Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

"Why have you come back?"

"I wanted to announce the death of Sema. She died with my memories." Kudseyi burst out laughing. And you think I'm going to let you go like that?"

"I don't think anything. I'm another person. I don't want to keep running because of the woman I no longer am."

He stood up and took a few steps. Waving his stick at her, he said, "If you've come back empty-handed, then you really must have lost your memory"

"There's no guilty party anymore. So there's no punishment."

A strange warmth entered his veins. Incredibly, he was tempted to pardon her. This was a possible conclusion. Perhaps the most original, most refined one… just let this new creature fly away, take wing… forget about it all… But he then stared straight into her eyes and said, "You have no face. You have no past. You have no name. You have become a sort of abstract being, that is true. But you have kept your ability to suffer. We will cleanse our honor in the stream of your suffering. We will -"

Ismail Kudseyi was struck dumb. The woman was stretching her hands toward him, palms uppermost.

Each of them was covered by a henna design. A wolf, howling below four moons. It was a rallying sign. The symbol used by the members of the new movement. He himself had added the fourth moon, symbolizing the Golden Crescent, to the three on the Ottoman flag.

Kudseyi dropped his stick, pointed at Sema and yelled, "She knows.

She knows!"

She seized this moment of stupor. She leapt behind one of the guards, grabbing him brutally. Her hand closed on the man's fingers, which were on the trigger of the MP7, sending a hail of bullets toward the dais.

Ismail Kudseyi felt himself take off from the ground, before being pushed to the foot of the sofa by the second guard. He rolled over and saw his protector spin in an explosion of blood while his gun fired in all directions, blasting the chests into a thousand splinters. Sparks shot up like electric arcs while the ceiling filled with clouds of plaster. The first man, who was being used by Sema as a shield, collapsed at the very moment she pulled his gun from his hand.

Kudseyi could no longer see Azer.

She dived toward the chests and overturned them for protection. At that moment, two other men burst into the room. No sooner had they arrived than they were hit-the dull, isolated sound of Sema's pistol punctuated the rattle of uncontrolled automatic weapons.

Kudseyi tried to slip behind the sofa, but he could not move-the orders from his brain were no longer being relayed to his body. He was paralyzed on the floor, inert. A signal rang though his being. He had been hit.

Three more guards appeared in the doorway, taking turns at shooting and then disappearing behind the jamb. Kudseyi's eyes blinked at the fire from their guns, but he could not hear the shots anymore. It was as if his ears and brain were full of water.

He curled up, fingers gripping a cushion. A painful convulsion ran through him, down to the pit of his stomach, pinning him into a fetal position. He looked down. His intestines were gushing out, unrolling between his legs.

Everything went black. When he came to once more, Sema was reloading her gun at the foot of the steps, beside one of the chests. He turned toward the edge of the dais and reached out his hand. One part of him could not believe what he was doing. He was calling for help.

He was calling to Sema Hunsen for help!

She turned around. With tears in his eyes, Kudseyi was waving his hand. She hesitated for a second, then bent below the continuing gun blasts, climbed up the steps. The old man groaned in thanks. He raised his shivering, gaunt red hand, but she did not take it.

She stood up, braced herself and took aim, like a bent bow.

In a flash, Kudseyi understood why she had come back to Istanbul.

Quite simply to kill him. To cut off that hatred at its source. And perhaps also to avenge a tree of life, which he had had cut off at the roots.

He blacked out again. When he next opened his eyes, Azer was diving onto Sema. They rolled down to the foot of the steps, among the scraps of leather and pools of blood. They fought as waves of fire still continued to break through the smoke. Arms, fists, blows-but not a single cry. Just obsessive, obstinate hatred. The physical fight for survival.

Azer and Sema. His evil brood.

On her stomach, Sema was trying to raise her gun, but Azer was pushing down on her with all his weight. Holding her by the nape of the neck with one hand while with the other he pulled out a knife. She slipped from his grip and rolled onto her back. He lunged and stuck the blade into her belly. Sema spat out a muffled cry of blood.

Lying on the dais, Kudseyi could see it all. His eyes, like two slow valves, were pulsing in a counterrhythm with his arteries. He prayed that he would die before the end of the fight, but he could not resist watching.

The blade flew down, rose, then went down again, ferreting its way into her flesh.

Serra arched up. Azer grabbed her shoulders and forced them back to the ground. He threw away his knife and plunged his hand into the open wound.

Ismail Kudseyi drifted far away into the shifting sands of death.

A few seconds before the end, he saw crimson hands stretched toward him, carrying their cargo…

Sema's heart in Azer's fingers.

In eastern Anatolia, the snow at high altitudes begins to melt at the end of April, thus opening a path to Nemrut Dab, the highest peak of the Taurus Mountains. Tourist excursions have not yet begun, and the site remains perfectly preserved, in total solitude.

After each mission, he looked forward to this moment when he would return to his stone gods.

He had taken a flight from Istanbul the day before, on April 26, and had landed at Adana in the late afternoon. He had rested for a few hours in a hotel near the airport. Then, later that night, he had taken the road in a hired car.

He was now driving eastward toward Adiyaman, having covered two hundred fifty miles. Long pastures surrounded him like flooded plains. In the darkness, he sensed their vague, supple undulations. These rippling shadows were a first step, the initial shift toward purity. He remembered the beginning of a poem he had written in his youth, in old Turkish: I have sailed the seas of greenness…

At half past six, he drove past the village of Gaziantep, and the landscape changed. In the first glimmers of daylight, the Taurus Mountains appeared. The fluid fields became stony deserts. Bare, abrupt, red spikes poked up. Craters opened in the distance, like dried sunflowers.

When confronted with this scene, the average traveler always feels rather apprehensive and vaguely anxious. But he loved these shades of ochre and yellow, growing deeper, brighter than the blue of the dawn. He was at home. This aridness had forged his flesh. It was the second stage of purity.

He remembered the next line of his poem:

Kissed the borders of stone, the empty eyes of shadow…

When he stopped at Adiyaman, the sun was struggling to rise. At the garage in the town, he filled his gas tank himself while the employee was cleaning his windshield. He stared at the pools of iron and bronze-tinged houses laid out as far as the foothills.

On the main avenue, he saw the Matak warehouses, his storerooms, where thousands of tons of fruit would soon be stocked before being treated, turned into jams or exported. He felt no pride at all. Such trivial ambition had never really interested him. Instead, he sensed the approach of the mountains, the nearness of the ridges…

Three miles farther on, he turned off the main road. No more asphalt, no more signs. Just a track cut into the mountain, snaking up through the clouds. At that instant, he truly felt that he was back on native soil, amid the flanks of purple dust, the spiky grasses forming aggressive clumps, and gray-black sheep parting just enough to let him through.