Angels of Istanbul, page 13
The rug had been hastily made by the cousin of one of Jala’s friends. It had a black background into which was woven the words that Adham bin Adil—Zayd’s recruit who could control sand—had chosen to activate his spell. The loose weave of the threads provided many small spaces to be filled with packed sand. “It’s early days yet, but we have made some progress. Allow me to show you?”
At the waved acknowledgement, he whispered the words of the spell, and the sand formed itself into six small zephyrs beneath the light rug, lifting it from the ground like a kite. It shook, stabilized, and then hovered a foot above the floor, the spinning sand beneath it fine enough to be barely visible except in the form of a faint haze.
The sultan clapped his hands together and rose. “I will stand on it.”
“Yes, Most High.” Zayd and Adham had tested this already, knew it could be done, though carefully. He watched as white eunuchs came forward to support the sultan under the arms while he stepped on to the gauzy platform, then helped him sink down to sit cross-legged in midair.
It really appeared to be flying. Zayd was impressed himself, felt he had earned the murmurs of surprised admiration from some of the greatest men in the land.
“How do I make it go forward?”
“That, Padishah, we have not yet discovered. I have people working on it as we speak. If I might have a few more weeks?”
“A month,” the sultan ruled, giggling to himself as he looked down, clearly savouring the fact that he was floating. “Our infidel troops will take that long to fully arrive and organise themselves. You should be ready when they are. In the meantime, I am pleased. What would you have as a reward?”
Zayd tried not to sigh in obvious relief, nor to press too hard on the little bump at his waist where the arsenic waited. “Anointed One,” he said instead, “I was attacked last night in my home by a demon. When I passed through the city this morning it seemed I was not the only one.”
He smoothed down his jacket, and under it the parchment of the poor single charm he had brought. This was surely the time to hold it out, to give it to the sultan, as was his clear duty. It was his absolute, unbending duty to beg Mahmud to protect himself. But he had remembered the angel, and he could not.
“These creatures seem unable to enter a man’s home without his permission. Unfortunately, they are able to influence his mind to force that permission out of him. Last night, my family and I made and tested a charm which protects the mind from the demons’ influence. I entreat you for time to make enough copies to give one to each member of this divan.”
The sultan turned so sharply towards Haji Nabih that he wobbled on his cushion of sandy air. “We have an infestation of demons?”
“We do, Exalted. I was going to raise it next.”
“What is being done?”
“Nothing, as yet.”
The sultan stepped off his carpet. This being the sign that the sand should retreat into the weave, the whole thing fell to the floor, heavier and more solid than it had been afloat. It rolled up like any normal carpet, none of the little particles escaping. Perfect. It had worked perfectly. If Zayd were not caught up in a war of guilt and reluctance, a disbelief of his own actions that made his body seem foreign to him, he would have almost been relieved.
“Nothing has been done—except by this man, who has worked on a solution before I had even been informed of the threat.” Sultan Mahmud smiled, a hot light in his eyes. When his lips curled up, it was as though there were too many teeth, rows and rows of teeth. Zayd blinked furiously—he was seeing things. It was simply a snakelike smile. But his heart fluttered in him nevertheless, as it had done when the white demon was trying to come through the wall. Mahmud had seemed, as though he had shaken off his temporary madness and returned to deal with the world as a man. But this was not a human smile. Instinct told him he had come too late to save Mahmud. Other people in this court deserved protection more.
“Nabih here has suggested we make you our archmage, Zayd Ibn Rahman. An archmage can surely give us carpets and charms in the generous amount of time he has been given. You will solve this demon problem for us.”
The sultan’s smile widened, combining childish glee with deep malevolence to terrifying effect. “Or you know what will happen to you next.”
“You see how plausible he becomes.” Nabih had tugged Zayd aside into an alcove between the first and second courts, where the sobbing and chattering of the petitioners queuing to see one official or another would cover up his words. “He begins to sound like a sane man. Those officials who might have backed me up in a movement to replace him when he was giggling and shouting at the walls will not do so now the evil influence has sunk so far beneath his skin it is no longer visible. And we are running out of live brothers who could take his place.”
Zayd had reached the point past urgency. An almost comforting calm had replaced too long a strain. He brought the folded parchment of his charm out from where it had been tucked into his sash. “Haji, if you think it wise, I have prepared this, which is the first of the charms I spoke about in the divan. This will protect its bearer from the influence of the long-toothed demons. I give it to you to dispose of it wherever you think fit. But it has taken me and my household the whole night to come up with this one thing. I have flying carpets to invent and demons to slaughter. I do not think I can do both of those and come up with a cure for divine madness too.”
“You have as many staff as you choose to recruit, and all my fortune behind you.” Nabih took the charm in both hands, as though it was heavy, tucked it into his own garments thoughtfully.
“It is welcome, and I’m grateful,” Zayd remembered to say at the last moment, “but I need mages, and Istanbul simply does not have them.”
“My son,” the Grand Mufti said solemnly, “Istanbul has you. Perhaps you do not yet trust in yourself, and if that is the case, then you must trust in Allah, who has placed you, and only you, here, at the very moment that you are needed. A solution will come to you. Do not doubt it, as I do not doubt you.”
He pressed a splayed hand over the magic square, his gaze a little less troubled now, as though he had made a decision. “Thank you for this. I know exactly to whom I must give it. Will you be able to make more?”
“I have people working on it right now. Though they must sleep at some point today.” He forestalled Nabih’s objection with a raised hand. “If they are tired, their fingers cramp and their eyes blur, and the magic fails. It is being done as fast as it can be done.”
Nabih gave him a warm smile of almost childish trust that made Zayd feel absolved of his many mistakes. “I have no doubt it is. May God strengthen your arm.”
Nabih departed into his affairs of state with a solemn gait. His trust meant a great deal to Zayd, and he was glad that Nabih probably only faced a future of being garrotted with a silken bowstring. Quick, relatively painless, and dignified. Zayd, however . . .
Well, Zayd had no other option than to perform miracles, because he would not let his family down. He set his weary mind to the task with determination. How to fight demons? The first step might be to find out where they had suddenly come from. If there was an enchanted lamp or a cursed book open, letting them out, it could be shut, surely.
Over the course of his interview with the sultan, the streets had been cleared of dead bodies. He found a janissary fireman with the last of the crop draped over his shoulder, and followed him to where they were laid out in rows in the courtyard of the Suleymaniye. Swathed women and weeping men were pacing the rows, trying to find their relatives, so that they could be decently washed and shrouded, and buried as soon as possible.
Joining the lines of relatives, Zayd walked among the corpses. There were twelve long lines with ten bodies in each, all of them white and wrinkled, like grapes well on their way to raisin-hood. He checked mouth and hands, not quite sure what he was searching for until he found it—a fist tightened in rigour mortis around a handful of soft dark fur. The hairs had clumped together, wet with what he at first assumed was blood, but when he teased them out, smelled more like seaweed.
Picking the fur out of the corpse’s hand, he sent a messenger boy to fetch Monique bint Maryse, and hurried to his stall to meet her there.
She arrived carrying some kind of pilau wrapped in flatbread, which, unable to eat without raising the veil over her nose and mouth, she offered to him. He took it just to hold and offered her the fur in exchange. “Can you find where this came from? I know you normally find things for people, but can you find people from their things?”
“I can try,” she said, and cupping it in both hands she raised it to her forehead, where the slope of her square headdress revealed a thin sliver of skin above her eyes. “You’d better eat that before it goes cold.”
So Zayd ate the pilau while Monique concentrated.
“Water. Yes, I think . . .” Half dreaming, half vibrating like a pointer dog, she turned on her heel and began to walk away, her hands still pressed to her forehead. He followed as silently as he could, aware that all around him the city too was hushed and grim. Down from Topkapi, down towards the Golden Horn she led him, out into dockyards-turned-tent-city-turned-army-camp, where the men who watched them pass had evil-toned eyes over high cheekbones, surly slave-like expressions on faces pale as curds.
They neither challenged nor acknowledged Zayd, as Monique led him down to the harbour’s edge and pointed out to where the fleets of hired merchant vessels were still plying up and down the Bosphorus, bringing in the sultan’s Baltic troops.
“It came from out there. Somewhere out there,” she intoned, then shook herself and focussed on him, lowering her hands. “But I don’t know where its owner went, after he and it parted. I’m not used to it this way around—normally objects stay still where they are left. It’s easier to take people to them.”
Zayd took out a handful of the sequins Nabih had given him and tipped them into her palm, turning his back to shield the gesture from the foreigners’ unsettling glares. He dreaded questioning them. Could any of them even speak the language? “This is good,” he said nevertheless, feeling the need to get her out of the situation fast. Since she was French herself originally, on an intellectual level, he supposed these men were more her kin than he was, but intellect didn’t come into it. She was a well-behaved pious Muslim woman, and he didn’t like how the infidels looked at her. “Thank you. Let me walk you back.”
Creases sprang into being by her eyes. She must be smiling. “Thank you. You are very generous.”
“I did take your lunch.”
By the time he had escorted her away from the armies, he had thought of a better method to proceed than to accost unwilling vassal yayas. He returned instead with Haji Nabih’s pass in hand to speak to the harbourmaster.
The harbourmaster, Ubaid Bin Turhan, brought Zayd into his own house and sat with him in the central courtyard, where a fountain cooled the air and doves hooted softly around a white dovecot of marble. There were tangerines swelling on the trees in all four corners of the garden and perfuming the air.
“I do remember something out of the ordinary happening,” he replied to Zayd’s question. “Only the night before last, I was woken and dragged out of my bed by the servants of one of the foreign lords.” Seesawing a hand above his tea, making the steam billow, he snorted. “This is less unusual than you might think—they are uniformly self-important, these distant warriors. No, what was unusual about it is that I didn’t mind.”
As though he was giving himself time to put his thoughts in order, he offered Zayd a platter on which squares of baklava and three different flavours of sweets were arranged like slightly dusty jewels—green, pink, and yellow. He was as round as the dome of his turban, like a small world on legs. His face was soft in the manner of fat men, but his eyes were shrewd.
“It’s more unusual that they even got that far,” he began. “Normally a guard or a servant would catch them at the door and turn them away until morning. These two walked straight into the private rooms, and rather than have them thrown into a cell to await my pleasure, I found myself doing as they asked.”
“It was a kind of mental compulsion?” Zayd closed his hand in reflex around the bead of his necklace. “You felt the press of another will on your own, and it moved you like a puppet?”
“No, no.” Ubaid licked jelly from his fingers. “Nothing like that. I would have found someone to report such a thing to. This was altogether subtler.”
From the fountain in the middle of the court, four shallow rills of water flowed. They reflected the sky in blazing bands of silver, until Ubaid put his fingers in the nearest and broke up the surface into dark ripples and snatches of tangerine. Zayd considered another question, then decided it would be wiser simply to allow his host to tell the story at his own pace.
“I woke and found two of them in the room with me. Unarmed. One was a young man of great beauty, golden haired, but too skinny. He was the one who spoke our language. But it was the other who was so extraordinary. A plain youth, with a birthmark here . . .” He indicated the side of his chin, above and below his jaw. “There was something astonishingly likeable about him. I woke and . . . I don’t understand it myself . . . I felt I was in the presence of an old friend who I had long missed, who had come back unexpectedly. I was filled with happiness to see him.”
He sipped at his tea, and picked a flake of pistachio nut out of a rose-coloured sweet. “Now I remember it, I don’t understand how I could have felt this, but at the time it seemed only natural to put myself out for him as you would for a brother. When they told me that their lord had brought his army and I must come and make a record of this at once, even though it was still before dawn, I made no protest. I dressed and went with them.”
“And it was as they said?”
“It was. A lord in white, with his son and his troops.” He shivered, theatrically, bunching his shoulders up by his ears. “All of them as cold as their country, as though they were made out of snow.”
“You told no one?”
Ubaid shifted on his cushions, drawing his legs in, making himself small. “It did not seem untoward until you questioned me about it. I found the young man’s ignorance and enthusiasm charming. There seemed no harm in a wish to report for duty immediately. An excess of zeal, perhaps, but it felt churlish to discourage such a thing in a time of war.” He gave a soft, uncertain laugh. “Now I’ve said as much, it becomes perfectly innocent again in my memory.” He drew a thumb across his lips as if smoothing them down. “It was a strange thing to happen, wasn’t it? I do not imagine that?”
“It was,” Zayd reassured him. “You checked them as normal, and housed their lord in a place he could be contacted when needed?”
“I did.”
“May I see the record?”
“Of course.”
The apartment to which Ubaid directed him was part of a block of many rooms, some with kitchens, some without. The front faced onto the parade square, the rear onto a canal that came up from the harbour and was dotted all over with small boats. Large doors well above head height and the remnants of platforms with wooden cranes told Zayd that the place had once been a warehouse, probably sold and repurposed when its original owner proved unlucky at trade.
Entering through the street door, past the grill behind which the landlady sat, all in black and smoking a pipe, gave him a view only of stairs and corridors punctuated by locked doors. He knocked at the right hand one, then wished he hadn’t, wished he’d brought troops to back him up—was tremendously relieved when no one answered.
Just barging in and asking questions of a man who presumably could control demons did not seem like a good survival strategy. He hurried out again, walked round the building and considered the canal behind. Better to find out what he could by observation. Then, if he needed to intervene, he could return with an army.
But would there be anything to see in the daytime? The demons that had plagued his home last night had disappeared when the sun rose. Ubaid had been hustled out of bed to make an inspection in the darkness. Surely they would not have called attention to themselves in such a way, if their business could have been done an hour later in daylight? No, whatever was happening only happened at night, so he should wait until nightfall to act.
After the weary night he had endured, Zayd was glad enough to go back to Ubaid’s house, tell him his intentions and send a runner to his mother to do the same, so she would not fret when he didn’t come home. Then he was able to snatch four hours sleep before sunset. Washed, brushed, and perfumed after it, he felt better—less disarticulated, less dazed.
Once the sun had fallen, Zayd commandeered one of the boats that were moored on the canal. Stepping down into it, feeling its queasy bounce, he hunted around for oars. After which he unlashed it from its buoy and awkwardly paddled it up to the lowest of the landing platforms.
Tying the rowing boat off there, he caught the edge of the landing firmly enough to swing himself up onto it. From there, he could do the same for the platform above. And from there it was only a shimmy across a hand-width of window-ledge (face pressed against the wall, hands outstretched like those of a drowned man floating in a pool) to reach the landing that protruded from the back of the foreigners’ apartment. This had once been one of the better entrances. A doorway large enough for a small cart to pass through was closed by two oak doors, bolted and locked in the middle.
He pried at the lock for a long moment, cursing himself for forgetting to bring a hacksaw. The iron itself, though rusted into one mass, was solid and immovable, but the wood of the door around it had softened through the metal’s repeated shrinking and expanding. If he clawed at it, his fingernails sank in deep. He took the dagger from his sash and dug around the lock plate. Punkwood flaked away easily, and though it grew harder the deeper he dug, the good layer was thin enough to be jabbed through.
It took perhaps an hour’s work to cut around the lock plate so that he could open one door, leaving lock and plate embedded in the other. Zayd was very glad to duck his head through and see a small anteroom, thick with dust and hung with mouldy ropes. Easing his way inside at once, full of guilt for his housebreaking, he touched Nabih’s parchment in his breast, which assured anyone who might have seen that he was a man with a mission and no mere criminal.
