Angels of Istanbul, page 17
Now he was beginning to blabber, embarrassing himself with eagerness. He closed his mouth, tilted backwards until he rested against the gloriously soft cushions. “I want them here.”
“You do not get to make demands,” said Zayd, pausing in the doorway to look back at him. But they were there when Radu woke.
“It wasn’t pleasant.” Ecaterina sipped on rose sherbet, which Zayd had taken out of Ubaid’s hand and served to her himself. To Radu she seemed fierce, formidable, as she recalled the insult of being thrown into jail. “But we were treated well enough.” Her gaze strayed to him and slipped past, discomforted. “Not like you.”
On the other side of the divan from her, Frank huddled against Radu’s side. His possessive grip hurt a little, and was flagrant as a confession. The moment he had seen Radu’s bloody face he had given a choking cry and attached himself to Radu like a limpet, face pushed into the crook of his neck. He had high cheekbones and a long bony nose, and they dug painfully into the swollen muscles of Radu’s shoulder, but Radu would be lying if he said the embrace wasn’t a comfort. He deserved hatred. To receive love instead seemed another, kinder miracle.
“I have been treated well,” he said, and found their expressions of disbelief strengthening. “Considering what I should have expected. Enough. We can discuss our hurts later. What are we to do, to turn back the disaster we’ve unleashed?”
“I’ve told the Grand Mufti that the bodies must be burned,” said Zayd. “He was not happy, but he is driving the order past the cadis today and organising it. If I understand rightly, this will prevent more of the creatures arising. It will not deal with the ones that already exist. Is that not so?”
“It is.” Ecaterina adjusted the veil that covered her face. It suited her, Radu thought. Hiding her rather coarse features, emphasising her large intelligent eyes. His betrothed. He could do worse. “I would suggest sending a small force to sweep the graveyards, while the sun is high—find where the strigoi have gone to ground. Then the tombs can be opened and the sun let in to destroy them.”
“You know that won’t work.” Mirela had not been forced into a veil, still sat cross-legged in her urchin’s guise. This was not a shape-shift, simply a change of clothes, so for once Radu believed he was seeing her the same way everyone else did. “Yes, we can find the graves, but they won’t let us get close enough to open them.”
At Zayd’s frown, Radu explained, “They have a form of mind control which they can practice even while dormant during the day.”
“I have experienced this.”
“They will turn aside anyone who tries to unearth them—make them forget what they came to do. Or perhaps make them sleep, so they remain there until nightfall and can be fed on. I am immune to this, but there is only one of me. I don’t see how I can expose every grave before the sun sets.”
Zayd’s scholarly expression looked more natural on him than the pinched fury and malice of earlier. “You have a magical talent too?”
“A lack than a gift. I am blind to magic. It’s as though, for me, it doesn’t exist at all.”
“So many different manifestations of the Power of Heaven in one place,” Zayd marvelled. “Do you by chance live close to one of the Atlantean devices?”
Frank lifted his head finally, pulling himself together with a great sigh. “All of Wallachia is within the radius of the accumulator on Radu’s land, but I think its influence is strongest in his fief. I have thought that perhaps it could be blamed for the existence of the strigoi. Even before the Rising, it must have been feeding a small residual current of magic into its close surroundings.”
Radu could tell when Frank registered Zayd’s blink of surprise. He smoothed his hair down—a futile gesture with those curls—tugged his waistcoat straight, and sat up, as if to pretend he had not been clinging for the last five minutes like a lost child or a reunited wife.
In return, Zayd’s expression shifted from the polite contempt accorded to a nobleman’s plaything and settled into delighted relief, like one who has found out, unexpectedly, that they are no longer alone.
“And I, of course, come from England, which is blanketed by the overlapping influences of one device on Glastonbury Tor, and another at Newgrange in Ireland. The seas between those two points have always been . . . unusual.”
“I thought as much.” Zayd beckoned, and a servant brought in food. Many little dishes, full of rice and meat and sauces. “Our own device was destroyed in the conquest of the city. Finding it below a church, our soldiers thought it an infidel thing to be removed from the path of right living. I have wondered if the Atlanteans could be persuaded to repair it, now they have returned.”
Frank’s face cleared. He was relieved perhaps to find no one had rebuked or arrested him for his show of affection. The beginnings of his foolish sunny smile gleamed around the edges of his mouth. It was so rare an expression, when it made an appearance Radu always felt it was a sign that anything was possible. “Do you think they could be approached? I heard they sunk boats that came too close . . .”
Frank’s enthusiasm made Radu smile too. He wasn’t sure what to make of this repentance business. The fact that he actually liked Zayd, liked Ubaid too, was being fed and allowed to rest and treated like an honoured guest should probably have heaped coals of guilt on his head. Instead he was simply grateful for it. “I think we’re getting off the topic now. You two can talk magic theory when we’ve solved the problem in front of us. How can we discover and open the graves when I am the only one resistant to the strigoi’s control?”
“These will help.” Zayd took a roll of parchment from his sash, separated it out into twenty leaves, each with an intricate square filled with impenetrable squiggles. “I have been wondering how best to use these—if I should take them up to the palace at once—but I think we will need them more down here.”
“Oh,” said Ecaterina, taking a leaf with a reverent gesture and smiling down on it—the expression visible in the crinkle of her eyes. “This is fascinating. Based on the system developed by Ibn Fadlan after his journeys among the Laplanders. I didn’t realise it was still a living tradition.”
This time Zayd’s expression was that of a man who had discovered gold and couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it yet. “Is it?” He poured over his own sheet as if he’d never seen it before. “I didn’t know. My mother learned the craft from her father, and he from his, but if she knew where it originated, she didn’t tell me. I must take you to meet her. And I must find a copy of this book. He wrote a book, I assume?”
Ecaterina tilted her head. “I believe he did, but I have never been able to find a copy. There are references to it in the account of his travels, and a very oblique mention—a much cruder square—cut into a Viking rune stave discovered at Tromso. The scholarship is . . .” She snorted. “Well. Frankly appalling. Full of holes. Trying to tie it all together into something effective—more than that, trying to synthesise some sort of universal system—is going to be the work of several lifetimes.”
She glanced around the room, her eyes half-apologetic, half-defiant, daring anyone to laugh. “That’s why my goal in life has always been to establish a university where these things can be studied properly and passed down to posterity in better condition than we find them.”
“That is a noble goal, Khanum.” Zayd pushed a platter of dates towards her and beamed when she took one. “How do you come to be involved in so ignoble a venture as this?”
Radu swallowed the bite of lamb he had been chewing and sighed. “Can the history lesson not wait? These magic squares, have they been tested?”
Ecaterina, Frank, and Zayd shuffled awkwardly as they were made aware they had been away in their heads like true intellectuals. Mirela, impudent as always, rolled her eyes at Radu as if to say, Thank goodness someone here remembers what’s important.
“They have. They work.”
“Then let them be given to twenty people, and let those people go out in pairs.”
“Why pairs?”
Radu bit back a sigh of impatience at having to explain. “Because a strigoi is stronger than a normal man. The tombs may be blocked with stones a single man . . .” Mirela raised an eyebrow at him and he amended, “a single person cannot lift. Each pair will need a crowbar and a sword as sharp as an adder’s tooth.”
Despite the tentative rapport that had grown between them over the meal, Zayd balked at this. “Why should I give any of you a sword?”
Radu opened his mouth, saw Ecaterina watching, and his excellent memory sprayed him in the face with the sensation of Stefan’s cold blood. He faltered.
“You have to chop their heads off,” said Mirela cheerfully. “That’s in the stories. And I bet they won’t lie still to be dragged out into the sunlight. There’ll be lots of screaming and clawing, I’m sure, and they’ll tear you apart while they run for somewhere darker.”
“But you don’t have to send us to do it,” Radu offered. “Give the charms to your own men and let them scour the graveyards. I can see why you would not trust me with a weapon.”
Zayd clumped together the last few pistachio nuts of his baklava in his fingers—when asked to bring a light meal, Ubaid’s household did not stint on the courses—and moulded them into a careful ball. He looked at Radu as Ecaterina had looked at the charm: as if Radu was a type of puzzle he hadn’t seen before, one that fascinated him, though he didn’t altogether understand how it worked. Radu wasn’t sure he liked it, but perhaps he had no right to object.
“Another man,” Zayd began, “who had turned as you did, all of a sudden, I would think simply a coward, trying to avoid punishment.”
In the light of desolation and redemption, Radu found it easier not to take the scrawny little heathen by the back of his prim collar and smash his face into the wall for his insult. It still stung.
“But I think instead,” Zayd carried on, calm, clearly unaware of his danger, “that Allah touched you, and your turn is a true repentance. So I will give you your sword and your boy, and I will find out your character from what you do next.”
“Do you think it was ‘a true repentance’?” Mirela waggled the end of the crowbar into the gap between the mausoleum’s door and its jamb, heaved, and watched the door grind open over the smashed remains of its plaster seal. “Or is he planning something?”
The sun had passed noon by now, and its disc was behind the monument. Only a little light fell into the catafalque chamber beyond, but she felt at once the desperate desire to be somewhere else that told her they had found a fledgling. The stink was another firm clue. She ducked her head under the lintel, saw a skeleton crumpled in the corner and a long catafalque with a top shaped like the ark of the covenant. Mortar and stone dust all around it, where the top had been recently removed. “We have another one. Ready?”
By mutual unspoken consent, Ecaterina had the sword. She positioned herself at the head end of the stone box. At her nod, Mirela levered the cover off, and as the thing inside shrieked at the light, she hacked down at it with a hand that had become all too practiced over the morning.
It looks like a young man, Mirela thought, but it squeals like a fox in the wood. Ignoring the tears that dripped from Ecaterina’s chin—which over the day had made her veil so wet it clung to her face—she picked up the head by its hair. It swore at her as she flung it like a ball into the scorching sunlight, but the body lay limp and obliging between them as they took an arm and leg each and threw it out too.
Just as her old granny had said: it was surprising what you could get used to. She dusted off her hands in satisfaction as she watched it burn. These things would never scare her again. Mirela Demonsbane. She liked it.
“I can’t imagine why we would be working with the Turks if he had not honestly changed his mind. I suppose, with the war over and Frank’s country safe . . .” Looking surreptitiously around, Ecaterina removed her veil and wrung it out, raising her naked face to the sunlight and closing her red eyes for a moment. “He was finally able to see them for what they were.” Her expression hardened like granite. “It should not have taken him so long.”
Mirela had begun this journey with no especial fondness for Văcărescu. He was her lord, her owner, and she owed him some resentment for it. But he’d had so many chances to expose her and every time he had chosen not to. He’d chosen to give her a wage, like a servant, when she was only a slave. He hadn’t known what he should do with her, but while he’d tried to figure it out, he’d let her be, which was more than most Vlachs had ever done for her. Apparently that had been enough for her to develop a faint loyalty to the man.
“Long time ago,” she tried to explain, working it out for herself even as she spoke, “I told Văcărescu he was as much a slave as me. It doesn’t always take mind control, you know, to force someone to do what you say. He’s only just realized his world has become bigger than his own family duty. I think maybe he’s finally trying to get free. Which is exciting, yes? You forgiven him yet?”
Ecaterina laughed and set the clammy cloth over her face again. “I don’t know. What happened to Stefan, I know it wasn’t his choice, but . . .”
They worried themselves sick for no reason, the upper crust. All those choices, perhaps—all that illusion that they were in control of their own lives. “Should I be checking for rat poison in his meals?”
This laugh was lighter hearted, genuine. Mirela liked the sound of it, and reckoned it didn’t much matter whether that was because she was being influenced by Catia’s magic or not. “Perhaps I will no longer go that far. Being married to me will surely be punishment enough for any man.”
Handed everything by an unequal fate, and still she couldn’t be happy. Mirela congratulated herself once again for having been born Romani. The more she poked at them, the more she realised the gadje had no idea how to live.
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, eyeing a grave farther up the hill where the earth seemed recently dug. She switched the crowbar to her left shoulder and picked up her shovel. “Maybe so for one who prefers the boys.”
“Mirela!”
“Oh what?” Mirela scoffed in return. “I been a footman enough times to figure out it’s not just the pretty girls your boyar men go home with—”
“But we don’t say so! It’s . . . it’s—”
“Not as if Frank could’ve made it any plainer. You don’t mind sharing your husband with his boy?”
Ecaterina sputtered, caught between outrage and laughter. “I’m marrying him for his land!” She settled down slightly as Mirela started to dig into the soft earth of the disturbed grave, but her considering expression was still underlain by a smile. “For the Cloak of St. George. I don’t think he knows what a treasure he has there—what prestige and power it would bring to a university built around it.”
Mirela’s spade clunked onto a coffin. When she levered the top off she found a new burial set on top of a clean set of bones. The grave must have been opened recently so the husband could be buried with his wife. Both of them honestly dead. It was a welcome reprieve.
“Frank’s welcome to the rest. And at least I won’t have to worry about mistresses and bastards and divorce.”
While Mirela filled the hole back in, Ecaterina examined the tombs on the hill above them, nodded at one with a broken slab. Then she gave Mirela a grandmotherly look that Mirela thought was hilarious, them being about the same age. “You must learn not to point it out to people. The church is happy, everyone’s happy, as long as they can pretend they don’t know what’s going on. If you keep coming out and saying it, they might decide they need to do something about it, and that . . .” Ecaterina seemed to be pondering the possibilities for blackmail or divorce. A ruthless creature, but somehow endearing with it. “That’s something I can keep in reserve, in case I change my mind about killing him.”
Mirela bent her head over her shovel and grinned. They bloody deserved each other, the pair of them. It wasn’t her place to do so, but she approved.
“One more.” Radu was already striding uphill, getting deeper into the necropolis of great tombs on the crest of the hill. Frank looked up to where the sunset lay in bright tangerine and topaz bands across the sky, and down again to the verdure that was taking on an evening, bluish hue.
He ran after. “We’re pushing it already. We have to get back inside somewhere before the ones that are left come out.”
“We can afford one more.” The intricate wrought-iron gate of the large building was padlocked shut, its door sealed. Inside, Frank guessed there were almost ten rooms. This was a family mausoleum. It could house a dozen strigoi, all of whom would be stirring awake right now, sniffing at the prey waiting just outside.
Being taken out of his cell only to find out that his new friends were alive had done something to him. Something wild and overriding enough to make him utterly forget his audience and reveal his affections to everyone. He could feel the new confidence lying within him like an ember carefully packed in a firepot, waiting to become a fire. He had not killed them. They had not died. Maybe it wasn’t absolutely guaranteed that they would. If so, maybe there were things Frank could do to save them.
He grabbed Radu’s elbow and pulled. “No. Don’t run from this by getting yourself killed. We’ll burn any new dead, sweep again tomorrow, wear them down slowly, there’s time.”
Radu’s grey eyes looked silvery in the twilight, his face set. He might have modelled for a portrait of St. George, had the artist not cared greatly about the character of his muses. “Those who die in the meantime are acceptable losses?”
“Oh, you have no place playing the righteousness card with me.” Frank tugged again, with a twisted pleasure. So here he was on the other side of this moral horizon, choosing Radu’s life over that of any number of unknown innocents, just as Radu had done for him at the start of all this. It felt oddly right, that he should make the same choice, be no more perfect than his lover. “We’re going back.”
