed by the serrated, snow-capped Ala Daglar range, its peaks muted blue and hazy by atmospheric perspective.

To Skarda, the landscape looked surreal, like driving across the surface of the moon. Millions of years of wind and rain had eroded the soft tufa into multi-colored, conelike shapes and phallic-looking obelisks capped with black basalt hoods. Some rose as high as one hundred feet above the plain.

”They're called peri bacalari,” Flinders said, pointing at a cl.u.s.ter of rock formations that looked like a grove of giant mushrooms. ”Fairy chimneys. People have actually hollowed them out and lived in them in the past. Whole cities, even. They still use them as storerooms for grapes, lemons, and potatoes.”

They reached Nigde just before noon. After a quick lunch at the Grand Hotel, they climbed back into the Land Rover and in a few minutes were speeding over a road that angled southwest through the furrowed landscape to Bor. Three miles further south lay the small town of Kemerhisar.

Skarda consulted his map. ”It looks like the ruins are on the north edge of town.”

In the rear seat Flinders was browsing through pages on the laptop. ”Wow,” she said, ”there's not much left. Maybe a pillar or two and a Roman aqueduct.”

April glanced back at her. ”At least it's a starting point. We've got to find those marching soldiers.”

The ruins turned out to be an arched limestone aqueduct from the reign of Caracalla and a network of Roman baths scattered over the three hills between the towns of Baheli and Kemerhisar. April parked the Land Rover in a crushed-stone lot and they climbed out into the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. The heat hit Skarda like a force field, causing p.r.i.c.kly sweat to instantly break out on his arms and between his shoulder blades. Taking a slug from his water bottle, he pulled their packs from the rear seat while April popped open the trunk to retrieve the weapons.

To mask their presence, they'd decided to leave the Land Rover and make the trek to the site on foot. But he was worried about Flinders. Even though the excitement of their quest was driving her, the stress was carving lines around her eyes.

He handed her her pack, but she was staring off into the distance, a look of wonderment on her face. ”Earth!” she shouted, clapping her hands. He turned to look in the direction she was pointing, seeing a low, rounded hill topped with the remains of two marble pillars.

”It's the Hill of Semiramis,” she explained. ”She was an a.s.syrian queen, if she existed as an historical person at all. It's possible that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built for her. She may have founded Tyana, so certainly the hill named after her would have been regarded as a local landmark.”

Skarda studied the map. ”Okay, I'll buy that. It looks like there a valley a bit east of here called 'Emli'. A valley can mean a dried-up river.”

”So we're on the right track!”

”Let's hope so.”

April grunted her impatience. ”All right, let's get going. Straight north.”

Shrugging into the knife sheath, she rammed the Glock into the waistband of her jeans and slung the Komar over her shoulder. Then she picked up the steel case housing the Steyr AUG and strode forward, her boots crunching on loose stones.

Skarda grinned as they took off after her.

”Is she always like this?” Flinders asked.