Beneath the earth, where our previous account left the company, the chamber gave up its first secrets: silver coins scattered amongst the stones, and — beneath a ragged hole in the ceiling — an Undead Priest at its supper, feeding upon the corpses of three or four of its fellow clergy. The party had scarcely composed itself before this spectacle when Turkish voices carried down the passage behind them — "they went this way" — and Sidra al-Najjar, the veiled girl of thirteen, crushed one of her sorcerous beads and blew its dust toward the approaching men to hinder their advance. Two came on armed, the one shouldering a polearm and the other a handgun; yet at the sight of a child and of Gizem Faruki beside her they faltered. "Who are you with? Why are you down here?" the first demanded. Sidra answered smoothly that they had been given a tip of zombie activity and had come to see to it — "We were given a tip that there was zombie activity and we came to check it out. Do you know anything about that?" — and when the man asked whether her parents knew her whereabouts, Gizem supplied, with a baker's composure, "She's my apprentice." The reply gave the men pause, and they deferred the matter to their chief, Hayriah, who presently arrived: an East African tomb-raider in the dun canvas of the expedition trade, who rounded upon Gizem and demanded the return of every article taken and an immediate withdrawal from the site.
Sidra answered the demand by calling a sacred flame down upon the Undead Priest, the sudden radiance lighting the vault and unsettling the armed men further; Hayriah, unwilling to be gainsaid, ordered her people to herd the party into a larger room, the better to divide them and clear the site at her leisure. What followed came swiftly. Gizem worked the priest with unsettling words and a withering mockery, Miray — the druid — set his quarterstaff alight with the old shepherd's charm and charged, though he managed only to knock a limb aside; and it was Jean-Zera Mongé who ended the thing, two precise cuts opening its belly and laying it down. Stepping out past Sidra, gore upon him, the half-elf flicked the filth against the wall — a gesture that so startled one gunman that he loosed a panicked shot, wounding Jean-Zera and barking at him to kneel and give up the knife. Hayriah advanced with a purple light crackling along her staff and struck his hand, forcing the blade from it, and ordered Gizem in turn to submit.
Gizem would not. She drove her elbows into two of the escorts and set herself across the passage to block them, whilst Miray conjured a moonbeam — a standing shaft of cold radiance — that fell upon one of the armed men and, in its sudden brilliance, made the company loom the larger in Hayriah's estimation. Sidra loosed a bolt of fire at a gunman, the flame catching and flaring through the moonbeam's mist and drawing Hayriah's whole attention to herself. The tomb-raider reached to lay a withering touch upon the girl — and in doing so stepped into the moonlight, which seared her catastrophically; the intensified radiance dealt so grievous a wound that she dropped where she stood. Jean-Zera turned dissonant whispers upon the gunman caught within the beam, and the man fled in a panic that carried him through the light and hurt him the worse; another guard, failing to shove past the half-elf, caught up Hayriah's body and made to bear it away, taking his own measure of the radiance as he went.
It was then that the night turned. Sidra al-Najjar's djinn surged with a terror all its own, and a cold mist gathered beyond the moonbeam and drew itself up into the shape of a Vampire, which stretched its arms and observed, with the ease of a thing long confined, "It feels good to be out of that cage." A flick of its wrist conjured a ring of floating blades that wept blood, and these it loosed upon Hayriah and another man, killing both outright. The company weighed flight against battle — the creature had sealed the way out with its field of blades — and chose to fight: Miray shifted the moonbeam directly onto the Vampire, whose scream confirmed what they had hoped, that radiance was its bane. Under that steady, cold attrition the body at last evaporated, leaving behind a suit of antiquated armour that clattered to the floor. The party gathered the fallen plate, debated amongst themselves the old rules that bind such creatures to their coffins, and resolved to confer with the Vampire's ghostly brother; and so Radu the Handsome appeared, thanking them for freeing and destroying his brother and declaring his own burden lifted before he departed. They inspected the Bound Casket: its chains were broken and its lid thrown open, the runic wards about the platform yet active, and the casket itself empty. Sidra's djinn, for its part, gave up a quiet relief that the deeper threat had passed.
They turned next to Hayriah's effects, her quarterstaff and a satchel that yielded a mouldering, metal-framed memoir ascribed to Mehmed II — a text of no small worth to the antiquary — though the manner of her earlier blast remained unfamiliar to Sidra even after careful reckoning. A long rest followed, and with it a curious grace: the whole company shared a single dream, of a little girl's flight after her mother had killed her father, of a sister who named her a "murderous witch" as the stones about her lifted with a latent magic, and of the child fleeing into the dark. Waking, they explored a Private Library and a shrine — the library holding a Turkish treatise on military tactics by Radu the Handsome and, under glass, the Malkoç Family Banner; the shrine dedicated to John III Sobieski, King of Poland and the victor of Vienna, with a pristine karabela Saber displayed beside it. They broke the glass and took the saber, the banner, and the book, no enchantment resting upon any of them.
Movement between the rooms disturbed scorpions, and the chamber to the right proved an infested nest ruled by a great broodmother that spawned lesser ones. Sidra advanced and loosed a wave of thunder down the corridor, flinging and wounding the creatures and laying bare the threats in both rooms. Gizem crushed a swarm with a dagger-stroke and her fists, and when two large scorpions closed on her, one seizing her in its pincer, she spun the grappler into its fellow and so turned aside a venomous sting. The broodmother's vast tail scooped up Miray and dragged him into the nest, pinning an ankle and raking him whilst the small swarms bit; Jean-Zera loosed his dissonant whispers upon the broodmother and drove it recoiling into its den, whilst Sidra burned down the last of the large scorpions in the hall. Gizem cut down the broodmother within the nest, danced through to stamp out the remaining swarms, and freed Miray; and from the carnage they harvested scorpion tails, a great claw, and a bag of smaller parts against future alchemy.
In a cabinet of heirlooms they found three rings of value, an amulet, and desk-boxes holding legible correspondence between Mehmed II and Vlad Tepes concerning the rule of Wallachia and the sending of Vlad II's sons — Vlad and Radu — to the Ottoman court. A secured door gave onto a Laboratory of broken vials and petrified herbs, from which they recovered one intact bottle of a viscous black liquid for later identification. A further door of steel, etched with runes that matched the casket's own, Jean-Zera opened by ritual; a booming voice thick with a northern accent answered from within, and one who named himself Njal the Tepegöz came forth, and after him four undead guardians in succession — a Varangian Guard of Viking aspect with a greataxe, a Janissary bearing a tüfek (the musket) and a yatagan (the curved short-sword), a Mounted Warrior with war-pick and kite shield, and an aged grenadier in the Persian style with spear and grenade. Miray stationed the moonbeam in the doorway, and each guardian took a severe searing in crossing it; the Persian Grenadier died at length to Sidra's hellish rebuke after hurling a firebomb, Gizem felled the Mounted Warrior with a single heavy blow so that his horse reared and dissipated, the Janissary was hemmed by a shifted moonbeam and finished by Gizem and Jean-Zera together, and the Varangian — identified as a former Byzantine Varangian — fell last under the light's attrition and their blades. They gathered the greataxe, the Janissary's tüfek and yatagan, the war-pick and the Byzantine kite shield with its family crest, and the Persian's spear and grenade.
Returning to a Warded Chamber, they found an animated suit of armour that a note named "Boyar Luca"; it acknowledged that Radu's charge was complete, sat, and went still, and a probing for magic showed the room's enchantment spent. Chests there held three vials of holy water and a note from Radu counselling their wise use. A nearby cell-block held noisy, unseen prisoners, and the company, judging discretion the better course, withdrew to a defensible position rather than open it. The Armory they did open, and it yielded spears, short swords, crossbows and quivers of bolts — five of them enchanted — together with two magical short swords.
After some ten or twelve hours beneath the ground, the party climbed out and stashed the greater part of their plunder in a Bathhouse Safehouse, holding back a suit of plate mail and a Necrotic Short Sword for their own use. Their local dealings then ran their course. Ahra 'the Wolf' thanked them for laying the site to rest, told them she had already returned a journal to Osman — who wished now to speak with them — and gave them leave to keep or sell the rest. Mert the alchemist appraised the scorpion parts, pronounced the black liquid a Potion Of Necrotic Resistance, and approved of the great claw. Giannis the treasure-broker took in the two books — Radu's treatise amongst them — the Malkoç Family Banner, the karabela, the Mehmed–Vlad correspondence, and the jewellery, and promised a handsome return: fifteen of his own twenty-five per cent advanced at once, the remainder to follow upon sale. As for the journal, Osman examined it and pronounced it an expertly wrought forgery whose cipher had already been cracked; the true article, he reported, was being held for a rendezvous the Ghost of March demanded in the Undercity — at a tavern the company already knew, the Reef Tavern — and Osman asked that they either escort him there or treat on his behalf, the Undercity being watchful of who enters it. They agreed to arrange the meeting, and, weighing his safety against the awkwardness of being seen openly at his side, resolved to manage it themselves rather than parade him into the deep.