“Do you still need to return home for your books?” Haji Nabih smiled a brittle but rather charming smile as he gestured for Daoud to pour them both tea. They’d been deposited in one of the small courtyards between walls where prisoners were kept before execution—out of the sight of more favoured members of the court, and well away from the general populace. No attempt had been made to keep them there, and they had found their way back to Nabih’s apartments unencumbered, but it had served as a gentle reminder of how easy it was to disappear should they fail.

Daoud had caught their mood and changed into an outfit the soft grey-pink of the breast of a dove. His unreadable face was shaped into a mask of solemn serenity, and nothing Zayd could do would persuade him to look up and meet his eyes.

It was like being served by an automaton of polished bronze, and the chilly perfection made Zayd yearn for his own home, where food and drink were typically accompanied by affection. In the days when they had been wealthy enough to have slaves, the slaves had been like younger brothers, obedient, but not afraid to answer back, nor ashamed to offer sympathy, or display human emotions. This perfection of servility made him feel very alone.

His mind was still flying into every corner, trying to escape what he had just seen. He sipped at cleansing bitterness and mint, attempting to convince himself it was washing away the smell of blood. “I cannot doubt that he is under an evil influence.” It felt like treason to say it. It was. But it was treason he shared with the holiest man in the empire. “Have you tried the lead pourers?”

“That is surely nothing but a woman’s superstition?” Nabih took a soothing breath of smoke and looked at him as though he was a deep and personal disappointment. A last hope that hadn’t paid off.

At least Zayd need not worry about insulting the Grand Mufti. There was little he could do to make his situation worse. “In our experience, it’s an extremely powerful ritual. If we could draw the influence from him and imprison it in hot lead, we could make bullets from the metal and shoot the evil away from him, into our enemy.”

“You are not telling me that actually works?” Nabih repeated, and when Zayd opened his mouth to do so, he waved his hand impatiently. “Even if it did, the sultan, may he live forever, would never allow a couple of old crones to pour lead above him while he slept. Or do you think you could smuggle them past the janissaries, and the white eunuchs and the black eunuchs, not to mention his concubines and wives, to reach him once he has retired for the night?”

“He won’t agree to it?”

“Of course not. He does not believe there is anything wrong with him, and would be incensed at the suggestion. The influence protects itself. We must be subtler.”

Zayd scrubbed at his hands with his fingertips. He’d been assured he was clean, but cool, tacky liquid seemed to have lodged beneath his fingernails nevertheless. “I may have misled you, Excellence, but I don’t know what I can do. I am a scholar of magic, not a practitioner—”

“Your charms—”

“Don’t require their maker to have any power. It is the letters and the shapes themselves that have an effect. You could copy them and they would be every bit as effective. Probably more so—I’ve never really had any success. My father did, my mother did. They were sure the gift should come out in me, but no. Nothing.”

Zayd picked at the imaginary blood until his fingertips were sore. His hands smelled of roses from the oil he had worked into them after washing. Haji Nabih’s cast-off clothes were grander by far than anything he had ever worn, and he felt like a boy playing at heroes who was suddenly expected to be ridiculously brave in real life. The clothes were too big for him, the perfume ostentatious, the act of sitting in a palace room a trespass against morality.

The Grand Mufti gave an exasperated laugh. “We went over this earlier. If you wish to bring the sultan his carpets within the next three months, you will have to acquire the power, somehow.”

“I can’t suddenly become a mage just for the asking.”

Haji Nabih got up and motioned for him to follow again, bringing him out of the palace and down into the closest street of clerks. There a small cupboard of an office had been squeezed in underneath stone steps that led to the guild house of the tailors. A box of a room with a low stone table, a few shelves around the walls, and a shutter that closed off the narrow entrance when the room was not in use, it smelled of mice. A very thin cat curled around Zayd’s ankles when he squeezed inside.

“It is the sultan’s will that you bring him magic carpets,” said Nabih, passing Zayd a document with his seal on it, which told its reader that Zayd was acting under the Grand Mufti’s authority. He watched with an eye of serene composure as Zayd explored the dim little space. “Thus I do what I can to make it possible. Did I not say you would gather mages to you to work on this together? I am not expecting you to do it alone. If you cannot create the carpets yourself, I commission you to find the mages who can. I give you these premises from which to operate. When you have recruits you will send their details to me, and I will pay their salaries and provide you with any supplies that are required. You may call upon my authority to back you in whatever else you need to make this enterprise succeed. You will bring the sultan his carpets, and you will bring him a cure for his malady. Is that not so?”

“I’m not sure.” Zayd looked again around the small, asymmetrical space. Put in charge of Istanbul’s magicians? Made in effect, if not in name, Istanbul’s archmage? It would have been an enormous honour if it hadn’t been also a trap. “The Jar of Heaven beneath Aya Sophia was smashed to pieces when Mehmed II conquered the city. Though we are at the edge of the influence of one in Greece, that, too, has been broken for five hundred years.”

Nabih gave him that look again. The one that said, Woe is me, that this is the best I have to work with. “Which means?”

“It means that it’s unlikely we’ll find anyone in the whole country with powers strong enough to do what the sultan demands.”

Nabih stroked his bottom lip with his thumb, as though, had he been forty years younger, he would have sucked it. “Well, I suggest you try. Success is in Allah’s hands, but without it, I think you can imagine what might happen.”

Zayd could not stop imagining it.

The sunset call to prayer rang out, startling him out of hopelessness, and in the absence of clearer ideas, he took his leave of Nabih and made his way to the nearest mosque. There he washed again, reapplied his perfume, and felt finally cleaner. Joining all the faithful in prayer in the centre of the mosque’s airy beauty, he allowed the sensation of space and light—the glowing blue and golden texts on the walls, the flickering of the many enamelled lamps—to make him feel that he was not alone.

Surely Allah would help him to fulfil his duty to His anointed ruler, to advance a holy war that would bring His truth to a dark benighted nation. Surely the maker of all things would uphold him, and even if he died in the attempt, would reward him with paradise.

He felt better, on coming out—stronger, more resolute. Seizing the moment, he strode off to the town criers’ guild. There he commissioned a notice to be read out on street corners, offering employment to those who could prove their magical talent. Having set a time for tomorrow and a meeting place of his new office, he went home.

In comparison with the gore-filled scene of the kafes, the tombs seemed cheery. He thought about his own grave, composed himself a small epitaph to be carved on his headstone. It was almost a comforting thought, until he ducked within the screen that shielded his harem from the outer world. A scent of lamb and couscous greeted him, and his mother and aunt paused in their work—one stirring the pot over the clay brazier, the other bringing plates out of their wrappings by the wall—to smile at him.

The plague had taken the rest of their family. There was no other male relative to whom he could entrust their care. If he died, what would become of them? Would the city still come to buy charms if the seller was a woman?

Perhaps they would, but Zayd hated the idea of either elderly lady having to deal with the outside world, with strange men of evil sorts, all by themselves. If it came to that, he would have failed them indeed.

“Mother. Auntie.” He folded himself down to sit on the cushions they had piled by the far wall. Accepting a basin of water, he washed the dust of his trek through the graveyard from his hands. “I have a great deal to tell you, but it may make you worry. Would you rather be in glad ignorance or in knowledge?”

They served the food and came to sit by him. His mother patted his knee. She had once been very beautiful—to him she still was—but the bones of that beauty could no longer quite support her aged skin. Life had rumpled it and added a yellow tint to the whites of her eyes, but their gaze was as direct and amused as ever. “I see it has made you worry. Tell us everything, then Jala and I can take over the worrying while you act.”

So Zayd told them all and found it was helpful to share his anxiety, to talk of hope.

“You’ll see,” said his mother, determinedly positive. “Tomorrow Allah will send you a prince among mages. Or the day after that.” It had something of the same sweetness with which she’d lied to him as a boy, telling him that the pain of circumcision would be over in a moment and forgotten. He remembered the agony even now, but he appreciated the bolstering nevertheless.

The morning came cold, and chilly breezes straight off the Black Sea whipped through the streets of Eyup borough, causing the dust to circle in eddies that stripped exposed skin, rattling the lanterns outside houses, billowing the fabrics and flags outside the stalls of the marketplace. Zayd dodged through a line of donkeys laden with firewood and was almost kicked by the one ahead of him, the beasts nervous at the uncertain weather. Their drivers nodded apologies at him that he returned absentmindedly as he came to his booth and found a queue outside it.

Opening the shutters, he studied the line of potential mages through his lashes. He was not entirely sure what a great magician ought to resemble, but surely not like a Nigerian camel driver, fiddling with his goad and flinching when anyone met his eye. A little further down the line, a Jewish doctor looked more likely, holy texts bound on his forehead and upper arm, and a necklace of Hebrew words and letters punched into sheets of silver. Two women also waited in the queue, heavily and modestly veiled. They must at least be certain of their skills, and brazen as an idol with it to come out here and try to take a man’s job.

Under the expectant gazes of nearly twenty people, he wished he’d brought a larger cushion and better writing set. But such as his splendour was, he spread paper, inkwell, and pen box around him, balanced a blank book on his lap, and prepared to take names, histories, and details of amazing powers.

The line dwindled over the morning. It consisted mostly of astrologers. One “astounding master of fire” proved to have invented a system of delivering black powder to his palms and kindling it with flints embedded in his fingernails. For a while, Zayd was willing to believe that if the fire was no mystery, still there was something miraculous in hands that did not burn. But then the man confessed he had spent months building up such thick calluses he no longer felt the brief flash of flame.

“Impressive as a street entertainment,” Zayd had to rule in the end, “but not what this guild is looking for.”

By midday prayers—and this time he took out his prayer mat and took part without moving from where he was—there were only six people left. Of these six, one man and one of the women claimed the ability to speak to the dead, but as neither was able to prove it, Zayd dismissed them both.

The Jew, Ibrahim, turned out to be an older counterpart of himself—learned in texts and formulas, steeped in what Zayd thought of as the sinister coils of the Kabbalah, but he, too, was a scholar and no practitioner. Zayd retained him anyway. He would not help make carpets, but it was only prudent for the empire’s long-term future in this newly magical world to gather as much expert knowledge as he could get.

“What do you do?” he asked the camel herder next. This was a tall and slender man, very black of skin, in a billowing cloak that reminded Zayd sickeningly of wings of skin.

“I am good with camels, effendi.” He had stood in line all morning as the wind dropped and the sun climbed higher. Now the street was the approximate temperature of a clay oven and still he stood patiently waiting to sign on with the wrong guild?

“I am looking for magi, not animal trainers.”

“I know this. I am exceptionally good with camels. Bring me one and I’ll show you.”

“You couldn’t have brought your own?”

The herdsman grinned. “Then you would say I had trained it.”

That being true, Zayd sent one of the small boys who sat in the shade and watched them—one of the boys who surely should have been in school—to fetch him a camel, and then watched in astonishment as the herdsman made it dance with whispered commands. He entered the man’s name— Süleyman bin Dada—and details into the records, not quite sure what good he could put the talent to, but grateful to have discovered anyone at all.

A black Egyptian named Adham bin Adil, was his third recruit. Adham sat on the ground before Zayd and made the sand leap up and form itself into tiny models of the ancient temples of his own people. Only an ayak or so in size—small enough to be easily held between his hands, but exquisitely detailed and populated by fingernail-sized people who walked and shopped and gossiped better than any puppet Zayd had ever seen.

After finding true talent in two foreigners, he was not surprised that his third recruit with genuine magical ability was one of the women—a slave originally from France, captured at sea, bought and eventually married by a maker of gold jewellery. Monique bint Maryse claimed an ability to find any item that had been lost, and proved it by telling three of the onlookers where they could find their keys, sarpech, and a sequin that turned out to have been embedded in the heel of their shoe.

She was the last applicant of any magical ability. It was just as Zayd had said to Haji Nabih—none of the people who had a gift were from Istanbul itself. Each had grown up within the range of one of the Jars of Heaven. Clearly the devices not only provided the raw power for magic, but also worked on the bodies of children raised near them, to enable them to use it. He was enough of a scholar to be pleased at the proof of his theory.

From a practical point of view, however, he had scoured Istanbul for magical talent and gained nothing. What a camel whisperer, a sand sculptor, and a finder of lost keys could do to build him flying battle platforms he could not begin to think.

He considered simply taking his family and fleeing the country—leaving this problem to someone else to solve. But he loved his city, loved his people who had been given to him by his father to protect. Running away was not an option. But letting his mother and auntie be tortured for his failure was even less so. No. He would do his best, and if—in three months’ time—he had failed, they could die together in peace before the soldiers came.

Soberly, trying not to tremble, he bought poison on the way home.