“So?”
“Sienna knows the poem references the ‘sunken palace,’ ” Langdon said. “And in Turkish, ‘sunken palace’ literally points …” He motioned to the “Yerebatan Sarayi” sign over the doorway. “… here.”
“That’s true,” Sinskey agreed wearily. “She may have figured this out and bypassed Hagia Sophia altogether.”
Brüder glanced at the lone doorway and cursed under his breath. “Okay, if she’s down there and plans to break the Solublon bag before we can contain it, at least she hasn’t been there long. It’s a huge area, and she probably has no idea where to look. And with all those people around, she probably can’t just dive into the water unnoticed.”
“Sir?” the doorman called again to Brüder. “Would you like to enter now?”
Brüder could see another group of concertgoers approaching from across the street, and nodded to the doorman that he was indeed coming.
“I’m coming with you,” Langdon said, following.
Brüder turned and faced him. “No chance.”
Langdon’s tone was unyielding. “Agent Brüder, one of the reasons we’re in this situation is that Sienna Brooks has been playing me all day. And as you said, we may all be infected already. I’m helping you whether you like it or not.”
Brüder stared at him a moment and then relented.
As Langdon passed through the doorway and began descending the steep staircase behind Brüder, he could feel the warm wind rushing past them from the bowels of the cistern. The humid breeze carried on it the strains of Liszt’s Dante Symphony as well as a familiar, yet ineffable scent … that of a massive crush of people congregated together in an enclosed space.
Langdon suddenly felt a ghostly pall envelop him, as if the long fingers of an unseen hand were reaching out of the earth and raking his flesh.
The music.
The symphony chorus — a hundred voices strong — was now singing a well-known passage, articulating every syllable of Dante’s gloomy text.
“Lasciate ogne speranza,”they were now chanting, “voi ch’entrate.”
These six words — the most famous line in all of Dante’s Inferno—welled up from the bottom of the stairs like the ominous stench of death.
Accompanied by a swell of trumpets and horns, the choir intoned the warning again. “Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’entrate!”
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!
CHAPTER 91
Bathed in red light, the subterranean cavern resonated with the sounds of hell-inspired music — the wail of voices, the dissonant pinch of strings, and the deep roll of timpani, which thundered through the grotto like a seismic tremor.
As far as Langdon could see, the floor of this underground world was a glassy sheet of water — dark, still, smooth — like black ice on a frozen New England pond.
The lagoon that reflects no stars.
Rising out of the water, meticulously arranged in seemingly endless rows, were hundreds upon hundreds of thick Doric columns, each climbing thirty feet to support the cavern’s vaulted ceiling. The columns were lit from below by a series of individual red spotlights, creating a surreal forest of illuminated trunks that telescoped off into the darkness like some kind of mirrored illusion.
Langdon and Brüder paused at the bottom of the stairs, momentarily stalled on the threshold of the spectral hollow before them. The cavern itself seemed to glow with a reddish hue, and as Langdon took it all in, he could feel himself breathing as shallowly as possible.
The air down here was heavier than he’d imagined.
Langdon could see the crowd in the distance to their left. The concert was taking place deep in the underground space, halfway back against the far wall, its audience seated on an expanse of platforms. Several hundred spectators sat in concentric rings that had been arranged around the orchestra while a hundred more stood around the perimeter. Still others had taken up positions out on the near boardwalks, leaning on the sturdy railings and gazing down into the water as they listened to the music.
Langdon found himself scanning the sea of amorphous silhouettes, his eyes searching for Sienna. She was nowhere in sight. Instead he saw figures in tuxedos, gowns, bishts, burkas, and even tourists in shorts and sweatshirts. The cross section of humanity, gathered in the crimson light, looked to Langdon like celebrants in some kind of occult mass.
If Sienna’s down here, he realized, it will be nearly impossible to spot her.
At that moment a heavyset man moved past them, exiting up the stairs, coughing as he went. Brüder spun and watched him go, scrutinizing him carefully. Langdon felt a faint tickle in his own throat but told himself it was his imagination.
Brüder now took a tentative step forward on the boardwalk, eyeing their numerous options. The path before them looked like the entrance to the Minotaur’s labyrinth. The single boardwalk quickly forked into three, each of those branching off again, creating a suspended maze, hovering over the water, weaving in and out of the columns and snaking into the darkness.
I found myself within a forest dark, Langdon thought, recalling the ominous first canto of Dante’s masterwork, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Langdon peered over the walkway’s railing into the water. It was about four feet deep and surprisingly clear. The stone tile floor was visible, blanketed by a fine layer of silt.
Brüder took a quick look down, gave a noncommittal grunt, and then raised his eyes back to the room. “Do you see anything that looks like the area in Zobrist’s video?”
Everything, Langdon thought, surveying the steep, damp walls around them. He motioned to the most remote corner of the cavern, far off to the right, away from the congestion of the orchestral platform. “I’m guessing back there somewhere.”
Brüder nodded. “My instinct as well.”
The two of them hurried down the boardwalk, choosing the right-hand fork, which carried them away from the crowd, in the direction of the farthest reaches of the sunken palace.
As they walked, Langdon realized how easy it would be to hide overnight in this space, undetected. Zobrist could have done just that to make his video. Of course, if he had generously underwritten this week-long concert series, he also could have simply requested some private time in the cistern.
Not that it matters anymore.
Brüder was striding faster now, as if subconsciously keeping pace with the symphony’s tempo, which had increased into a cascading series of descending semitone suspensions.
Dante and Virgil’s descent into hell.
Langdon intently scanned the steep, mossy walls in the distance to their right, trying to match them up with what they had seen in the video. At each new fork in the boardwalk, they turned right, moving farther from the crowd, heading for the cavern’s most remote corner. Langdon looked back and was astounded by the distance they had covered.
They advanced at almost a jog now, passing a handful of meandering visitors, but by the time they entered the deepest parts of the cistern, the number of people had thinned to nothing.
Brüder and Langdon were alone.
“It all looks the same,” Brüder despaired. “Where do we start?” Langdon shared his frustration. He remembered the video vividly, but nothing down here leaped out as a recognizable feature.
Langdon studied the softly lit informational signs that dotted the boardwalk as they moved ahead. One described the twenty-one-million-gallon capacity of the room. Another pointed out a nonmatching pillar that had been looted from a nearby structure during construction. And still another offered a diagram of an ancient carving now faded from view — the Crying Hen’s Eye symbol, which wept for all the slaves who died while building the cistern.