The Janissary Safehouse keeps to a poor quarter of the city, and keeps its own counsel besides. Its door is contrived to sit unremarked amongst its neighbours, so that a man might pass it a hundred times and never mark it for what it is; and that, of course, is the whole art of the place. Here the operatives of the Janissaries gather out of the light to talk and to lay their plans, secure in the knowledge that no unwelcome ear attends them.
It was here that a Janissary lieutenant brought word of Alexander, a recent defector to their cause, who had gone down into a certain reach of the catacombs some two days before and had not come up again. The lieutenant was at pains to note that this passage was a thing apart from the catacombs men call the "Secret Church" — a distinction that would, in time, prove to matter.