The innkeeper is a different one from last time, a gap-toothed red-haired Greek with only one eye, who gives Mulreany a leering smirk and says, “In town for the sorcery-trading, are you?”
“The what?” Mulreany asks, all innocence.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know, brother. What do you think that ring of witch-fire is, all around the city? Where do you think the Eastern Sea has gone, and the Genoese Quarter, and Persian Town, and everything else that lies just outside the city walls? It’s sorcery-time here again, my friend!”
“Is it, now?” Mulreany says, making no great show of interest. “I wouldn’t know. My cousins and I are here to deal in pots and pans, and perhaps do a little business in daggers and swords.” He colors his Greek with a broad, braying yokel accent, by way of emphasizing that he’s much too dumb to be a sorcerer.
But the innkeeper is annoyingly persistent. “Merely let me have one of those metal tubes that bring near what is far off,” he says, with a little wheedling movement of his big shoulders, “and my best rooms are yours for three weeks, and all your meals besides.”
He must mean a spyglass. Binoculars aren’t likely to do him much good. Even more broadly Mulreany says, “Pots, yes, my good brother. Pans, yes. But miraculous metal tubes, I must say ye nay. Such things are not our commodities, brother.”
The lone eye, ice-blue and bloodshot, bores nastily in on him. “Would a knife of many blades be among your commodities, then? A metal box of fire? A flask of the devil’s brandy?”
“I tell you, we be not sorcerers,” says Mulreany stolidly, letting just a bit of annoyance show. He shifts his weight slowly from leg to leg, a ponderous hayseed gesture. “We are but decent simple merchants in search of lodging in return for good coin, and if we cannot find it here, brother, we fain must seek it elsewhere.”
He starts to swing about to leave. The innkeeper hastily backs off from his wheedling, and Mulreany is able to strike a straightforward deal for a night’s lodging, three rooms for a couple of heavy copper sesterces, with tomorrow’s breakfast of rough bread, preserved lamb, and beer thrown in.
Wistfully the innkeeper says, “I was sure at last I had some sorcerers before me, who would favor me with some of the wondrous things that the high dukes possess.”
“You have sorcerers on the brain,” Mulreany tells him, as they start upstairs. “We are but simple folk, with none of the devil’s goods in our bags.”
Does the innkeeper believe him? Who knows? They all covet the illicit stuff the sorcerers bring, but only the very richest can afford it. Skepticism and greed still glitter in that single eye.
Well, Mulreany has told nothing but God’s truth: he is no sorcerer, just a merchant from a far land. But real sorcerers must have been at work here at some time in the past. What else could it have been but black magic, Mulreany figures, that set the city floating in time in the first place? The capital, he knows, has been adrift for most of its lengthy history. He himself, on various crossings, has entered versions of the city as early as that of the reign of Miklos, who was fourth century A.D., and as late as the somber time of Kartouf the Hapless, right at the end, just before the Mongol conquest in 1412. For Chicagoans, the periodic comings and goings of the city are just an interesting novelty, but for these people it must be a real nuisance to find themselves constantly floating around in time and space. Mulreany imagines that one of the imperial wizards must have accidentally put the hex on the place, long ago, some kind of wizardy experiment that misfired and set up a time-travel effect that won’t stop.
“Half past ten,” Mulreany announces. It’s more like noon, actually—the sun’s practically straight overhead, glinting behind the spooky light of the interface effects—but he’ll stay on Chicago time throughout the crossing. It’s simpler that way. If Duplessis is right the city is due to disappear back into its own era about eleven o’clock Thursday morning. Mulreany likes a 12-to-14 hour safety margin, which means heading back into Chicago by seven o’clock or so Wednesday night. “Let’s get to work,” he says.
The first stop is a jeweler’s shop three blocks east of the Street of Jews that belongs to a Turkish family named Suleimanyi. Mulreany has been doing satisfactory business with the Suleimanyis, on and off, for something like a century Empire time, beginning with Mehmet Suleimanyi early in Basil III’s reign and continuing with his grandfather Ahmet, who ran the shop fifty years earlier in the time of the Emperor Polifemas, and then with Mehmet’s son Ali, and with Ali’s grandson, also named Mehmet, during the reign of Simeon II. He does his best to conceal from the various Suleimanyis that he’s been coming to them out of chronological order, but he doubts that they would care anyway. What they care about is the profit they can turn on the highly desirable foreign goods he brings them. It’s a real meeting of common interests, every time.
Mulreany gets a blank look of nonrecognition from the man who opens the slitted door of the familiar shop for him. The Suleimanyis all look more or less alike—slender, swarthy hawk-nosed men with impressive curling mustachios—and Mulreany isn’t sure, as he enters, which one he’s encountering today. This one has the standard Suleimanyi features and appears to be about thirty. Mulreany assumes, pending further information, that it’s Mehmet the First or his son Ali, the main Suleimanyis of Basil’s reign, but perhaps he has showed up on this trip some point in time at which neither of them has met him before. So for all intents and purposes he is facing an absolute stranger. You get a lot of mismatches of this sort when you move back and forth across the time interface.
A tricky business. He has to decide whether to identify himself for what he really is or to fold his cards and try someplace else that seems safer. It calls for an act of faith: there’s always the chance that the man he approaches may figure that there’s more profit to be had in selling him out to the police as a sorcerer than in doing business with him. But the Suleimanyis have always been on the up and up and Mulreany has no reason to mistrust this one. So he takes a deep breath and offers a sweeping salaam and says, in classier Greek than he had used with the innkeeper, “I am Mulreany of Chicago, who once more returns bringing treasure from afar to offer my friend the inestimable master Suleimanyi.”
This is the moment of maximum danger. He searches Suleimanyi’s face for hints of incipient treachery.
But what he sees is a quick warm smile with nothing more sinister than balance-sheet calculations behind it: a flash of genuine mercantile pleasure. The jeweler eagerly beckons him into the shop, which is dark and musty, lit only by two immense wax tapers. Anderson and Schmidt come in behind him, Schmidt taking care to bolt the door. Suleimanyi snaps his fingers, and a small solemn boy of about ten appears out of the shadows, bearing an ornate flask and four shallow crystal bowls. The jeweler pours some sort of yellowish-green brandy for them. “My late father often spoke of you, O Mulreany, and his father before him. It gives me great joy that you have returned to us. I am Selim, son of Ali.”
If Ali is dead, this must be very late in the long reign of Basil III. The little boy is probably Mehmet the Second, whom Mulreany will meet twenty or thirty years down the line in the time of Emperor Simeon. It makes him a little edgy to discover that he has landed here in the great Emperor Basil’s final years, because the Emperor apparently went a little crazy when he was very old, turning into something of a despot, and a lot of peculiar things were known to have occurred. But what the helclass="underline" they don’t plan to be dropping in for tea at the imperial palace.