Angels of Istanbul, page 21
Down the street, then, Ecaterina on horseback going at a slow walk that the rest of them could keep up with. Though Constantin’s army was long out of sight, it was easy enough to track. The mehter music still boomed distantly below them, and when they came out from beneath the market’s roof and could look down, Frank saw the harbour lit up as if by bonfires.
A street above the final descent to the water, they ran into the back of the janissaries. The Turkish troops were spread in a wide semicircle around the harbour, armed men blocking every exit and every street that led out of it. A cordon with drawn swords separating Prosphorion Harbour from the city of Istanbul.
On the other side of the cordon, inside the port itself, the bandsmen had formed into a parade square with their backs to the warehouses. They played on, fear and uncertainty lending the music a terrible power. Along the opposite road—this one lined with janissary troops, tightening the cordon right down to the sea—confused dockworkers were putting the final touches to a dais, before which the fledglings had lined up in ten ranks, ten deep.
Fire baskets flamed in a grid, lighting the area between the troops almost as brightly as day. The light gleamed gold from the tents of the final players in this little military spectacle. Between the strigoi army and the sea, the Wallachian forces were pouring out of their tents. Lining up, still straightening their hats and buckling on belts, they formed themselves into companies and households, there on the narrow flat land between the water and the army of the dead.
It was too far, even in the light of all those fires, to see the expressions on the Wallachians’ faces, but Frank supposed they would look much as Radu did now, watching the horsetail standards come up onto the dais with white-rimmed eyes. Torn between the hope that this was an honour and the near certainty that it was betrayal. They must know they were in a trap, with nowhere to run, surrounded by enemies, summoned by the sultan to their own destruction.
The music stopped. In the silence Frank could hear the fires crackle. The unsteady gait of dead Sultan Mahmud betrayed how new a fledgling he really was as he followed the glide of Constantin and Alaya up onto the dais. There he stopped, just behind Constantin, mute and blank as a puppet.
Zayd growled something Frank couldn’t make out. Radu swung up into the saddle in front of Ecaterina, the bow and its quiver of wooden arrows in his hands.
The leaders of the Wallachian troops were all people that Frank knew after a month of partying in Bucharest’s high society, though they were different here. Stripped of foibles by the hand of war, they looked grim and legendary. Constantin was the most storybook of them all, flickering in the light of the torches like a pillar of salt. The diamonds in his hat coruscated with fire.
“When I was young,” Constantin began, his voice effortlessly loud, commanding, “I fought against the Turks under the guidance of the firm hand of Vlad Tepes.”
A distant murmuring like that of the sea from the Wallachians. Perhaps they had already caught the implication. Nearer to, Frank could hear the janissaries mutter unhappily over being addressed like this by an enemy of the Turks.
“Now, my countrymen, I have conquered where Tepes failed, and I am come to share my glory. You will be my Varangian Guard, my elite, my personal troops. You will rule over the Earth with me forevermore.”
The voices swelled. The neat lines of troops on parade broke up into arguing huddles. A man stepped forward into the haunted space beneath the eyes of the fledglings, and Frank felt the world slide to an appalled stop.
Incongruously bright in his yellow coat, his figure a little slimmer from a month of army rations, Decebal Sterescu, Ecaterina’s father, spat on the ground in front of Constantin, wiped his mouth. “We will not.”
“Daddy . . .” Ecaterina whispered. When two of the fledglings seized him by the arms, dragged him up onto the dais, she shouted it, “Daddy!”
Decebal’s head turned. Frank could see the shock go through him as he saw his daughter distant in the crowd. Constantin laughed, wrenched Decebal’s neck to the side, and buried his teeth in the great vein.
“No!” Frank shouted, waiting for Ecaterina’s scream. It didn’t come. Instead, she leaned down from the horse and clouted him a stinging slap across the ear.
“Do something!”
And he was dropped once more into the cauldron of seething doubt that was his own mind. “I . . . I can’t. Not from this distance, the light wouldn’t reach, I . . .”
“Useless. You’re fucking useless, Frank. What is the matter with you?”
She drew back her hand to hit him again, and Radu grabbed it. “Then we’ll do it our way.”
Setting his heels to the horse’s flanks, Radu nudged it forward into the back of the Turkish cordon. Each soldier they touched, as they tried to force their way through, glowered, turned with weapons raised, caught sight of Ecaterina’s angry tears, and suddenly turned helpful. The weapons were lowered, the horse ushered through.
Too slowly. They couldn’t possibly worm their way into the harbour in time to save Decebal, but fortunately he had other defenders. Now that Constantin had shown for certain what he was, the boyars of the other divisions drew their swords and dashed forward as if to storm the dais. It might have worked if their men had come with them, but the soldiers hung back, perhaps superstitious, overawed. The charging heroes, trying to hack their way through the fledglings, became the first fruits of a grisly harvest.
Unleashed, the hungry new strigoi seized the rescuers and fought over them. Ilionescu was torn apart, greedy mouths snarling over the pump of blood from his severed joints. The others disappeared in the centre of a feeding frenzy that seemed likely to have the fledglings destroying each other in their fury. The sight made Frank sick, made Constantin drop Decebal and stretch out his hands toward his creatures as if to claw back control.
The fall of Sterescu and Ilionescu tipped the motionless fear of the Wallachian troops over into panic. Their leaders gone, they turned and fled, breaking for the streets that would lead up into Istanbul, to a thousand places of hiding and safety.
There, in every road and alleyway, the janissaries pushed them back. Jostling at first, the Wallachians shouted, arguing, pleading to be let through. The Turks, clearly unhappy but obedient to their orders, tried to turn them back with open palms, fists at the most.
Behind the Wallachians the faces of the fledglings showed the first emotion Frank had seen on them—a glowing predatory joy. They stopped their infighting, their focus once again fully on the humans. To his horror he realised they must have allowed the panic, encouraged it perhaps, the way Alaya had forced Frank to run from her so that she would have greater sport when she killed. Even the young ones could have called their victims to come to them, blanked their minds, killed them mercifully, swiftly. Instead they chose this—to unman before they killed, to steal dignity as well as life.
At the end of the road Frank stood in was Cezar Dobre, Radu’s kindhearted old retainer in the flowered coat. Cezar had clearly had enough of trying to persuade the janissaries to stand aside; he drew his sword and cut down the man in his way. All the warriors around him took the hint. Blades were bared, but the janissaries followed suit, sabres suddenly in their hands.
“In the name of Allah the merciful,” Frank shouted in Turkish. “Let them through!”
Zayd hit him in the arm. “They are the sultan’s most loyal companies. They will not listen to you. Is there nothing you can do to stop this? How many more people must die to appease your lover’s monsters?”
It was the final straw. Frank staggered under the weight of his guilt—this was all his fault. His father had said so. Radu had said so. The way Ecaterina had looked at him! He couldn’t . . . He squeezed his eyes closed. He couldn’t go on this way. He couldn’t carry this and be of any help to anyone.
So what did he want? Did he want to collapse here and do nothing while his friends died all around him?
No. Radu had saved him and given him a new life. It was Frank’s turn, his chance to pay that back. If Radu had simply put down the last three hundred years of his family’s history and stepped out into the light, surely Frank could too?
Tethers snapped inside him. It was as if he had driven himself from his own body. He seemed to float above it, seeing the harbour in plan form: stopped-up roads, the beginning of a dozen desperate fights to get out, the fledglings plucking Wallachian soldiers one by one, pausing to feast before they moved on.
Up on the dais, someone had brought seats, so that Constantin, Alaya, and Mahmud could relax as they watched the carnage as if it were a gladiatorial entertainment. Every so often a captured man would be handed up to them like a goblet of wine.
Frank could see where the horse had finally emerged from the Turkish cordon, Ecaterina straightening up with two fistfuls of gold-glimmering bottles, Radu guiding the horse with his knees as he put an arrow to his bow and took aim.
Ecaterina’s first perfume missile burst on the back of a strigoi that had knocked Cezar’s hat off and tangled its nails in his hair. Liquid sunlight spattered across its spine and shone like molten gold. The screaming was indescribable. The fledgling dropped Cezar to the floor, tried to beat at its back with its hands—only succeeded at getting the oil on its palms too.
A breath, a moment as its mouth stretched in agony. A faint thread of satisfaction wove through Frank’s emptied heart as the oil soaked in and the creature burned in a blue flame of fat and gas.
And then Cezar got up, glassy-eyed, and charged at Ecaterina. His sword made a semicircle of silver in the air as he drove it at her thigh powerfully enough to have cut through her leg and the horse under it—had it landed. But instead his head jerked back, his whole body recoiling, the sword clattering to the ground as Radu—stricken faced—put an arrow through the shoulder of his sword arm, leaving him defenceless and bleeding in a harbour full of sharks.
But the strigoi were more afraid of the sunlight than drawn to Cezar’s wound. They huddled together in the centre of the harbour, retreating from the terrible light. At the same time, in every street, the Wallachian soldiers stopped trying to escape. They turned around, their blank eyes following the movement of the horse.
“What?” Zayd said beside Frank, “Why are they doing that?”
Mirela clutched at Frank’s sleeve as if to shake him into paying attention to her. Bodiless though he was, part of him was still listening, aware of her explaining, “The strigoi are controlling our people. Zayd, can you work out some way that Frank can give them all your immunity charm at a distance?”
It was Zayd’s turn to sound baffled and helpless. “Not in five minutes! It’s complicated. I need paper, diagrams, quiet. I need space to think!”
Space. That was what Frank needed too. Clean space in which he could slip on St. George’s Cloak without distraction. It was that simple. He had left his body, now he just needed to get away from his own mind.
Frank stepped sideways, crabwise in an odd little mental contortion that slipped him out of himself and once more into that empty place, built of crystal, where the energies of the vril accumulator crackled all around him in the walls.
And walls were what he wanted. He reached out his right hand to the sea and with his left described a great arc that delineated the land. Any fool could feel the barrier between those two things. Sea could not be land, by definition—there was therefore a kind of forbidding, an impassable quality between them. All he had to do was untangle the true nature of that barrier from the material world in which it had its imperfect expression. He had to find its Platonic form, and bring it down in a circle of force between his friends and the mind-controlled Wallachian troops.
There was no joy in the exercise. Nor was there any other emotion, only a steady sleeting of complexity, like advanced mathematics, as he puzzled out the shape of what he wished to do. Then he dipped his mental fingers in blue power, let it flow into and out of his design. It took a steady discipline, a focus too fine to allow for concentration on anything else.
He didn’t know it had worked until the air in the dockyards shivered and a great dome of transparent silver light came down over land and sea, trapping the strigoi and his friends inside it. Trapping everyone else outside it, Wallachian and Turkish troops alike, the bustle of the town and the estuary.
Still under compulsion, the Wallachians attacked it, but they rebounded as though they had thrown themselves into a wall. Out on the Bosphorus, where the outer sweep of the dome carried on past the harbour and into the sea, a galley and a caïque crashed to a halt as though they had run themselves onto a rock.
Frank, busy trying to hold himself in an ever-changing complex state of active meditation at the centre of terrifying force—rather like trying to calculate the positions of a storm of arrows so he could dance through the centre without being touched—did not appreciate Mirela shaking him by the arm and shrieking.
“Frank! Frank! You’ve just trapped Catia and Radu inside with a hundred demons. How is that going to help?”
Sealed in a jar with his demons, Radu grinned. Good. Let it be just him and them. His fight, his fault, and only him to pay the price. Well . . . he and his future wife, perhaps, and wasn’t she a prize? Delightfully fierce—he would be proud to die beside her.
“Ready?” He urged the horse straight at where the century of fledglings were still cringing away from their burning compatriot. As soon as they were within throwing distance, Ecaterina flung the bottles, sharp and accurate as throwing knives. The fledglings they landed on recoiled into their fellows. Infected by their terror, the others tried to scatter, and Radu picked up speed, galloping clockwise around the little strigoi army, keeping them packed in tight.
Ahead, a thing that had once been a blacksmith darted out from the crowd into the horse’s path. The horse jerked nervously. Radu murmured to it even as he knocked an arrow and let fly. The blacksmith was hurled back into the ranks, burning with a different coloured fire—green flames curling up the fletching of the arrow from where its wooden shaft was buried in his heart.
He picked off two trying to get out of the scrum ahead of him, then turned in the saddle to shoot those who were fleeing behind his back. Between the arrow shots, Ecaterina threw more grenades of sunlight into the tight-packed knot of fledglings until the light from them became so intense they couldn’t see to aim.
Radu let the horse drift aside then, waiting at a safe distance to pick off any strigoi capable of breaking out of what had become an enormous bonfire.
“Enough! That’s enough!” His mother’s voice roared loud as the bellow of a bull, all its sweetness turned into gravel. Reluctantly, he turned towards the dais, looked up to see her standing above Ecaterina’s father with a sword point held to his throat. Constantin was nowhere in sight. Decebal was curled up on his side, breathing in shallow, harsh punches of air, but not dead. Not dead yet.
“Darling, you’ve been very bad. You’re always so ungrateful. Stop this or he dies.”
It seemed perhaps the longest time of his life, drawing the bow, aiming, hesitating to loose. She was not really his mother. She had killed his real mother, taken her place so that he would not be able to do this. He should not play into her hands, but still he hesitated.
“Daddy!” Ecaterina shouted again. She hissed against Radu’s back, “Don’t you dare let her kill my father. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you like you deserve. Shoot her!”
But he couldn’t. He failed, gave up, and adjusted his aim. Let fly. The arrow hit Alaya in the back of her hand, piercing it, knocking the sword aside to go clattering across the planks. Alaya screamed and bent over her wound. As she did so, Ecaterina stood up in her stirrups and hurled a grenade. The small and glittering thing shattered on Alaya’s cheekbone splattering glowing oil across her face and throat.
The light did not work as quickly on one so old and powerful as it had with the fledglings. Alaya clutched her face with her hands, both beginning to smoulder. The light spilled out, ate inwards and spread like a spark on a nest of tinder until her fingers sunk into her dissolving skull. She staggered, falling to her knees in a pool of golden silk that slowly burst into flame, crumbling inwards.
“Mother . . .” The urge to run to her, to comfort, was blinding. Radu had turned the horse towards the dais, set his heels in its ribs without thinking when there was a blur of white smoke, and blood hit his face. The horse stumbled, tripped over its legs, and fell forward, tipping him over its head.
But Radu had been falling from horses since he was a child. He twisted in midair, hit the ground feetfirst in a pool of warm blood. He saw at a glance that the horse’s throat had been torn out, and that Constantin stood in the mess, crimson and dripping from head to toe.
There was no such reluctance in him to aim and loose at his father as there had been with Alaya. He felt only a creeping sense of guilt that he was finally being allowed to do this. He got two shots off. One thunked into the flesh at Constantin’s shoulder. One pierced his knee and made him yowl like an enormous cat. Both slowed him a little, but not enough for Radu to get out of his way when he charged forward and brought his sword down, cleaving effortlessly through the tensed string and the recurved wood of Radu’s bow.
Radu dropped the remnants and scrambled to the saddle where he had tied the sack of bottles. In the corner of his eye, he could see Ecaterina. Having obviously fallen with as little mishap as he, she had run to the dais and was now climbing up to her father’s side, all her attention on him.
Rooting for bottles—there must be some left—Radu saw her kneel by Decebal. Saw Mahmud stir out of his meat-puppet blankness and stalk close. “Catia! Behind you!”
An iron grip closed on the back of his neck just as his fingers found the last bottle. It should go in the face or over the heart, but he couldn’t twist in that inhuman strength to get a good aim at either. Constantin’s hand tightened on Radu’s nape as though it would crush his spine and rip it out. It was a waste of his last grenade, but he smashed it down on his father’s hand. The oil felt pleasantly cool, wintery, against the hot bruise on his own fingers. But his father let go, staggered away, hissing like a dragon, while fire ate the bones beneath his skin all the way up his right arm.
