When he tried to stand, he found the roof was so low he had to bend double before he could straighten his legs. Perhaps the cells were stacked here like the pigeonholes of a desk, with one prisoner atop another like letters to be answered. When he tried to shake the door it didn’t even rattle in its socket, too heavy for him to move.

  Immediate reaction over, Frank swallowed, lowered himself into the most convenient corner and muttered one of Ecaterina’s cantrips to soothe the pounding pain in his head. Where was Radu? Where were the girls? He had gone down quickly in the attack, taken by surprise before he had been able to draw his sword, and had not seen what had befallen the others. As much as he wanted to tell himself it could have not happened again—all his friends could not have been killed again, leaving him alone as the sole, unworthy survivor—it could. It was all too possible that his curse had struck once more, that he was left behind as a nemesis to the whole world, to anyone who had ever aided him.

  These were hopeless thoughts, but he could not shed them. It would have been better had there been other prisoners with him. Even if there had been an interrogation, torture—then his mind would have been occupied at least. As it was, they must have taken Radu for that, if he lived. And yes, perhaps Radu deserved torment, but Frank would have pleaded for him anyway, if he could. He was trying to save me. He was trying to save his city. He was trying to save my country . . .

  All of that added up to it being Frank’s fault. If Frank hadn’t journeyed to Valcea, Radu would have kept the strigoi in their own little pond, where they had to restrain themselves to a rhythm that the humans around them could live with. An existence that was controlled, manageable, tolerable.

  He tried to rattle the door again, then pressed his face to the grille and shouted, “Hello? Is there anyone there? I’ll tell you everything! You don’t need to hurt Radu. Talk to me! I’ll tell you . . .”

  There was nothing to see outside the door, only a blank stone wall across a narrow corridor. He couldn’t see where the light was coming from. Nor, if he turned his head, was anything visible on either side of his cell but slivers of masonry. If there were other cells surrounding him, they must be empty, because only silence answered his outbreak. Not even an echo of his own voice came back to him.

  Closing his eyes, Frank tried to meditate, tried to lift up, in cupped hands, the blue-white power that had been inside him since his experience with the vril accumulator. If he could but grasp it, he was sure he could shift himself out of this hole. He could shift this entire building out of existence, leave himself and the others sitting on the pavement where a prison had been.

  It was, as it had been before, like trying to catch a single pigeon in a town square: the power was a living thing that watched him. Let him get close. Then, when he lunged for it, it burst up between his snatching hands, sometimes brushing his face with its feathers, and was gone. He needed a structure to catch it in—the cage that a well-thought-out spell could construct—but he hadn’t come close to understanding the principles in his too-short time in Catia’s salon. He couldn’t put one together by himself.

  Three hours of trying left him angry and starving, with the headache coming back. Terror for the others gnawed at him with such teeth that he barely had space for terror for himself anymore. He only realised he was rocking back and forward when he leaned too far and smacked his forehead against the wall. Then frustration spilled out of him in a torrent of cursing. Useless. His friend—lover was probably being tortured at this very moment, and he could do nothing. He had killed his mother by being born. He had killed Gervaise by loving him. He had killed Protheroe and Stebbins by accepting their friendship and aid. Now he had killed Radu, and maybe Istanbul itself, by not being decent enough to lie down and die when he was given the chance.

  No wonder the magic wouldn’t come to him. It probably feared how many more deaths it would take before Frank would learn his lesson. The only mystery was why it had filled him that day at all. No surprise that finding itself inside a cursed man, a death-bringer like Frank, it should now try its hardest to keep out of his blighted hands.

  Here he was sealed away and forgotten. Powerless either to help or hurt anything ever again. His magic was wiser than he was—it had already accepted that here was where he should stay.

  A fat man in brocaded yellow silk, with sweat-darkened stripes beneath his arms and down his back, was at that moment showing Radu the torture implements. Radu, whose wrists had been tied behind his back, and who had then been suspended from them for some hours, was doing his best to be unimpressed. For his jailer’s safety, he was now shackled by cuffs locking his elbows and wrists behind him, and his feet were locked to a ball of iron twice the weight of a cannonball. Unimpressed was all he could do, at present, in terms of inflicting damage on his enemies.

  This was a poky little room—no proper torture chamber. More like a storeroom hastily emptied of contraband wares. It smelled of cinnamon, without a trace of fear or blood. Shelves held a sparse collection of unpleasant things; a flail, a scourge, a variety of thumbscrews and pears, pliers, saws, and stretchers. There was room only for a scrubbed table that looked as if it had come from a kitchen, improvised leather straps hanging loosely.

  The whole business seemed amateur in comparison with the well-appointed dungeon Radu had at home. He flexed his shoulders against their restraints—both of them were still in their sockets, though the muscles around them had been torn to red rags. He was glad to find they still moved, though with an agony like a wash of strong acid down his back.

  The fat man, who was apparently to be his interrogator, had an air of geniality and good-humour but for the knifelike glint in his eyes.

  The young man who had captured Radu earlier had gone quite pale beneath his tan and his soft, serious eyes frequently darted into the corners of the room as though afraid of rats. He licked his lips before translating, “Ubaid says that he understands the surroundings are homely, but he wishes to reassure you that the man he has employed to use these implements is skilled, and will more than make up for any smallness in appearance.”

  “I am grateful to him.” Radu found it easier to carry on pretending this was all a game when the translator seemed to be more frightened than he was. “I am of royal blood. I expect the best.”

  Ubaid’s reply sounded amused, as if he had seen defiance before and it didn’t impress him.

  The translator fiddled with his turban, letting down a tail of white fabric and holding it to his nose. He had a keen, hawklike face and large, dark eyes full of thoughts. When he smoothed the fabric over his shoulders and looked up to translate, his long fingers trembled. “There are, as you say ‘many ways to skin a cat,’ or a man. Rest assured we will find one to suit.”

  Ubaid opened the door and summoned in Radu’s guards. This, Radu assumed, was the point at which they would take him back to his cell and allow him to stew for a while in his fear, think about what the devices would feel like on his flesh. He knew this game too. It didn’t stop it from working.

  Father of all, Lord omnipotent. I am not worthy to pray to you, but help me now in the hour of my need. Help me to endure as so many others of my countrymen have had to endure. And forgive me. Forgive me for bringing this on us all.

  The leash of the ball attached to his leg was too short to allow him to pick it up and straighten, but if he tried to tug it behind him, it rolled forward with each step and struck him in the heels, an incessant battering persecution. He crouched down to lift it as far as he could, to sidle crablike back out into the corridor, but one of the guards smacked him across the fingers with a sharp cane. Pain hot like boiling water spilled on his hands. He didn’t drop it, and so they hit him again until the strength of his fingers failed and he did.

  Then someone hit him in the back, right between his torn and throbbing shoulders, made him lurch forward into the doorjamb, the ball rolling after to clip him in the ankle and make him stagger again with the impact of iron against bone.

  He was proud of how calmly he had taken all of this until they laughed, then seething hatred boiled through his veins like hot oil. He lowered his head, drove it into the nearest guard’s belly, and laughed in return when the man heaved for breath, doubled over and whooping.

  A blow across Radu’s right cheek filled his world with white stars, but left the guard’s hand close enough to bite. He raised his head, almost enjoying this now, his blood roaring with something better than fear, sank his teeth deep into the ball of the guard’s thumb and ground them together. Maybe he could provoke them into killing him—

  “Wait!” The scholarly young man laid a restraining hand on the guard’s chest. He was of a similar build to Frank. Don’t think of Frank. A greyhound of a man, all bones and elegance. He couldn’t have held back such a brute as the guard by strength. But the man stopped anyway, chastened.

  Authority, then, was the power this young man wielded. He didn’t look like anyone special—white turban, dove-grey clothes of heavy linen—but he had been the intelligence behind Radu’s capture, and he was now the authority to whom his tormentors answered. He caught Radu’s gaze with a complicated expression, wary and a little sickened, his stomach perhaps not strong enough for the task he’d taken on. I can work with that.

  Radu’s mouth, still clamped tight around the guard’s tugging hand, was full of blood. It flowed hot and stinking between his teeth. But this is not something I want to inherit from my parents. He unlocked his jaw, spat the blood out on the floor in front of him, and watched to find out what this unexpected gentleman would do next. Whether or not anything came of the man’s intervention, the pause—a breathing space to pull himself back together, to master all the pains and tell himself they were not so bad—was welcome.

  “This is not working.” The young man rubbed his fingers together, curled them around the rough pottery pendant he wore on a silver chain around his neck. To the winded guard, who had now recovered enough to stand, he said, “Bring me a lighter ball and chain. I want him to be able to straighten up.”

  He turned back to Radu with a sigh. “As for you, it seems to me that if I let them torture you, you will only think yourself justified in what you’ve done. Perhaps . . .” His voice grew hopeful, as if he would like to believe what he was about to say, “Perhaps you don’t fully know, yourself. You have been inside since you arrived, and I recall that you already had some doubts about your companions’ actions. You and I should go for a little walk. There is something I want you to see.”

  Even with the lighter ball it was still all but impossible for Radu to walk more than four steps at a time. Though he could lift this in one pinioned hand, the weight on his abused shoulders was enough to throw his back into spasms and make his ribs burn as though his heart were bursting. After four paces he had to let it fall, breathe, and collect himself, before he could pick it up with the other hand and repeat the process. This frustrated everyone so much that—before they had even made it out of the prison corridor—his captors had decided just to hobble his ankles together and leave off the weight.

  Instead he was bolted into a slave collar, its chain held by a guard with a drawn sword who flanked him on the left. Behind them, a second guard—the one he had bitten—followed at a distance with a primed pistol, and his guide took great care to stay beyond the reach of a desperate lunge.

  Outside, he was guided to a quay and made to step down into a small boat. Another clear, hot day was dawning, and though he knew he had been left to stew in guilt and agony for hours, he hadn’t realised he had spent an entire night in his windowless cell. He’d been trying not to think of the others, of what could have happened to the women, of whether Frank was alive or . . .

  But his interrogator had already shown him some mercy. So it couldn’t hurt, surely, just to ask?

  “What’s your name?”

  Seated rather primly in the bow, the young man looked surprised to be asked. “Zayd Ibn Rahman.” He paused a moment and then offered, “I am the padishah’s archmage. May he live forever.”

  Oh. That had been said tentatively, as though it was a lie, or something he scarcely believed himself. A new appointment? Or just another man like Frank, whom magic had filled with doubts and emptiness? Radu thought it was not a lie. It explained the vague unpreparedness in the man’s eyes, his soft heart, and his power all in one handful.

  “Tell me, Zayd. Does my companion still live?”

  “Do you deserve to know the answer to that question?” They passed a wharf-side house where a shrouded corpse lay halfway up the quay steps. When the guards tied up the boat to come up from the waterway and enter the city on the Pera side, they had to step over it.

  “It’s not a case of deserving. It’s a matter of whether we can talk or not. If you’ve killed him—”

  Zayd had light smoky-amber eyes and strong black brows that pinched together with distaste at the thought. “He is not dead.”

  Radu smiled at him graciously, made smug by relief. I am still a warrior, still a boyar, indomitable by this or earlier empires. Older and more certain than this boy, the ink of his job description still wet on the page. “Then, perhaps, I will listen to what you have to say.”

  They marched him across the square and into the first mosque they came across. Up the tight double spiral of one of the minarets and out onto the balcony from which the call to prayer was sung. At the top, it took Radu a long while, trying not to pant too loudly, nor to grimace too obviously from the sting of his many wounds before he had any attention to spare for what he was supposed to be seeing. But Zayd stood almost patiently while he gathered himself, and did not mock. The kindness was unsettling.

  “Look,” the archmage said at last, and with a flat hand he made a sweep from horizon to horizon.

  Radu would have said, Very pretty, if he had been altogether in command of himself, because the view of Istanbul was fine, with the harbour glimmering on one side of him, and the great palaces of the envoys of every nation standing up amid cypresses on the far side of it, white stone and flowerbeds pinked by morning light. On this side, crooked streets wound up into more parklands. Mosques and palaces greater than anything at home might have been oppressive had they not been shaped like distant clouds and glittering with gold.

  But Radu had also seen what he had been brought here to see. Corpses in all the streets. Processions of mourners. The courtyard of the mosques filled up with the dead.

  The heartbroken cries of the living rose up to him from the ground as though he stood above Hell itself.

  Into the courtyard below came a father with a child dead in his arms. The father’s face was silver with tears and the child’s white as snow. He was intercepted by the imam, and Radu watched them argue, the boy’s head lolling between them as his father twitched with agony and denial.

  “What . . .” He had to clear his throat. It had closed up tight. “What is the argument about?”

  “How am I to know?” Zayd replied, his voice quiet but angry. “Perhaps he asks why the holy men have not protected his son from this. Why Allah has allowed it. Or perhaps he has seen the heaps of the dead who must be buried today and wants to know that his child will not be left to wait.”

  The second seemed a petty concern, the first Radu did not care to examine too closely. “A day or two’s delay will make no difference.”

  “It is our way. A body must be buried as soon as possible. It is abhorrent for a father to have to watch his child decay.”

  From here, it was as though Istanbul was a kicked-over anthill. The dead lay thick and white as ant larvae over all the ground. As they watched, companies of soldiers had begun to go from house to house, dragging out whole households of corpses into the streets.

  Radu had once been in the mountains, picking his way across the base of a slope of scree, when he’d heard a single stone crack in the cold above him. Some instinct had raised the hair on his head and made him bound for the trees like a goat, narrowly escaping the fall of the whole slope. Now he had again that sense of avalanche. Suppose one strigoi fed on ten people in a night? The next night there would be a hundred victims, and the night after that a thousand. On the third night, ten thousand. By the end of the week, the city could be empty as the strigoi spread out into the countryside looking for fresh meat.

  Oh God, it was appalling! The magnitude of it. He had somehow imagined it would stop with the army, with the sultan and his soldiers, but they weren’t going to stop, were they? Not until the whole world was charnel.

  “You are our allies, our own people,” Zayd was speaking. Speaking such nonsense it took a while for Radu to understand it. “You live within the habitation of peace, under the wise and kind guidance of our own sultan. For hundreds of years you have been part of this empire, your beliefs and freedoms protected by our laws. How could you betray us like this?”

  Was that really what the Ottomans thought? How perverse. The absurdity of the claim took the edge from the overwhelming horror that had begun to lift the floor under which Radu kept it, to seep out into plain sight.

  He turned on the little fool with contempt. “Has it not occurred to you from the many times you have had to march your armies against us that we don’t want to be part of your empire? We don’t want your peace, your laws. We don’t want you stealing our children to be slaves, using us as cannon fodder in your wars, martyring our princes, and taxing our peasants into famine.”

  This was better. Pity had been in the process of unmanning him. Better the red rage and the desire to tear his enemy’s throat out with his teeth. “Yes, this is my doing. I brought this against you. Why should I be ashamed? Your people have sucked the blood from mine for five hundred years. It is no more than you deserve.”

  Zayd recoiled, as if he was in the presence of a monstrosity, the odd, soft innocence in him a reproach in itself. He retreated until his back was to the closed door, and Radu felt a high, exultant delight in the shock and terror on his face. After a night in chains and pain, it was wonderful to feel powerful again.

 

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