Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  Kamal spurred the horse forward, but it was a losing proposition. With people converging and shouting angrily from all corners and police whistles now coming from outside the station, it only managed to charge ahead a few more car lengths before the rear axle gave up completely and snapped in two. The rear left wheel went berserk for a few seconds before shearing off, and the wagon listed precariously before the right rear wheel snapped off, too. With both rear wheels gone, its tail end hit the ground, scraping along the asphalted road.

  Kamal and Nisreen hung on to the back of the seat as the horse strained to pull it forward, but Kamal knew it was time to bail. He pulled hard on the reins, and as soon as the horse stopped moving, he jumped off.

  “Come on,” he urged Nisreen.

  They ran down the street, chased by several policemen. Cars and onlookers, alerted by the shouts and the whistles, stopped to see what was happening, some of them blocking their way. They crossed a side street and carried on down a row of old buildings that housed several shops, Kamal steamrolling ahead relentlessly, Nisreen in his wake. They needed a solution and they needed it fast. It became all the more urgent when Kamal saw an armed officer down the sidewalk coming at them. He had his gun out and screamed at them to halt as he ground to a stop and crouched into a firing stance.

  Kamal pulled Nisreen to one side and ducked into the door closest to them. It was the entrance to a bakery. Women were standing at a wide counter waiting to be served while stacks of breads and pastries lined the shelves and display cases. Kamal charged through, past a cacophony of screams and protests, and barged into the kitchen, thinking there had to be a rear service entrance through which they could slip out.

  There was—but it gave onto a narrow alleyway that was walled in on one end and led back to the main road by the station on the other.

  A couple of old doors, other rear entrances, faced them on the opposite side of the alleyway. Kamal rushed across and tried to open the first one, but it was locked. The second was also. He pounded on it and yelled for help, but to no avail.

  Kamal knew they were trapped. Reinforcing this was the policeman who appeared at the mouth of the alley and spotted them.

  “Don’t move,” he hollered before blowing his whistle repeatedly and pulling out his gun.

  Kamal turned to Nisreen and grabbed her by the shoulders. “We have to jump. Now.”

  Her eyes were wide as saucers, and she was nodding frantically. “Okay, but … how far back? Ten days?”

  She pulled up her sleeves and stared at the markings, her eyes doing a jumbled dance across them.

  Kamal could see the confusion whirling around her. “Whatever. Yes. Do it.”

  Nisreen looked frazzled. “Wait. I have to put in the word for ‘ten’ instead of—”

  Kamal snapped his gaze back at the cop, who was walked toward them cautiously, his gun leveled at them. “There’s no time. We have to go.”

  “But I’m not yet—give me a sec to—”

  “Use what we know,” he yelled out as he rolled up his own sleeve and pointed at the whole incantation. The one that had the full number of moons in it.

  The one that would take them back to the siege.

  “We have to do it,” he said. “Now.”

  She looked at him with wild eyes and nodded.

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her, powerfully, on the mouth, his lips fusing onto hers and never wanting to pull back. But he had to, and he did, and he held her face there, his eyes burning into hers, and nodded. “I’ll see you there.”

  The shock lit up her face for no more than a heartbeat before they started mouthing the incantation again, only faster this time, even more urgently.

  Nisreen first, Kamal repeating her words without taking his eyes off her.

  Police officers creeping toward them, arms drawn, mystified by what they were seeing.

  A man and a woman, facing each other, locked into each other, oblivious to the warnings and orders being shouted at them, lost in some kind of silent, mesmeric ritual.

  And then they were gone.

  59

  VIENNA

  Ramadan, AH 1094 (September, AD 1683)

  They landed in hell.

  They made the jump successfully and landed together, facing each other, exactly in the same position they’d been in when they uttered the last word an instant ago. But that instant, that blink of an eye in which the very fabric of their bodies seemed to explode limitlessly before reassembling itself with infinite brutality, was 252 years away.

  They were in a very different Vienna now.

  The noise was the first sensation that assaulted them, and it was deafening. Cannonballs and mortar bombs were hurtling through the air before crashing down in bone-shaking explosions and kicking up geysers of fire and stone. Flights of poison-tipped arrows escorted them over the city walls, arcing across the smoke-filled sky before lunging downward in whistling death dives. Musket detonations crackled in the distance. And screams, all kinds of them, echoing out of the mayhem, coming at them from all corners: the battle cries of the city’s surviving defenders fighting on the walls, the howls of the wounded and the dying, the moans of the sick and the starving. Strongest of all, though, was the smell: a rancid, nauseating stench that weighed down the air around them and seeped into their naked pores like a malevolent rising tide. It was unlike anything they’d ever smelled before, but, given what they’d read, its cause was no mystery. It was the smell of rotting flesh combined with the stink of feces, the “bloody flux” from the dysentery that was decimating even more of the city’s frail occupants than the Ottoman’s cannon and blades had.

  It was the smell of death.

  The onslaught of sensations pummeled them, pounding clarity into their groggy, thrumming heads, and their eyes fell into focus to find each other, naked as before, in the narrow alleyway between the two rows of old buildings.

  Kamal cupped Nisreen’s face with his hands, as if to make sure it really was her, to confirm to himself that they had made it alive.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She nodded, her eyelids batting nervously.

  Then his eyes swung away, taking in their surroundings with urgency. The roof of one of the buildings backing up to the alley was caved in, and the wall of another was missing a large chunk that had been eaten away by a projectile. The alleyway itself was littered with rubble and debris.

  He turned to Nisreen just as a cannonball slammed into a nearby building. The ground shook under them, but Nisreen didn’t flinch. Instead, she was fixated on something behind Kamal, at the far end of the alleyway.

  “Kamal,” she said, her voice crisp and urgent, her lips quivering, her finger pointing behind him.

  Kamal turned. He saw what was making her tremble: between mounds of rotting trash, bodies, a couple dozen of them or more, were piled against the wall at the far end of the alley. A cloud of insects was feasting on them, as were some rats. Through eyes that were still sizzling from the jump, Kamal realized there was something else, too. People—live ones, or barely so, three scrawny, disheveled figures—were using the pile of bodies as bait to catch anything edible.

  Kamal knew the survivors had, by then, almost run out of food supplies. They had eaten all the dogs and cats in the city and had been reduced to hunting rats.

  The figures were so skinny, so filthy, their clothes so tattered that it was hard to tell if they were men or women. Not even when one of them spotted Kamal and Nisreen, alerted the others, and all three started moving toward them, rasping something incomprehensible in what they assumed was Viennese German, the language of Vienna at the time.

  “Let’s get out of here.” He grabbed her hand and started running.

  They emerged from the alleyway into a slightly wider street, their shocking appearance—naked, their bodies clean and healthy, as if they’d just stepped out of a royal bathhouse—attracting more startled attention and drawing in more frenzied locals, who somehow found the energ
y to start rushing toward them.

  Despite the imminent threat of capture, the sheer power of what Kamal and Nisreen saw was too stunning to ignore and just froze them in place.

  Most of the buildings up and down the narrow street were heavily scarred by the war. Rubble was everywhere, as were more dead bodies, some piled up against the walls, other, fresher victims still lying where they fell. A couple of bone-thin, filth-covered survivors pulled a two-wheeled cart on which more bodies were stacked. Dust and smoke hung in the air, soaked in that oppressive, omnipresent stench.

  The city had endured weeks of the most savage shelling and fighting Europe had ever seen. Even without the apocalyptic mutation, this Vienna was very different from the city they’d glimpsed before the jump. Its scale was much smaller. Despite being the fourth most populated city in Europe at that time, being enclosed by the massive fortifications meant that it couldn’t spread outward. It was a tight warren of medieval streets crowded with stone houses that were three or four floors high, most of which were topped by sharply slanted tiled roofs, some of which had dormer windows. Scattered among them, the tall spires of several churches jutted up into the smoke-tainted sky. Saint Stephen’s Cathedral and its soaring south tower dwarfed them all, looming over the crippled city from its central position. Miraculously, it was still standing, and right now it was acting as a beacon and drawing Kamal toward it.

  “This way,” he hissed as he pulled Nisreen away from the growing posse, but moving barefoot over debris-strewn ground wasn’t easy. Shards of stone and tile were cutting the soles of their feet, hobbling them and causing them to falter. More locals, drawn in by the shouts that neither Kamal nor Nisreen understood, converged on them.

  Kamal led Nisreen around a corner, but more men appeared, this time a half-dozen scraggy Austrian soldiers in grimy uniforms who froze at the sight of them. He pushed her behind him as he backed up against a wall, the soldiers and more locals rushing him. He slammed away at the outstretched arms that reached for him and tried to punch and kick his way free, but he was easily overwhelmed by their number. One of them pointed angrily at his tattoos, particularly the one on his right shoulder—the one marking him out as a member of an Ottoman detachment—and he was thrown to the ground, where the battering worsened. He could hear Nisreen’s screams of “No” and “Stop” from behind him, and tried to turn to see what state she was in, but the blows were coming in too hard and furious to allow it.

  Bloodied, out of breath, and crippled by pain, he was pulled to his feet. He twisted around, searching for Nisreen, and saw her there, by the wall, held in place by several leering men, a look of sheer terror gripping her face.

  “We’re here to help you,” he wheezed, “we’re friends.”

  But using Ottoman words to plead with the rabid Viennese mob only made things worse and triggered more shouts, slaps, and punches. He tried to make out the faces of his tormentors, tried to see if there was a leader among them, someone he could focus on and try to connect with, but they all blended into each other, a sea of desperate survivors who could only see a tiny, unexpected opportunity to vent their rage.

  They pulled and prodded Kamal and Nisreen, kicking and screaming, through the wrecked city, the mob growing with every step. They were soon at the fortified walls, where the prisoners were shoved and dragged up endless steps until they reached the wall-walk on top of the rampart. The noise was now deafening, and Kamal could barely think straight, but the few thoughts that did coalesce were ones of tortured regret and anger at the state of Nisreen, at what she was being subjected to with him. Reaching the firing step that overlooked the ditch between the inner and outer fortifications only made things worse.

  The sight was surreal.

  Savage close-quarters fighting was taking place on the mountains of rocks and rubble from the partly collapsed walls. Swarms of Ottoman soldiers and Viennese defenders were using muskets, swords, halberds, and pikes to slaughter each other, even resorting to rocks and bare fists. There were dead bodies lying scattered everywhere—on the rubble, in the pitted and cratered ditch at the base of the ruins—some of them whole, some of them missing a limb or a head. The ferocity and the gore were staggering. He’d read about the battles, he’d imagined what it must have been like, but there was a major difference between seeing it in his mind’s eye when reading about it and actually being there, in the thick of it, and witnessing it firsthand.

  A quick glance at Nisreen told him she was at least as shocked and horrified as he was.

  Beyond the walls, the ground outside the city’s defenses was a maze of trenches, lines of them, a testament to the blood and sweat of the five thousand sappers who had been ripping out the ground for weeks. The trenches, which sheltered elite janissaries poised for assault and light siege batteries to support them, ran parallel to the walls as far as the eye could see. They were intersected by trenches that led back to the Ottoman camp: tens of thousands of multicolored tents, a fifteen-mile-wide veritable city laid out in a crescent formation, home to all the warriors who had answered their sultan’s call and made the long pilgrimage to subdue the infidel. They were also home to more than thirty thousand villagers—men, women, and children—prisoners from the small towns ravaged by the Ottomans on their march to Vienna. Some of them would be chosen for slaughter in full view of the city’s defenders as a demoralizing spectacle, while the rest would be carted off to a life of slavery in empire territory. The entire spectacle of horrors was playing itself out to the deafening blare of the Ottomans’ mehter military bands, their kettledrums, cymbals, and horns echoing across the killing fields and propelling their men forward.

  To his immediate left, on the plongée at the top of the parapet, he saw something that didn’t register at first, not until the full horror of it sank in: shriveled, deformed severed heads impaled on pikes. And, if it were even possible, something even more ghastly: flayed skins of men nailed to the wooden posts. Inhumanly gory displays intended to taunt and demoralize their besiegers.

  He had read about that, about what the Viennese avenging mobs did to captured soldiers and to those they suspected of being spies or saboteurs in their midst. The Ottomans’ savagery was being repaid at every possible opportunity.

  A repayment that now awaited Kamal and Nisreen.

  60

  They were shoved past huddled marksmen and grenadiers, around the front of a cannon, and onto an embrasure cut into the curtain-wall top and held there, in full sight of the city’s besiegers. The man to the immediate left of Kamal was a reed-thin soldier with angry red blotches on his face, who stank and seemed to be the leader of the mob. He took cover behind Kamal to avoid the snipers and started yelling something in a fiery tone, his words aimed at the unseen troops huddled in the trenches below and the fighters converging on the mounds of rubble to join the mêlée.

  The man’s tirade caused the musket fire, sword clangs, and janissary war cries to die down, as did the clamor from the nearby military bands. Kamal couldn’t understand what he was saying, but given that the man was pulling him up by the hair and jabbing a finger at him and Nisreen, the man was clearly talking about them. His spittle flew into Kamal’s face as he continued his rant to raucous cheers and jeers from all sides. He was evidently taunting the Ottoman besiegers about the barbaric display that was about to take place.

  The soldier pulled out a large knife from his belt and, with his grip still clamped on Kamal’s hair, yanked Kamal closer and pressed the blade against his neck, all while shouting out more angry words. A mad panic shot through Kamal, and he fought to wrest himself free, but he was too well restrained by too many of them. The effort only got him a driving punch to the kidneys and an elbow to the jaw.

  Half-dazed, he heard Nisreen scream out, “Stop, please, stop. We’re here to help you. We’re here to save you.”

  A sharp slap silenced her, which sent Kamal into a fit of rage.

  “Listen to her, you bastards,” he roared. “Sobieski and Lorraine are here—they
’re close—but they’re going to die if you don’t listen to—”

  More incensed shouts and a couple of solid punches cut him short.

  Groggy from all the battering, he found Nisreen and his gaze locked onto her. Her pained, downcast expression reflected the despair that had hollowed him out, but in that desperate instant, an unspoken message of appreciation and love passed between them, a moment of profound closeness that transcended the utter wretchedness of their state and cleared all the horror and misery from around them for a blissful few breaths—until it was interrupted by the blotchy-faced soldier, who raised his knife into the air and hollered something that seemed to announce the start of the bloodletting ritual.

  Kamal saw Nisreen’s eyes flare out. Overcome with terror, she started shouting again for them to stop, but Kamal was too focused on the barbaric glint in his executioner’s eyes to make out her words—until other words broke through, not hers but a man’s, words that electrified the air and shifted the dynamic around them, causing the soldier to hesitate.

  The man kept repeating his sharp, forceful missive, his tone powerful and defiantly unbending before the angry jeers fired back at him by the mob. Then Kamal saw him, a lone figure shoving his way through the crowd toward him.

  The man was around Kamal’s age. He had dark olive skin and a thick black beard, but what was most striking about him was that he was in visibly better condition than the men he was pushing aside. He wasn’t a walking skeleton like the rest of them. His face was clear; his clothes weren’t tattered or covered in grime. He also wore a broad felt hat that sat low and covered his entire forehead, casting a dark shadow that shielded his face in a way that felt intentional.

  A fierce argument broke out between him and the others. They shoved him back and jabbed angry fingers in his face and at Kamal and Nisreen, but the man held his ground and shouted them down before yanking the executioner’s arm away from Kamal. Ignoring the outcry and breathless from the strain of the confrontation, he pushed in closer to Kamal and, speaking in Ottoman Turkish, said, “Answer me quickly. What about Sobieski? What were you saying about him?”