Chapter 19
The spice merchant stepped back, his face pale.
"You speak of a demon, woman," he hissed, his voice trembling.
"You speak of a creature that should exist only in the sermons of monks about the end of days."
Nirmala did not answer.
She only smiled—the same thin smile—then walked away toward the next stall, leaving the merchant with a pounding heart and a mind suddenly crowded with questions he did not wish to ask himself.
In the market of Konstantinople, still pulsing with life, among thousands who did not know that in eight days some of them would die on foreign soil, Nirmala kept moving, kept asking, kept sketching with her slow-moving hands, searching for traces of a five-headed being with a liturgy of death in its body—a creature that eight days from now would turn an ordinary sandstorm into a tragedy history would choose to conceal.
One by one, the merchants answered with a shake of the head.
The old one with dimmed eyes shook slowly, as if trying to recall something that had never happened.
The young one, brimming with curiosity, shook quickly, his eyes still holding remnants of fear from Nirmala's description of the sanity-stealing liturgy.
The butcher who had lost his goat the day before shook his head while laughing, thinking this was merely a joke a little too dark for the morning market.
The cloth seller, weary from lack of sleep, shook his head without truly listening, his thoughts perhaps drifting to unpaid debts or a feverish child from the night before.
The pale spice merchant could not even shake his head—he only stared at Nirmala as she walked away, his mouth half-open, still trapped in the image of a five-headed being singing its own liturgy of death.
Nirmala wandered until the sun climbed higher, until the shadows of the stalls shortened and the merchants grew busy with waves of customers.
She spoke with nearly everyone in the largest market of Konstantinople—from the baker at the eastern edge to the knife sharpener in the western corner, from the old woman selling chicken eggs to the boy offering to clean shoes with a damp cloth.
And every answer was the same.
Never seen.
Never heard.
Do not know.
Perhaps in another market.
Perhaps in another city.
Perhaps only a nightmare born of too much wine before sleep.
Nirmala accepted each response with a polite nod, with the same thin smile, with the patience she had honed over years of wandering through corridors of time.
When at last she felt it was enough—when there was no stall left she had not visited, no merchant left she had not spoken to—Nirmala drew a long breath and decided to stop.
She bid farewell to several of the friendlier merchants with a simple excuse.
There was work she needed to attend to at her place of employment.
They nodded in understanding, busy with their goods, none asking further about the woman with silver-gray hair and a pale veil concealing the bandage over her right eye.
Konstantinople was too large a city to pay too much attention to a single stranger who came and went.
Nirmala stepped away from the clamor of the market, leaving behind the scent of spices and roasted meat, threading through narrow alleys that eventually widened into quieter stone streets.
She walked with steady steps, passing multi-story stone houses with wooden windows mostly shut tight, passing a small church from which faint morning hymns drifted, passing children chasing one another between piles of hay.
Ten minutes on foot from the market, in a dead-end alley inhabited by only three modest stone houses, Nirmala stopped before a wooden door already beginning to rot at its base.
The house was small but sturdy, its thick stone walls holding back the heat of summer and the cold of winter with equal resolve.
Two wooden windows on the upper floor faced east, catching the morning sun, while a single entrance below was flanked by two dry plant pots long neglected by their previous owner.
Nirmala drew a simple iron key from the folds of her stola, slipped it into the lock, and pushed the door open with a soft creak.
This was the temporary house she had purchased three days before their arrival in Konstantinople—a small investment that would serve as a hiding place, an operational base, and a resting space during their stay in 1101 AD.
Inside the silent stone house, accompanied only by the groan of old wood responding to each draft through the window cracks, Nirmala sat cross-legged on the packed earth floor.
A sheet of coarse paper lay spread before her, held flat by two small stones to keep it from curling.
In her hand, a pen she had brought from the twenty-first century moved across the unfamiliar surface, leaving trails of metallic blue ink that would become an anomaly if discovered by others.
Every twenty seconds, without fail, her hand paused briefly before drawing a perfect circle around one or two words she had just written.
Her movement was ritualistic, like a nun reciting prayers in a language only she understood, or an executioner marking the names of those condemned to death.
The reader would never know which words Nirmala circled.
Perhaps names.
Perhaps places.
Perhaps dates.
Perhaps something entirely unrelated to what appeared on the surface.
What was certain was that each circle was a knot in the web she was weaving, each marked word a coordinate on a map only she could read, each stroke a message to her future self—or perhaps to Arya, should something happen to her before this mission ended.
Nirmala wrote in a silence broken only by the whisper of wind and the creak of wood, her single visible eye fixed on the paper while the other remained hidden behind the bandage, watching shadows ordinary people could not see.
Inside her head, a murmur kept turning, a confession she would never speak aloud.
There was no detailed data about the Abnormal she hunted in Konstantinople in 1101.
No secret reports stolen from the archives of the Temporal Cross-Police, no eyewitness accounts gathered during her wanderings, no certain clue about the form, habits, or movement patterns of the five-headed creature with the sanity-stealing liturgy in its body.
All she possessed was a gap in manipulated history, a peculiarity in records too immaculate, a premonition born from years of hunting abnormals through corridors of time.
And that premonition had led her here—to Konstantinople, to the bustling market, to merchants who knew nothing.
Yet from seventy of the hundred merchants she had spoken to that morning, there was one common thread she could not ignore.
Not about a five-headed creature.
Not about a liturgy of death.
But about a place.
They spoke of it in whispers, with averted eyes, with gestures as though warding off evil spirits.
The Mire Lands, somewhere in Central Anatolia.
A region which, according to the pronouncements of village elders, had swallowed many pilgrims and merchants who stopped there to rest.
And the strangest part—the most illogical, the most compelling to Nirmala—
No trace was ever found.
No bones left behind.
No clothing abandoned.
No scattered merchandise.
To be continued…