The company awoke, if one may call it that, to a ship in peril — the Ejder-i Derya, settling by degrees into the water. Behind them lay the wreck of the night: a djinn banished, a woman got up as a decoy for an exorcism fled by teleportation with her accomplices, and Osman Hamdi Bey robbed both of his journal and of his very recollection of what it held. Below decks the crew laboured in shifts, some bailing, others rigging a pump; and Sidra al-Najjar, looking to the breach, found it already closed — "It appears to have been magically remade," she observed, for the hull had been mended by no carpenter's hand. Presently the captain gave out that the danger was past, and that the Ejder-i Derya would run straight for Constantinople.
As they went on, a second vessel drew alongside, and the passengers were bidden keep to their rooms save under escort. The visitor was no common traveller but the Crown Prince Abd-ul Mejid himself, who came aboard with his guard, greeted Osman with a kiss upon either cheek, and spoke the plain and heavy words: "My father has died." Thus was the death of The Caliph made known, and the prince asked Osman's help in the delicate passage of his succession — "I'm going to need your assistance as I transition into my full power here" — which Osman, pleading his present charges yet not refusing, undertook to give. He then pressed upon the party the hospitality of his house in Constantinople for the night, making it clear they were free guests and by no means prisoners, at liberty to see to their own affairs before whatever task the morning might bring. Sidra al-Najjar asked leave to send a letter to her mother in the city, which Osman granted for delivery on the morrow; and Ahmet Yusuf put into the hands of Jean-Zera Mongé a letter for his own mother, to be left at a hamam — a bath-house — in the Kasimpasha District.
Osman's mansion proved a scholar's kingdom — libraries upon libraries, rooms of antiquities, and a row of well-appointed guest chambers with servants to attend them. Jean-Zera made straight for the books, where a locked glass-fronted case held tomes of magic in Greek and the ancient tongues of the Near East; he made out two governing themes among them — the one cosmological and hermetic, the Kabbalah and the talismanic arts, the other concerned with monsters and peoples and the nature of their souls, with theology appended. Ahmet, ranging over the shelves, knew many of the scripts but was baffled by others, certain characters of the Far East and stranger glyphs besides; and he quietly took down a Turkish volume upon the influence of the djinn, thinking to show it to Sidra.
That evening Sidra turned inward and addressed the presence that shared her flesh, demanding to know what it intended and whether she ought to fear it. It answered that it could sway but a few small things in the world, that it wished only to aid her in her doings, and it offered to explain to her what she was. Elsewhere Ahmet stumbled upon a study furnished with a grand pianoforte and a great map of Constantinople, this last marked over with the haunts and names of the city's underworld — Hano 'the Widow', Chique Manu, Giannis the Cut, and the ruined, bombed-out headquarters of the Janissaries among them. A large tortoise kept that room, and it proved the keeper of the whole house: Ashraf, a curmudgeonly creature who spoke, who chided them for disturbing the household by night and claimed to manage the place whenever Osman travelled.
Gizem Faruki gave her attention to certain texts upon the alteration of memory, and read there of methods ranging from the total effacement of a personality to the nice removal or implanting of a single belief — matter of no small moment, for the company recalled that Osman had written in a cipher of his own devising, so that, the journal being gone, not even he could come at its contents. Jean-Zera, casting a detection of magic across the library, was near overwhelmed by the press of strong auras rising from books and curios alike; and he contented himself with marking out certain Aramaic and Latin volumes to beg leave to copy at his leisure, rather than surrender a night's rest to the scribing of them.
That night a single dream was given to them all: a damp forest path much like the country about the dig, and upon it a house whose presence pressed strangely upon them — a house, one might say, that wished to be remembered — where a child at its dancing struck a handmade grandfather clock and sent it toppling into ruin, the mother's scream still hanging in the air as the shattered pieces drew themselves together again by some magic none of them knew.
Over breakfast Osman explained that Ashraf's gift of speech was the residue of an exposure to wild magic, and confessed that he needed the stolen journal both to recover its knowledge and to clear his own clouded mind. He then deputed the party to its recovery under the colours of "A Certain Community" — the Empire's quiet service — with resources and discretion at their command. To Jean-Zera he gave a sealed letter for one Ahra 'the Wolf', a leader of the Janissaries, to be carried to the Banished Angels in the Kasimpasha District. And Jean-Zera, for his own part, composed by illusory script a ciphered report to his father, arranging its passage through Rufus Dimitrious, a trusted go-between.
There were errands first to run. Jean-Zera sought out Chique Manu, a writer of some fame and a gambler of rather more, but found him indisposed after a long night; Sidra called upon her mother to warn her of an imminent departure; and Gizem looked in upon her bakery and the rooms above it, where her assistant and the assistant's young brother kept both the ovens and the alley-cats in good order. Then, reconvened, they followed their directions into a mean alley of the Kasimpasha District and a plain door marked faintly with Arabic letters. Two loiterers outside seemed sunk in opium, but a closer look showed them wakeful and watching the approach with care. Within, a long hall gave onto many doors; Ahmet opened the wrong one and found an armoury, lit by a furnace and crammed with more weapons than any of them had seen. The right door found, they went down stone steps past torches and a hissing gas-lamp and laid Osman's sealed letter before a guard.
Their escorts brought them to a chamber hung with the spoils of many lands, a carved wolf's head above its door, where Ahra "the Wolf" — a sturdy woman in Janissary dress, commanding what remained of that broken corps — took the letter and took the measure of them. She would help them find Osman's journal, she said, if in return they would work their way into the city's criminal enterprises whilst the Janissaries rebuilt their strength; and she named Giannis the Cut, Hano "the Widow," and Chique Manu as the doors by which they might enter. Asking a moment's privacy to confer — which they were granted — they resolved to begin with the Widow, and a guard led them to her discreet back-room court.
Hano, a feared fixer who dealt as readily with monsters as with men, set them a test: a bounty-hunter of hers lay abed upstairs, fallen into a strange fever. They found him a big man, soaked in sweat and thrashing in his sleep after days of stupor. Opinion divided — some cried contagion, but Sidra named it an affliction of the spirit rather than any active spell or common sickness, and, consulting the presence within her, learned it was no work of a djinn. Jean-Zera's detection revealed the truth of it: a focused, oscillating melody at the base of the man's skull, arcing away — a tether of magic binding him to some outside thing that fed upon his mind. A search of his person turned up old battle-scars but no fresh wound, no tattoo, no ritual mark. Hano told them what she knew: the man was by trade a tailor and by avocation a prolific hunter of monsters, whose last quarry had been a vampire, and who had lately been seeking that quarry near a mosque's soup-kitchen among the poor; doctors and imams both had seen him, and brought him up from utter coma to some movement, but no further.
The tether, Jean-Zera found, pointed a direction, and so to the soup-kitchen they would go. Ahmet, who knew the quarter, led them to the greater hub mosque famed for the feeding and aiding of the poor, where Gizem fell into talk with Nadja, the kitchen's organiser, offering her help and asking after a man last seen at the line some days before. Whilst Jean-Zera watched the queue and Sidra the crowd for any pattern in it, a stranger of some thirty years moved among the destitute offering lodging; and when one grown man accepted, the fellow led him off at once, passing over the children nearby. Uneasy at the sight, Jean-Zera slipped after the pair at Sidra's urging, whilst the others held their places at the mosque — and there the night's account breaks off.