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strength.
    ‘Your father is a great English lord,’ said Vasiliki. ‘I knew him well, and I loved him – he lived here with us at Janina, in the year before your birth.’
    She could not go on, so the pasha continued.
    ‘As the Baba said, he is our friend and is connected with those who are our friends. He lives on the great canal at Venice. You can reach him by boat within a few days. You can easily find his palazzo – his name is George Gordon, Lord Byron.
    ‘You will bring him the object you hold in your hands, and he will protect it with his life, if necessary. It is disguised in carbon, but beneath is the most valuable chess piece from the ancient Service of the Tarik’at created by al-Jabir ibn Hayyan. This special piece is the veritable key to the Secret Path. It is the piece we know today as the Black Queen.’

The Black Land
     
Wyrd oft nereth unfaegne eorl, ponne his ellen deah. (Unless he is already doomed, fortune is apt to favor the man who keeps his nerve.)
    – Beowulf
     
    Mesa Verde, Colorado
    Spring 2003
    Before I’d even reached the house, i knew something was wrong. Very wrong. Even though on the surface it all seemed picture-perfect.
    The steep, sweeping curve of drive was blanketed deep in snow and lined with stately rows of towering Colorado blue spruce. Their snow-covered branches sparkled like rose quartz in the early-morning light. Atop the hill, where the driveway flattened and spread out for parking, I pulled up my rented Land Rover in front of the lodge.
    A lazy curl of blue-gray smoke rose from the moss rock chimney that formed the center of the building. The rich scent of pine smoke pervaded the air, which meant that – although I might not be warmly welcomed after all this time – at least I was expected.
    To confirm this, I saw that my mother’s truck and jeep were sitting side by side in the former horse stable at the edge of the parking area. I did find it odd, though, that the drive had not yet been plowed and there were no tracks. If I were expected, wouldn’t someone have cleared a path?
    Now that I was here at last, in the only place I’d ever called home, you would think I could finally relax. But I couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong.
    Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon – patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge – with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
    Each female descendant had lived here at one time or another, including my mother and me. So what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I ever come here without this sense of impending doom? I knew why, of course. And so did my mother. It was the thing we never spoke about. That’s why – when I had finally left home for good – my mother understood. She’d never insisted, like other mothers, that I come back for familial visits.
    That is, not until today.
    But then, my presence today hadn’t exactly been by invitation – it was more of a summons, a cryptic message that Mother had left on my home phone back in Washington, D.C., when she knew very well I’d be off at work.
    She was inviting me, she said, to her birthday party. And that, of course, was a big part of the problem.
    You see, my mother didn’t have birthdays. She’d never had birthdays.
    I don’t mean she was concerned about her youth orappearance or wished to lie about her age – in fact, she looked more youthful each year.
    But the strange truth was, she didn’t want anyone outside our family even to know when her birthday was.
    This secrecy, combined with a few other idiosyncrasies – like the fact that she’d been in hermetic retreat up on top of this mountain for the past ten years – ever since…the thing we never