“So if Minnie’s the Black Queen, we’re all on the black team—you and I, Mordecai and Solarin. The guys in the black hats are the good guys. If Mordecai picked Solarin, maybe Mordecai’s the Black King—which makes Solarin a kingside Knight.”
“You and I are pawns,” I added quickly. “And Saul and Fiske …”
“Pawns that were knocked off the board,” Lily said as she swept aside a couple of pawns. She was moving pieces around like a shell game as I tried to follow her line of thought.
But something had been nagging my mind since the moment I’d realized Minnie was the fortune-teller. Suddenly I knew what it was. It wasn’t actually Minnie who’d dragged me into this game. It was Nim—it had been Nim all along. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d never have bothered to decipher that puzzle, worry about my birthday, assume other people’s deaths had anything to do with me—or hunt for the pieces of the Montglane Service. Now that I thought of it, it was Nim who’d arranged my contract with Harry’s company in the first place—three years ago when we were both working for Triple-M! And it was Nim who’d sent me to Minnie Renselaas.…
Just then Minnie came back into the room, carrying a large metal box and a small leather-bound book tied in stiff twine. She set both on the table.
“Nim knew you were the fortune-teller!” I said to her. “Even when he was ‘helping’ me decode that message!”
“Your friend in New York?” Lily chimed in. “Which piece is he?”
“A Rook,” said Minnie, studying the board Lily was adjusting.
“Of course!” Lily cried. “He’s staying in New York to castle the King.…”
“I’ve only met Ladislaus Nim once,” Minnie told me. “When I chose him as a player, just as I’ve chosen you. Though he recommended you highly, he had no idea I’d come to New York to meet you. I had to be certain you were the one I needed, that you had the skills required.”
“What skills?” said Lily, still fiddling with the pieces. “She can’t even play chess.”
“No, but you can,” Minnie said. “The two of you will make a perfect team.”
“Team?!” I cried. I was as anxious to be teamed with Lily as an ox is to be yoked to a kangaroo. Though her chess was clearly better than mine, she was all over the board when it came to reality.
“So we have a Queen, a Knight, a Rook, and a bunch of pawns,” Lily interjected, turning her gray eyes on Minnie. “What about the other team? How about John Hermanold, who shot at my car, or my uncle Llewellyn, or his pal the carpet trader—what’s his name?”
“El-Marad!” I said. Suddenly I realized what part he must play. It wasn’t that hard—a guy who lived like a hermit in the mountains, never leaving his place, yet conducting business all over the world, feared and hated by everyone who knew him … and who was after the pieces. “He’s the White King,” I guessed.
Minnie had turned deathly pale. She sank to a seat beside me. “You’ve met El-Marad?” she said, her voice nearly a whisper.
“A few days ago, in the Kabyle,” I told her. “He seems to know a lot about you. He told me your name was Mokhfi Mokhtar, that you lived in the Casbah, and that you had the pieces of the Montglane Service. He said you’d give them to me if I told you my birthday was the fourth day of the fourth month.”
“Then he knows far more than I thought,” said Minnie, more than a little upset. She took out a key and started unlocking the metal box she’d brought in. “But there’s obviously one thing he does not know, or you’d never have been permitted to see him. He doesn’t know who you are!”
“Who I am?” I said, utterly confused. “I don’t have anything to do with this game. Lots of people were born on my birthday—lots of people have funny squiggles on their hand. This is ridiculous. I must agree with Lily: I don’t see how I can help you.”
“I don’t want you to help me,” Minnie said firmly, opening the box as she spoke. “I want you to take my place.” She leaned over the board, swept Lily’s arm aside, picked up the Black Queen, and moved it forward.
Lily stared at the piece—at the board. Then suddenly she grabbed my knee.
“That’s it!” she cried, jumping up and down on the pillows. Carioca took this opportunity to snatch a fluffy cheese pastry with his little teeth and drag it into his lair beneath the table. “You see? With this arrangement, the Black Queen can place White in check, forcing the King out onto the board—but only by exposing herself. The only piece to protect her is this forward pawn.…”
I tried to understand. There on the board, eight of the black pieces sat on black squares, the others on white. And before all, at the end of white territory, sat a single black pawn, protected by a Rook and a Knight.
“I knew you’d work well together,” said Minnie with a smile, “given half a chance. This is a near perfect reconstruction of the Game to date. At least, this round.” Looking at me, she added, “Why don’t you ask this granddaughter of Mordecai Rad which is the pivotal piece around which this particular game now focuses?”
I turned to Lily, who was also smiling and tapping that forward pawn with her long red fingernail.
“The only piece that can replace a Queen is another Queen,” said Lily. “That seems to be you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought I was a pawn.”
“Exactly. But if a pawn passes the ranks of opposing pawns and reaches the eighth square on the opposite side, it can be transformed into any piece it likes. Even a Queen. When this pawn reaches the eighth square, the queening square, it can replace the Black Queen!”
“Or avenge her,” said Minnie, her eyes glowing like coals. “A passed pawn penetrates Algiers—the White Isle. Just as you’ve penetrated white territory, you’ll penetrate the mystery. The secret of the Eight.”
My mood was rising and falling like a barometric reading during the monsoon. I was the Black Queen? What did it mean? Though Lily pointed out there could be more than one Queen of the same color on the board, Minnie had said I was to replace her. Did that mean she was planning to leave the Game?
Furthermore, if she needed a replacement, why not Lily? Lily had laid out the game on that little pegboard set so every person fit the pieces and every move matched the events. But I was a patzer at chess, so what was my skill? Besides, that pawn had a way to go before it got to the queening square. Though it was too late for any other pawns to pick it off, it could still get eradicated by pieces that had more flexible moves. Even I knew that much about chess.
Minnie had unwrapped the contents of the metal box before us. Now she withdrew a heavy cloth, which she proceeded to unfold across the vast bronze table. The cloth was dark blue, nearly black. Scattered across it were chunks of colored glass—some round, some oval—each about the size of a quarter. The cloth was heavily embroidered with strange designs in a kind of metallic thread. They looked like symbols from the zodiac. They also resembled something else I couldn’t place, but which seemed familiar. At the center of the cloth was a big embroidery of two snakes swallowing each other’s tails. They formed a figure eight.
“What’s this?” I asked, looking over the strange cloth with curiosity.
Lily had moved closer and was feeling the fabric. “It reminds me of something,” she said.
“This is the cloth,” said Minnie, watching us closely, “that originally covered the Montglane Service. It was buried with the pieces for a thousand years until, during the French Revolution, both were exhumed by the nuns of Montglane Abbey in the south of France. This cloth has subsequently passed through many hands. It’s said to have been sent into Russia during the time of Catherine the Great, along with the broken board I told you they’d discovered.”
“How do you know all this?” I said, though I couldn’t seem to take my eyes away from the dark blue velvet spread before us. The cloth of the Montglane Service—over a thousand years old and still intact. It seemed to glow dully in the greenish light filtering through the wisteria. “And how did you get your hands on this???
? I added, reaching out to touch the stones Lily was already feeling.
“You know,” said Lily, “I’ve seen a lot of uncut gemstones at my grandfather’s. I think these things are real!”
“They are,” said Minnie in a voice that made me tingle despite myself. “Everything about this dread service is real. As you’ve learned, the Montglane Service contains a formula—a formula of great power, a force of evil for those who understand how to use it.”
“Why necessarily evil?” I said. But there was something about this cloth—perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed to illuminate Minnie’s face from below as she bent over it in the dim light.
“The question should be, why is evil necessary?” Minnie said coldly. “But it’s existed since long before the Montglane Service. So has the formula. Take a closer look at this cloth, and you’ll see.” She smiled an oddly bitter smile as she poured more tea all around. Her beautiful face seemed suddenly harsh and weary. For the first time, I realized what toll this game had taken on her.
I felt Carioca drooling cheese pastry on my foot. Pulling him from beneath the table, I set him on my chair and bent over the cloth to study it better.
There in the dim light was the golden figure eight, the serpents writhing across the dark blue velvet like a twisted comet across the midnight sky. And around it were the symbols—Mars and Venus, Sun and Moon, Saturn and Mercury … Then I saw it. I saw what else they were!
“They’re elements!” I cried.
Minnie smiled and nodded.
“The octave law,” she said.
Now it all made sense. These chunks of uncut gems and golden stitching formed symbols that had been used by philosophers and scientists alike since time immemorial to describe the most basic building blocks of nature. Here were iron and copper, silver and gold—sulphur, mercury, lead, and antimony—hydrogen, oxygen, the salts, and acids. In short, everything that comprised matter, whether living or dead.
I began to pace around the room as I thought it out, and it was all coming together. “The Octave Law,” I explained to Lily, who was looking at me as if I were crazy. “It’s the law on which the Periodic Table of the Elements was built. In the 1860s before Mendeléev formed his tables, John Newlands, the English chemist, discovered that if you arrange the elements in ascending order by atomic weight, every eighth element will be a sort of repetition of the first—just like the eighth note of a musical octave. He named it after Pythagoras’s theory because he thought the molecular properties of elements bore the same relationship to each other as notes in a musical scale!”
“And do they?” asked Lily.
“How should I know?” I said. “All I know about chemistry is what I learned before I was flunked for blowing up my high school chemistry lab.”
“You’ve learned correctly,” Minnie said, laughing. “Do you remember anything else?”
What was it? I was still standing, looking at the cloth, when it came to me. Waves and particles—particles and waves. Something about valences and electron shells danced at the outer edge of my mind. But Minnie was speaking.
“Perhaps I can refresh your memory. This formula is nearly as old as civilization itself, having been hinted at in writings as early as 4000 B.C. Let me tell you the tale.…” I sank onto a seat beside her as Minnie bent forward, letting her fingers trace the outline of the figure eight. She seemed lost in a trance as she began her tale.
“Six thousand years ago there were already advanced civilizations along the great rivers of the world—the Nile, Ganges, Indus, and Euphrates. They practiced a secret art that would later give birth both to religion and to science. So secret was this mysterious art that it required a lifetime to become an initiate—to be introduced to its true meaning.
“The initiation rite was often cruel and sometimes deadly. The tradition of this ritual has carried down to modern times; it still appears in the Catholic High Mass, in the cabbalistic rites, in the ceremonies of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons. But the meaning behind the tradition has been lost. These rituals are nothing other than a reenactment of the process of the formula that was known to ancient man, a reenactment that enabled him to pass on knowledge through an act. For it was forbidden to write it down.” Minnie looked up at me with dark green eyes, her gaze seeming to seek something deep in me.
“The Phoenicians understood the ritual. So did the Greeks. Even Pythagoras forbade his followers to put it into writing, so dangerous was it believed to be. The great error of the Moors was that they disobeyed this command. They put the symbols of the formula into the Montglane Service. Though it’s encrypted, anyone possessing all the parts can eventually work out the meaning—without undergoing the initiation which forces them to swear, on pain of death, never to use it for evil.
“The lands where this hidden science was developed—where it flourished—were named by the Arabs after the rich black silt that was deposited upon the banks of their life-giving rivers each spring, when the rite took place. They called them ‘Al-Khem,’ the Black Lands. And the secret science was named ‘Al-Khemie’—the Black Art.”
“Alchemy?” said Lily. “You mean, like turning straw into gold?”
“The art of transmutation, yes,” Minnie said with a strange smile. “They claimed they could transform base metals such as tin and copper into rare ones like silver and gold—and much, much more.”
“You’re kidding,” said Lily. “You mean we traveled thousands of miles and went through all these hassles just to find out the secret of this service is a pile of phony magic trumped up by a lot of primitive priests?”
I continued to study the cloth. Something started to click.
“Alchemy isn’t magic,” I told her, beginning to get excited. “I mean, it wasn’t that originally—only recently. Actually, it was the origin of modern chemistry and physics. All the scientists of the Middle Ages studied it, and even later. Galileo helped the Duke of Tuscany and Pope Urban the Eighth with their basement experiments. Johannes Kepler’s mother was nearly burned at the stake as a witch for teaching him mystical secrets.…” Minnie was nodding her head as I kept moving. “They say Isaac Newton spent more time cooking up chemicals in his Cambridge lab than writing the Principia Mathematica. Paracelsus may have been a mystic, but he was also the father of modern chemistry. In fact, we use the alchemical principles he discovered in modern smelting and cracking plants. Don’t you know how they produce plastics, asphalt, and synthetic fibers from oil? They crack the molecules, take them apart with heat and catalysts—just as the ancient alchemists claimed they did by turning mercury into gold. In fact, there’s only one problem with this story.”
“Only one?” said Lily, always the skeptic.
“They didn’t have particle accelerators six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia—or cracking plants in Palestine. They couldn’t do much more than turn copper and brass to bronze.”
“Perhaps not,” Minnie said, unruffled. “But if these ancient priests of science didn’t possess a rare and dangerous secret, why did they shroud it in a veil of mystery? Why require the initiate to undergo a lifetime of training, a litany of vows and promises, a cultlike ritual of pain and danger, before he was admitted to the Order.…”
“Of the Hidden Elect?” I said. “The Secret Chosen?”
Minnie didn’t smile. She looked at me, then down at the cloth. It was a long time before she spoke, and when she did her voice went through me like a knife.
“Of the Eight,” she said quietly. “Of those who could hear the music of the spheres.”
Clink. The last piece fell into place. Now I knew why Nim had recommended me, why Mordecai had set me up, and Minnie “chosen” me. It wasn’t just my sparkling personality, my birthdate, or my palm—though that’s what they wanted me to believe. This wasn’t mysticism we were talking about; it was science. And music was science—older than acoustics, which Solarin had studied, or physics, Nim’s special province. I was a music major, so I knew. It was no accident that Pythagoras had
taught it on equal footing with mathematics and astronomy. He thought sound waves washed the universe, comprised everything that existed from the largest to the smallest. And he wasn’t far from wrong.
“It’s waves,” I said, “that hold molecules together—waves that move an electron from one shell to another, changing its valence so it can enter into chemical reactions with other molecules.”
“Exactly,” said Minnie with excitement. “Waves of light and sound that comprise the universe. I knew you were the right choice. You’re on the right track already.” With her face flushed she looked young again, and again I observed what a beauty she must have been not so many years ago. “But so are our enemies,” she added. “I told you there were three parts of this formula—the board, which is now in the hands of the opposing team, and the cloth, which lies before you. The central portion is in the pieces.”
“But I thought you had them,” Lily cut in.
“I possess the largest cache since the service was first removed from earth—twenty pieces scattered in hiding places where I’d hoped they would not be discovered for another thousand years. But I was wrong. Once the Russians got wind of my owning the pieces, the white forces instantly suspected some might be here in Algeria where I live. And to my great misfortune they were right. El-Marad is collecting his forces. I believe he has emissaries here who’ll shortly close in upon me so I can never get these pieces out of the country.”
So that was what she’d meant about El-Marad not knowing who I was! Of course—he’d chosen me as emissary, never realizing I’d been hand-picked by the other team. But there was more to learn.
“So your pieces are here in Algeria?” I said. “Who has the others? El-Marad? The Russians?”
“They’ve some, I’m not certain how many,” she told me. “Others were scattered or lost after the French Revolution. They may be anywhere—in Europe, the Far East, even America—perhaps never to be found again. I’ve spent a lifetime collecting those I possess. Some are safely hidden in other countries, but of the twenty, eight are hidden here in the desert—in the Tassili. You must capture the eight and bring them to me before it is too late.” Her face was still flushed with excitement as she gripped me by the arm.