Empire of Lies

26

“It’s an incantation,” the tattooed man said. “A spell.”

Standing by the bed in the windowless room at the hospital, Ramazan glanced at his wife, his mouth agape. “A spell?”

“My prisoner found it, in Palmyra.” He spoke in a slow tone, the semiconscious haze he was under making his words stumble out in a slight slur. “In an old temple. Carved into the wall. I made him give it to me…” His face tightened under a disturbing frown. “Then I killed him. To make sure. No one else knows.”

Feeling his pulse throbbing inside his ears, Ramazan asked, “How does it work?”

“It’s Palmyrene. Just… words.”

“So you just say these words and you… you travel across time?”

“There’s only one rule. You can’t travel to a time when you already exist. It won’t work. And it’s… it’s…” The man went quiet as his face clouded with discomfort, and his eyes roamed the room in a wider arc than before.

Ramazan’s pulse quickened as worry flushed through him. Was the man getting too conscious? Was he having reservations about the information he was divulging? Moving fast, Ramazan’s hand reached across to the IV lines and slightly increased the flow of the drugs that were keeping his patient at the edge of full consciousness. He flicked a quick look at Nisreen, whose expression was also gripped with uncertainty and worry, then turned back to the man in the bed.

“Something this remarkable can’t be simple, of course,” Ramazan cajoled him. “And yet you mastered it.”

The man’s eyes roamed the ceiling for a moment, then settled back on Ramazan. “Yes,” he said, his voice lower than before.

“Please explain,” Ramazan prompted him.

“You say the words and put in the number of days—moons, yes, the number of moons—that you want to travel. In a specific place, in the incantation… and, voilà.” The frown turned into a slanted half smile. “Without clothes. Naked.”

Ramazan was struggling to stay focused. Too many questions were crowding his mind—then he noticed the man’s eyes turn to him and stare, his brow furrowing with consternation.

“Who are you, again?” he mumbled.

He was gaining consciousness. His gaze sharpened, suffused with more clarity than before, his expression taking on a hint of the menace he had shown before the surgery. “What day is this? Where am I?”

He turned his head slowly, as if drawn to something he remembered. To Nisreen.

She quickly lowered her phone again as their eyes met, a moment that triggered further confusion in the man’s face.

Ramazan’s breath caught. The man was crossing a critical threshold of consciousness. There was no time to waste. He had to try to keep him in that semi-alert state just a little bit longer to get that one last answer out of him—the most crucial one—even at the risk of the man waking up completely.

He increased the dosage again, slightly, knowing that it could very soon overwhelm his patient and send him back to sleep, all while trying to come up with a quick reply that wouldn’t raise the man’s suspicions. He studied the man’s reaction, trying to gauge the drugs’ effect. “I’m your hekimbaşı, excellency,” he told him, using the traditional word for chief physician. “You’ve got a little fever—that’s all. You were telling me all about this miraculous Palmyrene incantation you discovered. You remember it, don’t you?”

The man seemed even more glassy-eyed and disoriented. After a few seconds, he muttered, “The incantation… yes.”

Ramazan discreetly reached for a pen and for the patient’s medical chart, flipping it to the back to reach a clean sheet of paper. “So if you now wanted to go back to your time… what would you say? What is the incantation?”

And with Nisreen edging in to make sure her phone captured every sound and recorded his lips forming the mystical words, and Ramazan scribbling what he heard with rapt attention, the tattooed man closed his eyes in concentration and mouthed the incantation, slowly, hesitantly. He stopped to explain where the number of moons was to be inserted, clear-minded enough to avoid getting pulled back in time from his hospital bed inadvertently, before concluding with the rest of the spell.

The long sequence of words coming out of his mouth were strange and completely alien to them, a string of syllables in an unrecognizable, long-forgotten language, one that had fallen out of use for centuries. And yet they had a beauty to them, a lyricism, a cadence that seemed at one with their phenomenal power.

Ramazan felt an indescribable sense of awe. He turned to Nisreen, whose face was also beaming with astonishment. The small windowless room, the hospital, Paris itself—it all fell away, sights and sounds disappearing from around them as they stood there, spellbound, momentarily lost in their own flights of fancy, their minds somersaulting through the possibilities now within their grasp if this was indeed all true—a brief, magical moment of profound wonderment, but one that was also rooted in terror. It was short-lived as reality soon tore through their reverie, reminding them of where they were and of the precariousness of their situation.

Ramazan reached over and adjusted the IV feeds. “Thank you, your excellency. Now you should get some rest.”

He watched as the tattooed man’s eyelids slid down and the man’s breathing settled into a calm repose.

“You need to leave,” Ramazan told his wife.

“We need to talk.”

“I know. I know. But not now. I’ve got surgeries. I need to get ready. And you need to get out of here.”

“When then? This can’t wait until tonight. We need to talk about this. Lunchtime? Can you get out?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can take a lunch break.” She pressed.

“All right. I’ll call you as soon as I know when.” He then pointed at her phone. “Did you get it? All of it?”

“Every word.”

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

They were about to step out; she reached for his arm and stopped him.

“Be careful,” she said. “Make sure no one else finds out about this.”

Ramazan said nothing at first. Then he nodded. “I know.”

They stood there, the ramifications percolating inside them—then Ramazan opened the door, looked around, and led Nisreen out.

They were approaching the wide door of the intensive care unit when it swung open and Fonseca walked in, one of the nurses alongside him.

Ramazan reacted quickly, moving in front of Nisreen and spreading his arms welcomingly as he exclaimed, “Moshe, I was coming to find you.”

She understood just as fast. She tilted her head down and adjusted her veil, veering away from them as Fonseca replied, “We’ve got a busy morning, brother.”

Ramazan didn’t dare look back to see where Nisreen was, but he sensed her moving off. “Is there any other kind?” he asked the surgeon gleefully.

“Let’s get started then.”

As they walked back into the ward, Fonseca asked, “How’s our illustrated patient doing?”

Ramazan tried his best to keep his tone even. “I haven’t brought him out yet.”

Which surprised the surgeon. “Still not? Any complications I should know about?”

“No, not really. I just wanted to give his pain a chance to subside some more.”

“You can’t keep him asleep forever,” Fonseca said, slapping Ramazan on the back. “Let’s wake him up when we’re done. I’ve got to admit, I’m curious about the man. All those strange markings… He could have an interesting story to tell.”

“Maybe,” Ramazan replied, feeling an uncomfortable twist in his gut.