The Snake Stone

112

A thought, a memory, was stirring in Yashim’s mind. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, oblivious to the people passing in the street.

Amelie had vanished into thin air. The only clue to her plans lay in the book she had taken with her. Gyllius must have identified to Amelie-and perhaps, before that, Lefevre-the location of the Byzantine relics.

Amelie believed in their existence. They lay, she had said, in a hollow space beneath the former church of Aya Sofia. A crypt.

The way to the crypt lay through a network of tunnels that ran beneath the city. Most of them were no bigger than rabbit burrows, but some were big enough to admit the passage of a man. One, at least, seemed to run from the siphon in Balat to the church of St. Irene on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace, where Yashim had seen its mouth. Close to where Gyllius claimed to have gone down beneath a man’s house and flitted through a cavernous cistern in the dark. A hollow hippodrome, as Delmonico had said: the Atmeydan, where the Serpent Column had stood for fifteen hundred years.

Between Topkapi Palace, Gyllius’s cistern, and the Suleymaniye Mosque stood one ancient building more famous than the others. Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines.

Yashim held his eyes shut tight.

The waterpipe must lead to the Hippodrome.

Gyllius would have realized that three hundred years ago: he must have guessed where the relics were to be found.

And then he had left the city to go with the Ottoman armies to Persia. As if someone, or something, had frightened him away. Just as Lefevre had been frightened, three centuries later.

Men do not live for three hundred years, but ideas do. Memories do. Traditions do.

The sou naziry had made the point himself.

Yashim flung himself from the wall and began to run.