Реймонд Хаури - Empire of Lies

The sultan wasn’t sure what woke him up.

A ruffle of air, a barely detectable flutter of movement, a disturbance at the edge of his consciousness. Whatever it was, it was enough to cause him to stir within the lush expanse of his bedding and crack open his eyes, slightly at first as they adjusted to the faint light of the glowing embers in the fireplace, then jolting wide once they fell into focus to reveal the tall figure standing by the side of his bed.

“ Salamu alaykum, padishah,” the man said, his voice calm and low.

The sultan bolted off his pillow, his pulse rocketing with fear as he tried to process what he was seeing: an intruder—an assassin?—here, in his sumptuous chamber, deep in the palace, past an army of guards and eunuchs.

Not just an intruder: the man was, the sultan now realized, naked.

“What the—who are y—”

“Shhh,” the man ordered him, bending down with lightning speed to press one hand firmly against the sultan’s mouth while raising his own index finger to his lips. “Be calm and stay quiet, your sublimity. I’m not here to cause you any harm.”

Confusion now flooded in alongside the fear. The sultan struggled to breathe evenly and fought to regain some kind of control over his senses, but the barrage of inexplicable stimuli wasn’t giving him any respite, for now that his eyes were finally focused, he could also see that the man’s chest was covered with strange markings. Tattoos of words and numbers and drawings and diagrams, all over his torso.

“I need you to listen,” the man said.

He wasn’t speaking Ottoman Turkish, the official language of the empire since its inception. It wasn’t Persian either, a language the educated upper echelon of society could speak and read, mostly used for literature and poetry. No, the man was using an unusual dialect of Arabic, a language the sultan only used when reading and discussing religious verse.

“But before you do,” he continued, “I need you to believe.”

The man held his gaze, then dropped his chin and shut his eyes. He mumbled some words the sultan couldn’t make out. Then he vanished.

He simply disappeared.

The sultan’s head snapped left, right, scanning the vast room in utter panic. What kind of magic was this? Then, a few seconds later, the man reappeared, without any warning, standing at the far side of the vast chamber by the two-tiered marble fountain.

“I’m here to help you, your eminence,” the man told the sultan. “But in order for that to happen, I need you to believe what I say.”

Another mumble, then he disappeared again.

The sultan was now sitting up, rigid with paralysis. His breathing was frantic, his heart galloping furiously inside his chest. He thought of calling out for his guards. One scream and a dozen of his most trusted janissaries would come charging through the door, sabers drawn. But he hesitated. In part, he was too shocked, too terrified to react. He also thought they might take him for a fool if the intruder wasn’t there.

Before he could ponder things too much, the man was back, where he’d first appeared, right by the sultan’s bed, mere inches from him. Only this time, the intruder reached down to the floor and raised a yataghan, a short saber with a curved blade that was so sharp it could lop off a man’s head with a single flick. The sultan recognized it as one he kept in a display cabinet by the divan, only it wasn’t there anymore. It was now pressed against his neck.

“If I wanted to kill you, you would have already died a thousand deaths,” the man said. “But as I said, I’m here to be of service. More importantly, I’m here to save you and Kara Mustafa Pasha from a catastrophic defeat.”

Then he disappeared again, and the dagger fell to the ground and clattered against the marble flooring.

Almost instantly, the man appeared again, at the foot of the bed.

The sultan lurched back and slammed against the bed’s gilded headboard. His breath was coming short and fast, and he was overcome with violent shivers.

What was this creature, and how did it know about his plans?

He studied the intruder. “Who are you?” he asked. “What are you? Are you”—he hesitated, then asked—“a djinn?”

The stranger’s face cracked under the hint of a smile.

Unlike his father, Mehmed wasn’t mentally unstable or degenerate. He was a quiet and melancholy man, but he had one obsession: the legacy of his conquering ancestors. He was immersed in the mystique of the dynasty to which he belonged, and hungered to mimic his ancestors’ exploits. Lately, he had thrown himself into research to prepare for the coming summer’s offensive, carefully studying the chronicles of past military campaigns that lined the shelves of the imperial archives. But Mehmed was also a pious man, and, as such, was very familiar with the djinn , the supernatural creatures of Islamic mythology romanticized as “genies.” They enjoyed free will and could be agents of good and evil.

Without flinching, the intruder watched him in silence. “I am a friend who wants to help you achieve success beyond anything you’ve dreamt of,” he finally told him. “And if you heed my words and allow me to assist you, I can promise you that the Golden Apple will only be the beginning of your great and most glorious legacy.”

His words caught the sultan’s breath.

How could this intruder know what they were planning?

Two months earlier, the sultan’s gardeners had planted the imperial tug outside the palace gates—out in the open, for all to see. The meaning of the ancient war banners—tall, elaborately carved crimson poles topped by a flurry of horses’ tails—was well known, as it was a ritual that dated back to the days of the sultan’s steppe warrior ancestors: the Commander of the Faithful would be going to war.

The objective of the campaign, however, was a closely guarded secret.

“Oh, yes, your eminence. I know all about your meeting with Kara Mustafa last week,” the tattooed man continued, referring to the sultan’s grand vizier. “I know that once the winter snows melt, your army will be marching west. I also know its target won’t be the piddling fortified towns that pepper the lands west of Belgrade. No, your army will be marching on Vienna itself and on Leopold, the usurper who dares call himself Holy Roman Emperor.”

Leopold . The mere mention of the man’s name made Mehmed’s blood boil.

The sultan nursed a hatred for Leopold I that was far more severe than for his other enemies in Russia or Poland. Mehmed, as the occupier of the old imperial Byzantine throne in Constantinople, considered himself the rightful Kaysar-i-Rum—the Caesar of the Roman Empire. To him, the Habsburg monarch was a false claimant to the throne, one who ruled from a distant city that had no historical significance to the old empire. Stripping him of his capital and converting his people to the one true faith would be a most fitting end to his brazen delusions.

“Listen to me,” the intruder continued, “and you’ll fly the flag of Islam over the Golden Apple and turn its great cathedral into a mosque. And that’ll only be the beginning. Listen to me, and you won’t be known as avci any more. Even fatih won’t be enough. They’ll need a stronger word to describe your conquests.”