The archivist nodded slowly, blowing out his cheeks.
“Put your request in writing. We’ll see what we can do.”
Yashim leaned his elbows on the reading desk and chewed at a pencil. Eventually he wrote:
“Istanbul fire-towers. Location details.” And then as an afterthought he added: “Summaries of renovation/maintenance costs 1650-1750,” as being more likely to turn up what he wanted to know.
The archivist acknowledged the paper slip with a brief grunt but made no effort to read it. It lay on his desk for over twenty minutes while he thumbed through a quarto volume of figures and Yashim paced to and fro by the entrance. Eventually he picked it up, glanced at it, and rang a bell.
His subordinates moved in imitation of their master’s ponderous ennui, shaking their heads and glancing up at Yashim now and then as if they suspected he had come merely to try their patience. At long last one of them disappeared into the stacks. He was gone about an hour.
“Nothing specific on location. There are two volumes of accounts, which refer to the fire-service in general. They straddle your stated time-frame. Do you want to see them?”
Yashim mastered an urge to pull the man’s nose.
“Yes, please,” he said evenly.
The archivist shuffled off. He came back with two surprisingly small books, smaller than Yashim’s own hand and bound in blue cloth. The older book, which roughly speaking covered a period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to 1670, was quite badly worn, and the signatures which bound the pages together were so badly rotted that pages slipped from position in clumps, threatening to slide out of the covers altogether.
The archivist frowned.
“I’m not sure we can allow you to examine this one,” he began.
Yashim exploded.
“I haven’t waited all morning to be told I’m incapable of keeping a few pages of a book in order. I’m going to look at the book here, on the bench. Not fan it about, or shake it, or chuck it in the air.”
Yet the books proved to be a disappointment. After half an hour Yashim had only turned up three references, two dealing with the Stamboul Tower, which had burnt down twice, and the other referring only in the vaguest way to the fire-towers, without numbering or naming them. Entries had been made in the books by many hands, which made the business of deciphering some of the older entries in particular both exacting and frustrating.
It was while he was trying
He had written Preen a warning, making his instructions clear. Stifling the poetics of the written word, exaggerating the loops of his script, he’d written a few lines that anyone could read, even a child.
Only a literate child.
[ 59 ]
Preen poked her finger into the little black hole in the door and crooked it, feeling upwards for the slim wooden latch.
She felt it resting against the edge of her nail, and clicked it up. As the door swung open a sudden draught, laden with the unpleasantly sweet smell of rotten meat, snuffed out the candle in her hand. She gave a small cry of dismay and stepped backwards in the dark.
The swinging door struck against the side wall. At the same moment Preen felt something brush across her face, with a whirr like an insect against her skin. She jerked her head back, stumbled, and lost her footing on the top step of the darkened stairs. She fell with a crash, ricocheting off the back wall and plunging sideways down the narrow stairs.
Preen landed in a bruised tangle, her face pressed against the corridor floor. Her right arm throbbed. For a few seconds she did not move, hearing only the sound of blood pulsing in her head and the gasp of her own breath. In the darkness it sounded shockingly loud.
But then came a muffled crack behind her on the stairs, close to her feet, like the sound of someone testing their
