Текст книги "The Judas Strain"

Автор книги: James Rollins

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Gray’s hand was swallowed up by Balthazar’s grip. He stood just shy of seven feet.

Vigor continued, “Balthazar was the one who first discovered Seichan’s message in the Tower of Winds and helped me with the angelic translations. He’s also good friends with the museum’s curator here.”

“Lot of good that’ll do,” Balthazar groused in a deep baritone, and led the way into the main church. He waved an arm ahead. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

The man stepped aside and the view opened.

Gray gaped at the sight. Vigor noted his reaction and patted him on the shoulder.

A long barreled vault stretched a vast distance ahead, not unlike entering a train station. Overhead, a series of arches and cupolas climbed to the central main dome. A second-floor colonnade framed both sides. But the most impressive sight was not anything constructed of stone – it was simply the play of light in the space. Windows pierced walls and lined the bottoms of domes, allowing sunlight to reflect off emerald-and-white marble, off gold-encrusted mosaics. The sheer volume of empty space, unsupported by interior pillars, seemed impossible.

In awed silence Gray followed the two men down the long nave.

Reaching the heart of the church, Gray stared up at the scalloped vault of the main dome, twenty stories over his head. Its ribbed surface was decorated with rippling gold-and-purple calligraphy. Around its bottom circumference, forty arched windows allowed in morning sunlight, creating an appearance that the dome was hovering over one’s head.

“It’s like it’s floating up there,” Gray mumbled.

Balthazar joined him. “An architectural optical illusion,” the art historian explained, and pointed up. “See those ribs along the underside of the roof, like the braces on an umbrella? They distribute the weight around the windows down to the flared pendentives seated atop massive foundation piers. Also the roof itself is lighter than it appears, constructed of hollow bricks kilned in Rhodes from the city’s porous clay. It’s a masterpiece of illusion. Stone, light, and air.”

Vigor nodded. “Even Marco Polo was awed, to quote the great man, by ‘the apparent weightlessness of the dome, and the bewildering abundance of direct and indirect lighting effects.’”

Gray understood. It was also strange to know that where he now stood, Marco Polo had also stood, the two men joined across the ages by their mutual wonder at and respect for the ancient builders.

The only blemish to the effect was the wall of black scaffolding along one side that climbed from the marble floor to the top of the dome.

It helped ground Gray in his situation. He checked his watch. Nasser would be arriving before nightfall. They had less than a day to solve this riddle.

If his plan was going to work…

But where to start?

Vigor was asking the same of his friend. “Balthazar, were you able to question the museum staff? Has anyone seen anything like angelic script in here?”

The man rubbed his beard and sighed. “I interviewed the curator, talked to his staff. The curator knows Hagia Sophia from its underground crypts to the tip of its highest dome. He insists nothing like angelic script can be found anywhere. He expressed one thought, though…something you’re not going to like to hear.”

“What?” Vigor asked.

“Remember how much of Hagia Sophia was plastered over from when the church was converted into a mosque. What we may be looking for could be hidden under inches of old plaster. Or it could have been inscribed on plaster that has since been cleaned away.” Balthazar shrugged. “So there’s a very real possibility that what we seek may be gone.”

Gray refused to believe it. While Vigor and Balthazar discussed such matters in more detail, he walked away. He needed to think. He checked his watch again, a reflexive gesture. Nervous and worried. He didn’t even really see the time. He dropped his arm and crossed to the scaffolding. He should never have left his parents alone. His mother’s few words over the phone haunted him.

I’m sorry. Your father. I needed his pills.

Something must have happened. Gray had refused to take into account his father’s illness, his need for medication. Was his neglect a purposeful blindness, a refusal to accept his father’s true condition? Either way, his recklessness now threatened his parents’ lives.

Gray sank down, cross-legged, and stared up toward the dome. He fought to clear his mind. His worries, fears, and doubts would not serve him. Or them. Taking a deep steadying breath, he exhaled slowly and let the drone of the tourists fade into the background.

He pictured the church as it must have looked back in the sixteen-hundreds. In his mind, he repainted the walls again, whitewashing over the golden mosaics with plaster. He did so with concentrated deliberation. A meditative exercise. If only in his head, the old mosque came alive again. He heard the muezzin calling from the minarets over the ancient city. He pictured the supplicants knelt atop rugs, rising and falling, in faithful prayer.

In such a place, where would the next key be hidden? Where in all this vast space, with its countless anterooms, galleries, and side chapels?

As he sat, Gray spun his view of the church behind his eyes, like a three-dimensional computer model, studying it from all angles. As he did so, his finger absently traced in the plaster dust on the floor. He finally became aware of what he was drawing: the glyph of angelic script, the one inscribed on the back of Marco’s golden passport.

He stared down at the single letter while still spinning the architectural structure of Hagia Sophia around in his head.

“It was already a mosque,” he mumbled.

He tapped the four circles, what Vigor called diacritical marks.

Four circles, four minarets.

What if the symbol was more than the first key to solving the riddle of the coded map? What if it was meant also to be a clue leading to the second key? Didn’t Seichan say something about that? How the one key would lead to the next?

In his mind’s eye, he superimposed a schematic of Hagia Sophia over the symbol, positioning the minarets so it overlaid the diacritical marks. Four circles, four minarets. What if the symbol was supposed to also represent Hagia Sophia? A crude map with the minarets as anchors.

If so, then where to begin looking?

In the dust, Gray added an additional dotted line.

“ Xmarks the spot,” he mumbled.

11:02 A.M.

Vigor noted Gray crawling on his hands and knees near the center of the nave, sweeping the marble floor with his hands.

Balthazar noted the man’s actions with a raised eyebrow.

The two men crossed over to Gray’s side.

“What are you doing?” Balthazar said. “If you’re planning on checking the entire floor by hand, you’ll be here for weeks.”

Gray sat back, stared up at the dome as if gauging his position, then continued his sweep of the floor, working along the edge of the scaffolding. “It has to be here somewhere.”

“What?” Vigor asked.

Gray pointed back to where he had originally been seated. Vigor strode over and stared down at the smudged drawing in the dust. His brow crinkled.

Gray spoke. “It’s a rudimentary map of Hagia, indicating where we should be searching for the next clue.”

Vigor sensed the truth of Gray’s assessment, surprised yet again at the man’s unique ability to cogitate and analyze. It slightly frightened him.

Gray continued to crawl, slowly working a specific section of the floor, gaining a few strange glances from some passing tourists.

Balthazar tracked at his heels. “You think someone carved a bit of angelic script into the marble.”

Gray stopped suddenly, his shoulder brushing the black scaffolding. His fingers returned to a spot he had just swept over. He leaned down and blew on the tile.

“Not angelic script,” Gray said, and reached to his shirt collar.

Vigor joined him. Both he and Balthazar knelt around the tile that intrigued Gray. Reaching out, Vigor felt the marble with his fingertips.

Faintly inscribed in the tile, worn by ages and the erosion of treading feet, was the barest outline of a cross.

Gray pulled out the silver crucifix from around his neck. Friar Agreer’s cross. He tested its dimensions and shape against the inscription on the tile. A perfect fit.

“You found it,” Vigor said.

Balthazar already had a small rubber mallet in hand, removed from his belt. He tapped at the tile. Gray’s brow pinched at the man’s deliberate work.

Vigor explained, “It was how we found the hollow spot beneath the inscribed tile in the Tower of Winds. Percussion. Listening for any hidden cavity.”

Balthazar worked across the tile, meticulous, but the furrows across his forehead deepened. “Nothing,” he finally mumbled.

“Are you sure?” Vigor said. “It has to be here.”

“No,” Gray said. He sprawled out on his back, staring up. “What’s Jesus staring at?”

Vigor glanced to the vague figure of Christ in silver on the crucifix, then back up.

“He’s staring at the dome,” Gray answered. “The same dome that transfixed Marco Polo. A dome lightened in weight through the use of hollowbricks. If you wanted to hide something that would last the ages…”

Vigor craned, mouth wide. “Of course. But which brick?”

Balthazar leaped to his feet. “I have an idea.” He ran off toward the rear of the building, shoving through a German tour group.

Vigor offered a hand and helped Gray back to his feet. Gray collected the cross and hung it back around his neck.

“Brilliant, Gray.”

“We haven’t found the second golden paitzuyet.”

Vigor knew Gray had pulled Seichan aside for a private few words before they separated. “What’s the urgency, Gray? With Nasser coming in a few hours, why even bother finding the second key?”

“Because I want Nasser happy,” Gray said. Vigor read the worry in the young man’s eyes for his parents. “And to prove our use to him. We need him to keep us alive.”

Vigor sensed the man was leaving some bit of the plot unspoken. Before he could question Gray further, Balthazar reappeared and hurried back to them. Breathless, he held out a small tool. “With all the construction going on, I figured someone had to have a laser pointer or level. Handy when working across such vast spaces.”

Vigor’s colleague knelt down and positioned the laser device atop the inscribed cross and switched it on. Nothing seemed to happen.

Balthazar picked up a pinch of plaster dust and cast it above the device. A scintillation of ruby brilliance lit up the dust. “It’s working.” He craned up. “Someone will have to climb up the scaffolding to find which brick is lit up by the pointer.”

Gray nodded. “I’ll do it.”

Balthazar glanced around guiltily – then handed him a chisel and hammer. “I got these, too.” He waved for Gray to hide the tools away. “You’ll have to be discreet. No one’s allowed up there without a special artisan’s pass issued by the Turkish government. I got permission from the curator to allow one of us up there. To take some photographs. Briefly. But the guard”—he nodded to the armed sentinel by the scaffolding’s ladder—“in this day of terrorist attacks, they’ve been trained to shoot and ask questions later. If they see you take a chisel to the roof…” His voice trailed off.

“Beyond getting shot,” Vigor warned, “we can’t be discovered in any regard. If we’re kicked out…if the police are summoned…”

Vigor read the understanding in Gray’s eyes.

Nasser would know.

“And it’s not just our lives in jeopardy,” Vigor acknowledged.

Gray’s parents would suffer, too.

Sighing deeply, Gray lowered his voice, “Then we’ll need a distraction.”

11:48 A.M.

Halfway up the scaffolding, Gray kept his head ducked from the low bracings as he climbed. Reaching a landing of planks, he glanced below and spotted Balthazar. The tall man’s features were barely discernible as he stood with the museum curator. Gray leaned out to spot the scaffolding’s guard. The uniformed man had stepped away from his station to get a clear view of Gray’s progress.

Under everyone’s watchful gaze, Gray continued onward. He reached the ring of windows along the bottom edge of the dome. Sunlight blazed through the arched glass. Gray caught a glimpse of the Sea of Marmara through one of them. Then he was above the windows. The way grew more shadowy. After another two minutes of scaling, he finally reached the top of the scaffolding and could touch the domed roof. In fact, he had to crouch to keep from hitting his head.

All around, vast scripts of Islamic calligraphy cascaded down the scalloped walls. Immediately overhead, the dome’s central vertex cupped an ornate spiral of gold Arabic lettering, painted against a rich purple backdrop.

Gray searched around the edge of the vertex. Small dust motes flickered with fire to the left, lit from below by the laser pointer. He spotted his target – a glowing ruby dot sighted on a deep purple section of plaster. Good. The color was dark enough that any hole in it should be hard to spot.

At least he hoped so.

Reaching the targeted brick required continuing on hands and knees as the domed roof arched downward.

Once there, Gray crouched up and felt across the plaster. There was no carving. No angelic script. No other marking.

He frowned. What if he was wrong?

Unfortunately, there was only one way to find out. Gray waved his hand across the path of the laser, lighting up his hand.

It was the signal.

Below, Balthazar bent down, casually collected up the pointer, and aimed it down the length of the cavernous nave.

As if the light had struck some gong, a loud police whistle blew from that end of the church, piercing the solemn quiet, echoing all around the interior. Confused shouts followed.

Gray stared in the direction and spotted a burst of flame. An improvised Molotov cocktail, derived from rubbing alcohol used to clean the mosaics. Vigor had set it off in a trash receptacle.

More shouts.

Gray swung around to keep the bulk of his form between the guard below and his desecration above. He lifted his tools from his belt, positioned the chisel tip where the pointer had been. He waited a tense breath, then a second whistle blew.

As it blasted, Gray struck one strong blow.

Plaster broke – along with the hollow crack of dry clay.

A chunk of brick shattered free, struck Gray’s chest, and bounced off. He snapped out a hand and caught the lump in the hand with the chisel before it could tumble to the marble floor below. Cringing internally, Gray shoved the broken shard into his shirt.

Using the chisel, he quickly levered into the heart of the hollow brick, careful of the loosened pieces. Reaching up, he examined the cavity with his fingers. Rather than course clay, it felt glassy inside, watery smooth. He searched around.

Something was up there.

He fingered it out. Gray had been expecting the golden paitzu,but instead he pulled out an eight-inch-long tube of copper or bronze, capped at both ends, not unlike a cigar holder. The object ended up down his shirt.

Casting a sidelong glance, Gray noted the small trash fire had already been smothered with an extinguisher.

Hurrying, he searched again and felt something heavy, nudged with his index finger. It took another few seconds to work the second prize out of the secret vault: another gold paitzu.

The heavy passport fell free, bobbled out of his frantic fingers, and clattered to the rungs of the scaffolding at his feet. The metal rang like a struck bell, amplified by the cup of the dome. Unfortunately, it hit at the exact moment when there was a lull in the commotion below.

Crap…

As the noise echoed away, Gray grabbed up the golden passport and tucked it into his shirt. With shouts calling up from below, he did the only thing he could. He kicked the hammer off the scaffolding and tumbled after it, arms wheeling in midair, a shout on his lips.

11:58 A.M.

From the second-floor colonnade Vigor watched Gray plummet off the top of the scaffolding.

Oh, no…

Moments before, Vigor had blown the whistle at the opposite end of the church and dropped the lit Molotov he had been holding, hidden inside an unattended trash receptacle. He barely got his arm out in time, hurrying away. He had blown the whistle again – then tossed it into a potted plant. Having already donned the Roman collar of his profession, he merely had to look confused and a little scared. The guards ignored him as he rushed the length of the upper floor back toward the central nave.

He reached the center of the church in time to hear Gray shout and fall headlong off the immense scaffolding. People came running, others scattered out of the way below. A hammer struck the marble floor with a resounding crack.

Overhead, Gray cartwheeled and snagged a strut of the scaffolding with an outstretched hand. He slammed back into the bracings. His feet kicked and struggled for a purchase. He found it and scrambled back into the heart of the scaffolding. He lay on his back, plainly collecting his wits from the fall.

The scaffolding guard yelled up at him and waved another security guard to pound up the stairs to check on him.

Gray rolled back and forth, clutching his left arm, moaning.

Vigor circled back to the stairs to reach the floor of the nave. He joined Balthazar and the museum curator. The security guard helped Gray up, and half supported by the guard, the pair descended with care.

As Gray limped along, his face purpled with anger. He pointed to the hammer, the very hammer Balthazar had given him. “Don’t your workmen clean up after themselves,” he sputtered in frightened outrage. “All that commotion down here, I accidentally stepped on the blasted tool. I could have been killed!”

The curator, a slender man with a bit of a paunch, collected the hammer. “Oh, my dear sir, my apologies. Such recklessness. I assure you. It will be attended. Your arm…”

Gray was holding it to his chest. “Sprained, maybe dislocated.” He glowered at the curator.

“The police are already on their way here…for the fire,” the curator said.

Gray and Vigor shared a worried look.

If Nasser heard the police had come here…

Vigor cleared his throat. “The fire. Surely it was just a cigarette tossed by a careless tourist. Or maybe a harmless prank.”

The curator didn’t seem to hear. He had already turned to one of the guards and spoke rapidly in Turkish.

Vigor understood.

This was even worse.

“No, no,” Vigor insisted, glancing hard to Gray. “I’m sure our student doesn’t need to be taken to the hospital. No ambulance is needed.”

Gray’s eyes widened. They could not leave the church. Their distraction had only succeeded in getting them deeper and deeper into hot water.

“The monsignor is right.” Gray flexed and rotated his arm. Vigor noted a flinch. Gray really had hurt his arm. “Just sprained a bit. I’ll be fine.”

“No. I insist. It is museum policy. If anyone is injured on the premises, a hospital visit is mandatory.”

Vigor saw that there was no way to dissuade the curator.

Balthazar stepped forward, clearing his throat. “That sounds prudent. But in the meantime, perhaps there’s a place we could rest. Your office is in the basement, no?”

“Of course. No one will disturb you. I will deal with the police and summon you when the ambulance arrives. And Dr. Pinosso, please accept my sincere apologies. You’ve been so generous with your time and knowledge in the past and look how I repay you.”

Balthazar patted his arm. “Hasan, do not worry. All is well. Nerves are just shaken up. It serves my student right for not watching where he steps when on a precarious perch.”

Sirens sounded in the distance.

“This way,” the curator said.

A short time later the three of them were alone in Hasan’s basement office. It was sparsely furnished. The schematics for the church were tacked to the back wall, behind a cluttered desk. A single framed photograph of the curator, Hasan Ahmet, shaking hands with the Turkish president adorned the wall above a bank of steel filing cabinets. On the opposite wall was an ancient illuminated map of the Middle East.

Balthazar flipped the office door’s dead bolt and paced the length of the room. “There is a maze of rooms down here in the basement. You two could hide out until that Nasser fellow comes. I can go up and tell Hasan that you both left.”

“It will have to do.” Vigor sank into a couch next to Gray, who was massaging his shoulder. “We won’t have much time. Did you find anything up there?”

As answer, Gray unbuttoned the lower half of his shirt and pulled out a slab of gold and a tube of beaten bronze. He shook his shirt a bit more and a bit of ruddy clay pottery tumbled out. Gray bent down, picked it up, and placed it on the table.

Vigor began to turn away, but a bit of color from the pottery caught his eye. He retrieved the chunk of reddish clay from the tabletop.

“It’s a piece of the hollow brick,” Gray explained sourly. “I didn’t want to leave it up there. Heaven knows, things went badly enough.”

Vigor briefly examined it. On one side, a bit of purple plaster still clung to it, but on the other side, a thick skein of sky-blue glaze coated the clay. Why would someone glaze the inside of a hollow brick?

“Did you see any angelic script up there,” Vigor asked, and returned the chunk to the table.

“No. No writing, nothing unusual.”

Balthazar bent down and flipped the golden paitzuover. “But there is angelic writing here.”

Vigor leaned closer. As expected, a single letter of angelic script decorated the back side. A crude circle enclosed it.

“The second key,” Vigor said.

“But what’s this?” Balthazar asked. He nudged the tube.

Vigor picked it up. It was as thick around as his thumb, unadorned, except for the old hammer marks of its forger. “It may be a scroll tube.” He examined one end. A thin coin of bronze had been stamped over the end, sealing it.

“We’ll have to open it,” Gray said.

Vigor felt some discomfort at his suggestion. As an archaeologist, he feared mishandling such an ancient artifact. It needed to be photographed, its measurements taken, cataloged.

Gray reached to a pocket and slipped out a penknife. He opened the small blade and held it toward Vigor. “We’re running out of time.”

Taking a deep breath, Vigor accepted the knife. With a twinge of professional discomfort, he used the tip to pry the cap off the end. It popped cleanly, as if only crafted yesterday.

Vigor cleared a space on the coffee table, tilted the tube, and slid out its contents. A roll of white material dropped to the mahogany table.

“A scroll,” Gray said.

Without touching it, Vigor made an assessment from his years of study and lifetime of experience. “It’s not parchment, vellum, or even papyrus.”

“What is it?” Balthazar asked.

Vigor wished he had examination gloves for handling the old scroll. Fearful of the oils in his hands, Vigor collected a pencil from the curator’s desk and used the eraser to unroll the free edge of the material.

It fell away easily, delicate and gauzy.

“It looks like cloth,” Gray said.

“Silk.” Vigor unrolled more and more, teasing it across the length of the table. “It’s embroidered,” he said, noting the fine stitching of black thread across the white silk.

But the needlework did not form a picture or an intricate pattern. Instead, lines of cursive text, stitched into the material, spread down the length of the unrolled bolt of silk.

Gray twisted his head to read, but his frown deepened, not comprehending.

“It’s lingua lombarda,” Balthazar declared with awe.

Vigor could not take his eyes from the writing. “The Italian dialect of Marco Polo’s region.” He reached a trembling hand and followed with the pencil eraser, translating the first line aloud. “‘Our prayer was answered in a most strange manner.’”

He glanced to Gray. He read the understanding in the American’s eyes.

“It’s the rest of Marco’s story,” Gray said, “continuing where the Guild’s copy of his book ended.”

“The missing pages,” Vigor agreed, “embroidered onto silk.”

Gray glanced to the door, plainly edgy, and waved to the silk diary. “Read the rest of it.”

Vigor started from the beginning, continuing the story of Marco’s party. The first section left them trapped in the City of the Dead and surrounded by a cannibal horde. Vigor carefully translated the next part of the tale, his voice tremulous with the power of Marco’s original words.

Our prayer was answered in a most strange manner. And was thus brought about:

Night fell over the City of the Dead. From the vantage of our sanctuary, the moats and pools of the city below shone with light of a sepulchral nature; the hue and sheen was that of molds and mushrooms. It cast the scene below into some dread feast expelled from the Devil’s bowels, as the dead fed on the dead. We saw no hope for salvation. What angel would dare tread these blasphemed lands?

But then it came to pass that three figures emerged from the dark forest. They appeared as such: their skin cast a sheen to match pond and moat, and the dread cannibals parted before their feet insomuch as the wind sweeps through a field of grain. The three crossed through the city with little haste but with clear direction. Once at the foot of the tower, these strange apparitions were seen to be of the same people as those that feasted on flesh. Yet their skin glowed with some Blessed light.

In great terror, the kaan’s men dropped all weapons and hid their faces against the stone. The three entered our shelter and came upon us with no molestation. Their faces were gaunt and fever-worn; but they seemed sound of flesh, unlike their brothers below. But it was no flesh like unto man. The light of their skins seemed to penetrate their deeper bodies; and thus revealed the churn of bowel and shadowy beat of their hearts. It came also to pass that one of the three brushed against one of the kaan’s men. He screamed and fell away; and where he was touched his skin did blister and blacken.

Friar Agreer lifted his cross against them; but the first of the three came forward with little fear and touched the Dominican’s cross. He spoke in words that no one understood; but with much gesturing, their desire was communicated: to have us drink from the halved shell of an Indie nut.

One of the kaan’s men must have understood enough of the strange tongue to communicate. A great healing virtue was offered us; and with its consumption, we would be protected from the pestilence that struck here. But Heaven forgive us all for what it would cost, what it would make of us in the end.

The story stopped there.

Vigor sat back in frustration. “There must be more.”

“Hidden with the third and final key,” Gray suggested.

Vigor nodded and tapped the stretch of silk diary. “But even from this much of the story, it is plain why this tale was never told.”

“Why?” Gray asked.

“The descriptions of the strange apparitions,” Vigor stressed. “Glowing with a ‘Blessed light.’ Offering salvation.”

“Sounds like angels,” Balthazar said.

“But paganangels,” Vigor stressed. “Such a concept would not have gone down well with the Vatican during the Middle Ages. And remember, whoever split up Marco’s story did so during the sixteen-hundreds, during another Italian plague outbreak. Despite the disturbing content, the Vatican dared not destroy the message. Some mystics within the Church must have divided the text to both preserve and hide it. But the bigger question remains: What is still left untold?”

“If we’re going to discover that,” Gray said, “we’ll need to find that third key. But where do we begin to look? There’s no angelic script anywhere.”

“Maybe no angelic script that we could seewith the naked eye,” Vigor added pointedly.

Gray nodded his understanding. He twisted around to his pack and began fishing through it. “I brought a UV light. In case we ran into any more glowing obelisks.”

Balthazar dimmed the lights. Gray ran the UV over every artifact. Even the shard of broken clay brick.

“Nothing,” he finally admitted.

Dead end.

12:43 P.M.

Gray’s frustration had stretched to the tautness of a piano wire. He gave up any hope on his original plan, though it had been a long shot.

“We can’t wait any longer,” he finally admitted, checking his watch. “We have to get into hiding. Let’s gather this all together. Find a place to hole up.”

They had spent the last five minutes racking their brains, searching for some clue as to where to seek the third key. Vigor attempted to decipher a hidden meaning in the text, going over it again. Balthazar had studied all surfaces of the golden paitzu. Everyone agreed that the crude line circling the single angelic letter had to be significant, but no one could guess what it might be.

Vigor sighed and began rolling up the scroll. “The answer must be here. Seichan said the Guild’s copy mentioned how each key would lead to the next one. We just have to figure out what we’re missing later.”

Gray gathered up the last remaining artifact: the chunk of the brick itself. He tapped the plaster on the outside of the chunk. “Could there be some significance to the brick being plastered in purple? I’m assuming the false brick could have been any number of colors. They had the entire dome’s palette to choose from.”

Vigor barely seemed to hear him as he tucked the scroll back into its bronze tube. Still, he mumbled aloud. “Purple is the color of royalty or divinity.”

Gray nodded. Grabbing his backpack, he shoved the chunk inside. His thumb ran over the thick blue glaze on the opposite side. Gray remembered the inside of the brick had felt glassy.

“Blue,” he whispered aloud. “Blue and royalty.”

Then it came to him.

Of course.

Vigor realized it at the same time and sprang straighter. “The Blue Princess!”

Balthazar slid the gold paitzuover to Gray to pack away. “You’re talking about Kokejin. The young Mongol woman who traveled with Marco.”

Vigor nodded. “She gained her nickname because her name translates as sky blue.”

“But what’s the significance of her reference here?” Gray asked.

“Let’s backtrack,” Vigor said, ticking off on his fingers. “The first key was at the Vatican, in Italy, where Marco ended his journey. A major milestone. Following Polo’s route backward, we come to the next milestone here, in Istanbul, where Marco crossed from Asia and stepped for the first time back into Europe.”