Grown canny in its methods, the company resolved this night to divide itself. Gizem Faruki and Jean-Zera Mongé would to a clandestine gambling club in the company of Chique Manu, whilst Sidra al-Najjar and Ahmet Yusuf looked into certain disturbances at a Cemetery in a middling, respectable quarter. That she might move unremarked amongst the gamesters, Gizem put on a man's dress and swagger — a figure she named, in her own wry phrase, a "Turkish Marlena Dietrich" — and the bystanders, seeing her at Jean-Zera's elbow, took the two for partners.
The Hidden Tea-House Club received them behind beaded partitions and lush furnishings, its card-tables busy and its backgammon board livelier still, its custom running to cosmopolitan older men, though one Frenchwoman held her own admirably at the backgammon. Chique Manu — a poet grown rich in the trade of fixing matters for other men — spoke of wide travels across Europe and North Africa, and of his present labour to finance the Janissaries, the better to loosen his house's dependence and set its fortunes back in balance.
Meanwhile Sidra and Ahmet slipped through the unlocked cemetery gates after dark and essayed a quiet approach, until Ahmet caught his foot on a gravestone and went down with a clatter, at which a faint chittering in the dark abruptly ceased. Sidra spied a monkey-sized, lemur-eared silhouette upon a headstone, smoking a hookah, before it darted from sight. When they called out in Turkish to share the pipe, high-pitched voices clamoured on every side, demanding "cups" and "candy," and the pair found themselves ringed about — one voice asking, "Are you with Invisible Attacker?" and another, "Did you bring the candy?" Sidra drew baklava and sweets from her pockets, which the nearest creature snatched and stuffed away, chipmunk-fashion, reaching greedily for more; and she worked a small thaumaturgy — a minor conjuring — to raise a cloud of smoke, to general cheering, as one of them balanced the hookah upon a rock to prepare it. Ahmet recalled the folklore of the Scavengers, mischievous fae given to petty theft and small trouble, surely the very "evil spirits" the gravekeeper had feared.
The Scavengers told how the Invisible Attacker had "took the tree" they lived in, pointing to a much larger tree two hills over, and would share no cup with it. They displayed besides a cache of some twenty bottles of wine and sundry jars, a scavenger pouring a measure into the pair's cupped hands to taste. Sidra and Ahmet agreed to restore their home; but their stealthy approach to the large tree failed, for stones came hurtling down out of it, and a heavy rock struck Sidra clean out of her senses. Ahmet dragged her to cover, revived her with a healing charm, and took the measure of the unseen assailant. Sidra loosed a Fire Bolt into the tree, whose upper branches took light and lit the whole ground, and by that glare she made out the contours of a spindly, roughly five-foot-tall, ape-like thing moving invisibly amongst the flames. Guided by her word, Ahmet struck it with a Fire Bolt of his own — it barked in pain and beat out the small flames clinging to it — then flung a rock that caught it beneath the ribs and knocked it off its branch. His Sleep spell did the rest: the creature slackened, fell, and died of the fall. Sidra called up water to douse the blaze before the living tree could fully catch, and Ahmet's Spare the Dying confirmed the thing was dead. They bore the corpse back to the Scavengers, told them the tree was safe, and withdrew with dispatch as the little fae uncorked their wine to celebrate.
Back at the club, Gizem had been learning backgammon from the players whilst she read the room, the Frenchwoman playing competitively on. Rami Sharif, an Egyptian man of business lately come from Paris, staked Jean-Zera two hundred gold to enter a higher game, to be repaid only from his winnings; the offer was accepted. As the play wore on, Rami remained winless, Rashad grew visibly irked, and Jean-Zera's fortunes drifted from slightly down to up — until a great hand: Jean-Zera laid down a full house, Rashad a broad straight, and Chique Manu, to a stunned silence at the table, a royal flush.
The evening's second face showed itself in a lull, when Rashad pressed a blade to Chique Manu's collar, hauled him toward a concealed back door, cast down a device of sulfurous smoke, and fled with him into a waiting carriage. Jean-Zera failed to spring aboard the moving vehicle; he and Gizem seized an unattended one and gave chase, Gizem driving by ear through the dim streets and choosing the right fork to close the gap. Sighting Rashad dragging his captive down, Jean-Zera attempted a hard turn-and-leap to cut them off, crashed, and hurt his leg, losing his moment. Gizem closed to melee; Rashad — a kabadayı, one of the city's street-bravos — flew into a rage and missed his stroke at Chique Manu. Jean-Zera flung a vicious mockery to rattle him, and Gizem beat the tough senseless through his resistance, freeing the fixer at last. Chique Manu thanked Jean-Zera, pressed a single para — the smallest of coins — into Rashad's slack hand as his "winnings," and led them back to finish the game, where Jean-Zera swept the closing hands, repaid Rami's two hundred gold, and rose from the table three hundred to the good; Chique Manu clasped his hand — "Pleasure. We'll have to do this again sometime."
For their part, Sidra and Ahmet carried the creature's body to Hano 'the Widow' at her home, and she, well pleased, allowed that the cemetery's trouble was ended. She gave them a Silver Yatagan — a curved Ottoman yatağan, a short sabre, wrought in silver — a set of thirty Silver-Tipped Throwing Knives, and two hundred gold, asking after their skill with ranged arms; of the knives she remarked, "most of the time you don't need them. But when you need them, you need them." They halved the knives, fifteen apiece; Sidra kept the yatagan; and of the gold Ahmet took a hundred and fifty and Sidra fifty. Chique Manu's invitation followed — to keep the Festival of Candles the day after the Padişah's crowning — and the party resolved to attend both coronation and festival.
They descended thereafter to the Undercity and, after some haggling, bought Permanent-Entry Coins — "fast passes," overpaying for the ease of coming and going — and in the Thieves Bazaar Jean-Zera purchased healing potions enough that each of them carried one. Sidra thought to buy light armour, but her djinn warned so strongly that armour would spoil her spellcraft that she let it be. The stalls offered a Knock Spell Scroll at two hundred seventy-five gold, Boots of Elvenkind at a thousand, sundry poisons and particular antitoxins, and forged identities and deeds besides; Gizem asked after goggles of the night and such darkvision wares, and found none for sale. Jean-Zera won the first goodwill of Mert, a brusque Undercity alchemist, by respectful persistence; Gizem felt herself shadowed, off and on, by a tail she could not name, and kept her guard the higher for it. Seeking a buyer for a tome lifted from Osman, Jean-Zera came upon "Sif's Books & Manuscripts," a cramped rare-book shop whose Tall Tiefling Proprietor, Sif, curt at the first, warmed to a negotiation; and poring over a recovered spellbook he made out four further spells within it — Parquet Lock, an abjuration; the Mantle of the Sophists Avicenna, a divination ritual; Solomon's Everlasting Wrath, an evocation; and Conjure Animals — meaning to scribe or cast them in due course. Then the company drew together again, took its rest, traded the night's tales, and made ready for the Padişah's coronation and the Festival of Candles to follow.