The Demons of Constantinople

by Eric Flint

  Breathing deeply for calm, Devlit finished the incantation and the shape in the pentagram was forced into the bull centaur cart with the movable legs and wheels in place of hooves. He reared back on his hind legs, like a horse rearing, and the human torso bent forward so that the beast stood on his hind hooves a good thirty feet tall. His front legs pawed the air like a mighty horse. And sparks flew as the wheels struck the air at the edge of the pentagram. His arms were raised to the sky, with the sword in one hand, the shield in the other. Both sword and shield were built into the arms, so the king of djinn couldn’t use his hands for anything but wielding sword and shield. He came back down to his four wheels and glared around.

  “How dare you!” he bellowed. He looked around. Seeing Sultan Savci, he glared. “Impudent pup. Would you own a god?”

  That apparently got Savci’s back up. “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet!” Savci shouted back. “And by the rules of that world from which you come, I command you and am your master.” Which was true, because though Devlit had called the ifrit, it was Savci who owned the vessel that the ifrit was forced into. Therefore, he owned the ifrit and owned him permanently, because against the restrictions in Delaflote’s book, Devlit had locked the ifrit into the cart until it was released. Even the destruction of the cart would not release the ifrit. If the cart was cut, the ifrit would bleed. It wasn’t done out of cruelty, but need, Devlit told himself. By strengthening the link between ifrit and container, the container gained more of the abilities of the ifrit. It was that which allowed the wooden human-shaped torso to move as a human chest would and not be restricted by the wood it was constructed from.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Amar Utu Marduk, ifrit lord of Tessifonica, landed on his front wheels, hard, and it hurt. They didn’t crack, but that was more because of Amar’s magic than the strength of the hardwood wheels. It was also entirely his magic that let him move the joints of the cart, let him move at all. This body they had locked him into was stiff and heavy, made of wood, leather and bronze, with no iron in its construction save for the sword and shield. The bull’s body had no back. Instead there was an opening that would hold twenty men if they stood close together and half that many seated. The wheels were a foot and a half tall rim to rim, and half a foot wide, solid wood with axles that fit into the two-pronged forks that were the lower legs of his bull body.

  In spite of his anger, he noticed that the craftsmanship was excellent. If he’d been asked instead of commanded, he would have willingly come to such a body.

  Amar was not so powerful as Themis, but was greater than the demon who had used his pet human to enslave her for a time. And, unlike Themis, his land was left in the netherworld where it belonged. So the heavens didn’t ring with his kidnaping, but sooner or later, the land that was the greater part of him would suffer from his absence. His people, his wives, sons and daughters, his servants, and all those djinn who lived in his lands would suffer.

  At least these fools didn’t have a demon lord advising them, so they failed to restrict him from speaking to or commanding his people.

  But who to call? Amar loved his children, sons and daughters. He loved his wives and his people, but he knew well enough that his children were ambitious. He had made them with the will to rule. How else could they govern the parts of his city that he assigned them to? But that ambition made these circumstances more difficult, for his children would be tempted by his absence. Tempted by his absence to take his city for their own and leave him locked in the thing of wood and leather.

  Who could he call?

  Who could he trust?

  He considered. None of his sons. Nor his wives, for they would be tempted for their sons’ sake. His daughters were no less ambitious, but their ambitions were subtler.

  Inanka’sira, he whispered in his mind. I have been taken by barbarian humans from the north . . . He gave his daughter a rundown of what had happened and pointed out the danger to the city if his sons began to war with one another over it. You must hide my absence, but you must also find a way to free me from this prison of wood and bronze they have locked me in.

  Amar was a proper ifrit. He had used some of his substance in forming his children and his wives used more of theirs. The shape of his children was more their own work than was true of the western gods like Themis and Zeus, so Inanka’sira was his to command, but less so than would be the case if he were the city god of some town in Thrace or Italy.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Inanka’sira heard her father out, and he made some good points. The djinn of their city would suffer if her brothers were to fight among themselves. She began to look for ways of rescuing her father. Then she remembered a petition. The wife of a cloth djinn had come to her, asking for an abatement of taxes since her husband had been forced into a phone by the humans from the future. Djinn being forced into jewels and lamps and all manner of things had increased greatly since the tearing of the veils, but this petition had stuck in her mind because of the odd thing the husband was forced into.

  Location: Royal Palace, Constantinople

  Time: 8:15 AM, June 20, 1373

  Princess Maria’s phone rang while she was having breakfast. She stopped eating, picked it up, and saw the words “Caller ID Blocked.” That had never happened before. Always when she got a phone call, the caller was identified on the screen. Curiosity piqued, she accepted the call.

  “Hello, Maria. You can call me Siry. That’s not my name, but you can call me that. I am an ifrit. Do you know what an ifrit is?”

  “An evil djinn.”

  “Not at all. Ifrit are djinn lords. We rule the ordinary djinn, like your family rules your subjects in Byzantium. As it happens, I am a princess too.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “Because the djinn in your phone is one of my subjects. Well, one of my father’s subjects, but I am one of my father’s councilors, so in a way he’s one of my subjects. That connection is what allows me to talk to your phone. But because of the restrictions placed on your phone by the person who enchanted it, if I call him he has to inform you of the call. I can’t use him to place a call to anyone but you. He can only make calls that you authorize.”

  Maria knew that well enough. She had gotten in a lot of trouble the other day for rejecting a call from her mother. Mother had threatened to take her phone away if she didn’t use it responsibly.

  “So who do you want to talk to?”

  “Gabriel Delaflote. I understand that he wrote the book that was used to summon my father.”

  “Phone, conference call with Siry and Delaflote.”

  “Your phone is Ali,” Siry said.

  “So?”

  “Politeness is a tool of power, child. Leaving it in its scabbard weakens you.”

  The words, gently spoken as they were, got Maria’s back up. “You don’t tell me what to do. Phone, end call.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Gabriel’s phone rang and announced a conference call with Princess Maria and a blocked ID. There were no blocked IDs. Amelia had talked about blocked numbers from back in her time, but there weren’t that many phones, even with the ones made locally, and the ability to block caller ID wasn’t something they had included. The phones from the future had it. It was built into their programing. The call ended before he could answer it.

  “Who was the blocked caller, Pierre?”

  “Don’t know, Gabe. Ali says he can’t say!”

  “Get Maria back.”

  “Audio or video?” Pierre asked. Even the locally made phones had quasi-cameras. They wouldn’t work without enchantment, but were close enough to a camera to function once a demon was put in the phone. They also let the demons in the phones see the world around them, which made them an attractive feature for the demons called to the phones.

  “Assuming she’s decent, video,” Gabriel said. In his experience, it was harder for people to lie effectively if you could see their faces.

  The phone rang three
times before Maria answered. “Yes?” she asked, looking put out.

  “Princess Maria, who was the blocked ID in the conference call?”

  “No one!” Maria said, eyes shifting. Gabriel waited, looking at her image on the phone. “Some snooty ifrit.”

  “And why did this snooty ifrit call you? For that matter, how did she call you?”

  “She’s my phone’s princess or something. I decided that I didn’t want to talk to her.”

  “Maria, please call her back now,” Gabriel said.

  “Hang up!” The line went dead.

  Gabriel sighed. “Call her back, Pierre.” The phone rang and rang, then the screen filled with the words “Call rejected.”

  “All right. Call Queen Helena.”

  Location: Royal Chambers, Constantinople

  Time: 2:25 PM, June 20, 1373

  They were all sitting in Queen Helena’s rooms when—under threat of parental displeasure—Maria finally had Ali call his liege lady back. And even so, it took a while before relations were established.

  There were issues of trust, but there were also technical issues. The best solution would be for Siry to install a pentagram in Tessifonica and a matching pentagram in Themis’ lands, but that wasn’t all that easy. Tessifonica was some distance away in the netherworld, farther in netherworld distance than in natural world distance.

  The only connection that they had was the direct connection that Siry had with Ali because he was one of her father’s subjects, so any phone calls would have to be through Ali until something else was worked out.

  It took three days, and Maria ended up with a new phone that was officially owned not by Maria, but by Helena. Ali got to go home to his wife and willful daughters. He was replaced with a volunteer—two of them, in fact. One was one of Siry’s maids, a djinn who would be Maria’s new phone owned by Helena, and an ally of Siry who would act as the connection between Themis’ phone system and the one that Siry was putting together in Tessifonica.

  Meanwhile, they got a lot of the Ottoman’s plans, because Sultan Savci didn’t realize that his ifrit-powered war wagon was talking to his daughter.

  They also got indirect intelligence of what was going on in the area around the ruins of Ctesiphon, which correlated to the location of Tessifonica. They learned that Timur-the-no-longer-lame was in discussions to bring Shiraz into his realm and that wasn’t supposed to be happening yet.

  Themis and Tiphaine had run horoscopes for the ruler of Shiraz, and Shah Shoja wasn’t supposed to yield to Tamerlane until 1382, nine years from now. And Timur was supposed to still be lame.

  By now, all the twenty-firsters, the rest of the French delegation—from cardinal to slop boy—knew that when Tiphaine’s horoscopes were wrong, it was because of some effect of the tearing of the veils. Tiphaine and Themis were still working out how the outer planets, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto—not to mention the Oort cloud objects and the asteroids of the asteroid belt—were affecting things now that the rifts in the veils were letting them influence events, even though they didn’t have netherworld corollaries. In the netherworld, the moon, the sun, the planets out to Saturn, all had crystal spheres that matched the natural world.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Wilber had quietly—and never in the hearing of either Tiphaine or Themis—decided that astrology didn’t work. The whole idea offended his notions of scientific truth. What was really in play was the difference in the structure of time between the two universes. That difference allowed the demons to “remember” future events and associate them with what was seen in the night sky.

  In the meantime, the fact that Timur—Tamerlane, as he was known in the western tradition—was ahead of schedule, and the fact that he was no longer lame, meant that he had demonic help. That could well be perfectly benign. A friendship with a Buddhist angel, an ifrit, or only just a healer with a knowledgeable familiar, might explain it. For all they knew, Tamer might have had his leg rebroken and straightened. Or it could be something like Wilber’s little bit of Merlin in his cochlear implant.

  But it definitely meant that Tamer had netherworld aid of some sort. And from netherworld sources, it appeared there was a good chance that that netherworld aid knew something about the ripping of the veils.

  Location: Docks, Constantinople

  Time: 7:23 AM, June 23, 1373

  Taavi took his phone out of his inside pocket and checked the time. The phone was a princely gift and he knew perfectly well that the only reason he was getting it was the mission he was being sent on. He was to go to Ctesiphon, and once there use his phone to contact the wizard Wilber and, following Wilber’s instructions, build a pentagram that could be used to shift to and from Tessifonica. The face of his phone showed the red-skinned black-haired beauty who enchanted it.

  He touched one of the icons and she was replaced by a date and time. 7:23. The boat was late, but not too late. He slipped the phone back into the hidden pocket, picked up his bag, then strode up the gangplank into the ship.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Four hours later, he was climbing down the gangplank at Uskudar. The Turks still held it, but at the moment they were more concerned with other Turks than some down-on-his-luck sellsword from across the Bosporus.

  It took him most of the day to find a horse, and the one he ended up with was long overdue for its meeting with the glue makers. Its teeth were bad and its back was bowed. But it could still walk and it added to Taavi’s indigent appearance wonderfully.

  Location: Tarnovo, Bulgaria

  Time: Evening, June 25, 1373

  Kera Tamara knelt outside the pentagram, and looked at the statue. It was small, perhaps eighteen inches tall. It showed a lovely woman standing behind a table. On the table were scales and a sword, but the woman was holding a torch in her right hand and a book of the blessed in the crook of her left arm.

  If desired, the book and the torch could be placed on the table and the statue could hold the sword and the scales. It was bought from a merchant who was in Constantinople less than a week ago, and was supposed to be a statue of Themis, She of the Lovely Cheeks.

  But what called Kera to Themis, in spite of the response that the Orthodox Church was likely to have, was the story book that came with the statue. For it was the story of the enslavement and liberation of a god. It was Lady Liberty that Princess Kera Tamara would call to her aid. Murad was dead, but her brother was now talking about selling her to Manuel II of Byzantium or, perhaps, the Czar of Rus. Maybe a Polish magnate.

  Kera wanted the freedom to choose her own husband or, better yet, choose none at all.

  She lit the torch, which had a small rag soaked in tallow. She looked down at the booklet and began to recite a prayer to Themis, asking with respect—never demanding—that she come and visit.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She was Themis, and she wasn’t. She was made of the substance of Themis in her entirety, but she had a limited function. She was, in effect, Themis’ social secretary for when Themis was called in her persona as Lady Liberty. Themis had another one for Justice, the weigher of souls. And the two, often enough, found themselves in conflict, but they were both of Themis and it was Themis who would make the final call.

  She answered the call and found herself not in a hidden shack in the woods, but in a private chamber in a castle. She noted that the torch arm could move at the shoulder, and that it was one of the dolls that had a speaker behind the mouth. So she waved the torch and said, “Yes, Princess? What do you want of Themis? And what do you offer in return?”

  “I don’t want to marry, and I don’t know. I could perhaps have a shrine built, but the Christian priests wouldn’t like that.”

  “Free a slave in my name,” Themis’ avatar said. “As to the not marrying, you need to offer your brother something else of value. Something you can provide that he would lose if he were to sell you into marriage. Start a school. Go to Constantinople to get faculty. The school will be valuable . . .”

  They discusse
d the how and the why for hours. What arguments might or might not work with her brother. Themis’ avatar, having Themis’ knowledge, was able to make some excellent guesses about what would or wouldn’t persuade Ivan Shishman, king of Central Bulgaria.

  Chapter 17—The Hagia Sophia

  Location: Hagia Sophia, Constantinople

  Time: Evening, June 25, 1373

  Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos knelt before the icon of Archangel Michael.

  “You are failing God!” The archangel bellowed so loudly that it should have shaken the rafters of the Hagia Sophia, but no one but Philotheos heard a thing.

  “Heresy and paganism are running rampant! And you do nothing out of fear of John V’s displeasure. You are the servant of God, not some mortal king, or the puffed up bishop of Rome. Show some backbone! Get the French delegation into my Lord’s house and I will deal them such a scourge that they will be forever chastened—”

  Archangel Michael went on in that vein for some time. The archangel was not owned by Patriarch Kokkinos, but by the church, the Hagia Sophia itself. So while Kokkinos had influence, that influence was limited. And by now it was almost gone. He was not, in Michael’s opinion, doing nearly enough to put forward the importance of God, and especially not the Hagia Sophia, and the Greek Orthodox Church.

  Location: Magnaura, Constantinople

  Time: Evening, June 26, 1373

  The messenger was a Greek Orthodox bishop with a full black beard. Lakshmi thought he looked like a biker in a bed gown. He also looked like he was afraid that he would be permanently contaminated by so much as touching the hand of a papist cardinal, much less a Hindu girl from the twenty-first century. Not that Lakshmi was all that devout, but her family was mostly Hindu, with a bit of Buddhism on her mother’s side. And even the occasional Christian hiding in the odd branches.

  In other words, a perfectly ordinary high caste Indian family—except for the fact that Lakshmi had spent fifteen of her eighteen years in America.