The Festival of Candles ended in blood. The Ghost of March and his companions, got up in the uniforms of the Sekban soldiers, cut down the perfumer Nazif where he sat beside Chique Manu, charging him with betrayal and declaring his responsibilities supplanted — a matter, they let fall, that touched the Council of the Ninth Life. The Bostanji Imperial Guard proclaimed a state of emergency and moved to break up the crowd. Gizem Faruki bent over the body in the seating and found the perfumer quite dead, whilst Chique Manu sat by in shock. Miray Ruba Mata Biru approached the Ghost to beg an audience; "Now is not the time, little one, but soon," he answered, and withdrew, his people splitting in several directions and melting into the city as fresh guards arrived to restore order and send the people home.
Chique Manu pressed Jean-Zera Mongé to carry the evening on in private over something stronger; Jean-Zera declined, and the fixer took his leave. The four gathered instead at a late café over bread and tea to set their observations side by side. Gizem had marked that the Ghost's retinue wore the dress of the Sekban — the very corps that had destroyed the Janissaries and was itself disbanded afterward — and the company fell to wondering whether the Janissary-minded agitators of the coronation and these Sekban-clad followers of the Ghost were one underground force or two.
Resolving to learn who would now hold the door to the Undercity with Nazif gone, they went that same night to his perfumery stall in the Grand Bazaar to see who would control passage below after his death. Under cover of the emergency, and with a Pass without Trace to smooth their steps, they picked the lock and slipped into the darkened shop unseen by any patrol. There they met Sharif the Strong Fur, a black cat in a small red fez who spoke, and who announced that he had taken up Nazif's office of granting undercity passage, for coin or for password. When Jean-Zera began the gesture of a detect magic, the cat opened his ankle with a single slash — "You can use magic anywhere else, but not here" — for the volatility and secrecy of the place, he said, would suffer no spellcraft. He asked Sidra al-Najjar, with thanks for her earlier kindnesses in the Undercity, to return on the morrow to tend four gravely ill cats and to take up some larger matter besides, and he accepted her word for her companions. He was no modest animal: he could see the Ghost of March, he said, "when [he] wish[ed]"; "no one's my equal"; and "all cats report" to him "since we defeated the monkeys" — here he told the old Istanbul tale of the cats' overthrow of the monkeys. Nazif, he added, had been "relieved of his duties" by the Ghost, and the matter lay between those two. The company withdrew for the night and slept, this time, without a shared dream.
After breakfast at a friendly bakery they made their way through the guarded lanes of the Kasimpasha District to Ahra 'the Wolf', who had already sent to Osman Hamdi Bey to have them summoned. They laid out for her all that had passed — the Ghost at the festival, the killing of Nazif, his removal from the undercity door, the Sekban dress of the Ghost's men. Ahra confirmed the recovery of the journal and set them, as their final payment, to lay the "unquiet dead" beneath the ruined Saint Benoit Church, she being herself much taken up with the Ghost's doings. Pressed politely, she allowed that several state armouries had been broken into that very night and great stores of state weapons carried off, all of a piece with the Sekban-styled activity; that none of her own people had come to harm in the Janissary-themed protest at the coronation, which she called brave but ill-advised — to which Miray added that they had looked in on one outspoken protester's residence. The only road below that she knew, she said, ran through Nazif's location; she asked to be told of any change in its price, counselled buying a map in the Grand Bazaar, and named the dead that troubled the church by an old word, "Nef-tun."
By history and local talk they gathered that Saint Benoit had been the first Catholic church, raised in the fourteen-hundreds and left derelict after an earthquake some hundred and twenty years past; that the neighbourhood spoke of demon infestations, ill noises in the night, evil dreams and rising dead; and that antiquarian gossip bound the place to a parashad of a century ago and to treasures perhaps still lost within. Jean-Zera bought a good map showing the less-frequented ways in, among them an entrance through the graveyard leading into the church, and called on Giannis the Cut at the Andropoulos Estate, who told him their party had been underbid by one Hayriah but agreed to a quarter's cut if they raced to a swift result. Jean-Zera mentioned the shadows that had gone after Chique Manu's ring at the festival; Giannis scoffed at the fixer and traded banter, showed off curios legal within that jurisdiction, and offered a set of thirty complementary marble statues at two thousand five hundred gold apiece. The company shared out the map and chose to go in by the graveyard in daylight, to steal a march on rival seekers.
In the quiet of the cemetery they found a weed-grown trapdoor with an iron ring and went down a stair into a dark passage. The ways below did not answer to their map, and they judged themselves in a basement added later, beneath the church's mapped level. At a doorway stood a European — not Turkish — Suit Of Armor With Red-Glowing Eyes near a row of chests; when Jean-Zera's Mage Hand tried a lid, it spoke, first in Turkish and then in a tongue Sidra's djinn named for Romanian, warning "You may not take anything," and undid the spectral hand. Further on, a fallen wall opened on a rotted barracks that had lodged soldiers rather than clergy, and in a larger hall several animated cadavers shambled out to attack, dealing heavy, crushing blows and giving off an oily, poisonous secretion, with things that crawled beneath their split skin. Upon one Jean-Zera knew the heraldry of House Tepes, from curiosities his father had once shown him — "This is the sigil of House Tepes!" — and so bound the dead to that lineage. Sidra tried the corpses in Romanian, asking safe passage; they turned their heads toward her, but what understanding they had stayed unclear. Between Gizem's wild-shape bite-and-drag, Sidra's spells — Dissonant Whispers, and later a Sacred Flame — and Jean-Zera's blows, the cadavers were put down, though not before maggot-like vermin got briefly into one companion's mouth and had to be spat out. Jean-Zera's Detect Magic caught some presence deeper in the complex, and they supposed that whatever it was had been sustaining these dead.
Beyond, a broader chamber opened like an arena, its margins ringed with spectral crowds of ghosts seated and silently watching. In the midst stood a handsome, noble-seeming ghost who greeted them warmly in a thick accent — "Adventurers here at last!" and "I haven't had visitors in so long" — saying he had watched their exploits and grown weary of the place. His brother, one Vlad, lay bound ahead; he begged them to break the seals and slay Vlad, that he himself might at last go free, for he had been fixed there for centuries to keep his murderous brother from escaping, and had commissioned these very chambers soon after the church was built. Only, he warned, spilt blood would strengthen Vlad, and they should shed none in any confrontation. The company chose to put off the reckoning with Vlad and to search the other rooms first.
They found a small Christian prayer-room that felt at peace, of little use but for a place they might barricade and rest in; a second chamber that proved a true torture-room, its shackles and rusted irons giving off no magical aura; and, past rubble and a locked door, a modest storeroom where a small box held fifty pieces of silver amongst the stores. Then, clearing further debris, they broke into a breached chamber where a figure in tattered priestly vestments — a ghoul — crouched amid the gnawed remains of priests, and it flung a severed limb at them and rose to attack. In the same moment came Turkish voices from behind — "It sounds they went this way" — and so the scene closed upon humanoids drawing near.