Carpathian Devils

by Alex Oliver

  A man sat in it alone, a stout gentleman with a carefully dressed mustache and beard, who muttered under his breath as he fiddled with a nargile of solid gold with a jade mouthpiece. Zayd realized what he was seeing too late and tried to prostrate himself. The width of the passage was too slender to allow it; all he could manage was an awkward bow.

  Haji Nabih raised an eyebrow at him as if to say 'well?'

  "I can't tell just like that," Zayd whispered. "I need to go home, prepare a charm and look up the correct formula in my books.”

  "I will have a hundred angels!" the man screamed suddenly at the ceiling. "I will go forth accompanied by saints. I will have carpets and djinni. Where are my holy men, where are my magicians? I will have them pour fire on my enemies, teach them not to insult me with flame."

  "Oh." Zayd tried to take a step back and failed in that too, but his slipper brushed along the wall with a thud scarcely louder than his words, and Sultan Mahmud looked at the wall behind which they were standing. Zayd felt, indeed, as though the Sultan's white-rimmed eyes were looking directly at him. He tried again to fall to his knees, a cold sweat of terror blooming along his backbone, but again 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 some of 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 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 himself 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 recognizable as his own, so much more melodious, smoother, more reassuring. "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 walls 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 ever wanted to see of the inside of the palace.

  "Zayd Ibn Rahman, a great future is before you," the sultan began, a strange quality to his voice, as though he had caught the cadence of the marketplace storytellers, thought he could shape the world simply by narrating it. Though that was not so strange - 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 far more of a mage than Zayd even pretended to be.

  He 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 surprise. Mad, the sultan might be, but creative with it. Think what a fleet of such things could do! Only after he had seen the destructive glory of the idea did he remember that his own powers amounted only to the ability to write neatly in very small spaces. He could not do this thing.

  He'd never been gladder to be crouched on the floor, for his limbs seemed to have dissolved beneath him. He knew now how the jellyfish had felt when lifted from the comforting ocean. His own reek of terror stung his nose and completed his humiliation - to come before the sultan and to stink at him? He scrambled after his wits.

  "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."

  A sound of warmth, 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, 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 offensive, it was nothing to the miasma that greeted him in the lowest chambers. The carpets underfoot were soggy with warm red liquid. Satin cushions, fine enough for a prince, little tables and boxes that had once been polished, 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. It slid away on a crimson trail.

  Nabih's hands were cutting off the circulation in his arm, digging in and bruising. He could hear the older man's breath speeding, speeding, and then slowing again as he caught himself, forced himself to calm. Zayd himself didn't believe he 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 thing that had once been a man laid out there in the deepest pool of blood. He'd been hollowed out like a calf at the butchers, 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 the skin from the man's torso, stretched over a frame of brass.

  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 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 does not throw up on the sultan's brother, however brutalized. 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 more 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 arrived 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 further and shook him back to clarity. "I will require some time, and the help of other magicians, lord. 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 a sigh. "Three weeks. 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, it will take months for the armies to be mustered, especially those that have to come from the tribute provinces. There is yet time to do this properly."

  Nabih was trying to buy him time to leave the country, Zayd realized with a little sliver of grat
itude. He did not disappoint in person – as brave and as kind as rumor painted him.

  "I will see progress in three weeks, or I will have you both executed as the spies you are."

  "Favored of God, our lives belong to you already, and all we desire is to serve you." 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 smile as he gestured for Daoud to pour them both tea. They had been deposited in one of the small courtyards between walls where prisoners were kept before execution. No attempt had been made to keep them there, and they had made their way back to Nabih's apartments unencumbered, but it 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 as soft gray-pink as the breast of a dove. He took away the basins of water and towels with which they had cleansed themselves, took away their stained clothes and, having finished helping them into new ones, offered tea.

  Zayd’s mind was flying into every corner, trying to escape what he had just seen. He sipped at the cleansing bitterness of mint tea and attempted to convince himself it was washing away the smell of blood. "I cannot doubt that he is under an evil influence. 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 a very powerful ritual. If we could draw the influence from him and imprison it in hot lead, we could even make bullets from the lead and use it to transfer the evil 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, cutting him off. "Even if it did, do you think the sultan, may he live forever, would 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 doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with him. The influence protects itself. We must be subtler."

  Zayd scrubbed at his face with his fingertips. He had been assured he was clean, but he felt spatters of cool, tacky liquid in his hair 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 out and they would be every bit as good. Probably more so. I've never really had any success. My father did, my mother did. They felt sure it should come out in me, but no. Nothing."

  His fingernails felt scrubbed and sore. His hands smelled of jasmine from the oil he had worked into them after washing. Haji Nabih's cast off clothes were grander by far than anything he had worn in his life, and he felt like a boy playing at heroes who is suddenly expected to be ridiculously brave in real life.

  The Grand Mufti gave a thin, exasperated laugh. "Then that will be the first thing you have to do, if you wish to bring the Sultan his carpets within the next three weeks. 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 which lead to the guild-house of the tailors. Just a box of a room with a low stone table, a few shelves around the walls, and a shutter which closed off the narrow entrance when the room was not in use. It smelled of mice, and a thin cat curled around Zayd's ankles when he tried to go 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 Zayd explore the dim little space with an eye of serene composure. "Thus I do what I can to make it possible.

  “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 to me and I will pay their salaries. I will provide you with any supplies that are required, and you may call upon my authority at will 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 honor 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 Istanbul 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.

  When Nabih returned to the palace, Zayd strode 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.

  Then he remembered that there was no other male relative to whom he could 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?

  Well, perhaps they would, but Zayd didn't like the idea of either elderly lady having to deal with the outside world, with strange men of all sorts, all by themselves.

  "Mother. Auntie," he folded himself down to sit on the cushions they had piled by the far wall. "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 reached out a hand to pat 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 afraid. Tell us everything, then Jala and I can take over the worrying while you act."

  So Zayd told them everything. It was helpful to share the 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 it still, but he appreciated the bolstering nevertheless.

  The morning came strangely cold, and chilly breezes straight off the Black Sea whipped th
rough the streets of Eyup borough. 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 absent-mindedly as he came to his booth and found a queue outside it.

  Opening the shutters, he studied the line of potential mages surreptitiously through his lashes. He was not entirely sure what a great magician ought to look like, but surely not like a Nigerian camel-driver, fiddling with his goad and flinching when anyone looked at him. A little further down the line, a Jewish doctor looked more likely, wearing holy texts bound on his forehead and upper arm, and a necklace of Hebrew words and letters punched into sheets of silver. At the end of the queue there were even two women, heavily and modestly veiled. He thought they must at least be certain of their skills, and brazen as an idol with it to come out here and try to take a man's job.

  Under the expectant gazes of nearly twenty people, he wished he'd brought a larger cushion, and the more impressive of his writing sets. But such as it was, he spread paper, inkwell and pen-box around him, balanced a blank book on his lap and prepared to take names, histories and details of amazing powers.

  The line dwindled over the morning. Mostly astrologers. One 'astounding master of fire' proved to have invented a system of delivering black powder to his palms and kindling it with flints embedded in his fingernails. For a while, Zayd was willing to believe that - if the fire was no mystery – still there was something miraculous in hands that did not burn. But then the man confessed he had spent months building up such thick callouses he no longer felt the brief flash of flame.

  "Impressive as a street entertainment," he had to rule in the end, "but not what this guild is looking for."

  By midday prayers there were only six people left. Of these six, two claimed the ability to speak to the spirits of the dead, but as neither was able to prove it, Zayd dismissed them both.