“Oh.” Zayd tried to take a step back and failed in that too, but his slipper brushed the wall with a thud scarcely louder than his words, and Sultan Mahmud glared at the wall behind which they were standing. Zayd felt, indeed, as though the sultan’s white-rimmed eyes were looking directly at him. How could he have seen their colour otherwise? He tried again to fall to his knees, a cold sweat of terror blooming along his backbone, but Haji Nabih caught his arm and prevented him.
“Nabih! I can tell you’re there, prying and peeking as always. Come out or I will send in the tigers after you. Big cats in the walls—that would put an end to the spying.”
The sultan was still laughing to himself at that thought when Nabih jammed his fingers into a crack in the wall that Zayd had thought little wider than a fingernail. It hinged back and revealed a handle that, when pulled upon, allowed the entire section of wall to slide aside and Nabih to step out into the sultan’s private rooms as if he had meant it all along.
This time Zayd was permitted the prostration. He fell to his hands and knees with some relief and felt Nabih fold gracefully into the same posture beside him.
Silence for a long while, and the sultan paced around them both, his gaze like lead weights on Zayd’s back. “What is this?”
“You asked for holy men, Padishah.” Nabih’s voice was scarcely recognisable as his own, so much more melodious, smoother, more reassuring. He might not be certain the Lord of the Horizons was under an evil influence, but he acted as if he was. “This is Zayd Ibn Rahman, who keeps the shrine of Dede Abdul Khaliq and is a well-known magician in the Eyup quarter. I was not sure if you wanted the other members of the divan to know you sought magicians for the war, so I brought him in by private ways.”
“And if I had not heard you, scrabbling in the wall like rats?”
Nabih’s jovial laugh approved of a joke the sultan had almost certainly not made. “I was about to knock as you called, Exalted.”
“Hm.” The feet circumnavigated Zayd again. He raised his head just a little to watch them—dazzling slippers on dazzling carpets. More than he’d ever wanted to see of the inside of the palace.
“Zayd Ibn Rahman, a great future is before you,” the sultan began, as though he were creating the future simply by describing it. Though of course he could. He could simply speak and make it so. Nothing stood between his will and the physical execution of it. In that way he was a far greater mage than Zayd even pretended to be.
Zayd wished he had not thought the word execution.
“I wish to equip my heaviest artillery units with the means to travel swiftly without the need for supply trains. To let them swoop down on our enemies’ cities from the sky. You will bring me a hundred flying carpets, each one a hundred ayak long and sturdy enough to carry thirty cannons a side with their crews and ammunition.”
Zayd imagined it with a blink of startlement. Mad, the sultan might be, but creative with it. Think what a fleet of such carpets could do! Only after Zayd had seen the destructive glory of the idea did he remember that his own powers amounted to nothing more than the ability to write neatly in small spaces. He could not do this thing.
He’d never been gladder to be crouched on the floor, for his limbs had dissolved beneath him. He knew now how the jellyfish had felt when lifted from the comforting ocean. Even his reek of terror must give offence, overpowering the jasmine oil he had applied earlier. “Um . . . Highest and most excellent lord, the, um . . . the—the art of making flying carpets is forgotten. Has been forgotten since before the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him. I don’t . . .”
“Then you will reinvent it.”
An indulgent laugh, as though the King of All the Earth smiled above his head, and then the sultan said, “Up! Up and see what I have already achieved.”
Silently, Zayd allowed Nabih to help him to his feet, to guide him like a blind man in the wake of the sultan’s departing heels. The floor narrowed and widened, and then there were stairs down, and chained doors that had to be opened by genuflecting eunuch guards.
If Zayd had thought his own stench bad, it was nothing to the miasma that greeted him in the kafes chambers. These were fine living quarters, but the once-beautiful carpets underfoot were soggy with warm red liquid. Satin cushions lay ruined in puddles. Little tables and boxes blue with sapphires, were now browning and stuck with flies, flecked with small pieces of meat and sinew. A blood clot the size of a fist wobbled by Zayd’s foot, black until the vibrations of his footstep stirred it, making it slide away on a crimson trail.
Nabih’s hands were digging into his arm, cutting off the circulation. He could hear the older man’s breath speeding, speeding, and then slowing again as if he was catching himself, forcing himself to calm. Zayd didn’t believe he himself was breathing at all.
“The first of my angels.” The beautiful slippers reached a dais, stepped up, and Zayd didn’t need to raise his eyes to see the man—the thing that had once been a man—laid there in the deepest pool of blood. He’d been hollowed like a calf at the butcher’s, internal organs removed, genitalia removed and placed in his right hand. By the look on his face, this had happened while he was alive enough to feel it. Oddly shaped, leathery wings spread out from his back, and when Zayd got closer he could see they were made of skin from the man’s torso, stretched over a wooden frame.
The sultan knelt with a squelch, and tried to smooth some of the lines of inhuman agony from the victim’s face. “Why should my brothers live in captivity, after all, when they might head my armies as avenging angels? It is more fitting for the sons of Osman to fly as warriors than to rot in a cage.”
Allah the merciful! Zayd swallowed, and swallowed again as his stomach threatened to heave. One did not throw up on the sultan’s brother, however brutalised. Panic turned to a hard ball of hot iron in his mouth. He would say anything, anything to get out of here and then perhaps kill himself cleanly once he had the chance.
“Winged armies,” he gasped, with a voice that trembled so fast it was almost steady.
“Astounding, yes?”
“Yes, Exalted One. Nothing I had ever imagined.”
“So you will bring me carpets tomorrow.”
More flies were arriving every moment. The air was itchy with their drone. The floor seemed to move with the squirming of their black backs. Zayd wobbled on his feet. Unobtrusively, Nabih dug his fingers in farther and shook him back to clarity.
“I will require some time, and the help of other magicians, Exalted. I will have to call for other men of power to come to me so the lost incantations can be re-created. Also this cannot be done with mundane carpets bought in the souk. They will have to be woven for the purpose.”
Nabih made a placatory gesture with one hand, his voice, unbelievably, just as smooth and reasonable as ever. “That accords with what I have read, Padishah. The magic has to be woven in from the start.”
A longer pause. Zayd struggled not to faint, struggled not to look up, to try impiously to read the sultan’s face. Then came a sigh. “Three months. I will have converted my remaining brothers by then, and sent a message to the English that—stupid as they are—they will not be able to misinterpret.”
“My lord,” Nabih wheedled, “it may take three months for the mages to arrive in Istanbul before they can even begin this work. It is an intricate undertaking. In the meantime there are armies to be mustered, especially those that have to come from the tribute provinces. Perhaps six months would be . . .”
Nabih might have put him in this appalling position, but he was at least doing his best to help him survive it, Zayd thought with a little sliver of warmth that only made the stark devastation of the rest of his mind seem more jagged by contrast. The Grand Mufti did not disappoint in person—as brave and as kind as rumour painted him.
“I will see progress in three months, or I will have you both executed as the spies you are.”
“Favoured of God, our lives belong to you already, and all we desire is to serve y
ou.” Nabih prostrated himself on the wet floor, tugging Zayd down with him. A moment later they were hauled to their feet and marched out by two beylik guards.
“Do you still need to return home for your books?” Haji Nabih smiled a brittle but rather charming smile as he gestured for Daoud to pour them both tea. They’d been deposited in one of the small courtyards between walls where prisoners were kept before execution—out of the sight of more favoured members of the court, and well away from the general populace. No attempt had been made to keep them there, and they had found their way back to Nabih’s apartments unencumbered, but it had served as a gentle reminder of how easy it was to disappear should they fail.
Daoud had caught their mood and changed into an outfit the soft grey-pink of the breast of a dove. His unreadable face was shaped into a mask of solemn serenity, and nothing Zayd could do would persuade him to look up and meet his eyes.
It was like being served by an automaton of polished bronze, and the chilly perfection made Zayd yearn for his own home, where food and drink were typically accompanied by affection. In the days when they had been wealthy enough to have slaves, the slaves had been like younger brothers, obedient, but not afraid to answer back, nor ashamed to offer sympathy, or display human emotions. This perfection of servility made him feel very alone.
His mind was still flying into every corner, trying to escape what he had just seen. He sipped at cleansing bitterness and mint, attempting to convince himself it was washing away the smell of blood. “I cannot doubt that he is under an evil influence.” It felt like treason to say it. It was. But it was treason he shared with the holiest man in the empire. “Have you tried the lead pourers?”
“That is surely nothing but a woman’s superstition?” Nabih took a soothing breath of smoke and looked at him as though he was a deep and personal disappointment. A last hope that hadn’t paid off.
At least Zayd need not worry about insulting the Grand Mufti. There was little he could do to make his situation worse. “In our experience, it’s an extremely powerful ritual. If we could draw the influence from him and imprison it in hot lead, we could make bullets from the metal and shoot the evil away from him, into our enemy.”
“You are not telling me that actually works?” Nabih repeated, and when Zayd opened his mouth to do so, he waved his hand impatiently. “Even if it did, the sultan, may he live forever, would never allow a couple of old crones to pour lead above him while he slept. Or do you think you could smuggle them past the janissaries, and the white eunuchs and the black eunuchs, not to mention his concubines and wives, to reach him once he has retired for the night?”
“He won’t agree to it?”
“Of course not. He does not believe there is anything wrong with him, and would be incensed at the suggestion. The influence protects itself. We must be subtler.”
Zayd scrubbed at his hands with his fingertips. He’d been assured he was clean, but cool, tacky liquid seemed to have lodged beneath his fingernails nevertheless. “I may have misled you, Excellence, but I don’t know what I can do. I am a scholar of magic, not a practitioner—”
“Your charms—”
“Don’t require their maker to have any power. It is the letters and the shapes themselves that have an effect. You could copy them and they would be every bit as effective. Probably more so—I’ve never really had any success. My father did, my mother did. They were sure the gift should come out in me, but no. Nothing.”
Zayd picked at the imaginary blood until his fingertips were sore. His hands smelled of roses from the oil he had worked into them after washing. Haji Nabih’s cast-off clothes were grander by far than anything he had ever worn, and he felt like a boy playing at heroes who was suddenly expected to be ridiculously brave in real life. The clothes were too big for him, the perfume ostentatious, the act of sitting in a palace room a trespass against morality.
The Grand Mufti gave an exasperated laugh. “We went over this earlier. If you wish to bring the sultan his carpets within the next three months, you will have to acquire the power, somehow.”
“I can’t suddenly become a mage just for the asking.”
Haji Nabih got up and motioned for him to follow again, bringing him out of the palace and down into the closest street of clerks. There a small cupboard of an office had been squeezed in underneath stone steps that led to the guild house of the tailors. A box of a room with a low stone table, a few shelves around the walls, and a shutter that closed off the narrow entrance when the room was not in use, it smelled of mice. A very thin cat curled around Zayd’s ankles when he squeezed inside.
“It is the sultan’s will that you bring him magic carpets,” said Nabih, passing Zayd a document with his seal on it, which told its reader that Zayd was acting under the Grand Mufti’s authority. He watched with an eye of serene composure as Zayd explored the dim little space. “Thus I do what I can to make it possible. Did I not say you would gather mages to you to work on this together? I am not expecting you to do it alone. If you cannot create the carpets yourself, I commission you to find the mages who can. I give you these premises from which to operate. When you have recruits you will send their details to me, and I will pay their salaries and provide you with any supplies that are required. You may call upon my authority to back you in whatever else you need to make this enterprise succeed. You will bring the sultan his carpets, and you will bring him a cure for his malady. Is that not so?”
“I’m not sure.” Zayd looked again around the small, asymmetrical space. Put in charge of Istanbul’s magicians? Made in effect, if not in name, Istanbul’s archmage? It would have been an enormous honour if it hadn’t been also a trap. “The Jar of Heaven beneath Aya Sophia was smashed to pieces when Mehmed II conquered the city. Though we are at the edge of the influence of one in Greece, that, too, has been broken for five hundred years.”
Nabih gave him that look again. The one that said, Woe is me, that this is the best I have to work with. “Which means?”
“It means that it’s unlikely we’ll find anyone in the whole country with powers strong enough to do what the sultan demands.”
Nabih stroked his bottom lip with his thumb, as though, had he been forty years younger, he would have sucked it. “Well, I suggest you try. Success is in Allah’s hands, but without it, I think you can imagine what might happen.”
Zayd could not stop imagining it.
The sunset call to prayer rang out, startling him out of hopelessness, and in the absence of clearer ideas, he took his leave of Nabih and made his way to the nearest mosque. There he washed again, reapplied his perfume, and felt finally cleaner. Joining all the faithful in prayer in the centre of the mosque’s airy beauty, he allowed the sensation of space and light—the glowing blue and golden texts on the walls, the flickering of the many enamelled lamps—to make him feel that he was not alone.
Surely Allah would help him to fulfil his duty to His anointed ruler, to advance a holy war that would bring His truth to a dark benighted nation. Surely the maker of all things would uphold him, and even if he died in the attempt, would reward him with paradise.
He felt better, on coming out—stronger, more resolute. Seizing the moment, he strode off to the town criers’ guild. There he commissioned a notice to be read out on street corners, offering employment to those who could prove their magical talent. Having set a time for tomorrow and a meeting place of his new office, he went home.
In comparison with the gore-filled scene of the kafes, the tombs seemed cheery. He thought about his own grave, composed himself a small epitaph to be carved on his headstone. It was almost a comforting thought, until he ducked within the screen that shielded his harem from the outer world. A scent of lamb and couscous greeted him, and his mother and aunt paused in their work—one stirring the pot over the clay brazier, the other bringing plates out of their wrappings by the wall—to smile at him.
The plague had taken the rest of their family. There was no other male relative to whom he coul
d entrust their care. If he died, what would become of them? Would the city still come to buy charms if the seller was a woman?
Perhaps they would, but Zayd hated the idea of either elderly lady having to deal with the outside world, with strange men of evil sorts, all by themselves. If it came to that, he would have failed them indeed.
“Mother. Auntie.” He folded himself down to sit on the cushions they had piled by the far wall. Accepting a basin of water, he washed the dust of his trek through the graveyard from his hands. “I have a great deal to tell you, but it may make you worry. Would you rather be in glad ignorance or in knowledge?”
They served the food and came to sit by him. His mother patted his knee. She had once been very beautiful—to him she still was—but the bones of that beauty could no longer quite support her aged skin. Life had rumpled it and added a yellow tint to the whites of her eyes, but their gaze was as direct and amused as ever. “I see it has made you worry. Tell us everything, then Jala and I can take over the worrying while you act.”
So Zayd told them all and found it was helpful to share his anxiety, to talk of hope.
“You’ll see,” said his mother, determinedly positive. “Tomorrow Allah will send you a prince among mages. Or the day after that.” It had something of the same sweetness with which she’d lied to him as a boy, telling him that the pain of circumcision would be over in a moment and forgotten. He remembered the agony even now, but he appreciated the bolstering nevertheless.
The morning came cold, and chilly breezes straight off the Black Sea whipped through the streets of Eyup borough, causing the dust to circle in eddies that stripped exposed skin, rattling the lanterns outside houses, billowing the fabrics and flags outside the stalls of the marketplace. Zayd dodged through a line of donkeys laden with firewood and was almost kicked by the one ahead of him, the beasts nervous at the uncertain weather. Their drivers nodded apologies at him that he returned absentmindedly as he came to his booth and found a queue outside it.
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