The Janissary Tree

[ 90 ]

The first person Murad Eslek saw when he strolled into the cafe for his breakfast was Yashim effendi, the gentleman he had rescued from the tanners.

Yashim saw him grin and wave. He murmured something to a passing waiter, then he was sitting down beside Yashim and shaking hands.

“You’re well, inshallah? How’s the foot?”

Yashim assured him that his foot was getting better. Eslek looked at him curiously.

“And I believe you, effendi. Forgive me, but you seem like a watered rose.”

Yashim bowed his head, remembering the hours he and Eugenia had spent sheathing the sword last night. He thought of her gasping, flinging back her beautiful head and baring her teeth with frantic lust, almost overcome—as she had whispered to him—by the discovery of a man who could do more than feed her appetite: who could, in the hours they played together, awaken a hunger she had never known before. He hadn’t slept a wink.

He hadn’t slept too much the night before, either, the night that he’d dropped Preen’s assailant into the bubbling vat at the tannery. Since then he’d been constantly on the move—that second time to the Russian embassy, sending Palewski to the party to buy him time, pounding the streets in search of a tekke which meant nothing to anyone but him and—who? All the time his mind had been turning over the possibilities, tracking back over his encounters of the past week, looking for something he could take a grip on.

All the time trying not to think about what had happened last night. The pain, and the desire. The torment he had been powerless to resist.

He’d see what his friend Eslek could do to help him, and then he’d go to the hammam to revive. To wash away the dust of the Kerkoporta Tower. To ease his aching limbs, to dissolve his thoughts, and contemplate the presence of the demon he had fought so long and so hard to control.

Murad Eslek looked up from his coffee to see the expression on Yashim’s face.

“You all right?”

Yashim smoothed it away.

“I need your help. Again,” he said.