The Demons of Constantinople Read online

  Bertrand wanted to keep pushing. Partly because it was the right strategic move. But politics were involved too. His king, Charles V of France, wanted the Christian powers to push the Turks back across the Bosporus. So did Pope Gregory. And because of the phones in Paris, they could tell him so. The pope was in Avignon again, but Avignon wasn’t Rome. It was only a few days away for a fast rider. And besides, the pope had a crystal set enchanted by a cherub in Avignon.

  The effect of these things was to allow the royalty, secular and ecclesiastical, of western Europe to stick their oars into the management of eastern Europe, completely bypassing Venice, Rome, and Genoa—which wasn’t calculated to make them happy. The phone in Vienna was a major coup for Austria because it put them in the same club.

  “If we are to have any hope of continuing this campaign,” Helena Kantakouzene, John V’s wife, said before Bertrand could get his mouth open, “we must have more money.”

  “I understand, Majesty. However, I can’t provide it. And if you are to generate more revenue, you must recapture at least some of the territory that you lost to Murad and to the Bulgarians,” Bertrand pointed out. “And if you are to defend what you have, we must recapture and fortify Gallipoli and control the Sea of Marmara.”

  It was a long afternoon. Phones were brought out, phone calls were made to Paris and Vienna. Money was promised, and an embassy arranged from France to Venice, in an attempt to get Venice to return the crown jewels without giving them the island of Tenedos.

  At the moment the Turks controlled the Sea of Marmara, to the extent anyone did. The introduction of cannon or rockets and the ships to carry them would change that. But that wasn’t going to happen fast, and in the meantime the Turks needed to be distracted.

  Bertrand’s plan for that was straightforward. Take back the Byzantine Empire north of the Sea of Marmara. To do that he would need Roger, the janissaries captured from Murad I converted into a standing army paid for out of the royal purse, and the ability to recruit more. An army that was loyal to Byzantine, not its paymaster or the noble who called them up from his lands. They could use the janissaries as a core because all of the janissary cavalry had been with Murad I at Tzouroulos.

  Location: Prisoner Camp, Outside Tzouroulos

  Time: 8:30 AM, November 24, 1372

  Wilber walked along the camp street outside Tzouroulos. He heard a meow and turned in time to catch Leona, who landed on his shoulder. Four kilograms of gryphon landing on your shoulder is something you need to be braced for.

  “You can walk,” Wilber complained in Gryphon. Gryphon, it turned out, had aspects of cat and crow but was neither. At least Leona’s Gryphon. Wilber imagined a lion-eagle gryphon would have a different dialect.

  “Indeed I can,” Leona said in gryphon-accented Greek. “But that’s what humans are for. To carry us, pet us and, most of all, feed us.”

  “Why don’t you go visit Roger?”

  “Roger doesn’t speak Gryphon.”

  “Well, you’re heavy,” Wilber said. “So you can walk or fly.”

  Suddenly the weight on his shoulder lessened. He turned this head to find himself facing a sharply pointed cat face that was translucent. “How did you do that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Leona said. She became heavy again, then light, and as she did her transparency varied in sync. The lighter, the more transparent. Now, on the edge of invisible, she looked around. “There’s a djinn over there.” She pointed with her nose.

  Wilber couldn’t see anything, but he was experienced enough to make a good guess at what was going on. A big part of a will-o’-the-wisp’s power was its ability to appear and disappear, and the way it did that was to slip back and forth from the natural world to the netherworld at will. It didn’t need a rip in the veils to slip through, and it could exist in both the netherworld and the natural world at once.

  Wilber decided to try something. His voice, like his hearing, was magically enhanced by the little bit of Merlin left in his cochlear implant. He was now, at least in small part, a magical being. What the limits on that were, he didn’t know. Pitching his voice to pass into the netherworld, he spoke Djinn. “Hello. What are you doing here?”

  He didn’t see anything, but suddenly Leona was off his shoulder, and she disappeared.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Leona was watching the djinn as Wilber spoke. She saw it look around and see her floating in the air of the netherworld with her wings folded and sitting on something it couldn’t see. It was a minor djinn, nothing more than a zephyr. It gave a little squeak of fright and took off running. At that point instinct took over. Both cat and crow were active hunters, and if the will-o’-wisp part of her was less active about it, it was still a hunter. Leona was off Wilber’s shoulder and flying after the little creature in an instant. Almost, she dined on djinn, but she wasn’t all that hungry, and she thought Wilber would be upset if she killed it before he could talk to it. So she grabbed it in her talons, and slipped back into the natural world.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The being that suddenly appeared in Leona’s talons was the size of a puck, bright orange as though it was made of fire, and it rested on a smoky tail, like a cartoon Aladdin’s lamp-style genie. He was also pissed and clearly frightened.

  “Hello,” Wilber said again. “Now will you behave if Leona lets you go?”

  The djinn looked desperately around, then gave Wilber a crafty look, and said, “Yes, yes, master.”

  Wilber could hear the lie. Apparently djinn weren’t held by their given word like European demons. “Hold him for a few, Leona.” Wilber picked up a stick and started to draw a pentagram around the djinn. It took less than two minutes and it wasn’t particularly powerful, but it should hold the thing.

  “Let it go, Leona.”

  Leona flicked out of the natural world, leaving the djinn in the pentagram.

  Meanwhile, Wilber had drawn a crowd. He took a moment to explain what had happened. Then he started questioning the djinn. It turned out that he was from a tribe of djinn to the southeast. From what he said, Wilber guessed it was somewhere around Syria, and he was here because one of Murad’s wizards had grabbed his wife and stuck her into a sword. Both he and his wife were the most minor of djinn, and all he wanted was to get his wife and go home.

  “Which sword?” Wilber asked. There was something wrong about this, but Wilber wasn’t sure what.

  Again with the shifty eyes. After a bit of hemming and hawing, he identified the tent that held the sword, and described it. It was a scimitar. Not Murad’s, but one of his lieutenants, who had been injured in the battle and captured.

  Baqir wasn’t thrilled with the sword in the first place, and sold it to Wilber. Again, Wilber wasn’t convinced that that was going to be enough to get the truth out of the djinn, but it was a start. The first djinn wanted Wilber to give him the sword and let him go, promising on a stack of Koran to be Wilber’s willing slave if he did.

  Wilber wasn’t buying. Another pentagram, and then he released a fetching top half of a young woman, also orange, but with more yellow, and dressed in veil and harem outfit. She looked at Wilber, looked at Orange, and started cursing a blue streak. Apparently, Orange wasn’t her husband. Orange was a low class djinn who wouldn’t leave her alone. She wasn’t thrilled about being in the sword, but better the sword than that little freak Omar.

  Wilber translated this for the Turks, and some laughter ensued. Not all the prisoners were celibate janissaries, and not all the janissaries had always been celibate.

  “What do you want then?” Wilber asked.

  “I want my freedom! It’s not right that a mere human should hold any djinn, even that one.”

  “Well, at least you’re being honest,” Wilber said. Meanwhile he was getting warning from all around that letting djinn loose without protection was unsafe. Wilber suspected they were right. At the same time he wasn’t thrilled about holding this young woman against her will. It wasn’t gentlemanly, not by Wilber’s standards
of gentlemanly behavior.

  Wilber pulled out his phone and called Merlin, who was in his room in Tzouroulos. Then he listened as Merlin spoke to the female djinn, who proved to be a minor ifrit. Then, having gotten a fair piece of her name as a surety of protection, Wilber released her. In a moment, she was gone, and a moaning Omar was released and fled.

  The effect was mostly to convince the Turks that Wilber was a powerful wizard.

  Chapter 12—A Pause to Breathe

  Location: The House of Gaius Augustus Crassus, Constantinople

  Time: 3:34 PM, November 25, 1372

  The afternoon sunlight pouring through the glazed windows was augmented by candelabras along the walls of the hall. The ladies in their gowns and the gentlemen in their tunics, which were shorter gowns, made a glittering display. Or would, if you hadn’t grown up with twenty-first century Paris fashions, materials, and techniques. The silks from China didn’t shine and the dyeing was sometimes like unintentional tie-dyed.

  Someone should mention buttons to these folks, Wilber thought, then remembered “someone” had. He was wearing a buttoned up jacket. So were the other members of the French delegation in attendance, even Dr. Delaflote.

  It wasn’t the pretension that bugged him. Wilber’s mom could, and often did, look down her nose at the world about as thoroughly as anyone he’d ever known. What he found increasingly irritating was that these people seemed to think they were the real deal.

  “You’re not dancing,” Liane said in twenty-first century French which now had a bit of a fourteenth century accent.

  “Neither are they.” Wilber pointed at the dancers with his chin. “They’re almost strolling to the almost beat.”

  “They’re not that bad.”

  Wilber looked at her and said, “What? The French fashionista is suggesting that I put a bone in my nose and bay at the moon with the local street gang that thinks it’s a civilization?”

  Liane laughed. “Well, maybe not the bone through the nose. Something tasteful, like a diamond stud.”

  Wilber snorted.

  “Hey, at least some of the girls are good looking.”

  “Not so you’d notice,” Wilber said. “Too much rice pudding and too many sweets for most of them.” That was true. Constantinople was apparently the father of the western world’s obesity problem.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Aurelia spoke French. One of the family maids was French and she had learned it. Besides, for some reason the man’s French was more understandable than it should have been. She looked out at the dancers, then at the man. He was wearing a . . . something. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it had sleeves that went down to the wrists, and she couldn’t imagine how he had gotten into the top or the pantaloons. It was a style of clothing that her father couldn’t buy, that the emperor couldn’t buy, because no one knew how to make it in the first place.

  What a haughty disagreeable man, she insisted to herself. It was true that he was attractive. Tall and slim, with sandy blond hair and clear blue eyes. He was clean shaven, which gave him an exotic look.

  Location: Guest Quarters, Magnaura, Constantinople

  Time: 8:30 AM, February 25, 1373

  After the battle of Tzouroulos, things started getting organized, at least a bit. Bertrand and Roger got stuck with Andronikos and were raising, training, and using a small but growing army to take back Byzantium. Their efforts were aided by the fact that the Turks were in disarray after the death of Murad because Savci Bey and his brothers were locked in a desperate battle with each other to determine who would be the next sultan of the Ottoman Empire, even as the rebellion in Anatolia was growing.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the twenty-firsters and most of the French priests were back in Constantinople, trying to start the industrial revolution.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Jennifer Fairbanks, Annabelle Cooper-Smith, and the master coppersmith all leaned over the wide sheet of papyrus, looking at the design of the tube boiler. It was a modification of a design developed at the University of Paris. Steam power was a technology that the twenty-firsters knew existed, but not a lot more. They did know a little more. They had all seen pictures of steam locomotives and they all knew about internal combustion, including the fact that they had cylinders that pushed pistons. Between that and experiments in France, and the memory that there was such a thing as a tube boiler, they were trying to decide if the coiled bronze tube would hold enough pressure to run a steam engine.

  “The only way to learn is to try,” Jennifer said.

  “That’s an awfully expensive test.”

  “Maybe we could build a scale model, one-tenth scale. That would use a lot less bronze.”

  “But we don’t know if the cube square law applies,” Jennifer insisted.

  “What is the cube square law?” asked the mastersmith.

  They tried to explain and got nowhere fast, until Annabelle mentioned that it was why puppies have such big feet. “They have feet in scale to the adult dog they will be.”

  The coppersmith still didn’t really understand, but at least now he mostly believed.

  Location: Harbor, Constantinople

  Joe Kraken tightened his “guts” and squirted a jet of water out his stern. Squid don’t have a front and back the way that people or boats do. They go this way and that, depending on circumstances. And Joe wasn’t a squid anyway. He was a kraken, a sea monster, bigger by far than the largest giant squid. Joe was in a designed body. A body whose primary design function was to act as the transport for Pucorl. His “mantle,” for want of a better term, was the body of the barge, the part that Pucorl sat on. He could move most readily in that direction, but his tentacles, mouth, and jet were in the stern and his underwater eyes were on the sides. Close to shore or in shallow water, he mostly moved using his tentacles, walking along the river or sea bed. But out in the bay he used his jet to push himself and his tentacles as fins, or sometimes as though he was swimming.

  Joe was much more maneuverable than a normal boat, but still more directional than his kraken body back in the netherworld. Which, along with the fact that he was stuck on the surface of the sea unable to sink to the bottom, was something he’d had to get used to after he got his new body.

  Not that there weren’t compensations. His new body didn’t require any concentration to maintain so all his will could be focused on strength. While smaller than his body in the netherworld, his body here was much stronger. One of his tentacles flashed out and nabbed a large grouper. A quick motion and that grouper’s spine was snapped by Joe’s iron beak. Joe liked mortal fish. His artificial body didn’t need food, but his magical self did absorb the fish’s body, and that was making it more solid and stronger.

  Joe was out today, almost on a day off. He was patrolling the Bosporus Straits and grabbing some snacks, instead of sitting at the docks of Constantinople, waiting for Pucorl to need a ride. As part of the deal, he had a crew of five officials of the Constantinople bureau of tariffs.

  They were approaching a galley showing a Genoese flag. And Joe had a bad feeling. Suddenly a rain of arrows shot from the galley and three of them hit his decking. They hurt.

  Squid aren’t particularly aggressive. In truth, they are shy and retiring creatures. But Joe wasn’t a squid. Joe was a kraken. And, as of this moment, Joe was a pissed off kraken.

  As the customs agents made for his cabin, Joe, using jet and tentacles, maneuvered his stern to face the galley and reached out with his tentacles. Grabbing oars and jerking, he pulled and used that pull to lift his stern out of the water, and then reached up with his tentacles and grabbed the port sidewall of the galley and pulled it down.

  The galley wasn’t designed for that. It flipped, pouring sailors into the drink, and shoving Joe’s bow below the surface. Then Joe had to work to keep from sinking himself.

  Joe knew he wasn’t supposed to eat people. But it did seem a horrible waste, watching the crew of the galley sink into the Bosporus and drown. He’d be eating i
f he could, but he had specific orders on the subject, and demons are under the control of the owner of their vessels. So, however much the waste, he could not eat the crew of the galley. He did use his built-in crystal set to call Pucorl and complain about unreasonable restrictions.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Pucorl got Joe’s call while he was in his netherworld lands, and he had a thought. Two ideas. First, he sent back to Joe Kraken,

  Once Joe had done that, he called Joe to him.

  Pucorl’s lands were on the edge of the Elysian Fields, which—among other things—meant that Pucorl had a coast. It wasn’t much of a coast, a few hundred yards long, over on the other side of the garage from the dryad’s grove. But Pucorl had reshaped the land into a dock after he got Joe. Until now, he had never had any cause to call Joe to his part of the netherworld.

  Annabelle was in her office with Royce, looking at a steam cart design. It wouldn’t be anything like Pucorl, but Annabelle insisted that it would be better than the ones they were making in Paris. More importantly, this one would be designed based on the US Army WWII jeep, and it would be used by Bertrand’s army.

  It wouldn’t be like it was back in the world. Mass production didn’t exist. Each jeep would be handmade, and each and every one would need a demon to make it work, because they couldn’t make spark plugs or distributor caps, at least not yet.

  If they got ten of the things built this year, they would be pulling off a miracle. That wasn’t the only thing they were working on. The twenty-firsters were introducing as much as they could of the tools to build the tools to start an industrial revolution.