As the sun dipped below the horizon, the four — Sidra al-Najjar, Jean-Zera Mongé, Gizem Faruki, and Ahmet Yusuf — threaded the crooked alleys of the Undercity, meaning to work their way back toward the perfumer's shop and Kore's theatre for a performance. Ahmet, ever the resourceful scout, canvassed the bookshops for a buyer for a peculiar book in their keeping; he turned up a possibility or two, but in the end thought better of parting with it.
The evening turned when Jean-Zera felt a hand — a gnome's, one Frank's — slip into his pocket, and marked accomplices drifting to block the exits. Muggers showed themselves on every side: an Elveda, a Kasap Yusuf, a Melek, an Ejder, and others besides, closing a ring about the company. Sidra tried a Charm Person upon Frank, who shrugged it off and demanded money instead, whilst Ejder and his fellows moved to flank, the one brandishing a poor, shabby weapon and threatening to use it.
Jean-Zera opened with Unsettling Words and then cast Dissonant Whispers upon Ejder, who reeled in pain and staggered away; Ahmet called thorns onto his quarterstaff — a shillelagh charm — and swung at Elveda, missing as she kept her distance. Kasap Yusuf, an orc, rushed Gizem with an axe and missed, his reckless arcs plain to read; Melek, a tiefling, worked some unseen spell to no visible effect; and Ejder, from partial cover, slung a flat stone that struck Jean-Zera hard. Gizem made the most of the orc's recklessness and landed a flurry of strikes that hurt him, whilst Frank drew a pistol, grazed Jean-Zera with a shot, and vanished amongst the crates and tarpaulins.
Then the leader stepped forth — a dwarf his crew named Usta Kerim, master of the Child Gang — and cast a dagger that wounded Sidra, who answered with a searing magical rebuke that burned him for all his dodging. Ahmet advanced and clubbed Elveda to the ground, cowering and spent; the orc swung on, wild and wide, until Jean-Zera, shifting his position, drew a heavy axe-blow that felled him. Usta Kerim pressed Sidra at close quarters with a scimitar and wounded her; Ahmet slipped behind cover and reappeared as a black fox with a blue eye-shine to rejoin the fray; and the orc struck the recovering bard down a second time. Sidra's Sleep washed over the orc and broke against him with a strange, chilling cold, and it was Melek who then knelt to Spare the Dying and stabilise the fallen Jean-Zera.
The young ones began to waver: Ejder gathered up the cowering Elveda and slipped away, crying out in thieves' cant; Frank popped up to snipe the fox upon a rooftop, then hid himself again. The orc seized Sidra and hurled her aside, bruised and prone — whereupon she blasted Usta Kerim with fire that flash-burned half his beard and set him raging. Ahmet the fox leapt down from above to bite the dwarf and spoil his footing, and Gizem finished the work with a rain of measured, unkilling kicks that laid the dwarf leader out cold.
At Melek's urging the orc had paused a moment and demanded "10 para" — a handful of the smallest coins — to let the party pass; but that was moot now. As the dust settled, a talking street cat named Grey spoke from Sidra's shoulder, bidding her seek the Council of the Ninth Life and promising to put in a word for her to "Sharif." The muggers, revealed as youths kept under Usta Kerim's thumb, weighed the notion of leaving their leader and asked only for somewhere safer to go. Upon the dwarf they found a heavy purse of eight-and-fifty gold; Gizem kept ten for herself and set the rest aside for the children, and when Frank tried to pocket it, Jean-Zera disarmed him and reclaimed the bag for the youths. At a nearby dining-theatre Kore agreed to place the young ones — with the Ghost of March's help — for twenty gold, leaving the children twenty-eight for their keep.
Kore spoke then of the governance of the Undercity: the "ghost" was a single leader with an order behind him that kept the peace, his standing better in some quarters than others but broadly reckoned legitimate; and at the party's asking, Kore undertook to say an exceptional word that they might meet the man himself. Ahmet, for his part, let the fox-shape fall away openly and owned his double life — Ahmet Yusuf upon the surface, and in the çarşı, the covered bazaar, Miray Ruba Mata Biru, a halfling druid who minds children and wards against the evil eye, much in the manner of Hano 'the Widow'.
That night all four dreamt the same dream — a father-figure, enraged, struck down from behind by the mother, who wielded a bloodied desk-clock — and Jean-Zera discerned a fifth-order enchantment working upon the woman. Come the morning, Jean-Zera rode with Osman Hamdi Bey to the parade-ground near Topkapi Palace, toward the Hagia Sophia, the others gathering close by; Osman remarked how long it had been since the royal house was so properly honoured by such a procession. The Bostanji Imperial Guard marched with bands and banners, and the new daguerreotypists caught the scene as Abd-ul Mejid came forward to be enthroned. Upon the steps of the Hagia Sophia he received the Sword Of Osman, and the guards flung little bags of money into the crowd.
The gift soured at once: some threw the coins back, shouting that "This gold belongs to the Janissaries," and Osman's close guard — drawn, it was murmured, from a certain community — quietly drew the ringleaders out of the press. Osman pressed the company to quit the public scene and led them to a private brunch, where he declared flatly that the Janissaries had been wholly destroyed and their place taken by modern troops, and met Jean-Zera's surprise as one indulges a child's naïveté. He saw clean through "Ahmet Yusuf" for a disguise, yet politely let the boy keep his mask without a word.
The day's inquiries followed. Ahmet worked the hamam — the bath-houses — for talk, and learned that those who had cried out at the parade were paid in kind, their homes turned over and their families taken for questioning; slipping into one such ransacked house, he judged the search a deliberate hunt for papers and hidden compartments, not mere robbery nor a common fright. Sidra combed a private library for alchemical receipts and found plausible formulae behind obscure, coded names of ingredients; Papa Mert suffered her to watch him work, though he bade her sit quietly and taught her nothing by the hand. Gizem, met by progressive co-religionists at a friend's restaurant, was pressed to spend whatever access she had to Osman upon the cause of pluralism and the shelter of the minority communities.
That evening the company took an outdoor table with Chique Manu near a shadow-theatre — a piece by one Mihrimah Hatun — amid the candles of the festival. Mid-play, the puppets Karagöz and Hacivat peeled themselves from the screen, slid along the ground, and lifted Chique Manu's gaudy, ruby-studded ring clean off his hand. Jean-Zera slipped a Mage Hand beneath the table and sent it chasing the shadows across the rooftops, passing the whole business off for part of the show, whilst Gizem went up the walls to the roof, grappled a shadow, and tore the ring loose as the figures drew back, spoke the old apology-line of the shadow plays, and dissolved to a patter of street applause. Grateful, Chique Manu made Gizem a present of a banknote worth some hundred gold.
The perfumer Mosolite Nazif, proprietor of the perfumery, joined the table, and he and Chique Manu spoke of a small delay in a delivery and of business to come; Jean-Zera, watching, observed how the fixer forever touched the ring, a luck-charm plainly dear to him. Amongst the festival's many cats there moved, oddly, tortoises bearing candles with small satchels strapped to their shells, and Jean-Zera spied men crouched watching from the neighbouring roofs. Then the fuses on those satchels burned down: blinding little bursts went off across the square, with distant gunfire sounding elsewhere in the city. Into this came an old figure in the uniform of the Imperial past, bearing a tempered-steel whip and a couple of dozen followers at his back; Nazif went white — "it's Ghost of March." The Ghost of March whirled the chain-whip about the perfumer's neck, yanked, and broke it, pronouncing that Nazif's tributes had done harm to his people and that he had new partners now.