Empire of Lies

59 VIENNA

They landed in hell.

They made the jump successfully and landed together, facing each other, exactly in the same position they’d been in when they uttered the last word an instant ago. But that instant, that blink of an eye in which the very fabric of their bodies seemed to explode limitlessly before reassembling itself with infinite brutality, was 252 years away.

They were in a very different Vienna now.

The noise was the first sensation that assaulted them, and it was deafening. Cannonballs and mortar bombs were hurtling through the air before crashing down in bone-shaking explosions and kicking up geysers of fire and stone. Flights of poison-tipped arrows escorted them over the city walls, arcing across the smoke-filled sky before lunging downward in whistling death dives. Musket detonations crackled in the distance. And screams, all kinds of them, echoing out of the mayhem, coming at them from all corners: the battle cries of the city’s surviving defenders fighting on the walls, the howls of the wounded and the dying, the moans of the sick and the starving. Strongest of all, though, was the smell: a rancid, nauseating stench that weighed down the air around them and seeped into their naked pores like a malevolent rising tide. It was unlike anything they’d ever smelled before, but, given what they’d read, its cause was no mystery. It was the smell of rotting flesh combined with the stink of feces, the “bloody flux” from the dysentery that was decimating even more of the city’s frail occupants than the Ottoman’s cannon and blades had.

It was the smell of death.

The onslaught of sensations pummeled them, pounding clarity into their groggy, thrumming heads, and their eyes fell into focus to find each other, naked as before, in the narrow alleyway between the two rows of old buildings.

Kamal cupped Nisreen’s face with his hands, as if to make sure it really was her, to confirm to himself that they had made it alive.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded, her eyelids batting nervously.

Then his eyes swung away, taking in their surroundings with urgency. The roof of one of the buildings backing up to the alley was caved in, and the wall of another was missing a large chunk that had been eaten away by a projectile. The alleyway itself was littered with rubble and debris.

He turned to Nisreen just as a cannonball slammed into a nearby building. The ground shook under them, but Nisreen didn’t flinch. Instead, she was fixated on something behind Kamal, at the far end of the alleyway.

“Kamal,” she said, her voice crisp and urgent, her lips quivering, her finger pointing behind him.

Kamal turned. He saw what was making her tremble: between mounds of rotting trash, bodies, a couple dozen of them or more, were piled against the wall at the far end of the alley. A cloud of insects was feasting on them, as were some rats. Through eyes that were still sizzling from the jump, Kamal realized there was something else, too. People—live ones, or barely so, three scrawny, disheveled figures—were using the pile of bodies as bait to catch anything edible.

Kamal knew the survivors had, by then, almost run out of food supplies. They had eaten all the dogs and cats in the city and had been reduced to hunting rats.

The figures were so skinny, so filthy, their clothes so tattered that it was hard to tell if they were men or women. Not even when one of them spotted Kamal and Nisreen, alerted the others, and all three started moving toward them, rasping something incomprehensible in what they assumed was Viennese German, the language of Vienna at the time.

“Let’s get out of here.” He grabbed her hand and started running.

They emerged from the alleyway into a slightly wider street, their shocking appearance—naked, their bodies clean and healthy, as if they’d just stepped out of a royal bathhouse—attracting more startled attention and drawing in more frenzied locals, who somehow found the energy to start rushing toward them.

Despite the imminent threat of capture, the sheer power of what Kamal and Nisreen saw was too stunning to ignore and just froze them in place.

Most of the buildings up and down the narrow street were heavily scarred by the war. Rubble was everywhere, as were more dead bodies, some piled up against the walls, other, fresher victims still lying where they fell. A couple of bone-thin, filth-covered survivors pulled a two-wheeled cart on which more bodies were stacked. Dust and smoke hung in the air, soaked in that oppressive, omnipresent stench.

The city had endured weeks of the most savage shelling and fighting Europe had ever seen. Even without the apocalyptic mutation, this Vienna was very different from the city they’d glimpsed before the jump. Its scale was much smaller. Despite being the fourth most populated city in Europe at that time, being enclosed by the massive fortifications meant that it couldn’t spread outward. It was a tight warren of medieval streets crowded with stone houses that were three or four floors high, most of which were topped by sharply slanted tiled roofs, some of which had dormer windows. Scattered among them, the tall spires of several churches jutted up into the smoke-tainted sky. Saint Stephen’s Cathedral and its soaring south tower dwarfed them all, looming over the crippled city from its central position. Miraculously, it was still standing, and right now it was acting as a beacon and drawing Kamal toward it.

“This way,” he hissed as he pulled Nisreen away from the growing posse, but moving barefoot over debris-strewn ground wasn’t easy. Shards of stone and tile were cutting the soles of their feet, hobbling them and causing them to falter. More locals, drawn in by the shouts that neither Kamal nor Nisreen understood, converged on them.

Kamal led Nisreen around a corner, but more men appeared, this time a half-dozen scraggy Austrian soldiers in grimy uniforms who froze at the sight of them. He pushed her behind him as he backed up against a wall, the soldiers and more locals rushing him. He slammed away at the outstretched arms that reached for him and tried to punch and kick his way free, but he was easily overwhelmed by their number. One of them pointed angrily at his tattoos, particularly the one on his right shoulder—the one marking him out as a member of an Ottoman detachment—and he was thrown to the ground, where the battering worsened. He could hear Nisreen’s screams of “No” and “Stop” from behind him, and tried to turn to see what state she was in, but the blows were coming in too hard and furious to allow it.

Bloodied, out of breath, and crippled by pain, he was pulled to his feet. He twisted around, searching for Nisreen, and saw her there, by the wall, held in place by several leering men, a look of sheer terror gripping her face.

“We’re here to help you,” he wheezed, “we’re friends.”

But using Ottoman words to plead with the rabid Viennese mob only made things worse and triggered more shouts, slaps, and punches. He tried to make out the faces of his tormentors, tried to see if there was a leader among them, someone he could focus on and try to connect with, but they all blended into each other, a sea of desperate survivors who could only see a tiny, unexpected opportunity to vent their rage.

They pulled and prodded Kamal and Nisreen, kicking and screaming, through the wrecked city, the mob growing with every step. They were soon at the fortified walls, where the prisoners were shoved and dragged up endless steps until they reached the wall-walk on top of the rampart. The noise was now deafening, and Kamal could barely think straight, but the few thoughts that did coalesce were ones of tortured regret and anger at the state of Nisreen, at what she was being subjected to with him. Reaching the firing step that overlooked the ditch between the inner and outer fortifications only made things worse.

The sight was surreal.

Savage close-quarters fighting was taking place on the mountains of rocks and rubble from the partly collapsed walls. Swarms of Ottoman soldiers and Viennese defenders were using muskets, swords, halberds, and pikes to slaughter each other, even resorting to rocks and bare fists. There were dead bodies lying scattered everywhere—on the rubble, in the pitted and cratered ditch at the base of the ruins—some of them whole, some of them missing a limb or a head. The ferocity and the gore were staggering. He’d read about the battles, he’d imagined what it must have been like, but there was a major difference between seeing it in his mind’s eye when reading about it and actually being there, in the thick of it, and witnessing it firsthand.

A quick glance at Nisreen told him she was at least as shocked and horrified as he was.

Beyond the walls, the ground outside the city’s defenses was a maze of trenches, lines of them, a testament to the blood and sweat of the five thousand sappers who had been ripping out the ground for weeks. The trenches, which sheltered elite janissaries poised for assault and light siege batteries to support them, ran parallel to the walls as far as the eye could see. They were intersected by trenches that led back to the Ottoman camp: tens of thousands of multicolored tents, a fifteen-mile-wide veritable city laid out in a crescent formation, home to all the warriors who had answered their sultan’s call and made the long pilgrimage to subdue the infidel. They were also home to more than thirty thousand villagers—men, women, and children—prisoners from the small towns ravaged by the Ottomans on their march to Vienna. Some of them would be chosen for slaughter in full view of the city’s defenders as a demoralizing spectacle, while the rest would be carted off to a life of slavery in empire territory. The entire spectacle of horrors was playing itself out to the deafening blare of the Ottomans’ mehter military bands, their kettledrums, cymbals, and horns echoing across the killing fields and propelling their men forward.

To his immediate left, on the plongée at the top of the parapet, he saw something that didn’t register at first, not until the full horror of it sank in: shriveled, deformed severed heads impaled on pikes. And, if it were even possible, something even more ghastly: flayed skins of men nailed to the wooden posts. Inhumanly gory displays intended to taunt and demoralize their besiegers.

He had read about that, about what the Viennese avenging mobs did to captured soldiers and to those they suspected of being spies or saboteurs in their midst. The Ottomans’ savagery was being repaid at every possible opportunity.

A repayment that now awaited Kamal and Nisreen.