The tale resumes where the last left off — with that fearful crack still ringing in every ear at the farmhouse upon the plain outside Constantinople. It was Ahmet Yusuf, the curious boy of ten, who first ran to learn its cause; and at Thymbra Farm he found a thing to trouble older heads than his — a tree, and a full thirty feet of ground about it, leached wholly of colour, the very hue drained from leaf and soil, and yet the tree itself alive, with no fissure nor wound in the earth to account for it. Within the house, Jean-Zera Mongé passed a hand of magic across the bedchambers and caught the faint residue of a transmutation lingering in one of them, though he judged it prudent, for the moment, to let the matter lie. Out of doors Rufus Dimitrious prevailed upon Général Patrice de MacMahon — still nursing the previous night's wine — to lay his hand upon the blanched tree; the general reported neither chill nor any other effect for his pains. The noise had worked upon Osman Hamdi Bey more strangely, for the polymath fell at once to writing furiously in a journal set down in his own cipher. Then Sophia Schliemann came with word that her husband was nowhere to be found, and Osman charged the company to gather the others and seek out Heinrich Schliemann, and Frank Calvert with him if it came to that. Ahmet, wearying of the tree, wandered ahead toward the half-dug excavation with its potsherds and column-bases, and trampled, in his boredom, whatever traces the ground might have kept; while Rufus let fall the fragment of talk he had carried from the night before — a matter, he said, of "a hill and a key."
Rather than take the road with the rest, Jean-Zera doubled back to the house on the pretext of fetching a cartographer's instruments, and Rufus went with him. The old and janky lock of the study gave readily to the sailor's fingers, and within they found what a scholar's den ought to hold — shelves of the classics and a marble bust of Homer keeping watch over them — but also volumes bookmarked and annotated to a single obsession: the search for Troy. In a hidden compartment of the desk lay a parchment in ancient Greek, titled The Lion’s Key — a spell, so far as Jean-Zera could construe it, for the opening of locked or sealed doors within ten feet, though he suspected the copy imperfect, its workings miscopied here and there. They took a spare key from the drawer and left the study, to their small discredit, unlocked behind them.
On the way to the dig it was Rufus who spied a narrow crevice in the hillside — a passage barely wide enough for one — and called the others to it. By lantern-light they went down into what proved a chamber of great antiquity, its walls part-collapsed and its stone tumbled, the first hall of the Ruins of "Troy". There Sidra al-Najjar, the veiled girl whose djinn rode her senses, laid her fingers to the wall-paintings and marvelled — "These are curious; I haven't seen these in a couple thousand years," she murmured — while Jean-Zera studied the frescoes and pronounced them older than the Greeks themselves, and of no small worth to learning. Ahmet, with the discretion of a practised magpie, slipped a decorated potsherd into his pocket, though the jars and vases stood untouched in their places. Deeper in, the passage opened into a broad hall with a hearth at its centre and columns about it, its northern wall half fallen and a black hole gaping down into the dark; Rufus caught upon the air a faint reek of rotten eggs, and Jean-Zera knew the plan of the place for a megaron — the great hall, or throne-room, of the old kings.
From that pit there rose a Serpent, some eight or ten feet in length and very thick of body, which fixed the company with its regard. It was Gizem Faruki — the dervish and baker — who stepped forward and addressed it courteously in Turkish: "May we have your hospitality? We apologise for intruding." The creature, whether flattered or merely curious, consented to forbear, on the one condition that they rid the next chamber of certain "interlopers" who disturbed its peace; then, warning them to be quick about it, it slid back down into the depths.
In the adjoining chamber the interlopers proved to be the missing men. Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann stood frozen and unmoving within a luminous ward scribed into the soil, their eyes fixed upon an Ophidian Door graven with the image of Aphrodite and fitted with two serpent-handled pulls whose eyes were set with jewels. Rufus, recalling some childhood tale of Medusa, urged the others to keep their distance; Jean-Zera fell to sketching the ward and reasoned it bound up with the procedure of the door-opening spell; and Sidra knew the snake-handled imagery for the tale of Heracles, who strangled serpents in his cradle. By dint of prodding and patience the two scholars slowly recovered their motion — Frank the sooner, doubling over to be sick upon the ground.
No sooner had Heinrich his wits again than he declared the door the very threshold of ancient Troy and demanded it be opened at once, brushing aside every caution. When Gizem carried word of his intent to the serpent, the creature re-emerged without a sound, wound itself about Heinrich, and bore him off toward a separate way out, while Frank fell to panic and cried for aid. In the confusion Rufus went down the serpent's hole on a rope and came upon its nest — a clutch of eggs, and among them treasures: a bronze goblet, an incomplete Ouroboros necklace, a silver-owl-pin brooch, a scatter of ancient coins, and a wide triangular arrowhead. Gizem and Frank meanwhile followed the serpent's course to an outdoor mouth upon the neighbouring hill, and there found Heinrich cast down, senseless but living, and presently come to himself. Jean-Zera broke the glowing ward by the simple expedient of kicking dust across its circle, and set down a careful drawing of door and chamber against future need. Upon the hillside the company argued for prudence, and Heinrich — finding no ally, not even in his own Frank — grudgingly agreed to defer the business and return another day with a proper party. Before they quit the farm, Jean-Zera made a fair copy of The Lion's Key, returned the original by stealth to its hidden compartment, and kept the purloined key for himself.
Back at the house Heinrich trumpeted his discovery of "ancient Troy" to any who would hear, Frank offering what measured objection he could, until Osman reminded the room that to carry antiquities out of the Ottoman Empire was no small crime. Then came to Osman an urgent summons calling him back to Constantinople that very evening, and he begged the service of Jean-Zera — with Rufus, Ahmet, and Sidra as his assistants — to which Frederick Calvert consented, releasing the young ones into his charge. In private Rufus prevailed on Jean-Zera to appraise the serpent's hoard: the broad arrowhead, they found, might be mounted and would lend its venom to any shot fired with it — an "ankle-biter," as the sailor named it; the ouroboros necklace was incomplete and of some cultic significance; and the goblet no more than a dirty bronze vessel of unknown use. Osman bought the goblet, the necklace, and the ancient coins for eighty silver in all, while Rufus kept back the owl brooch and the poisoned arrowhead.
That evening the party took passage aboard a Non-Government Steamer furnished with parlour, sleeping, and cargo decks — Osman in a private room, Gizem in a better one, the rest in shared berths. In the quiet of the sleeping-quarters Rufus turned the owl brooch in his fingers until its silver bird sprang into a living owl, real for some twelve hours together, which he hid beneath the blankets. In the parlour Osman sat to chess with a paşa — a lord of the empire — and Sidra and Jean-Zera, watching, spied a checkmate two moves distant and saw him bring it off. Rufus found again an old comrade in the Greek Captain, a fellow smuggler and veteran of the Greek war of independence, who commended to him a black-market fixer of Constantinople named Giannis the Cut — cautioning him, though, to keep such dealings well clear of Osman and his scruples against looting.
It was Sidra who first perceived that the band's Singer was not wholly of this world, and was working a spell of Darkness quietly into her song. Presently a steward begged Osman to attend a woman taken ill upon the sleeping deck; Osman, Gizem, and Jean-Zera went in to her while Rufus kept the door and Sidra and Ahmet came down after. Within, the "woman" sloughed away into a wicked Shade, and the door sealed itself by magic; Gizem closed with the thing hand to hand, Osman forced the door again with a Knock, Rufus fired from the threshold, and Sidra, drawing upon her djinn, loosed a radiance that set the shade screaming into vapour. In the same moment the Darkness spell swallowed the greater part of the Parlor Deck in blackness; and as the singer fled she flung a warning at Rufus — to "seek out the Ghost of March."
Returning to his quarters, Osman found his journal gone and his very memory of its contents somehow sealed away from him. Below, in the hold, Sidra and Ahmet came upon a ritual circle freshly swept clean, where the singer and her confederates — the hunched Mervhan among them — finished their reading from a scroll, the pentagram flared, and the whole company of them vanished. Examining the circle, the two young ones understood that the rebound of that spell had breached the hull: water was coming in, slowly yet surely enough to doom the voyage unchecked. Ahmet ran to rouse the Greek Captain, who fell to hailing a nearby vessel for aid — and there, with the Steamship beginning to settle into the sea, the night's chronicle closes.