Angels of Istanbul, page 19
“We’ll go,” said the princess—Ecaterina. “These things killed my brother. If I meet with any of them in the night, it is they who should be afraid.”
Zayd would no more send out a woman and a eunuch to do a man’s job than he would leave another sultan unprotected. “Neither of you speak Turkish. How will you get in the doors, or explain what you’ve brought? I’ll go.”
Ecaterina studied him for a moment. Then she smiled. His reservations seemed silly, all at once. Her magic was strong indeed. Possibly even the strigoi would be reluctant to do her harm.
“We’ll come with you. Our friends may need help—”
“If they haven’t just run away—”
“You might need it too, if everything’s chaos up there. Both of us have powers you do not have. Both of us have known of these creatures, and their limitations, all our lives. We are not to be dismissed.”
Zayd had forgotten, had fallen back into thinking them nothing more than the foreign lord’s household. But this might indeed make things easier. He flipped the bundle of charms open, drew his travelling pen from under his robe and uncapped it. He was not a great artist, but the hastily sketched portrait of Haji Nabih resembled the man a great deal, to his eyes. “This is Grand Mufti Nabih. He’s a very holy person, like your patriarch. Can you become him?”
The eunuch, Mirela, examined the paper, squinting with thought. (If indeed he was a boy. Who could tell, if his shape was not fixed?) “How tall?”
“Up to here.” Zayd indicated his own eye level and watched with a mixture of admiration and disgust as the boy’s body stretched and expanded to fit.
“Colours for his clothes? Eyes and hair?”
“An emerald robe. A jade-green turban, black eyebrows and beard, eyes the colour of treacle . . . a little darker. Allah have mercy, you are the very man himself.”
Mirela—and was that a boy’s name, he wasn’t sure—gave a wide, white grin. “Sugar and smoke-blackened teeth,” Zayd corrected, taken aback to see such a roguish expression on the dignified face. It made him wonder what the mufti had been like in his youth before he’d had the spiritual well-being of the entire empire emptied on his head. Could he ever have smiled with such abandon?
“You’ll still have to speak for me.” Mirela examined his reflection in the faint shine of a black marble pillar. “But that’s fine. I’m too important to make idle conversation anyway. Shall we?”
“Mother, you’ll stay here?”
She took him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks, the press of her lips indistinguishable beneath the heavy, greasy touch of her indigo-dyed veil. “I will. Go to victory or to paradise, my son.”
The solemn exhortation shook him a little, but he left her sitting, one of Ubaid’s younger children scrambling into her lap. If he came home tomorrow, unscathed, he vowed she should have grandchildren. He would finally tell her yes to a wife, be the expense what it may.
Perhaps it was that thought that let him smile as he drew back all the locks on the door and stepped out into the alien night. Or perhaps, with an enchantress and a shape-shifter as his companions, it was just that he felt he was the hero in a story, and things were bound to turn out well.
It was a long walk up to the palace from the harbour. They saw signs of improvement—someone had opened one of the refreshment stalls in the tea garden. Twice a brave traveller went past them at a near trot, head down, face turned away. People had noticed, then, the clearing of the graveyards, the burning of the infected dead, and had recovered some of their bravery—enough to go out at night if dire need pressed. Even so, the guards at the souk sat in their little stone guard houses and did not come out, and nor did the guards at the covered market. Unchallenged, Zayd followed “Haji Nabih” up the street of armourers, turned into the street of perfumers, and strode up towards the palace.
But Nabih was known and revered throughout the city. Perhaps the guards would never have challenged him, strigoi or not.
The next thing Zayd noticed was the yellow dogs, streaming down past them as they huffed up the final approach to the palace. As the creatures loped past, their tall pricked ears alert, their golden Anubis eyes wary, they seemed to be telling him to run away.
Topkapi was brilliant with torches. In the first court, cursing grooms and plunging, wild-eyed horses screamed at one another, the grooms trying to pull the horses from their stables, to give their reins to the increasing army of strigoi who were trickling into the courtyard one by one, lining up like soldiers.
There were palace cooks and black eunuchs, concubines and courtiers, all of them with the sagging, ashen look of the newly dead. A faint squish accompanied them as they walked. Their eyes were white as marbles, and their smell was almost visible as a fog above the fountains.
He counted almost a hundred, standing solemnly in lines, waiting for the squealing horses to be brought to them. But the horses were having none of it. Wild with terror, the lead stallion pulled its groom off his feet, and broke for the city. Following him, the rest of the herd went streaming out of the gate, hauling the stable hands behind.
Under cover of the general panic, the three of them took the chance to slip past the gate and duck down one of the corridors that led around the back of the public buildings. If the true Nabih was in the palace, he would surely be in the rooms he used as offices.
“Do they have no will of their own?” he whispered, puzzled as they left the strigoi’s stoic indifference behind them. Despite the chaos, the creatures stood at rest as if there wasn’t a mind between them. Zayd had expected the slightest sound to give him away, as it almost had at the lodging house, but these things stood as if they were impaled and gave few signs of being conscious.
“They’re too young,” Mirela whispered back. “They’re fragile when they’re new.” He gave a twisted sideways shrug. “Well, more fragile than they are when they’re older. If they’re only a day or two old, they’re probably having enough trouble trying to form their new bodies before their old ones give out. Planning is for the sires like . . . Oh.”
Into the chaos there sauntered the white lord and his wife. Next to him—Zayd fought the instinctive urge to kneel—walked Sultan Mahmud, with the same dazed, dead eyes as the soldiers, and the same flaccid, lifeless obedience.
Mahmud had terrified Zayd in life, but that made no difference to the scour of white-hot fury that boiled up from within him, seeing the dead body of an honoured padishah emperor made some foreigner’s slave. He opened his mouth to shout, and Ecaterina clapped a palm over it and pressed. “Shh! It’s the living we need to protect now. Come on.”
A moment’s thought proved her wise. He nodded, and she dropped her hand. They watched together as Constantin dismissed the few horses that had not yet managed to bolt, and beckoned. Beyond the company of strigoi, the palace’s janissaries began to emerge from their quarters and form themselves into a blank-faced square.
These were living men still. Zayd didn’t know whether to be proud of them for standing so undaunted, loyal to Mahmud beyond death, despite the sweat of terror that soaked their uniforms, or ashamed that they would take orders from abominations risen from the grave. Whichever it should be, he was at least grateful that the army was dragging its feet, the assembly was slow, the soldiers unwilling. The strigoi remained detained in this place, easy to be avoided.
Quietly as they could, he and the others slipped into the network of little courts behind the public squares. Shadows amid shadows, they came to Nabih’s rooms unchallenged, stepped inside.
It stank of hashish and attar of roses, so powerfully it stung the nose, and the rooms were utterly empty. Zayd gave a hiss of frustration. “He is at his own house after all.”
The pile of cushions on the divan trembled. Embroidered peacocks and pomegranates stirred and slid aside, and Nabih’s long saffron-coloured arm came squirming out like a crooked snake.
“Haji!” Zayd took a charm from his bag and held it out, delighted that his friend and mentor was still alive. “We remembered we had not made charms for the sultan, nor for the valide sultan. Nor for the sultan’s sons and brothers. I’ve brought them now, and I pray it isn’t—”
“Give me one!” Nabih snatched a magic square from his hand, wadded it small, and folded it to his forehead, his eyes shutting and his laboured breathing slowly smoothing out as he relaxed. “Oh, Allah is merciful! I thought . . .”
“But I gave one to you before, my father. How do you come to be unprotected now?”
Nabih’s eyes opened, sharp and stern. “Because I gave mine to the sultan’s last remaining brother, Osman. He who will be sultan himself if he survives to see tomorrow. I have been lying here in prayer since then. They sniffed at the door, but the scent was strong, and while I recited the names of Allah in my mind I could resist their call, as long as I did nothing else. But now I dare move, we must find Osman and protect him. Mahmud will want to see him dead if he himself wishes to carry on ruling from the afterlife.”
Zayd welcomed the older man’s wisdom, his direction. He had been stumbling through nightmare with no real idea of what to do. He was glad to surrender the responsibility of thought to Nabih. “Where will Osman be?”
“In his private apartments in the harem.” Nabih sighed. “Where, even in this time of blasphemy, neither you nor I may enter.”
Not too proud to admit when someone else proved right, Zayd explained the problem to his companions: Mirela, who had returned to the guise of a eunuch, and the princess, worthy by power if not by beauty of a place among the great ladies of the land herself.
“But we can,” Ecaterina agreed. She drew her sword, and Mirela at her side gave a jaunty little wave. “Take us there.”
“Not quite what I expected,” Mirela said, interrupting Ecaterina’s concentration. Charming the guard into allowing her to take her sword inside was more difficult than usual. The guard, a six-foot-tall African shaped like a fertility goddess, seemed more worried about the darkness behind him than he was overwhelmed by the radiance of her presence. She prevailed in the end—helped by the fact that Mirela now resembled a stately odalisque who belonged inside rather than outside the doors—but she didn’t like his distracted state. Surely all the strigoi were off doing whatever it was they intended to do with their little army. What was left in here that had an influence more powerful than hers?
“Hm?”
Darkness brooded beyond the doors. They stepped down onto marble floors where only a few lamps glimmered on low tables. Cushions scattered at their feet; they skirted a dulcimer and a pair of curved slippers lying abandoned beside a pool. Small doors were shut with curtains, the occasional light flowing out from behind them. Chambers that could be separated from the main rooms had been given notional thresholds over which a visitor would have to be invited if he was to stray.
“I thought it would be a cross between a prison and a brothel,” Mirela’s cheerful smile had gained a jumping tick of nerves on the left side that sometimes made her look like she was sneering. “This is like someone’s living room.”
“A living room can be a prison if you can’t get out.”
Up and through another courtyard and then they came to true doors again, that shook beneath their enquiring hands but did not open, wedged or bolted inside.
“Wives’ quarters?” Mirela asked. Then she raised her voice and shouted, “Hey, in there, is Osman with you?”
The somnolent quiet of the darkness seemed to stir. Ecaterina jumped, her heart racing. The blood fluttering in her veins made the distant lanterns seem to flicker, and she thought the air moved strangely against her skin. “Shh!”
“How else are we supposed to . . .?”
From the end of the corridor, where painted and gilded double doors enclosed a much grander room, they came on all fours, oddly balanced and moving like bears—front legs shorter than the back. Ecaterina saw only darkness and wings at first until they looked up and their faces were maws of teeth. “Shit!” she said, and they heard her, blind eyes turning to her with eerie accuracy.
The foremost gave an awkward hunched leap and threw himself into the air, his skin wings creaking as they flapped, his legs dangling awkwardly, knocking over tables, smashing cups and silverware. The legs seemed still to be dead, though there was a will in the hands and wings and teeth.
But they were fast. A long hand caught her chin, twisted her head and threw her to the ground. She landed jarringly on the base of her spine, going numb from the tailbone down. With another bound, the creature hurled itself onto her chest, its impact knocking her elbows out behind her, pushing her to the floor with its mummified limbs atop her. Its head lowered; she turned her face away and then heavy, thick glass hit it in the temple and shattered, raining shards on Ecaterina’s skin. Mirela had thrown a sherbet jug at it, the scent of lemon incongruously clean amid the wreckage.
The heads of both beasts swung around until their attention was on Mirela. She squeaked when their eyeless gazes landed on her, and then transformed into the likeness of Constantin Văcărescu.
Uncertainty slowed them both, opened the clawed fingers that were tearing into Ecaterina’s shoulders. She took the chance to thrash and buck the angel off. When it hit the ground, rather than coming back at her, it crawled away, dragging itself on its belly over to Mirela. It gave an odd plaintive groan, like a dog that wanted petting.
Ecaterina gripped the sword more firmly, slipped past Mirela and the angels both, hammered on the double doors. “Osman? If you’re in there, it’s not safe. The grand mufti has sent us to get you away!”
Both angels were sniffing the air again. To Ecaterina’s nose, Mirela smelled so powerfully of jasmine she could detect nothing else, but the angels must have scented that she was not the real Constantin at all. Their teeth lengthened, and they spread their wings from wall to wall, cutting off the girls’ escape. Mirela, weaponless, retreated until she was pressed against the locked doors, Ecaterina standing between her and the oncoming creatures. Time pulled into a moment of unbearable tension as everything seemed to slow.
The tension snapped. Both angels hissed. Their wings clapped, they drove themselves forwards with their clawed arms outstretched.
And the doors opened behind Mirela. Someone plucked her inside, hauled Ecaterina in by the collar, and shut the doors again behind them with a smack. Ecaterina accepted the beam someone held out to her, fumbled it into its wrought-iron casings in the stone jambs on either side of the door, barring it. She laughed twice in harsh coughs before choking it off lest it become hysteria.
The arm that had pulled them to safety proved to be attached to a man with a hennaed beard and a naïve, innocent expression. “I am Osman,” he said in book Latin, as something heavy hit the door and brought flakes of paint down from the ceiling, “and I do not understand a word you’ve said.”
“But I understand you.” Ecaterina blessed her tutors and her lifetime’s study of learned languages. Osman’s too. Of course, even in the Ottoman Empire, every educated person could speak Latin. “And I tell you we need to get you out of here. Take you somewhere the strigoi don’t know where to find you. Or you won’t live until tomorrow.”
Scratching noises from outside the door, and then a boom as it was hit. The locking beam jumped and rattled in its supports, and Osman winced. “I have been protecting myself through many, many years of palace infighting, and my brother’s madness. With Nabih’s help I could have got through this too. But still, let us not sit debating survival, but depart this place and accomplish it.”
Ecaterina was grudgingly impressed by his calm and command, but didn’t have time to say so. The door juddered and thumped against its hinges, and though the bar held, the wood itself creaked and bowed. Even as she hesitated, a desiccated hand crawled beneath the planks, curled around the bottom of the door and pulled. The mortise joint snapped, the plank separated from its brothers, and a gap appeared in the door through which the fingers of another hand came scrabbling.
“These creatures don’t seem to need an invitation,” she said. “They’re not strigoi, they’re an abomination I haven’t seen before, and they’re coming through that door whether we want it or not. Is there another way out?”
“Yes.” Osman nodded at the wall, where a panel of coloured marble depicted a vase of orange and purple tulips with sharp petals curved like a knife. “Through there. Hold them off a moment. I’ll open it.”
With a rending rip and crack, the bottom of the outer doors splintered and was pulled away. Mirela jumped backwards just as two long arms squirmed through the hole and caught her ankle with yellowed nails. Ecaterina slashed down at the invading arms, opening terrible cuts that did no more than seep a little black blood. Her next blow chipped an arm bone, made the hand open up and let Mirela go.
Recovering, it twisted and tried to grasp her sword blade. She drew the sword back sharply and severed a couple of fingers. Joints then, she thought with satisfaction. I can cut the joints.
But Osman had the tulip panel open. Mirela gave Ecaterina a not-at-all apologetic smile and climbed in. She got the message—the Roma girl would do her part, but Ecaterina need not expect saintly self-sacrifice. It was something of a relief, for instead of sensibly fleeing as she would have preferred, Osman was coming away from the door, reaching out a hand as if to take her sword.
“Now you,” he said. “I will defend you. I have trained to wield a sword and you—”
“And I have too!” Fencing lessons every Friday. Twice a week, once Stefan was old enough to hold a blade. “I am here to rescue you, Your Highness. You have an empire to take back. You do not have the luxury of heroics.”
He looked abashed. Apparently he was not immune to the lash of a woman’s disapproval. Nodding, he headed for the hole in the wall, wriggled in, then dropped into what must be a passage beneath. By that time a second pair of arms were grasping and hauling at the door, the hole in it big enough to admit a shoulder and then a head.
