Sons of Devils

by Alex Beecroft

  Opening the shutters, he studied the line of potential mages through his lashes. He was not entirely sure what a great magician ought to resemble, but surely not like a Nigerian camel driver, fiddling with his goad and flinching when anyone met his eye. A little further down the line, a Jewish doctor looked more likely, holy texts bound on his forehead and upper arm, and a necklace of Hebrew words and letters punched into sheets of silver. Two women also waited in the queue, heavily and modestly veiled. 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 better writing set. But such as his splendour 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. It consisted mostly of 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 calluses he no longer felt the brief flash of flame.

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

  By midday prayers—and this time he took out his prayer mat and took part without moving from where he was—there were only six people left. Of these six, one man and one of the women claimed the ability to speak to the dead, but as neither was able to prove it, Zayd dismissed them both.

  The Jew, Ibrahim, turned out to be an older counterpart of himself—learned in texts and formulas, steeped in what Zayd thought of as the sinister coils of the Kabbalah, but he, too, was a scholar and no practitioner. Zayd retained him anyway. He would not help make carpets, but it was only prudent for the empire’s long-term future in this newly magical world to gather as much expert knowledge as he could get.

  “What do you do?” he asked the camel herder next. This was a tall and slender man, very black of skin, in a billowing cloak that reminded Zayd sickeningly of wings of skin.

  “I am good with camels, effendi.” He had stood in line all morning as the wind dropped and the sun climbed higher. Now the street was the approximate temperature of a clay oven and still he stood patiently waiting to sign on with the wrong guild?

  “I am looking for magi, not animal trainers.”

  “I know this. I am exceptionally good with camels. Bring me one and I’ll show you.”

  “You couldn’t have brought your own?”

  The herdsman grinned. “Then you would say I had trained it.”

  That being true, Zayd sent one of the small boys who sat in the shade and watched them—one of the boys who surely should have been in school—to fetch him a camel, and then watched in astonishment as the herdsman made it dance with whispered commands. He entered the man’s name— Süleyman bin Dada—and details into the records, not quite sure what good he could put the talent to, but grateful to have discovered anyone at all.

  A black Egyptian named Adham bin Adil, was his third recruit. Adham sat on the ground before Zayd and made the sand leap up and form itself into tiny models of the ancient temples of his own people. Only an ayak or so in size—small enough to be easily held between his hands, but exquisitely detailed and populated by fingernail-sized people who walked and shopped and gossiped better than any puppet Zayd had ever seen.

  After finding true talent in two foreigners, he was not surprised that his third recruit with genuine magical ability was one of the women—a slave originally from France, captured at sea, bought and eventually married by a maker of gold jewellery. Monique bint Maryse claimed an ability to find any item that had been lost, and proved it by telling three of the onlookers where they could find their keys, sarpech, and a sequin that turned out to have been embedded in the heel of their shoe.

  She was the last applicant of any magical ability. It was just as Zayd had said to Haji Nabih—none of the people who had a gift were from Istanbul itself. Each had grown up within the range of one of the Jars of Heaven. Clearly the devices not only provided the raw power for magic, but also worked on the bodies of children raised near them, to enable them to use it. He was enough of a scholar to be pleased at the proof of his theory.

  From a practical point of view, however, he had scoured Istanbul for magical talent and gained nothing. What a camel whisperer, a sand sculptor, and a finder of lost keys could do to build him flying battle platforms he could not begin to think.

  He considered simply taking his family and fleeing the country—leaving this problem to someone else to solve. But he loved his city, loved his people who had been given to him by his father to protect. Running away was not an option. But letting his mother and auntie be tortured for his failure was even less so. No. He would do his best, and if—in three months’ time—he had failed, they could die together in peace before the soldiers came.

  Soberly, trying not to tremble, he bought poison on the way home.

  Wallachia

  Teeth pushed against Frank’s skin, rough edged, dirty. He was scared to breathe. He wanted to recoil, but dared not move in case that would provoke Alaya to strike.

  Constantin held up the hand he was not using to restrain Radu, gestured imperiously. Halt. Alaya obeyed, Frank still bent double in her hands and silently screaming.

  “My son, why should we allow you this boy’s life when you will not defer to us in one simple request?”

  Radu was trying to pry open Constantin’s grip on his wrist, but the fingers would not bend, nor loose their grip enough to allow the blood through to his purpling hand. He stopped at the end of this sentence and laughed, bitterly. “Bribery, Father?”

  “Fairness.” Constantin smiled. It was the same absurdly sweet smile Frank was used to in Alaya, but seen upside down, with his neck aching fit to break, its sinister quality was far more evident. “You do this little thing for us, and we allow you to keep your pet. Defy us again, and we have here the means to punish you in a way that will count. It is your choice.”

  Radu covered his eyes with his free hand and laughed again, the kind of laugh that was indistinguishable from pain. He slumped slowly until his father’s hand was all that was holding him up. The very picture of defeat. “We will go to Bucharest.”

  Frank was set down gently on his feet. Alaya beamed at him and patted him in mock reassurance on the chest. Her long nails snagged like cats’ claws on the fabric above his heart. “Oh, Frank, I’m so glad you came to us. You should be too. The capital will be such fun.”

  “We should get packed, my dear.” Constantin tucked her hand into the crook of his arm as they walked away, leaving Frank bleeding and alive, but racked with a familiar, terrible guilt. Carew might well have had the right idea in thinking the world would be better off without Frank in it.

  He looked over at Radu, who took his hand away from his face swiftly as if to deny he’d been trying to hide his new bruise. “Just moving house can’t be so very bad, can it?”

  “Wait and see,” said Radu coldly. “I hope you’re worth it.”

  That night Frank was left alone, his room no longer a battleground. He took what little comfort he could from that. It meant until they had arrived at the capital, he was safe to sleep unmolested. Or to try, at least. Sleep was hard to come by, though he undressed and put on the nightgown he had begun to think of as his, lay down in “his” bed and was physically as comfortable as a man could be, with stinging cuts between his eyebrows and a puncture wound through the palm of his hand.

  The holes were small and had closed up already, more like insect bites than teeth-marks, the skin around them inflamed with healing. He pulled the hand against his chest and curled around it, as though he could comfort it with a hug. It felt d
irty, and he felt . . . he scarcely knew what he felt, with his past so newly, rawly restored to him. All to be worked through so that he could try, again, to learn to live with it.

  But the present had ceased to be any better. Tucking the furs tight around his ears, he tried not to feel wretched at the defeat he’d seen on Radu’s face. This argument about Bucharest had clearly been going on a very long time, meant something far more important than it appeared to Frank. And he had been the one to hand victory to Radu’s parents. Not what he had wanted at all.

  “I’m not going to feel guilty for not wanting to die,” he muttered to himself, turning over, restless with anger and shame. But it felt like he should. The thought of taking down one of the pistols from the wall, loading it, and blowing his own brains out kept recurring like the call to a moral duty. Everything he knew came down on the side of death. Nothing at all argued that he was worthy to survive.

  He should get up and do it now in the quiet hush, while the strigoi were out hunting and could not stop him. But the night dragged on, endless, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

  Eventually the dark warmth of his bed, the feeling of safety, unclenched something in his aching head. It grew heavier, as though pulled forward by a great weight. Then in a burst that seemed to shatter his skull, he relived the one last missing piece from his memories. The one he had tried hardest to keep from himself. The true face of his sin.

  It is evening and he’s still in bed, sweat cooling on his limbs and his body limp with one long, delicious ache that tastes of molasses and sunlight. Most of the time he can’t believe that this is wrong at all. The world should be this shape—a small chamber with walls of a cheery green, two candles on their sticks like marigolds in a cricket field. And Gervaise, looking down on him as though he is something precious.

  Gervaise sees him frown, leans in to kiss the furrow between his brows, too fond a smile on his face for the man of politics, for the member of parliament, he is. Not a particularly handsome man, with his nose too large and his face too bony for fashion. But he has tip-tilted dark-blue eyes, and all the lines on his face are from laughing. They met when Frank’s father introduced Frank to the residents of his own coffeehouse. A paternal “keep away from that one” had added weight to Frank’s curiosity, and when Gervaise came up to Cambridge for the hustings, it had been an easy matter to insinuate himself into the older man’s flock of sycophants.

  And then this. Love, if you will. Love, Frank insisted to himself when he was tempted to wither with shame, love such as Patroclus felt for Achilles. If the Greeks had not thought it shameful of Hephaestion to love Alexander, why should he think it shameful to love Gervaise?

  “I wish I could keep you with me,” says Gervaise now. He moves to find his small clothes, put them on, but—at the look of loss on Frank’s face—thinks better of it and lies back down. “You know that, don’t you? Perhaps when your studies are over you might be my clerk, my protégé, and then we can walk more openly beside each other, without fearing—”

  Boots. The drumbeat of boots running up wooden stairs, and the locked door shudders. There’s a crack as the frame splinters. All Frank’s blood turns to ice water. Horror in Gervaise’s face as he uses the last few seconds to stuff himself into his breeches, and Frank is too slow, cowardly, stupid to follow suit, just grabs the sheet and crawls backwards along the bed until his shoulders meet the wall. What happened to the molly-house’s proprietor? The guards who were supposed to give them notice?

  The door flings itself outwards and smashes into the wall. Flakes of plaster explode where it hits. Four men and a magistrate burst through. The men have cudgels of oak and the first strikes Gervaise in the temple, knocks him off his feet, sends him crashing into the iron lamp bracket. He falls and lies very still. There is blood on the wall.

  Then they look at Frank, naked under the sheet, and he’s never felt so worthless. A talent he didn’t know he had until then comes over him like the need to vomit. Without knowing how, he fills the room with blazing light, and as they curse and fumble, he grabs his own breeches and runs.

  Shuddering, Frank crawled out of bed, took the chamber pot from its cabinet, and sat there in the bracing cold hugging it until the pressing need to vomit had passed. Oh God! So much horror he couldn’t at first distinguish what it was horror about. He thought at first he recoiled from the discovery that his crime was not murder at all, but perversion. A perversion from which his country, his father, recoiled in greater abhorrence than they would have done from murder.

  Gradually, however it came over him that this crime was not one that Frank himself regretted. Surely his own body was his to do with as he chose, providing he hurt no one with it? Slowly, he understood that what he felt was not shame at all, but grief and anger, and even relief.

  No wonder he had dismissed it so easily—with so little instinctive disgust—in Radu. No wonder Radu himself had seen it in Frank, and not hesitated to act on it. Merely a desire for another man. Not murder.

  That was a swell of joy at the base of his grief. Thank God, thank God. Not murder.

  But the relief came layered with the realisation that he had been in love. That he had lost his love to injustice and then, inconceivably, had forgotten Gervaise ever existed. Forgotten what his name meant. Shameful inconstancy! It came layered with the suspicion that Frank really was an angel of death—that everything he touched, everything he loved, he inevitably destroyed as a result. How could he bear to live if that was the case? And yet he didn’t want to die.

  The memories, having started, came back like a landslide, unstoppable, sleeting behind his eyes even while they were wide open:

  By magic, he makes it home—his college has turfed him out for the summer holidays, and home is his father’s house. He holes up in the library, safer, more comforting than his room, and curls up in an armchair, suffers through the longest of nights, sick to think that Gervaise may be dead, sick to think he may not be dead but may instead be dragged to some stinking cell and made to stand trial. The noose is not the worst of his fears—it is the thought that they will laugh at this high-minded, dignified, kind man, sneer at him as though he were worse than some pox-ridden whore.

  He thinks over a dozen schemes to help Gervaise, and all of them sound as likely as the world turning inside out and everyone standing on the sky. He would flub a rescue if he tried, and a trial at which he is present would be a thousand times more damning than one where the runners can only give their word they saw an unknown young man with him. He’s fairly sure they didn’t recognise him. Fairly sure he can’t be forced to witness if they don’t know who he is. Without a correspondent, surely the trial will fail.

  That’s when Gervaise’s wife turns up, of course, fresh from being hauled down to the magistrate’s house to make a statement. Gervaise keeps a portrait of Frank in miniature set in the secret compartment of his cigarette case—except that nothing is secret to her. She knows who Frank is, and she’s come to tell Frank’s father that if her family’s reputation is to end up in the pig shit with Frank’s boot on the back of its neck, his is too.

  “You killed your mother as soon as you drew your first breath,” says his father, frigid with rage. Frank hadn’t meant to do that, but it makes no difference to his father if he had or not. It never has. The man lost his beloved, gained only an unwanted responsibility. “And this—if this gets out, if a son of the house of Carew is seen choking to death on the gibbet to the amusement of the vulgar mob—this will kill your sister too. You have brought nothing but death to this house, Frank. Would that you had been four months early and stillborn.”

  Arthur Carew is too principled a man to take a cudgel to his own son, but Frank well remembers the stripes from his riding crop laid hot across his shoulders as he is chased down the stairs, into the street, his father disowning him with every blow.

  The walk to Cambridge is over thirty miles, and he fears apprehension with every step. By the time he gets to Protheroe’s lo
dgings he can’t feel his hands or feet, his face is raw from crying in the dusty wind, and the shuddering makes him jerk like the legs of a galvanised frog—harsh, involuntary, mad.

  He confesses all to Protheroe, too shattered to make up a decent story. At some point in the recitation, the older student puts a glass of brandy into his hand, folds his nerveless fingers around it and holds on until he’s sure Frank will not let go. Protheroe is shorter than Frank—most people are—with a poet’s wild hair and a tendency to wear a dozen of the gaudy amulets the theurgy students favour, around his neck and pinned on his sleeves. He has a broken front tooth from brawling, and eyes the colour of russet apples. For one long moment, once the story is told, Frank is terrified of him.

  Then he says, “Actually being an invert’s a sign of talent, old chap. Magical talent. Between you and me, half of the theurgy students are the same.”

  Protheroe sends across the corridor for Stebbins, spins him a tale of illegitimate pregnancy, a grasping milk maid, and the sort of disgrace that makes a man fonder of his friends. “I always wanted to see the vril accumulator in Romania,” he suggests cheerfully. “How about we go on a mini grand tour together? My treat. Let Frank’s father cool down enough to welcome him home with forgiveness.”

  He pats Frank reassuringly on the arm, and Frank can’t help but think of manacles, of Gervaise blood-stained and limp on the floor of a dirty cell. I won’t know if he’s alive or dead! He can’t say it, because Stebbins is here. But Stebbins assents at once and with enthusiasm. Frank cannot help but hug them both and allow himself to be saved.

  News reaches them on the coast of Greece. He sits in a white boat by a white shore, on water so vividly blue and under a sky of such vivid azure that they surely belong in heaven, and reads the notice of Gervaise’s death. Dead of the head wound. Never came to trial. Frank tries not to weep openly, tries not to resent the fact that he has to try, that he can’t mourn as openly as any widow. It’s a long time before he no longer hates the world for it.