Bedros Kuyumcuyan is a well-dressed, well-groomed Armenian gentleman of middle years, the head of a large extended household that shares one of the city's several-storey villas, and — as Jean-Zera Mongé learned last of all — an assayer at the imperial mint: the man who warrants that a coin is true metal at its true worth. He is also a member, or a remnant, of the Lodge of Byzantia, and something of a magical hand besides.
His name surfaced twice over. Ashraf recalled that Armenian up from the mint among the Lodge's old roster, and Osman's correspondence bore him out: a run of frosty, coded, contractor-like letters, the most recent some two and a half years old and turning on the accessibility of the room — Osman pressing that it be made so, and problems with it named but never spelled out. A magical commission, the company judged, and very possibly the Lodge sanctum itself. With a letter of introduction from Chique Manu, Jean-Zera called at his villa; Bedros took him in warily, would not speak plainly in the street, and confirmed within that the Lodge is all but dead — riven at the catastrophe the city calls the greatest good, its factions no longer on speaking terms, with himself and Osman and one other the neutral brokers who had failed to mend it.
Skeptical that any good would come of it, he nonetheless agreed to attend the Grand Negotiation as Jean-Zera's guest, and to draw in what other elements of the Lodge he could. At the table he was visibly nervous — deferring his own introduction in a panic — but rose at last to speak for reconciliation: of a tradition older than the Ottomans and sure to outlast them, whose care is for the mending of ruptures; and he held out that, were a quorum reached, there were levers that might be pulled to make a transfer of power smooth and bloodless, contingent on the council's agreement. When the company excused themselves, he stayed behind — to follow up, he said, in his own time.