Carpathian Devils

by Alex Oliver

  At the sight of that feral smile, Frank's body found a new strength - a fountain of energy bursting up from a spring of terror. He ran for the trees as if he was unharmed, all of his pains subsumed in the need to get away.

  His hunter laughed behind him, and as Frank raced over the final yards of rocky turf, plunged into the darker shade under the trees, there came again that thin whistle and a twisting, ribbon-like mist flanked him, cold as a crypt. The night air filled with the earth-like reek of old, dried blood.

  Frank heard water ahead. Bounding over tree roots, he headed straight for the sound.

  To his left, the pale cold thing kept pace with him, reaching out a tendril every so often to stroke his face and chill his bones. Ahead, water cut through the deep valley. Not the mountain rill he had imagined, but a river, deep and black, edged with reeds and rushes. To Frank's right a path lead downhill beside the stream - the path the elder had told him to take to make it to safety in Bircii.

  In the distance, where moonlight struck the water, something white could be seen moving, drawing away fast. Mirela. He hoped fiercely that he had done enough - that she was far enough away.

  The thing following Frank stopped with him as he halted with his heels out over the stream. It poured itself back into the silhouette of a man - he still couldn't see its face, though silver glinted on its chest in five parallel lines, and the shape of it flared out towards the bottom, as though it were wearing a long military coat. Its eyes were not on him - that strangely misshapen head had turned to follow Mirela's escaping form.

  Some of the confident mockery had gone from its voice when it turned back. "You are a troublesome cur after all." It lowered its voice to a whispery purr. "Enough playing now. Come, let us be at it." It lashed out, long clawed fingers curving around Frank's neck.

  Instinctively, Frank reached out with a forgotten talent. There was no sunlight to pull, but he pulled at the glow of the distant stars until it filled him up inside and welled out of his pores in a blue-green glow. The creature hissed in pain, jerked its hand away from his flesh. Free for that moment, Frank hurled himself backwards and plummeted into the stream.

  Profound darkness closed around him, and cold such as he'd never felt before struck him to the bone. The glow of borrowed starlight washed away.

  Frank held his mouth shut by main effort, keeping in the bubble of warm air, though all his instincts told him to gasp at the chill. A rock skewered him in the hip - he rebounded and then the current took him, pulling him under, sweeping him on.

  He felt a bright flare of joy at the speed of it, a feeling of liberty - he had escaped! But a moment's thought contradicted that. The hunter would simply keep pace with the water, and when Frank came up for air, his monster would be there to snatch him up. The thought of those grinning teeth froze him worse than the mountain run-off.

  Frank fought the current, clawing his way out of the deep channel to the bank. His speed slowed. Soon he could pull himself in amongst the reeds, surround himself with stems. He burrowed further in, until his questing hand closed on a tree root and he came to a complete halt.

  He could not hold his breath any longer. He put the smooth end of his hollow cane in his mouth, raised the jagged end to where he thought the surface was, and sucked. Silt and water came down at first, but gave way to a cool draught of air, and he breathed it in gladly despite the danger.

  In the ooze of the reed bed, on a dark night, with the moon behind the distant mountains, he could see nothing at all, and that was good because it surely meant that no one could see him.

  His heartbeat had just begun to slow and his panic to abate when the tree root to which he clung shivered slightly. And again. There was a pattern to its shaking - one two, one two - footsteps, coming closer along the bank. Trapped and helpless, he froze like the prey he was, breathed in deep and held it for an infinitely long, terrible time of utter silence.

  Then the footsteps began again, going from a shake to a shiver, the vibration trailing off into nothing. They had gone. He had gone.

  Weariness at last overcame him. He hitched his arm more firmly under the root, propped his cane against it to relieve the other arm, and closed his eyes.

  In the sleep that followed he lost his grasp on everything, didn't know how long he'd managed to hold on under the reeds before the rushing, tumultuous dreams buffeted him. All he knew was later, waking up, too cold to shiver, on a shingle bank beneath a single arched stone bridge. In the sky a half-risen sun was pouring needles of prickly warmth over him, drawing steam from his thin, clammy clothes.

  "Nnnhhhhh!" he said, a long drawn out exhalation of agony and life. Turning over, he crawled up the bank and onto the road.

  Scarcely five hundred yards away the first house of the village was garlanded in edible flowers - roses, marigolds, borage and others he did not recognize. Its gaily painted pale blue door stood open, and Frank yearned with all his soul for someone to come out.

  There should be drovers on the road, shouldn't there? Goose-girls and goat herds and cows with tuned bells around their necks making a slow melodious jangle as they browsed. There should be women in the gardens, children on the green. At the very least there should be smoke from the smoke-holes and chimneys of the neat, well-tended houses.

  Surely Frank deserved to be spotted by a kindly burger, picked up and put to bed with warmed stones and warmed milk and tincture of opium for the pain? He pulled himself upright by the railing of the bridge and limped towards that open door.

  Inside, he found emptiness - no chairs, no table, a pile of straw where there should have been a mattress, and ashes in the hearth as cold as the stones that surrounded them.

  Frank spent some time on his knees in the empty room, with his arms curved protectively around his chest and his head bowed. He thought perhaps he slept, even, if the gap in his awareness could be called a sleep. At any rate, when he raised his head again the sun was high in the sky and the air warmer.

  He had just stumbled back outside when a half heard sound turned him toward it with a jerk and a racing heart. That was the sound of hoofbeats, and the high, metallic jangle of harness.

  Hope choked him. He ran to the other side of the village almost as fluidly as if he had been hale, and by that time he could see the horsemen crest the foothill, come cantering down into the river valley, all color and movement and life.

  Frank had been shy to ask for aid from the Roma, but now he was desperate. He ran towards the riders, ignored the lancing pain long enough to raise both hands and wave. "Help! Help, please!"

  The horsemen came thundering up, broke around him and went on, into the village. A brief, vivid impression of coat skirts and tall boots and horse-sweat and then he was alone again.

  "No!" he sobbed, clutching at his hair. But they stopped in the center of the town, and all but one of them dismounted, scattering to kick in doors. There came the sound of booted feet on wooden stairs, the crashes of furniture being hurled over.

  Frank turned and was skewered through by the steel gaze of the one man still on horseback. This must be their lord - he was better dressed, his long deep-blue coat lined with wolf fur, fastened with ropes of silver frogging across the chest. Atop his black hair, he wore a tall, cylindrical hat, and the shape he made against the bright sky was exactly the shape the demon-creature had cast against the stars.

  Even the cold gray gaze felt familiar. Frank seized up beneath it, pinned in place like prey, and that was just like last night too. So much for all his efforts and his resourcefulness. He gave a shaky, hopeless laugh. Why had he thoughtlessly assumed the creature could not come out under the sun? How ironic that he had run straight to it, calling for help.

  The man slid from his saddle, strode towards him, his harsh, handsome face aglitter with fury. He seized Frank by the elbows in a grip that seemed stronger than iron bands. Though he didn’t remember where the conviction came from, it comforted Frank a little to think that perhaps he deserved whatever happened next.

>   Chapter Two

  In which the ArchMage of Istanbul is at a loss

  ∞∞∞

  Zayd thought the jellyfish tried to skirt his fingers, but he was too fast for them. When pinched between finger and thumb, they felt a little like cold sliced chicken - the same yielding firmness as that of muscle. But if so, it was muscle made of glass, for he could see perfectly from one side to the next. Sometimes the fluttering edge of one would pull itself out of his grasp, and he would know the thing was alive, aware of him in some way.

  The Bosphorus was full of them, drifting like flowers made of evanescent light. They seemed to have no eyes, no brain, unless the central tangle of pink, fleshy stuff contained both, contained their hearts too and their mouths. Yet they were conscious, somehow, else how would they know to try and avoid his fingers?

  He scooped up a net-full. Out of the water they seemed even less alive, unable to support their own weight, flattened into disks of mucus as if spat onto the harbor's roads.

  He transferred them to a bucket of seawater, where they billowed out once more into their true shapes. Here, when examined at close quarters, they appeared less luminous, more simply pale, disappointing.

  "Zayd, effendi. What under the heavens are you doing?"

  The boat's owner, tiller in one hand, loose end of the sail in the other, nudged the bucket with his bare foot. Settling back on his haunches, Zayd considered the question. He must indeed look very foolish.

  "It is surely a creature of uncanny abilities," he said at last, ignoring the ferryman's skeptical smile. "They are aware, and they generate a faint light. I intend to discover if it is an ink, like the ink of octopuses, which is not at all magical, or if it is something more marvelous and rare."

  The ferryman pushed two fingers under his cap and scratched his head. "You wanted it for your charms?"

  Zayd was impressed. Though ‘charms’ and ‘magic’ were not strictly accurate—this was a science based upon the principles of the ancient Atlanteans—the words were useful enough to allow. "That's right,” he said. “Would it not be better to write charms against the darkness of the evil one using ink that is itself brimming with magical light? I'm sorry, I see so many people, did you...?"

  "My nephew came to see you, this time last year, for a word that would keep the cats from our store-room."

  Zayd smiled and wondered if he should ask 'did it work?' But he had found that putting a question in his clients' minds about the efficacy of the remedies often lead to them failing. Faith clearly played an element in the working of science, which was understandable enough. It played a role in everything else.

  Nor was there was any real reason to doubt the charm’s efficacy. He might have no talent himself - a fact he kept as carefully hidden as the truth that it was in fact his mother's blessing which lay on the parchment squares - but he had copied out the formula exactly from the books of many well regarded sages. If it worked for them, there was no reason to doubt it would work for him too.

  "Nevzad Ibn Ahmed," he said instead. "I remember him. He paid in anchovies. My family dined well that night."

  "It would be pretty, at least," said the old sailor, "if you could write in a blue like that - so pale you would think it was burning salt."

  "It would," Zayd agreed. He would have to take the bucket home and spend the hours he needed to cut up the creatures, find out if the colors could be harvested. If the operation itself required magic, his mother and his aunt might be needed to help. "Well, I think no more will fit in here, so I am done."

  But the ferryman was no longer attending him. "What...?" he exclaimed under his breath, catching the wind in his sail, slewing round the tiny boat so he could see more clearly.

  Following the line of the old man's gaze Zayd watched a ship sail round Seraglio point. It came surging up through the black water, over the floating white blooms of the jellyfish, throwing plumes of white foam to either side of its blind prow. Its hull was black and eyeless, except for the impious carving of a half-naked woman on its bow. People who could put such a thing as decoration on their ship must have no respect either for women or for themselves.

  Behind the painted houri, the shape of the tarred hull swept back in bulbous lines. A row of cannon protruded their open mouths from gun ports visible in the sides, and a second row bristled above them.

  Above the silvery decks, the yards of the ship were festooned with men, and the full spread of white sail that drove her fast into Istanbul harbor was efficiently being taken up and bound in long cords. Infidels, thought Zayd, uneasily. French or English or Dutch, perhaps, whose newly sprung cultures had barely wiped off the blood of the crusades before they were back, trying to spread their devilry to the civilized world. "What could they want here with a battleship?"

  The ship dropped its anchor, drifted to a gentle halt just inside the hook of the straits, half way between Topkapi and the mosque of Suleyman. Zayd and his boat were just a little further in, due south of the Galata tower.

  A little distant man in a tight blue coat and a hat that gleamed with gold leaned over the side and beckoned to him, shouting something that was probably not as unmannerly as it sounded, in his language that was like the muttering of icy djinn in the distant north.

  Reluctantly, Zayd stood up straight, brushed down his kaftan and cebken, and yelled back "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying."

  A second man joined the first by the rail, this one half naked and apparently completely unconcerned by the fact. He had the olive coloring and clever eyes of a Greek. "He said, 'we British ship Inconstant. Want to talk--"

  "Zayd, effendi," his ferryman interrupted him with a fierce nod to the shore. "Kneel. The sultan comes."

  Pushing off from their landings in the grounds of the palace came the five caiques that formed the honor guard of the sultan. Ahead of them the golden oars of the sultan's caique beat like falcon wings. As always at this hour, the Lord of the Horizons was going to prayer at the Suleymaniye.

  Forty oarsmen dressed in white sped his sacred person over the black waters of the Bosphorus in a white caique that flew like an arrow. Its snowy sides were striped with green like a billion emeralds. The sultan himself sat on a golden chair at the stern and trusted that no one would dare to look straight at his magnificence. Instead, behind him, but ahead of the four guard boats, there came a second caique just a little less grand, with the imperial standard bearer in the seat of honor, carrying the sultan's turban.

  It was to the turban that Zayd bowed, the sultan himself being too numinous to look upon, except as if by accident from the corner of his eye.

  All the movement of the harbor ceased as men in the boats and on the shore bowed down to the symbol of the shadow of God on Earth. A hush fell as if over all the world.

  In that hush there came a grumbling of wooden wheels and a faint hiss. And then, treacherously, unthinkably, the British ship opened fire. Her whole dark side erupted in tongues of flame and plumes of white smoke. A moment later and her thunder roared across the peaceful harbor. Boys crabbing from the harbor walls screamed and fell. Fishermen jumped overboard to safety, or cowered, covering their heads to protect them from the rain of fiery debris. Ashes and sparks floated on the wind.

  Zayd's heart stopped beating, his mind went perfectly blank for a long moment, waiting for the cannon balls to smash into the little fleet of caiques, tear them into splinters and rags of flesh. As he waited, the guns trundled back. They fired again. Again, flame and noise, and this time a wad of burning fabric the size of a clenched fist burst from one, struck the imperial turban, set it alight and knocked it into the waves.

  He watched it unravel beneath the water into a long white ribbon, the diamonds in its sarpech twinkling forlornly as they sank. All of a sudden his desire to point out that the cannons had not been loaded, that it had clearly been meant as a salute of honor, didn't seem to matter at all. When the sultan stood up in the stern of his caique, drew his scimitar and declared war, Zayd joined in wi
th the cheering with all the fervor of fear and outrage combined. Accidental or not, such an insult could not be born without consequences.

  Zayd was torn between a desire to stay and watch what happened next, and a desire to get out of a harbor rapidly filling up with armed warships as Istanbul's navy mobilized to chase off the threat. The ferryman's priorities however, were clear. He whipped the sail around, braced himself against the tiller and raced before the wind straight up the estuary, out of the potential conflict, into the Golden horn. When he landed, Zayd was but an hour's walk from home. Zayd was glad enough of the man's discretion to give him twice the agreed fee and ask him to come back next week to repeat the trip.

  Hefting his bucket of jellyfish by the rope handles, Zayd began to walk uphill, through the narrow, but prosperous streets of his neighborhood. Zayd made it a slow journey, stopping at his barber's, the front of the baths, the storyteller's niche in the marketplace and at the house of the Bektashi order to tell everyone he knew that war had come, bringing risk and spoils and triumph - new slaves, new lands, new converts for a city that had become perhaps a little staid.

  At the baker's counter he stopped again, set down his burden and waited. A towel had been flung over the bread and cakes, and the baker's chair was empty, but a small blue glass cup of tea sat on the stones beside it, still steaming. Clearly he was due back at any moment.

  Hearing voices, Zayd slid his bucket under one of the cloths and went round to investigate, and there was the shopkeeper, leaning against the pierced stonework window of a rich merchant's house, exchanging the time of day with the beggar whose pitch this had been since Zayd had first ventured into the world as a nervous schoolboy of seven years old.