The night's hunt found the company scattered through the darker lanes of the city. Sidra al-Najjar had drifted from the mosque and come to herself in a still corridor of warehouse-fronts and upper storeys, a street she did not know, with unease upon her. Ahmet Yusuf meanwhile trailed a suspicious pair — a lure and his intended mark, talking of lodging for the night — down ever-emptier streets, while Jean-Zera Mongé shadowed from behind, keeping his place though the quarter ill suited his appearance, and Sidra came up by a parallel lane.
There appeared before them an uncanny thing: a winged creature in the seeming of a woman, spindle-limbed, its hair indistinct, which took the lure's hand and turned toward the drowsing the mark in the alley. A wave of supernatural dread broke over the watchers and held them from closing in; Jean-Zera murmured a warning and a word of heart to Ahmet. Away at the mosque kitchen, meanwhile, Nadja, a self-possessed volunteer, was pressing Gizem Faruki on whether the practice of Islam might suit those non-human folk raised up by magic — a question the dervish answered from her own inclusive Sufism. Ahmet, for his part, named the creature: an albasti, a feeder upon dreams that hunts the sleeping mind; and Jean-Zera knew its method too, the passing of a hand across the eyes to bring on slumber.
Ahmet moved boldly, feigning acquaintance with the mark — a practised "come along with me" — and tugging at him to wake him, so that the albasti drew back as the man steadied himself upon the boy. Sidra, still shaken, climbed to the lip of a rooftop to watch, and put her question to her djinn, which sensed a leech-like thing preying upon others. Then the albasti's face resolved, close to, into a grille of vented flesh without proper nose or mouth; it laid a hand across Ahmet's eyes and forced him magically to sleep in the very arms of its devotee.
Jean-Zera answered with dissonant whispers, a music of pain that struck the human helper, drove the breath from him, and sent him staggering off down the street, letting Ahmet fall. Ahmet, for his part, "woke" within the albasti's dream — a blazing, counterfeit desert of endless dunes, where a fully veiled figure told him, "You are not equipped for this landscape. Let me help you," and then dissolved into sand, the oasis with it, leaving him to his despair. Upon the roof Sidra crushed a Nazar Bead and blew its dust at the creature, laying the evil eye upon it that its next stroke might go awry; then she loosed a Fire Bolt — which, rather than strike, ran through the albasti and into some victim bound to it elsewhere, so that a piercing scream came echoing back through the thing.
The mark, loosed from his trance, ran flustered to the mosque and told of a near-robbery begun by a child, and so pointed Gizem to the alley. She sprinted the length of the district with the step-of-the-wind and came upon the albasti at the dead end; her first blow missed, and the creature lunged with clawing hands and a chill "bite" of its vented face, and missed in its turn. In the dream Ahmet saw at last that the dunes and sun and wind were all physically wrong, knew the place for contrived magic, and forced himself awake — at a brutal cost, for the waking flung him down again, overcome. Gizem steadied him upon the cobbles and called Shield of Faith about herself, a shimmering ward, while Jean-Zera's Healing Word drew Ahmet back to his feet, weak but able to fight.
Ahmet spoke words in a tongue none knew, and his quarterstaff twisted into thorned wood; with it he dealt the albasti a heavy blow. Sidra called down Sacred Flame from the roof's edge to scorch it, and Gizem finished the work with a flurry of blows that beat the thing senseless — whereupon the many dream-tethers fastened to it withered away. Uncertain even of its pulse, they bound the inert body, rolled it in a cast-off rug, and bore it out of that ill quarter.
At Hanno's they unrolled their prize before Hano 'the Widow', a sharp-eyed patron and huntress of monsters, who was well pleased, paid them twenty-five gold, and gave Gizem a Handaxe +1 for her trouble. She bade them carry word to Ahra 'the Wolf', the Janissary leader, that she was much impressed by Ahra's recent recruits. And it was here Sidra's djinn confided a thing from the fight: that Jean-Zera's fierce cursing had worn thin the veil between the world and the land of the dead, so that the corpses nearby might have risen — though, mercifully, none did.
Afterward Jean-Zera searched Osman Hamdi Bey's library for the like of this cursed sleep, and found records of afflictions that had held their victims slumbering for years, reckoned magical, but no named predator behind them. Ahmet pored over a rare tome he had earlier pilfered and discovered in it a rigorous secret history, wherein many a known event concealed its magical duels, its assassinations, its meddling by non-human hands. And that evening Ahmet sounded out a regular of the hamam, the bath-house, upon the matter of the Undercity, and was teased for his pains toward the Thieves Bazaar and "the Ghost of March" — a lead, it was implied, best approached with care.
Once more a dream was shared among all four: a warm wooden house where a little girl cradled a dead cat that twitched back into life upon a rising magical breeze, her mother scolding from behind — "No glowing lights under this roof" — even as the creature stretched and the child rejoiced; and it ended in a grinding of clockwork that swelled until it woke them, each in his own lodging, unsettled.
Over the morning's tea Gizem and Sidra weighed the auspiciousness of such shared dreams in the terms of their Sufism, and agreed to keep the particulars among themselves for the present. Sidra then went to her mother to ask about the Undercity, and had of her — wary but not unwilling — a great coin bored with a hexagonal hole, a toll-token for one person, and a word of caution besides.
At Nazif's Scents in the Grand Bazaar, while a shopman plied Gizem with perfumes, Sidra marked a finely dressed figure slipping through a rear curtain from somewhere below. Gizem asked Nazif — a prospering perfumer of eclectic custom — for passage to one Kore; he agreed, led them to an old stone door, took Sidra's coin for the toll, and set them down worn and ancient stairs into a carpeted stone hall, and through a guarded arch into the bustling Undercity, a place thronged with tieflings, half-orcs, half-elves, and other folk visibly altered. The guards there directed them to the Arraf Tavern, where Kore — a beautiful singer of near-human seeming — was arranging flowers upon the stage. At her word Mervhan, a half-orc of seven feet with arms uncommonly long, brought them food and drink, and they watched her late-morning turn. In the pause of it Kore and Gizem fell to discussing Sufism and its heterodox practice underground, and the place in it for the non-human; Gizem shared sayings of Rumi and a brief demonstration of the whirling. Then Kore, not wishing them beholden to any middleman, had Mervhan bring Gizem an Undercity coin-pass of her own, like the one that had admitted them at the gate; while Sidra fell shyly in with the local children and began to make herself some friends.
Jean-Zera, mid-morning, called upon Chique Manu — a well-dressed man in a fez and collarless coat, freshly risen from a large breakfast, who greeted him warmly: "It's good to see you. How's your father?" Jean-Zera confessed he had not heard from his father in some while, and spoke of a chance meeting in the south-east of France; at which Chique Manu let fall that he had met the elder in those parts some months before and "taken his return fare" — a hint of gambling losses, and of obligations beyond mere money. He bade Jean-Zera come that night as his escort to the Karakoy Casino, though he would answer for his own purse; and he explained, with some amusement, that Ahra's Janissaries came begging him for means, and that he doled out just enough to keep them dependent and beneath his hand.
Ahmet meanwhile sought a private word with Hano "the Widow," offering his help in exchange for passage to the Undercity and word of the Ghost of March. She told him to go by way of Nazif's Scents and to say only that he sought Kore, for a fair toll — cautioning that to drop her own name was unwise, and that Nazif might overcharge him. A report of "evil spirits" in a graveyard of the Upper City she made light of as likely exaggerated, yet worth the party's looking-into, easy work beside the albasti; and she bade him settle the graveyard before he pressed her further about the Ghost of March, whose weight, she warned, he did not yet grasp.
At last the four came together at Ennis's, a restaurant near the Grand Bazaar, where Sidra produced an excellent sketch of the revived cat from their dream to anchor the talk, and all agreed to keep the dream's particulars close. They laid their course: to go deeper into the Undercity, to look into the graveyard disturbances of the Upper City, and to take up Chique Manu's invitation to the casino. There remained only Osman's word, brought later to Jean-Zera, of an invitation for all four to view the coming parade and crowning ceremony, some days hence, with arrangements offered; Jean-Zera accepted for them all, Gizem noting privately how the great man's "suggestions" carried the force of commands that people somehow obeyed. And against the casino, Gizem made ready a more masculine cast of dress, the better to deflect scrutiny during the outing.