City of the Lost
A high-stakes thriller which weaves Turkey’s war-torn past with action, adventure and conspiracy.A TERRIFYING ATTACKSouthern Turkey. Business intelligence operative Iain Black, having survived the hotel bombing that killed his friend and partner, vows to find out who was responsible – then make them pay.A PAST THAT WON’T STAY BURIEDHistorian Karin Visser, who also lost friends in the blast, teams up with Iain to uncover secrets hidden deep within the region’s past, from the bloody division of Cyprus all the way back to the Trojan War.AN EXPLOSIVE SECRETPiecing the puzzle together, Iain and Karin discover the shocking conspiracy behind the blast. But now they’re running out of time to reveal it – before they’re silenced for good.
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CITY OF THE LOST
WILL ADAMS
To Hattie and Mark
Table of Contents
Alashiya, Eastern Cyprus, 805 BC
She’d thought she’d have till dawn, but it wasn’t to be. They came at dusk instead. From the ramparts of her palace, she watched them landing on the beach. Between the breaking of the waves, she could hear the muffled roars of their triumph and the jubilant clashing of spears on shields as they saw they were unopposed and realized that her people had abandoned her.
She didn’t blame them for that abandonment. She’d brought it upon herself through neglect of her queenly duties. What cut her, what truly cut her, was that the man she’d neglected them for had abandoned her too. She could see his fugitive sails still, the splash of frantic oars. She thought scornfully: Aeneas of the Teukrians indeed! No doubt he’d be telling himself comforting lies about how Sicherbas was her brother and could therefore be trusted to treat her honourably. She wanted, suddenly, for him to be confronted with the brutal truth of it. And, with him already so far distant, there was only one way to achieve that.
It was time.
Her palace was on three levels. The subterranean treasuries and storerooms, hewn out of raw bedrock. A ground floor of grand chambers with walls of ashlar masonry and roofs of cedar timbers shipped in from her childhood homeland. And, finally, the upper quarters of wood and thatch. The bottom level would never burn; the top would burn easily. It was the middle floor, therefore, that needed work.
Her sister Anna was waiting below with two lit torches. She, at least, had no illusions about what their brother would do if they fell into his power. Nor did she have any stomach for letting him regain his claimed treasure. That was why, when word had first reached this new city of theirs that he was on his way with his full fleet, pledging terrible revenges upon them both, they’d sent every man they had to chop down the surrounding forests and fill these rooms with timber.
She and Anna touched their torches to the largest stack now, then stood back to watch the contagion spread, flaming embers spitting and drifting to neighbouring chambers, where new fires quickly started. The smoke made her eyes water so that tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them angrily away lest Anna mistake them for self-pity. When the heat grew too much for them to bear, they retreated to the treasury steps, then hugged and wished each other well on their respective journeys. Once Anna was gone, she went alone down the steps into the vaults, fetched her sword from her armoury. His sword, more properly, for it was what they’d exchanged instead of vows. She used its blade and hilt to pry and hammer away the stone chocks, releasing cascades of sand from the walls, allowing the vast marble slab to sink slowly beneath its own unimaginable weight until it slotted neatly into place above her, sealing these steps off forever.
One entrance closed. One more to go.
Through dark and twisting corridors, she hurried to and down the long staircase. Usually, when she stepped out into the great cavern at the foot, it was already aglow with the myriad constellations of oil lamps in the walls. But her handmaidens had left with Anna and the others, to found their next new city on the Libyan coast, beyond even her brother’s vengeful reach. And so, for once, this place looked gloomy rather than magical. She closed and barred the heavy bronze doors behind her. Now for the second entrance: the twisting cave passage down which she and Aeneas had first discovered this place while seeking refuge from a storm. The mouth was high above the chamber floor, reached only by a staircase pegged to the left-hand wall, where the camber was easiest. She climbed it to the top, then crossed the short bridge to the narrow slit in the limestone. She ducked her head as she passed through it into the shaft beyond, then climbed the crude steps hacked in the rock up to and beyond the trap-doors.
High above her, the night sky flickered orange. Her palace was ablaze. Her heart twisted with a kind of bitter triumph, knowing her lover couldn’t help but see this pyre as he fled his cowardly way. But she had no time to waste. She hacked at the two ropes until they both cleaved and slithered off upwards like startled snakes, then stood there for a moment, panting from the exertion. Rumblings began, as though Mother Earth herself were hungry. Her engineers had warned her to be swift. She climbed back below the trap-doors then closed them flat across the shaft and fixed them in place with their locking-bars. She was barely done when it began, a soft pattering that abruptly turned into a thunderous deluge before being so muffled by the sand already fallen that it grew silent again.
