Chapter 3

“Brutes! I have done nothing wrong! Let go!” the gangly trader whined and kicked as the bored guards hauled him to the fortified prison fort on the east bank of the Bosphorus.

Iskander passed them by, caught the man’s eye, smiled and gripped his right wrist with his left hand.

The merchant howled with incessant rage: “That is the boy! He set me up, he sold me those barrels! Look at him making a mockery of the Sultan’s justice!” The guardsmen however, did not even pay his words any heed.

Without a second thought, the killer sauntered through the afternoon market and inspected the rest of the goods. “Hmmh, nothing particularly interesting today.” He sighed listlessly and passed up on the opportunities for horsing around with some other merchants. Today’s kill was relatively unexciting. The Sultan seemed to rely more and more on diplomacy these days rather than anything else and only preferred to use his assassins to tie up loose ends. Killing a poison dealer with his own product: the irony was not lost on Iskander, but he kept wondering whether all the weapons training was ever going to help him again.

Mehmet was waiting anxiously for the debrief back at the palace and so Iskander broke off his Sisyphean task and hurried to the ferry he took that morning to return to the Western bank. The old ferryboat captain wordlessly held out his hand. Iskander dropped three akçe, nodded stiffly at the captain and slid gracefully onto the deck. Hempen ropes and sails hung so low that he had to perpetually duck until he found the starboard rail. In the distance, the Topkapi Palace dominated the skyline with the Aya Sofya poking out just behind it. Galata tower pierced the sky just North and beyond that lay the estates of the Sultan’s family, viziers and even the late Hayreddin Barbarossa’s abode.

Iskander stared past the palaces and mosques out to where the Sultan’s ships were docked. Magnificent trading galleys and fearsome battleships littered the port, but Iskander’s attention turned to the corsair’s swift tartanes. The idea was planted and he knew Mehmet would throw a fit, but Iskander was not going to spend his life chained to one city, carrying out meaningless, unskilled assassinations until he was forced to retire in a second-rate palace with a second-rate harem reject. He would enlist the next morning.

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Akçe �" the currency used in the Ottoman Empire at the time.