Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,90
burner in a cloth and added it to his supplies. Everything necessary had to be brought into the cavern.
As he zipped his jacket, he turned to the others, sizing them up. He distributed the parkas, and gave everyone a cap and a pair of gloves. Both Sveti and Vera were potentially worrisome. Although trim and tanned from her work on the Black Sea, Sveti was a linguist, whose greatest physical exertion was the moving of books from one shelf to another, and—if he was a good judge of character—Vera wasn’t much different. Neither of them had the training or the strength for a real expedition.
He tried to remember that he’d been a novice himself once too, and that he needed to be patient with his younger colleagues. His first expeditions were in the Pyrenees Mountains, where he and his first wife, Seraphina, had fallen in love. They continued to find remains of the Nephilim in mountain sites in the years following their marriage. Her work in the Rhodopes had changed everything for them both. The discovery of Valkine, contact with the Watchers, the series of photographs Seraphina had taken of a dead angel, and—their greatest achievement—the recovery of the lyre: Such advances had never been made before, and although nearly seventy years had passed, he’d never reached such heights again. He had remarried twice, but he’d never forgotten his brilliant Seraphina. Maybe it was nostalgia for their time together, but he felt closer to her in the mountains than anywhere else.
They set off toward the peaks above Smolyan, walking within the thick forest. They would avoid the village roads near Trigrad and descend to the Devil’s Throat from behind. He’d done it many times over the past years, filling his backpack with a video camera so that he could record his observations about the site. Only now he didn’t pack his notebooks or his camera. He knew that this was his last trip into the cave.
The snow had melted in March, and they climbed over a bed of pine needles and rock, safe under the cover of enormous evergreens. A patch of sunlight appeared overhead, sliding between the barren branches of a linden tree and casting a golden gleam over the forest floor. He glanced over his shoulder as they ascended, noting the smoke rising from the chimney of his stone house—the smoke grew fainter and fainter, until it dissolved away completely.
The sun had climbed into the sky by the time they reached the Devil’s Throat. The rocky surface of the mountain seemed silver in the brightness. Valko led the way up the steep rise of the mountain and through a dense patch of forest. Beyond the overgrown bramble stood the large, dark cave. Once, many years before, this had been a much revered entrance to the Devil’s Throat. Thracians had created shrines here; myths and legends grew around the site. The local people believed that Orpheus descended to the underworld from the cave and that devils lived in the labryinthian structures deep below it. Anyone who entered would be cursed, lost to life aboveground, forever mired in darkness.
Approaching the entrance, Valko remembered the first time he had seen it. It had seemed to him to be just a hole gaping in the side of the mountain like so many other caves he’d seen in his travels, but of course it had been so much more. He would never forget the smile of triumph on Seraphina’s face when she returned to Paris after the Second Angelic Expedition. She had found the opening to the underworld, and she had brought back its most precious treasure. Of course, everything had changed since her death. He’d stayed in Paris, remarried, raised a daughter, divorced, buried a daughter. Only then, after Angela’s death, when the last of his connections to Paris was gone, had he made the trek to the Devil’s Throat Cavern himself. For twenty-five years Valko had climbed the sheer rock face, the sound of the waterfall crashing in his ears, and spied on the Watchers, waiting for the day when he would return. For years his life had been in that secluded valley. He’d disguised himself so well that nobody knew who he was or what he was doing. He’d married a Bulgarian woman, spoke Bulgarian like a native, mixed with local men in the village bars, and done everything he could to fit in. If the Nephilim had discovered his identity, he would be dead. But they hadn’t.
Leaning against the