catch up with it.
Still, he kept the pressure on, summoning his inner cowboy and urging the horse on as best he could. The SUV had disappeared from view by the time he reached the road. He guided the horse onto the cracked asphalt, but he knew it was moving too slowly to have any chance of catching up with Tess. He had to find another way to keep going. A car, a truck, a motorcycle, anything motorized—even an old, beat-up pickup truck creaking under the strain of a mountain of watermelons, which was what he got, trundling up the road and honking for him to move aside.
He had little choice.
He steered the horse into the road, then tugged on the reins, forcing it to stop sideways and block the way. The pickup truck slid to a halt just a few feet short of him. Two men were in its cab, the driver jabbing his horn angrily, his passenger leaning out the window, both men yelling and waving for Reilly to get out of the way.
It didn’t take long.
A wave of the handgun did the trick with ruthless efficiency, and a few frantic seconds later, Reilly was on the road again, hurtling after the long-gone Jeep with a truckful of watermelons in tow.
Chapter 39
With every leaden step, reality receded further and further from Tess’s mind as she followed Zahed and Abdulkerim across the alien terrain.
She wasn’t sure where she was anymore. Her eyes were having a hard time focusing, and her feet felt like they were made of lead. The relentless strain of the last few days, compounded with the heat and the lack of sleep, was debilitating. Worst of all was the haunting mirage that was Reilly. It wouldn’t leave her. She was desperate to know that he was all right, that he hadn’t died on that mountain, but she knew she wasn’t about to find out soon, and possibly never would. The uncertainty was crippling and added to the sense of disorientation that she felt, a feeling that was heightened even more by the bewildering landscape around her.
The valley they were hiking through was very different from the canyon where they’d found the Templars’ grave. In fact, it was unlike anything she’d ever seen before. It was broader and was edged by bizarre clusters of huge, pinkish-white stone cones and turrets. Fields of fairy chimneys dotted the plain haphazardly, mushroomlike spires twenty or more feet tall that were topped by caps of rust-red basalt. Framing the whole surreal spectacle were gentle slopes that rose up to a crowning cornice of vertical tufa. And while the valley may have looked disconcertingly like a behemothian meringue tray, it was the canyon within it, the one that they were now traversing, that threw Tess the most. Everywhere she looked, dark openings in the rock formations peeked out at her. One of three parallel canyons that held the ancient—and now deserted—village of Zelve, its walls were riddled with living quarters, hermitages, churches, and monasteries that had been excavated out of the most unlikely of places. From the narrowest of “fairy chimneys” to the soaring rock walls that lined the ravines, there didn’t seem to be a patch of smooth rock that wasn’t studded with a small window. Hundreds of rock-hewn sanctuaries were scattered across the region, tucked away in its valleys and hidden ravines, their walls covered with a veritable trove of Byzantine art.
From the earliest days of the faith, Cappadocia was an important cradle of Orthodox Christianity, second only to Constantinople. Paul of Tarsus—St. Paul—preached throughout the area just twenty years after the Crucifixion. Cappadocia soon became a refuge for the first followers of the Cross who were fleeing Roman persecution, its maze-like landscape providing a natural shelter from danger. In the fourth century, Basil the Great, the bishop of nearby Kayseri and one of the so-called “Cappadocian Fathers” of the faith, witnessed monasticism on a trip to Egypt and brought the concept back with him. Monks started colonizing the area like moles, building anything from individual prayer cells in ten-foot-wide spires to rock-cut churches of surprising grandeur and multilevel monasteries that reached high into the cliffs.
The burrowing didn’t only extend aboveground. With the Mongol and Muslim conquests under way, it expanded below the surface. Dozens of underground cities—some whose origins dated back to the Hittites—riddled the area, and many of them hadn’t yet been fully explored. Some of them extended as much as a dozen levels below the surface, perhaps even more, vast labyrinths of tunnels, living quarters, and storage rooms. With their ingeniously designed air shafts and one-ton “millstone” trapdoors to keep enemies out, they served as sanctuaries for entire communities whenever invading hordes were running rampant aboveground and helped the Orthodox Christian population cling to the valleys and ride out the centuries of Seljuk and Ottoman rule pretty much unscathed.
Ironically, it wasn’t until 1923, in the dawn of the secular Turkish Republic, that the Christians were finally expelled from the region. Under the forced repatriation agreement between Turkey and Greece that followed the four-year war between the two countries, the local Orthodox population was resettled in Greece while Muslim Turks moved into the valleys in its place. Following the exodus, most of the churches and monasteries there gradually fell into disrepair, through neglect and vandalism, a sad end to the last surviving link to the glory of Byzantium that had started over one and a half thousand years earlier.
As they moved through a cluster of thirty-foot-tall rock cones, Tess was finding it hard to keep in mind that the canyon had been colonized by humans. In her exhausted, weary state, it looked more like something trolls would inhabit, and her mind kept dredging up disturbing images of Morlocks and sand people creeping out of the dark recesses and dragging her away.
Zahed’s voice broke through her daze.
“Where are all the tourists?” he asked Abdulkerim. “This place is like a ghost town.”
Although the valley was a national park, they hadn’t encountered more than a half dozen groups of hikers, each with no more than a handful of individuals in it.
“This canyon and the two on either side of it were deemed unsafe back in the fifties,” the Byzantinist explained. “The caves were crumbling on their occupant. All the villager were relocated to a new town a few kilometers away, and nowadays, tour group prefer to stick to safe areas, like Goreme.”
“The less, the merrier,” Zahed said, his eyes surveying the trail ahead. “How much farther?”
“Almost there.”
Moments later, they had cleared the cone village and paused by a featureless rock face. The sun was much lower now, its shifting angle bathing the moonscape around them in a striking mix of pinks and blues.
“This is it,” the Byzantinist announced.
It didn’t look like much until the man pointed upward. Tess followed his direction. There was a gaping, square-cut hole in the side of the cliff, about fifty feet above her head. It was an exposed room—part of a room, actually—that had been carved into the rock.
“The church’s outer wall collapsed in a rock slide centuries ago,” Abdulkerim explained, “taking with it the entrance tunnel and the stair that led up to it.”
“So how do we get up there?” Zahed asked.
“This way,” the Turk said as he led them to the edge of the cliff and pointed out the footholds that had been chiseled into the smooth wall of tufa.
“Lead the way,” Zahed gestured.
Abdulkerim went first, followed by Tess, then Zahed. They clawed their way up the crumbly wall and managed to reach a small ledge. Steep, eroded steps led from there to the three-walled chamber. There was no railing at its edge. Its floor just ended with a drop straight down the cliff.
Tess looked down. The sight made her wince. “I can see why this isn’t exactly heaving with tourists.”
The Turk shrugged. “This was the vestibule of the church,” he explained. “Come. The nave is through here.”
He led them through a narrow doorway and switched on his flashlight.
The room they were standing in was surprisingly large, around forty feet deep and half as wide. Aisles ran along either side of it, separated from the nave by columns that were purely decorative as they weren’t supporting anything, given that the entire church had been carved out of the soft rock. The nave rose to a soaring, barrel- vaulted ceiling and ended in what looked like a horseshoe-shaped apse.
“The mural’s this way,” Abdulkerim said, leading them farther into the church, “and the burial chamber’s
