The Janissary Tree

He’d forgotten all about the silver ring.

He remembered only the need for punishment, and the itch for pleasure.

[ 46 ]

Preen had found it hard to believe what the imam seemed to be saying. A revival of the Janissaries? New Guard cadets found murdered in despicable ways?

She picked up a pair of tweezers and began to pluck her eyebrows.

She wondered, looking into the mirror, if the imam’s message had anything to do with the information she had brought her friend Yashim.

Murder.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Today she would take the line ever so slightly higher: she could always heighten the curve with kohl. She began to hum.

Nothing she’d heard in the mosque had anything to do with Yashim, or her, or that disgusting pimp.

She worked briskly with a practised hand along the arch of her brow, watching herself in the mirror.

But Yorg could be involved in anything. With anyone.

She’d only peddled a little ordinary gossip. It was nothing.

Though Yashim had been pleased. Gold dust, he called it.

But Yashim wouldn’t tell. She moved her hand and began on the other eyebrow.

Yorg would tell. Yorg would tell anything, if he was paid enough.

Or frightened enough.

Preen sucked in her breath. The idea of Yorg being afraid was, well, scary.

She lowered her tweezers and snapped up a piece of kohl between their jaws. Carefully she started to thicken the line.

What would Yorg do, she wondered, if he heard about the murdered soldiers? Not at mosque. The Yorgs of this world heard nothing at mosque. They wouldn’t even go.

But if he heard, and started putting two and two together?

The kohl wavered. The face in the mirror was very white.

He’d squeal, for sure.

[ 47 ]

Fire-officer Orhan Yasmit cupped his hands around his mouth and blew into them. It had been a filthy morning, not just because it was damp and cold but because the mist made it almost impossible for him to work properly. Who could spot a fire in this miasma? He could scarcely see across the Golden Horn.

He stamped a few times to warm up, then crossed the tower to the southern side and peered gloomily down towards the Bosphorus. On good days, the Galata Tower presented him with one of the finest views the city could afford, almost three hundred feet up above the Golden Horn, across to Stamboul with its minarets and domes, south to the Bosphorus and Uskiidar on the farther side—sometimes he could actually see the mountains of Gule, purple in the distance.

It was a solid tower of massive dressed stone, built by the Genoese almost five hundred years before, when the Greek emperor ruled in Byzantium and Galata was its Italian suburb. Since then it had survived wars and earthquakes—even fires. The face of the city had no doubt changed, as minarets replaced the spires, as more and more people settled in the burgeoning port, building their wooden houses cheek by jowl, fragile wooden houses crammed like dry tinder into the declivities of the seven hills. And they’d been kicking over their braziers, letting their candles tilt, sending out careless sparks for centuries, too. Hardly ten years ran by without some section of the