Angels of Istanbul, page 10
She had not reckoned on arriving at Timișoara at night. The road ran out into sand. The wagons drew to a halt, and from the back of Văcărescu’s covered carts—which had been so innocently empty up to now—an army climbed down.
They had Stefan’s eerie stillness. Drawn up in rough lines on the quayside, they stood without fidgeting, without breathing, looking out together at the Turkish troop transport ship that was rowing with long sweeps toward the town’s single jetty. Anchored out in the bay, a second ship waited its turn to take on her father’s men, and a third was just dropping anchor beside it. That one would come in the following morning and transport the troops of whichever noble arrived next.
The first ship tied up to the dock. From the first of Văcărescu’s wagons a white figure emerged, followed by a smaller one clad in flickering blue. Ecaterina had been tired and dispirited—a long way away from home, having second thoughts—But the sight of him, white bearded, with a starburst of diamonds in his hat, made prickly cold roll over her skin, stopped her breath.
So Mirela hadn’t lied. Văcărescu knew the strigoi, was in league with him, and by malice or neglect had caused her brother’s death.
She strode forward, shrugging her rifle into her hand. Văcărescu dismounted from his horse and stood beside the white lord. She saw with betrayal that Frank Carew was there too, though he looked as though he would not be removed from his horse by anything short of lightning strike, his eyes as wide and frightened as his mount’s.
Already the sailors, jumping from their ship like fleas from a big dog, had flung down a gangplank and begun to help with the unloading of the wagons. This was her chance. In the middle of such bustle, in the dark, who would see her preparing to fire until it was too late? She took another couple of steps forward, getting a better angle, rammed powder, shot, and wadding into her rifle, primed the pan, and raised the heavy weapon to her shoulder.
Almost . . . yes. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
The white strigoi stepped in front of her prey, and at the same time a long arm knocked the barrel of her gun up towards the sky, grabbed it firmly, and resisted her every attempt to pull it back down.
Cursing, she turned to find an elderly gentleman with a moony moustache and a coat embroidered with flowers. “Let me go!”
“Son,” said this pest, in a tone of paternal concern, “don’t. A bullet can’t stop him. All you’d do would be to make them all very interested in you, and you don’t want that. Am I right?”
He thought— She recovered from the shock quick as she could. He thought she had been aiming for the white sire. He had not attacked her; he was trying to protect her. The glamour had not failed again. She was safe.
Safe, but thwarted, because Văcărescu had taken this chance to walk up the gangplank and disappear into the belly of the ship.
Ecaterina let go of the rifle, allowed her unwanted rescuer to lift it out of her hands, and lower it to rest—nicely away from the muck of the seashore—on the tip of his boot, mouth still facing the sky. The moment allowed her to think.
“All of them?” She pitched her voice low and husky, hauling it out of her stomach and making her throat ache, trying for an incredulity that did not give away the fact that she already knew this. “You don’t mean every one of them is a strigoi?”
“Ah.” He stroked his moustache, first one side, then the other, and she thought he was recalculating himself, after an inadvertent slip. “Not quite. I’m not, for example. But many. It doesn’t please you, the thought of unleashing our monsters on the Turks?”
This must be some country retainer of Văcărescu’s. He would never have lasted five minutes in the voivode’s court, with that tendency to tell his master’s plans to anyone who would listen. “The Turks? I thought we were fighting the British?”
He laughed, half-warm, half-rueful. “So I’m sure we will, once we’ve dropped off our little friends in the city of Istanbul. But now I’ve told you this, it occurs to me that it’s not a story I want you to spread around.” He ran a suddenly much shrewder eye over her clothes. “Who’s your lord?”
“I have none.”
“You’re certainly dressed as a bandit, though young for it. Run away from home to go to war?”
Her own truth was safe enough to share. “Ran away for vengeance. That thing—that white sire—it killed my brother. I’m going to kill it in return.”
Văcărescu’s household army of demons had begun trailing up the gangplank after him, some of them carrying what looked like rifle cases between them—cases large enough for a man to squeeze inside. Where would they bury them on a ship? What would they do in the daytime if they fed on the sailors at night? Did Văcărescu have enough control to stop them feeding? If not, the whole ship was doomed on the second day, with no one left to work the sails. That . . . would not be such a bad thing.
The older gentleman followed her gaze. For a moment she was surprised to see great weariness on his face. “Shot won’t do it,” he said quietly. “And if you are capable of getting close enough to behead him, and drive a stake through his heart, you are a better man than I.”
Stefan’s final moments returned to her, as though a spray of blood had spattered the back of her eyes. She and Frank had been pinned, unable to move, magic users as defenceless as if they had none at all. Then it’s good that it isn’t him I’m really after.
For a moment her heart faltered. Why was it not the strigoi on whom she meant to wreak vengeance? What if Văcărescu himself had not known what his pet was up to? Would he have spared Stefan, if he could?
There were a hundred dead men here who would not have been dead if Văcărescu had stayed in his mountains, and every one of them was someone’s brother, lover, husband, or father. He was owed repayment for them too.
“I have to try.”
“You can’t be happy just to know that our country is rid of him? That he is to become our enemy’s problem?”
Truth be told, she did rather like the idea of the strigoi rampaging through the Ottoman Empire. That would teach them what came of killing Wallachia’s princes and subjugating them to a Greek. If Văcărescu had proposed the idea before Stefan’s death, she would have had no quarrel with him. She might have found it ingenious and rather funny. A dead brother changed that. “I want him to know that he dies for my brother’s sake. Out of all the hundreds of people he has killed, I want him to regret he ever touched my kin.”
Another laugh, and then her rescuer offered her rifle back. She looked askance at him as she took it, and he shrugged. “I, too, would be happy to see Constantin finally sleeping his long sleep, and my lord would be indebted to you if you could manage it.”
“Does he care?” That came out harsher than she wished. He stepped back, and she caught the moment the power of her glamour reasserted itself, his offense and suspicion vanishing in the flood of her magical trustworthiness.
“Of course,” he said, frowning. “He is as much a prisoner of the things as the rest of us. Perhaps more.” He took a small vial of perfume from his pocket and dabbed it on her collar with a burst of jasmine. “The scent will mark you as one of the family—not to be touched. It should cling for a couple of days. If you succeed in killing him, I will put you in a boat afterwards, before the scent has time to fade.”
Life was so easy when everyone wanted to help you—it was like being a princess in one of the old tales, where a good fairy appeared at every hurdle to make the most impossible of quests routine. “My thanks,” she said. “What is your name, kind sir?”
“Cezar Dobre.”
“I am Catalin.” Impulsively she clasped his arm, hoped too late that when he returned the gesture he would not feel how thin and unmanly her biceps was beneath its bulky sleeve. But if he did, he didn’t mention it, just nodded and, turning, began to walk up to the ship. Falling in beside him, feeling the gangplank’s spring beneath her feet and then the unquiet heave of the ship, she was grateful for his reassuring presence beside her.
On the deck, a cauldron of frantic activity seethed. Sailors clustered around a tall wooden cylinder that rose out of the planking towards the front. They were fitting long bars into the slots at its top, getting ready to . . . wind something up? At the rear of the ship, there was a raised deck where four more sailors were taking bundles of material and rope out from a wall of netting and handing them to Văcărescu’s soldiers.
The owner, captain or master of the ship—she didn’t know which he was—stood on top of the rail that separated the raised deck from the lower, bellowed into a brass trumpet. From his sour look and his beautiful coat she guessed he was a successful merchant, pressed into service by the agents of the sultan to transport the army, and not at all happy about it. “Take a hammock, then get below. Someone will teach you how to sling it. When that’s done, get into it and out of our way. Stay there. You’ll be assigned to watches and fed when they are fed, but apart from meals I don’t want to see you on my decks. Anyone who interferes with my men or my discipline on my ship will be flogged. Are we clear?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, jumping down and striding off to the small wooden hut at the back of the ship. Ecaterina was suddenly very aware that she was standing in the middle of the deck, conspicuously doing nothing, and that there was no sign of her prey anywhere.
Would he, too, be in the cabin? If that was where the high-ranking people went, then probably. She headed for the steps up to that part of the deck, but was caught before she could put a foot on the first riser. Warm hands on her arms, not cold. Sailors then, not strigoi. She wasn’t sure she liked either, but these wore the tolerant grins of grandmothers left in charge of a room full of boisterous toddlers.
“Can’t go up there, mate. You’ve got to go down below. Didn’t you hear? Now—” a surprisingly heavy bundle of cloth was thrust into her arms, making it impossible to draw rifle or sword “—take this and go ‘downstairs.’” He said downstairs as if it was a foreign word and he found it distasteful to pronounce. “Get yourself a good spot before it’s all snapped up.”
Compared to the deck, the next level down was ghostly silent, but for the creaking of timber and wind. In the centre of the vaulted space a large cast-iron range stood cold, and hammocks did indeed hang from every inch of the floor above, but they were limp and flaccid, their occupants mysteriously gone.
Ecaterina unwound hers and found cleverly made eyes of rope on either end, which, after studying how the others had done it, she hooked to the first available beam with a couple of S-shaped hooks. There was still a little space left unclaimed towards the front, where a latrine stench filtered through the heavy wooden walls.
Down here there was no sound of footsteps, but when she had hung her bed and turned, she saw a steady movement of figures down the steep stairs and down again into the next level. Uncanny how they walked, as though they were made of wax and not bone. Once or twice one paused and looked at her, lifted its head, and snuffed the air, but the scent did its work—they frowned and drifted away.
There was no one else on this level. No sign of Văcărescu. He was either up in the great cabin or down in a lower deck. Unable to look in the cabin, she bit her lip and breathed deep deliberately until she could throw off the horror of the strigoi’s presence long enough to join the silent procession of bodies down into the hold.
Cold struck her to the marrow the minute she ducked her head below the floor. The walls around her glimmered as water seeped through the planks of the hull. A lantern shone over a half deck to the squarer back end of the ship, and there, because God was righteous, she made out the voice of her prey.
She could just see him through a doorway in a wall made of canvas. He was standing on one side of a scrubbed wooden table, covered with gruesome instruments, and on the other side stood a man in the blood-soaked apron of a barber-surgeon. This must be the ship’s doctor in his surgery. Even as she watched, the doctor took his apron off and set it aside in a small chest, poured himself a bowl of water and began scrubbing the brown stains from his fingers.
The quiet procession of strigoi down and farther down continued. Văcărescu was gesturing at the doctor’s scalpels now. Concocting some tale, presumably, that would convince the man to wash them too. She wondered why he bothered, when he had done nothing to protect Stefan.
It couldn’t hurt to see what the strigoi were up to. She climbed backwards down the final ladder into the hold. It was shaped like the rib cage of a whale, the dim light from the lantern on the deck above only just showing looming bulks of equipment carefully stacked and tied. Beneath that, the keel was covered with a deep layer of gravel, wet from the constant snake of water down the walls. One by one, the strigoi were sinking to their knees and shovelling this aside, tunnelling down into the ballast like razor worms sucking themselves under the beach. The wet cold air was full of a swish, swish sound as the sea’s movement stirred the little pebbles on the top of these watery graves.
The roll of the sea was far more marked now. The lantern above made a restless circle as it swung. The swishing was joined with a lower thrum, as the pillars of the masts trembled with stress. She had barely time to notice they were underway when the pirouetting light slid over something icy blue, and then the rope ladder on which she hung jerked and clattered against the side as a body joined hers on it, and a small hand with a sapphire ring closed over her ankle.
A pause, where it seemed the world froze with her. She was aware of big blue eyes examining her face, of fine white cheeks and a blush like a rose, and a red mouth parted in surprise. “You smell like one of us, but you don’t look like it.”
The clues joined up into certainty—she’d seen a little figure, blue like this, come out of Văcărescu’s cart on the white sire’s arm. The hand on her foot was cold. She didn’t think, just drew her sword and hacked down blindly at that upturned face, felt the tip of the weapon catch in something firm. A ripping noise. The strigoi flinched, and Ecaterina kicked out, freed her foot, and scrambled into the light.
When her feet were on the previous level again, she glanced back once, saw she had dislodged the thing’s headdress and it was struggling with askew masses of torn silk and pins. Strangely clearheaded at the prospect of imminent death, Ecaterina thought, Vengeance first. I can die satisfied if I kill him first. Turning on her heel, she bolted for the doctor’s office.
The door was shut now, but it was only a canvas door. She slashed it open with her sword, burst through. The small room was crowded with witnesses, but that hardly mattered now. Nothing mattered. What power there was, in the instant before annihilation.
There was her victim, struck dumb by the violence of her entry. He had scarcely begun to frown before she had lunged and skewered him right through the ribs.
Then everything went to hell.
Văcărescu clutched at the wound, bowed forward, hissing between his teeth at the pain, but he did not fall. Bright-red liquid bloomed under his fingers, filling the cabin with its warm, metallic scent. Almost instantly, the canvas walls bulged and rippled with seeking fingers, before they were torn out of their mouldings and ripped apart. Their places were filled with a shrinking circle of animated bodies, all bones and teeth and hunger. Two paces before the foremost of these inferior ghouls, the beautiful young maiden strigoi, with her hair hanging down to the backs of her knees, grabbed Ecaterina by the throat and pulled her in to bite.
A hand found Ecaterina’s wrist and pushed in so hard the bones creaked against each other, and the sword dropped from her numb hand. Her head was wrenched to the side, fire along her backbone at the twist, the gritty sound of vertebrae trying to move farther than they could.
And still Văcărescu had not fallen, though he was panting, supporting himself on the table with one hand while the other pressed in. Blood ran over his fingers and splashed on the floor with a tiny tink.
It was enough to make the moment explode. The watching strigoi groaned and surged forward. The white strigoi, Constantin, materialised from the darkness and threw out a commanding hand. “No!”
They stopped, held, all their eyes fixed on the red rain, swaying back and forth in thwarted movements as if to the time of the beat of a heart.
Then the doctor clapped a pad of white material over the wound, and Frank threw off the restraining arm of a familiar red-haired valet to lay his hands on either side of the laceration. Using a chant she had taught him herself, the traitor, he closed the wound and sealed it over. The bleeding stopped.
“No!” She was owed vengeance, damn it. If this was to be her last chance, how could it fail? Where was the justice in that?
Văcărescu straightened up, still breathing hard. Frowned at her, with no understanding at all in his clear grey eyes. “Why?”
“You bastard! It’s because of you my brother is dead. I’m going to kill you, even if I have to come back from my grave to do it. I’m going to kill you, for Stefan’s sake.” She wouldn’t cry. She refused—she would not die weeping. She was better than that. But her face was wet when she felt the cold mouth descend on her throat. She screwed her eyes more firmly shut, so she would not see their pity and disgust when the creature fed on her. When she died.
“Wait!” Văcărescu’s voice, surprisingly. “Mother, wait. Please.”
Constantin replied, a faint shake in his firm tones. “We gave you Frank. How many more are you going to ask for? Are we always to be under your thumb?”
“Just . . . just this one, Father. If you spare her, I will marry her. I will marry her. You will have the heir I’ve denied you.”
What?! Ecaterina kicked at her captor’s legs, but only got her boots entangled in the myriad folds of silk. What felt like the tips of two slightly rusty needles grazed along her skin but did not break it. Then the maiden put her carefully down on her feet and regally circumnavigated her.
