A Gibbous Moon Over Constantinople
The tale, as tales of this city so often do, began at a dinner. At the Calvert family's farmhouse upon Thymbra Farm, north of Constantinople, the company gathered amongst guests of some consequence; Frederick and Frank Calvert kept the table, and the talk ran to the local excavations in a comfortable mélange of French, Turkish, and English. Osman Hamdi Bey, a considerable man in the antiquarian line, praised Sidra al-Najjar and young Ahmet Yusuf before the company for their labours at the dig.
As the evening drew on it acquired a second, quieter face of private dealings. Rufus Dimitrious, presented as a guide of the coast, watched the wealthier guests whilst conducting business of his own; Jean-Zera Mongé drew the hosts out upon the dig's discoveries; and the night ended over dessert, where Gizem Faruki's baklava won the table's praise. Toward the small hours Gizem practised the Sufi turning upon the terrace, teaching its steps to the younger girls, whilst in Sidra the sight stirred an unease about her own djinn-touched magic. Then a sudden, violent withering struck a flowering tree before the house, draining the colour from the very ground and leaving every ear ringing.
The following day, at the dig, the boy Ahmet found the tree and a circle of ground some thirty feet across leached wholly of colour. Within the house Jean-Zera read a faint residue of magic, and Rufus prevailed upon a tipsy general to lay hands upon the blighted tree, to no ill effect. Word came of Heinrich Schliemann's mysterious absence, and Osman's frantic hand in a ciphered journal hinted at deeper troubles, whilst Ahmet scouted the dig and covered the party's traces and Rufus carried back a whisper of "a hill and a key."
Bolder then, Jean-Zera and Rufus let themselves into a locked study and turned up research bent upon Troy and a hidden parchment named The Lion's Key, and a narrow crevice besides, opening into a cave of pre-Greek frescoes about a central hearth. Their exploration turned perilous when a great serpent reared up and demanded the removal of the interlopers in the next chamber — Schliemann and Calvert, held within a luminous ward — and after a tense standoff the party broke the ward and copied the working they had found.
Back at the farmhouse, Schliemann proclaimed aloud his discovery of ancient Troy, at which Osman thought it prudent to remind the company of the law upon the export of antiquities. An urgent summons drew Osman back to Constantinople that same evening, and he asked Jean-Zera, Rufus, Ahmet, and Sidra to attend him. Aboard a non-government steamer they beat off a Shade, which Sidra undid; but Osman's journal was found stolen, and a teleport ritual worked upon the ship breached her hull and set her sinking.
The crisis past and the shore gained, the party were welcomed into Osman's house, where they wandered his libraries and artifact rooms — Sidra naming the magical tomes, Ahmet quietly pocketing a Turkish volume upon the influence of djinn — and a shared and troubling dream hinted at magics deeper still. Osman deputed them to recover his journal, and set them upon their first contacts.
The trail led into the Kasimpasha district and to Ahra 'the Wolf', who offered her help with the journal in exchange for the party's hand in certain criminal affairs. They subdued an albasti, a winged thing feeding upon a sleeping man, and, after study of other cursed sleepers, went down into the Undercity, where they met Kore at the Arraf Tavern and were given a coin of passage.
Dividing their forces one evening, Gizem and Jean-Zera took to a clandestine gambling club whilst Sidra and Ahmet looked into disturbances at a cemetery. The club brought an attempted abduction, which the two thwarted before returning to win handsomely at the table; the cemetery brought the mischievous Scavengers, a traded round of sweets and wine, and an invisible, ape-like assailant put down at the last. Bearing its body to Hano 'the Widow' earned the party their reward and their permanent coins of the Undercity, and they made ready for the Festival of Candles — which erupted into chaos as animate shadows stole Chique Manu's ring, a rooftop chase ensued, and the Ghost of March appeared to execute a perfumer in a public display of his power.
Regrouping, the party looked into the Ghost's doings and the meaning of those Sekban uniforms, and returned to Kasimpasha, where Ahra confirmed the journal recovered and set them, as their final payment, against the unquiet dead beneath Saint Benoit Church. Through its graveyard they came, amongst animate cadavers, to a ghost who charged them to break certain seals and slay his bound brother, Vlad Tepes. They faced the tomb-raider Hayriah; a vampire rose, killing her and two of her escorts before it fled; and the party ran it down and destroyed it, recovering artifacts and arms, and afterward sold their findings — a Potion Of Necrotic Resistance among them — before seeking audience with the Ghost.
Interlinked dreams of a sigil then led them to Osman Hamdi Bey's House, where they found selective looting and recovered Osman's true journal, and within it a letter bequeathing his manor and naming the whereabouts of a diviner. They weighed their possible allies, followed leads at the Spectral Hippodrome, and gathered word of the Crown of Sargon and of The Shahmeran bound beneath the Basilica Cistern.
The road led at last to a reckoning with the Egyptian Kavalan Pasha, who put a would-be assassin to death within Topkapi Palace; the dead man's memories, read aloud, set Jean-Zera's face upon the record and the party to fresh strategy. Down into the Basilica Cistern they went, past marrows and a Medusa, and deeper still into a lower prison complex, where they freed a sorceress — and there, for the present, the chronicle stands.