Angels of Istanbul, page 20
Ecaterina hacked down, trying to sever the neck, but the angel twisted, caught the blow on its cheekbone. The skin of its face peeled open, showed the workings of tendons and the serpent-toothed jaw. It didn’t stop grabbing at her, pulling at her feet. She jumped back, grabbed Osman’s clothes chest, and dropped it on the questing fingers, plugging the hole if only for a moment. With a great effort of will she turned her back on it, writhed into the gap in the wall, leaned out, and pulled the panel shut behind her, and then she too fell into the dim and dust of the passage.
Osman caught her so she didn’t jar an ankle. She liked him for that, but wouldn’t say so. “Where now?”
Farther down the passage, a floor drain brought a flicker of lamplight. It was all dust and rubble, uneven and cramped. Mortar rained down as people walked in the rooms overhead.
“This way.” Osman squeezed himself to the front and then through a strange doglegged corner Ecaterina might have taken for an alcove without him. “I’ve been opening these passages since I was a boy. And a good thing too. When my brother’s executioners came for me, this is where I hid. I suppose, now I am to be sultan, I shall have to close them again, lest my own rivals use them to thwart me.”
Muffled through the stone came the groan and thunder of the double doors in the kafes chamber being battered against the obstructing chest, and then the crash as they finally gave way. The creatures must have made it into the room and found it empty.
“Let’s not count our chickens just yet,” Ecaterina warned, imagining them sniffing around the walls. How long till they found the tunnels, broke through, and came down into the warren with them? “Lead us out into the city. Somewhere we can lose ourselves.”
“Through these tunnels, it is said one can come even to paradise,” Osman huffed, pulling himself up to a higher level. “Certainly it is possible for me to take you to Nabih himself. Follow me.”
Quiet for a while. Darkness closed in as they clambered through small spaces away from the light. Ecaterina found herself listening obsessively to their breathing, their footsteps. Was there something scratching behind? Was that shuff she half imagined the faint soft sound of flesh being rubbed off wing supports? The angels did not breathe, and she didn’t know how they saw, eyeless as they were. Would they stumble in the dark? Would they make noise that could not be covered up by the chinks and rattle of stones under mortal feet, the breathing and the curses?
Hot and squeezed by the passages, weighed down with dread, she heard nothing. It wasn’t until Osman had found a panel of latticework, swung it open, and clambered out that she was seized by the ankle, tipped onto her face and pulled toward its hungry mouth.
She shrieked like an owl, plunged her sword straight into the darkness. It hit something chalky and pushed through. Teeth pattered against the ground as her sword blade sliced through them, buried itself in soft palate, and stopped with a jar against the skull. The creature closed its mouth and bit down on the blade. It was more than she could do to draw the sword out of its jaw. The second angel began clambering over the first to get at her.
Then hands reached in to the passage from outside and drew her free by the shoulders. She turned to thank Osman and found it wasn’t him at all—it was Zayd, with Haji Nabih, right behind him, beaming with relief.
The angel clung to her leg. It had been drawn out with her, still biting the end of her sword. Zayd gave a choking laugh at the sight of it and brought his scimitar down on the nape of its neck. The blade sliced between two vertebrae, and with a wet, sucking noise the whole head popped off. A moment later the body jerked and went limp, and Ecaterina was able to pull her foot and sword away.
Behind it, the second angel turned as if to flee into the warren of passages. Ecaterina leaned in to grab it, to try to finish it off. Nabih turned aside to pick up the bow he had laid on his divan, while Zayd and Osman startled back from the room’s main door.
Ecaterina’s blow did not go wild this time, her aim was true—the point of her sword caught the retreating corpse just below the jaw, lodged in its throat. She waggled it, almost disappointed by how easily these creatures died compared to their less ferocious-looking kin. Another little jabbing twist and this neck, too, was severed.
A violent crash reverberated behind her as the doors to the council chamber broke open and rebounded from the walls. She turned at Mirela’s warning scream to find two more angels had burst into the room.
Nabih had been bending down to pick up his quiver when the first of them hurtled through the doors. It was on him in one bound, before he could straighten up. Like a snake’s mouth, its jaw stretched impossibly wide as it took him by the shoulders and engulfed his whole head in its maw.
Ecaterina glanced at the other one. It was being kept at bay by Mirela with her dagger, as Zayd manoeuvred into position to decapitate it.
Not needed there, she leaped at the monster that held Nabih motionless in the great ring of its teeth. Seeing her coming, its jaw tightened, and the room was splashed suddenly with a curtain of warm crimson. Nabih jerked twice, then hung from its mouth, swaying and trembling like dead meat.
Ecaterina didn’t remember the blow that finished it off. She just came to herself moments later with the angel decapitated at her feet and Nabih’s bow and arrows clutched to her chest like a baby, as if saving them would somehow make everything right.
Osman and Zayd prized the creature’s mouth open, and it was obvious at once that Nabih was beyond help, except for Zayd to whisper, “Allahaısmarladık,” over him as he closed his eyes.
Zayd turned away afterwards, covering his face with his hands, and Ecaterina could not allow that. If one stopped running, reacting, even for a second, one might never dare start again. They could not risk sentiment, not until everything was done and safety achieved. Better give him something to do, before he slowed enough for all the regrets and grief to catch up. “Zayd. We don’t know how many of these things there are. We need to get His Highness out of here at once. You know the way best. Lead on.”
It was not a hard thing to sneak out of the first court. The place was now filled to capacity with other humans. The hundred fledglings still stood impassively, impervious to time, their eyes incurious and their faces like wax masks. Behind them the space was filled with the beyliks of the sultan’s personal regiment. The dead sultan himself was flanked by a pair of Solak archers. Behind the sultan an orta of sekban janissaries stood fidgeting, while their military band fiddled with the straps of their drums.
The reek of terrified humanity was thick enough to conceal the fugitives even if there had been a dozen more. But Ecaterina was still shaky and thin with tension when the gates were passed and behind her. Istanbul’s nighttime streets felt as blameless and welcoming as her father’s hall by comparison to the haunted palace they had just left.
It being the quickest way to Ubaid’s customs house, they returned via the covered market. They were exhausted, their steps dragging. Ecaterina hung her head and allowed herself to think of a hot bath, a meal, a soft bed to sleep in.
But then the mehter music started up behind her—the crash of big drums and cymbals, the eerie unnerving drone of the zurna. They were close enough to hear the footsteps, all beating in time and shaking the earth as though a giant were strolling up behind them. Constantin’s army was coming.
“In here!” Mirela threw back the curtain that closed a little perfume shop on the side of the road, darted inside. Zayd exchanged a glance with Ecaterina, but she had no better idea. Osman was looking around as though he could not work out what anything was. Had he even seen the sky before? Surely before he’d been a threat and a potential spare heir he had been allowed to be a boy?
It didn’t seem like it. His face was full of wonder as she hauled him inside the shop and drew the curtain closed again. Tiny jars of perfume crowded the many shelves. Further in the back, an inner door opened onto a storeroom filled with larger amphorae, sweating sweetness in their straw-packed storage. The night here was a cacophony of scents so thick it made Ecaterina’s cheeks feel as though they’d burst into flower. Not an entirely pleasant sensation, but a relief after so much blood.
“Here.” Mirela passed out vials of oil to each of them. “The strigoi hunt by smell. Put this on and they won’t know you’re food.” She watched Ecaterina dab at her wrists with jasmine, then grabbed the bottle and dumped its contents entire over her head. So Ecaterina was wiping sticky, slimy, nose-numbing scent out of her eyes when the army passed by. She didn’t see the two dark forms following it, loping from shadow to shadow as they hunted the hunters.
But Zayd did. He pointed them out to her once she could safely open her eyes. Two strangely dressed shapes flattened into a shop doorway. When the final drummer passed the street of goldsmiths and disappeared around the bend in the road, Zayd darted out into the empty market, came back with Radu and Frank in his train.
Ecaterina would apologise to Stefan’s shade for it later, but she found herself grinning, absurdly pleased to see them. “I knew you wouldn’t run away,” she said as Mirela dumped attar of roses over their heads. The perfume was especially necessary in their cases—they stank like a latrine and their boots were caked in brown up to the calf. “What happened to you?”
“What are you saying?” Osman demanded in Latin, for they had lapsed into Wallachian by instinct.
Frank’s grin echoed Ecaterina’s own incredulous relief at being reunited; he switched languages with effortless ease. “It’s not very glamorous, I’m afraid. We stayed out too late and the strigoi caught us. They plan to turn this into their own empire, using Mahmud as a puppet and converting the Ottoman armies into an army of fledglings with which to conquer humanity and farm us like cattle. They wanted to offer Radu the chance to join them—”
“Why?” Osman put down the bottle he had been examining and frowned at Radu—who looked so terrible, so bruised and tired, Ecaterina almost felt sorry for him.
Radu grimaced, paused for a long time. Then he said, carefully, “Who are you, and what business is it of yours?”
“I am . . . Tomorrow I will be girded with the sword of Osman. I will be Osman III, Padishah Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, shadow of God on earth. Tell me why these demons would offer you my kingdom.”
Radu laughed. Ecaterina wondered how he would wriggle out of giving an honest answer to Osman’s question. My father asked me to join him because he knew I approved of killing Turks. It wouldn’t go down well.
Radu only rose and bowed. “I am Radu Văcărescu, son of the devil, Your Highness. It is my father who has done this in your land. He gave me the opportunity to approve of it and join him. I declined.”
A quick and bitter silence, before Frank filled it with a self-depreciating grin. “Then we ran away and hid in a cesspit until they were gone. Does anyone know what they’re up to now? We probably ought to stop it if we can.”
“How can we?” Ecaterina was already sick of the stench of flowers. Her head hurt and she wanted to go to bed while she let the Turks deal with their own crisis. “The only thing that works is the charms, and we can’t make them fast enough.”
Radu appeared even more savage than usual, scraped and discoloured, with droplets of jasmine oil balancing on the ends of his flicked-up locks of too-long black hair, but his gesture was suitably tentative when he reached out to the bow and quiver she was still clutching. He fell back into his own language and hers. “May I?”
She handed it over, but didn’t fully understand his thought until he began to remove the arrowheads and sharpen the points of the wooden shafts. Oh, stakes! Tiny stakes that can be driven in from a distance. But wouldn’t the points splinter? She went into the backroom and dug out a lamp, lighting it as she returned to the front. “The tips would be better if they were fire-hardened.”
He grinned at her, unexpectedly bright and fierce. She had to admit she rather liked it. “If my demons die, there is a future for us. And lord, what wolflike children we would have between us.”
But that was just presumption. Perhaps her magic had finally gone to his head. If so, this was not the place to have that conversation. “One quiver full of arrows is hardly going to do it.”
Radu snorted, dismissed her in favour of his boy. “Frank, you still have problems with spontaneous magic, but you cast fine when there is a known spell you can follow. Am I right?”
Frank nodded, his shoulders drooping as though he was preemptively getting ready to disappoint them all. She’d had such hopes when she met him—a genuine mage, full of power. It was such a bloody inconvenience in this situation to discover that something crippled him inside, prevented any of it coming spontaneously, without the crutches of incantations written by others.
“Then is there some way that your sunlight spell could be attached to a physical object? To something we could throw at them?”
“Ooh, ooh!” Mirela waved a perfume bottle in the space between them. “Put it on the oil. Then when you throw the bottle and the glass breaks, the oil will come out and soak their clothes with sunlight. They won’t be able to run away from it because it will be all over them.”
“It’s brilliant! Can you?”
“I don’t . . .” Frank stuttered. “Theory’s not my—”
Ecaterina met Zayd’s eyes across the circle of lamplight and saw her own curiosity, hope, mirrored there. “I think I can.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “If you can give us half an hour, I think we can.”
The spell Ecaterina and Zayd came up with between them was so elegant and so beautiful it made Frank want to weep. Three characters to trace on each bottle and a sentence of what seemed like nonsense words, but which pulled at the magic in the back of his mind like poetry. When he tried it first, still in the grip of his own self-doubt, he wanted to wither up and die at how good they were at this, and how useless he was in comparison.
It was a well-worn emotion, this bitter yearning not to take up the world’s space when he did nothing to deserve it. One he was really beginning to grow fed up with. It had held him back from doing anything to help his friends when he was in Ubaid’s cell. Its dire warnings of inevitable doom had proved false. Frank was past ready to put it down and move on, if he could only work out how.
Shame persisted for the first ten bottles, but then the rhythm of the magic itself began to wear it away. He called to the power with someone else’s words, but it was he through whom the delightful flood of power streamed, tingling through his fingertips, opening him to be a conduit for the fearless brilliance of sunlight. Once he had enchanted every bottle within reach—even those Mirela had found stacked in the back of the shop—the repeated spell had worked a kind of meditation on him.
By the time he stopped, he felt split as he had been by losing his memory. A part of him remained the old, doubtful, doglike Frank, but another part seemed newly formed out of crystal, echoing and empty, too big for his own skin. When the others told him it was time to go, he almost had to relearn how to walk, had to grope not for the threads of magic, but for those that anchored him to his own body.
He lurched into the doorjamb, staggered across the street, and tripped over a cold incense burner, but then Mirela steadied him, and he could feel his feet again.
It was darker than ever under the arched roof of this covered market—but something was moving ahead of them. From just around the corner came the thud of heavy baskets falling, something metallic rolling on the paving stones, a staccato knocking.
Radu stopped by Frank’s side with a breath of exasperated laughter. “What now?”
“It doesn’t sound like the strigoi,” Frank reassured him.
Which made Radu snort again. “I’ll go and see.” He gazed over Frank’s shoulder, to where the newest man in their little party was standing, horribly vulnerable in the middle of the street. “Translate this for me, Frank. I can’t think in Latin . . . ‘Osman, Your Highness. You should stay indoors. They don’t know where you are. With the perfume and the charm, they will neither smell nor sense you. If one does try to come in, there is a threshold you can forbid them to cross . . . You should be safe enough here until dawn. No point in putting yourself in danger now.’”
Frank passed this message on and translated the reply sympathetically. “‘I want . . .’” Osman had the earnest expression of a very young man—one who begrudged not being involved in the adventure. But his brow creased before he could get the rest of the sentence out. Frank could see him debating with himself, remembering his duty to his empire. “I want to come, but I bow to your wisdom. I will stay here and be safe. May God go with you all.”
Zayd’s shoulders eased with relief as Osman returned to the inner room of the shop and shut the door. Radu, too, seemed to relax a little without his ancestral enemy on hand to protect. He opened his mouth to say something, but the jostling, crunching noise came again, closer now.
Sword drawn, Radu stalked silently to the intersection. He leaned forward, peering through the dark, and then chuckled. Sheathing his sword he walked out of their sight. Frank heard him crooning to something that snorted in answer.
Then he returned, unharmed, with a bridle in his hand, and a saddled and bridled loose horse clopping behind him, still chewing on a ferny head of aniseed.
Ecaterina pushed past Frank to come to the horse’s head and stroke its nose. Though her smile at Radu was sharp with nothing more intimate than a tactician’s approval, Frank didn’t approve. A nobleman needed a wife, he more than anyone knew that. But neither of them had to like it.
“This will make things easier,” Ecaterina grinned.
“My thoughts exactly.” Radu tied the sack of enchanted bottles to the horse’s saddle, leaned down to link his hands together to form a step, helping Ecaterina swing herself up onto the beast’s back.
Frank tried to shove jealousy—the awareness that the boyar and the boyaryshyna understood one another on a level he could never hope to achieve—over to that side of him occupied by nonmagical Frank. He wasn’t entirely successful. Jealousy unevened his halves and made his mental balancing act harder. He pushed it away anyway. This was not the time.
