THEIR footsteps echoed off the high walls of the Seraglio as they walked across the First Court. Usually on a Friday the place would have been busy, but a combination of gray skies and the suppressed tension hanging in the air had left the great court all but deserted. Ceremonial guardsmen stood at attention around the perimeter walls, as silent and immobile as the Janissary guards whose stillness had once struck chill into the hearts of foreign envoys. Yashim wondered if the New Guards were not, in their own way, more sinister: like German clockwork dolls rather than real men. At least the Janissaries had possessed their own swaggering panache, as his friend Palewski had pointed out.
His fingers closed on a scrap of paper tucked beneath his belt. Coming across the Hippodrome, he had swerved on an impulse from the bronze serpent and cut across the dirt to the Janissary Tree, knowing what he would find: the same mystic verses that had been puzzling him all week.
They had been pinned to the peeling bark. This was how the Greeks advertised their dead, Yashim thought, with a piece of paper nailed to a post or tree. He had pulled down the paper and studied it again.
Unknowing
And knowing nothing of unknowing,
They sleep.
Wake them.
A fire in the night, Yashim thought. A call to arms. But what did this mean?
Knowing,
And knowing unknowing,
The silent few become one with the Core.
Approach.
He folded the paper and tucked it into his belt.