Chapter 18
His eyes were fixed on a sequence of numbers and symbols that meant anything only to those trained to read them.
His lips moved faintly, memorizing the crucial orders one by one.
When he finally lifted his face, his gaze returned to Nirmala.
On Arya's face bloomed a wide smile—one that rarely appeared.
It was not the cynical or bitter smile he usually wore in difficult moments, but a sincere one born of anticipation, of conviction that this time they would arrive first, that this time they would secure the abnormal before the Temporal Cross-Police could create another catastrophe.
Konstantinople, 1101 AD, after the First Crusade.
Just as the uproar of the Byzantine city welcomed them with all its chaos, Nirmala and Arya felt how the atmosphere of 1101 hung thick with something heavier than mere dust and smoke.
At every corner—from grand churches with soaring stone domes to muddy markets filled with the shouts of merchants, from suffocating stone houses to open squares where travelers rested—the voices of preachers echoed without pause.
They spoke of the forgiveness of sins for anyone who took up arms in defense of the Holy Land, of the punishment deserved by infidels deemed perpetrators of inhuman genocide, of a dogma that slowly crept into every layer of society: that anything beginning with the Muslims would inevitably end in ruin.
Nirmala heard it, felt it, and for a moment she imagined how this cultivated hatred would blossom into bloodshed beyond counting in the decades to come.
"We need to adapt quickly," Arya whispered beside her, his eyes alert as they scanned every movement around them.
Several soldiers in worn cloaks passed in front of them, no more than ten paces away, but fortunately they were too engrossed in coarse talk about war spoils to notice the two newcomers who had just emerged from a corridor of time.
Nirmala nodded, and without wasting a second, the two of them sought a hidden corner between rows of cracked stone buildings to change their clothes.
A few minutes later, Nirmala reappeared with an entirely different appearance.
A long tunic of fine bluish-gray wool fell to her ankles, fully concealing the modern contours of her body.
Narrow long sleeves wrapped her arms down to the wrists, while over it a pallium was draped across her shoulders and chest, shielding her from Konstantinople's unpredictable weather.
A plain leather belt circled her waist—sufficient for function and visual hierarchy, without excess.
On her feet, low closed leather shoes with thin soles replaced the twentieth-century loafers she usually wore, flexible enough to step across the slick stones of this ancient city.
Her silver-gray hair was carefully gathered into a low bun, then covered with a pale, thin veil that also concealed the bandage over her right eye.
If anyone asked, she would claim it was a religious medical dressing—something not uncommon in a city with monastic hospitals.
Arya was no less swift in his transformation.
A Byzantine man's chiton of dark brown wool wrapped his body to just below the knees, complete with long sleeves that concealed his tense muscles.
On his left shoulder, a chlamys was fastened with a simple bronze brooch—not gold, because gold meant the palace, and the palace meant questions they did not wish to answer.
Narrow trousers were worn beneath the tunic, paired with ankle-high leather boots suited for walking over the rubble of a city scarred by conflict.
His wristwatch had been wrapped in cloth and hidden deep inside his belt pouch, while the thin leather gloves on his hands could still pass as ordinary working gear.
His slicked-back hair was combed neatly with a bit of olive oil stolen from a stall, removing its modern sheen.
His face remained clean, with only the faint shadow of stubble making him resemble a common laborer rather than a nobleman or soldier.
In the largest market of Konstantinople, as the morning sun began to creep through the gaps between stone buildings and church domes, Nirmala Surdaya blended into a crowd already thick since the seventh hour.
She moved slowly between wooden stalls laden with spices from the east, woven fabrics from Antioch, and warm loaves freshly lifted from stone ovens.
The smoke of roasted meat mingled with the scent of cinnamon and cumin, creating an atmosphere both foreign and strangely familiar.
Nirmala steadied her breathing, aligning her heartbeat with the pulse of the awakening city, while her mind continued to work—recalling what would truly happen eight days from now.
A crusading force numbering between thirty-five and seventy thousand men would gather, prepare, and then march toward the promised land, convinced that their sins would be absolved at the edge of a sword.
Meanwhile, Arya had already darted in another direction, weaving through narrow alleys toward the residences of the papal envoys, meeting military leaders at breakfast over roasted meat and diluted wine, approaching major merchants whose contracts would determine whether tens of thousands of soldiers would starve or eat in the coming weeks.
Nirmala did not need to watch him, did not need to send coded signals or telepathic whispers.
They had been together far too long not to trust that Arya would carry out his task flawlessly—investigating, extracting information, discovering whether anyone had seen something that should not exist in a city that had just endured such a long day.
Amid the clamor of the market, Nirmala began to converse with the merchants one by one.
She started lightly—asking the price of a bolt of blue wool that caught her eye, praising spices whose aroma seemed strong enough to awaken the dead, letting out a soft laugh when a meat seller told the story of a goat that had escaped and been found three days later on a church roof.
Yet between laughter and casual words, with gestures that seemed no more than embellishments to a tale, she began to describe something.
Her hands moved in the air, shaping an image visible only to eyes that truly paid attention.
"Have you ever seen a creature," she whispered to an old cloth merchant whose sight had grown dim with age, "with a body like a human, standing one meter from sole to crown, yet from its shoulders rise five heads upon five towering necks?"
With her fingers, she marked five points above her left palm.
The merchant shook his head, blinking in confusion, thinking perhaps this woman was slightly disturbed by spirits after too much fasting.
Nirmala offered a faint smile, nodded politely, and moved on to the next stall.
To a young spice merchant, curious and sharp-eyed, she added another detail.
"On its body," she said, her voice nearly swallowed by the market's din, "something moves. A kind of liturgy—an ancient church hymn that should not come from such a being."
"And if you hear it for more than two seconds, you will feel your sanity pulled away slowly, like someone drawing the stopper from a barrel of wine."
She leaned closer, her single visible eye fixing sharply on the merchant.
"You will remain alive. You will keep breathing. You will still chew your food and swallow your wine.
But inside your head… empty. Like a vessel drained so thoroughly that not a single drop of dew remains."
To be continued…