Langdon smiled wryly. “Venice does have one museum that perfectly qualifies as a ‘gilded mouseion of holy wisdom.’ ”
Both Ferris and Sienna looked at him expectantly.
“St. Mark’s Basilica,” he declared. “The largest church in Venice.”
Ferris looked uncertain. “The church is a museum?”
Langdon nodded. “Much like the Vatican Museum. And what’s more, the interior of St. Mark’s is famous for being adorned, in its entirety, in solid gold tiles.”
“A gilded mouseion,” Sienna said, sounding genuinely excited.
Langdon nodded, having no doubt that St. Mark’s was the gilded temple referenced in the poem. For centuries, the Venetians had called St. Mark’s La Chiesa d’Oro — the Church of Gold — and Langdon considered its interior the most dazzling of any church in the world.
“The poem says to ‘kneel’ there,” Ferris added. “And a church is a logical place to kneel.”
Sienna was typing furiously again. “I’ll add St. Mark’s to the search. That must be where we need to look for the doge.”
Langdon knew they would find no shortage of doges in St. Mark’s — which was, quite literally, the basilica of the doges. He felt encouraged as he returned his eyes to the poem.
Trickling water?Langdon wondered. Is there water under St. Mark’s?The question, he realized, was foolish. There was water under the entire city. Every building in Venice was slowly sinking and leaking. Langdon pictured the basilica and tried to imagine where inside one might kneel to listen for trickling water. And once we hear it … what do we do?
Langdon returned to the poem and finished reading aloud.
“Okay,” Langdon said, disturbed by the image, “apparently, we follow the sounds of trickling water … to some kind of sunken palace.”
Ferris scratched at his face, looking unnerved. “What’s a chthonic monster?”
“Subterranean,” Sienna offered, her fingers still working the phone. “ ‘Chthonic’ means ‘beneath the earth.’ ”
“Partly, yes,” Langdon said. “Although the word has a further historic implication — one commonly associated with myths and monsters. Chthonicsare an entire category of mythical gods and monsters — Erinyes, Hecate, and Medusa, for example. They’re called chthonics because they reside in the underworld and are associated with hell.” Langdon paused. “Historically, they emerge from the earth and come aboveground to wreak havoc in the human world.”
There was a long silence, and Langdon sensed they were all thinking the same thing. This chthonic monster … could only be Zobrist’s plague.
“Anyway,” Langdon said, trying to stay on track, “we’re obviously looking for an underground location, which at least explains the last line of the poem referencing ‘the lagoon that reflects no stars.’ ”
“Good point,” Sienna said, glancing up now from Ferris’s phone. “If a lagoon is subterranean, it couldn’t reflect the sky. But does Venice have subterranean lagoons?”
“None that I know of,” Langdon replied. “But in a city built on water, there are probably endless possibilities.”
“What if the lagoon is indoors?” Sienna asked suddenly, eyeing them both. “The poem refers to ‘the darkness’ of ‘the sunken palace.’ You mentioned earlier that the Doge’s Palace is connected to the basilica, right? That means those structures have a lot of what the poem mentions — a mouseion of holy wisdom, a palace, relevance to doges — and it’s all located right there on Venice’s main lagoon, at sea level.”
Langdon considered this. “You think the poem’s ‘sunken palace’ is the Doge’s Palace?”
“Why not? The poem tells us first to kneel at St. Mark’s Basilica, then to follow the sounds of trickling water. Maybe the sounds of water lead next door to the Doge’s Palace. It could have a submerged foundation or something.”
Langdon had visited the Doge’s Palace many times and knew that it was absolutely massive. A sprawling complex of buildings, the palace housed a grand-scale museum, a veritable labyrinth of institutional chambers, apartments, and courtyards, and a prison network so vast that it was housed in multiple buildings.
“You may be right,” Langdon said, “but a blind search of that palace would take days. I suggest we do exactly as the poem tells us. First, we go to St. Mark’s Basilica and find the tomb or statue of this treacherous doge, and then we kneel down.”
“And then?” Sienna asked.
“And then,” Langdon said with a sigh, “we pray like hell that we hear trickling water … and it leads us somewhere.”
In the silence that followed, Langdon pictured the anxious face of Elizabeth Sinskey as he had seen it in his hallucinations, calling to him across the water. Time is short. Seek and find!He wondered where Sinskey was now … and if she was all right. The soldiers in black had no doubt realized by now that Langdon and Sienna had escaped. How long until they come after us?
As Langdon returned his eyes to the poem, he fought off a wave of exhaustion. He eyed the final line of verse, and another thought occurred to him. He wondered if it was even worth mentioning. The lagoon that reflects no stars.It was probably irrelevant to their search, but he decided to share it nonetheless. “There’s another point I should mention.”
Sienna glanced up from the cell phone.
“The three sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” Langdon said. “ Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. They allend with the exact same word.”
Sienna looked surprised.
“What word is that?” Ferris asked.
Langdon pointed to the bottom of the text he had transcribed. “The same word that ends thispoem—‘stars.’ ” He picked up Dante’s death mask and pointed to the very center of the spiral text.
The lagoon that reflects no stars.
“What’s more,” Langdon continued, “in the finale of the Inferno, we find Dante listening to the sound of trickling water inside a chasm and following it through an opening … which leads him out of hell.”
Ferris blanched slightly. “Jesus.”
Just then, a deafening rush of air filled the cabin as the Frecciargento plunged into a mountain tunnel.
In the darkness, Langdon closed his eyes and tried to allow his mind to relax. Zobrist may have been a lunatic, he thought, but he certainly had a sophisticated grasp of Dante.
CHAPTER 64
Laurence Knowlton felt a wave of relief wash over him.
The provost changed his mind about watching Zobrist’s video.
Knowlton practically dove for the crimson memory stick and inserted it into his computer so he could share it with his boss. The weight of Zobrist’s bizarre nine-minute message had been haunting the facilitator, and he was eager to have another set of eyes watch it.
This will no longer be on me.
Knowlton held his breath as he began the playback.
The screen darkened, and the sounds of gently lapping water filled the cubicle. The camera moved through the reddish haze of the underground cavern, and although the provost showed no visible reaction, Knowlton sensed that the man was as alarmed as he was bewildered.