When the caique touches the marble stairs, the pasha flings himself onto shore. His mouth is open, sweat rolling down his face.

He races from one end of the burning house to the other, moaning. He feels the heat on his face. He can no longer hear the screams.

But he hears, instead, someone call his name.

“Fevzi Pasha! Pasha!”

Two arms thrust a bundle from a window. The pasha reaches up.

The roof sags, dropping a sudden flurry of flaming shingles, which spin to the ground. The pasha leaps back. The figure at the window is gone. The window is gone.

The flames are driving a firestorm: the pasha feels the wind snatch at his cloak, drawing him back toward the yali.

He cradles the bundle to his chest and stumbles away.

The gate bursts open, and a crowd of men surges in with buckets, hooks, ladders. But it is far too late. As the men run by, the pasha hears timbers break and the sky is lit up.

He does not turn back.

Summer 1839

1

Cannon boomed across the Bosphorus. White smoke, the color of mourning, billowed low over the water.

Sultan Mahmut II was dead. He had come to the throne of Osman as the turbaned ruler of a medieval empire, and had died in a frock coat and a fez. In his long reign he had given the Ottoman Empire French saddles, a constitution of sorts, modern drill and percussion rifles. He had destroyed the ferocious Janissaries, as an obstacle to progress, and he had lost Greece to the Greeks and Crimea to the Russians and Egypt to an Albanian adventurer called Mehmet Ali Pasha. He had built himself a modern palace, at Besiktas, where he maintained a harem like sultans of old.

The harem was in pandemonium.

“You are the Kislar aga, Ibou. You must help them to leave,” Yashim said quietly. “The sultan’s harem is your domain. The sultan has died, and the women must move on.”