The company woke still under the spell of a shared dream — a little girl in flight after her mother had killed her father, and a sister left distraught with the dreamer — and the vision coloured the counsel that followed as they took stock and laid their plans. They confirmed what they had suspected: that Osman held only a forged copy of his journal, which settled their resolve to leave him behind. Osman had given them a thread to follow in one Matilda Manukian, a half-elf with the run of the Undercity, of whom they had a description and the report that she kept near the Hagia Sophia. They rehearsed, too, the aftermath of the vampire: the rival treasure-hunters had died at the creature's hands, some perhaps already slain by the company in an earlier affair — though they recalled they had never in fact entered the church on that prior job — and a man fleeing a sinking ship had been heard to name the Ghost of March. As for the soldiers seen in the Ghost's company, they judged them to be presenting as Sekbans, a corps long since disbanded, their martial dress more a symbol worn than the mark of true veterans.
The spoils were then divided. Two uncursed short swords of fine make — Magical Short Swords (+1) — went one apiece to Jean-Zera Mongé and Sidra al-Najjar, and the company kept back its grenades and holy water against later need. Gizem Faruki took a turn at her bakery, catching up with the regulars and keeping an ear open, and there her neighbours — Yusuf, a chatty husband, and Yasmin, his taciturn wife — spoke of a new underground diversion at the Hippodrome, a thing that drew "all kinds" and was held below rather than in the old public plaza, with the counsel to "bet on green." It was Yasmin who pressed an invitation upon Gizem to attend a race — and not upon a Saturday — warning her plainly that "the horses are not real," and naming the Theodosius Obelisk, hard by the Hagia Sophia, as their meeting place.
Gizem next tried the hamam, the bath-house, for talk of Janissaries or of ghosts, but the patrons closed such subjects the moment they were raised. Jean-Zera, meanwhile, made use of Osman's library, where the staff reported their master had not come home, being caught up in very live matters at the palace, and was even then closeted with Bergüzar, wife of the newly raised Padişah (the Sultan) Abd-ul Mejid, in her own quarters — the exacting house librarian adding that she received Osman privately on account of her constrained movements, and that there was nothing in itself unusual in it. His reading told him that most of the recovered artifacts were of real historical weight, older than the Janissaries or the Sekbans, dear to collectors, and bound up with the history of the Church and with the line of Vlad and Radu's father. When a buyer's letter arrived asking after the treasure-job, Jean-Zera drafted a careful reply that kept every supernatural thread out of sight, and sent Giannis a deceiving account of plain success — noting that Hayriah, the rival hunter, was "no longer in the picture" — with a sketch of the karabela Saber appended to show its worth.
Sidra gave herself to a survey of the Undercity, mapping its residential pockets, the arts-quarter that gathered about the Leaky Pit, and the routes by which the upper city came and went. She logged its amenities — the Styx Bathhouse; the Thieves Bazaar; the Shapeshifter, an elite shop of disguise and tailoring; the Ermeydani, an underground fighting-pit where no weapons were suffered; and Misty Pond, a serene subterranean park of clear water and strange fauna — and from the pond she gathered moss and fungi for her alchemical journal. At Papa Mert's apothecary she was set to scrubbing her hands with a white powder called Biyin, which draws the poison from the skin; one of her specimens proved genuinely dangerous, and the old man taught her the medicinal and toxic properties of the fungus and the safer manner of collecting such things.
Their plans took shape. Gizem confirmed her outing with Yasmin to the race, and gauged which friend to carry along; the company agreed to approach the Ghost of March plainly and diplomatically, stating their aims and asking in turn what the Ghost desired. To find Matilda Manukian they settled on the plazas about the Hagia Sophia and a cover of trade — Gizem and Sidra delivering baked goods from shop to shop and leaving quiet inquiries in their wake, whilst Sidra kept watch at a tea-shop with Jean-Zera at her elbow in the guise of her drawing-master. The stratagem was interrupted before it bore fruit: well-dressed men closed upon Jean-Zera at the tea-shop, asked whether he was the son of Claude Mongé, pressed a concealed firearm to his ribs, and insisted he come with them to their "offices," the tea-shop's patrons falling into a stunned silence as he was steered out.
One of the agents pried at the surface of Jean-Zera's thoughts whilst weighing how little standing a foreigner enjoyed before the law, and they named Osman and Giannis to him, tying all three together in what they cast as an inquiry into corruption and letting him feel how exposed a man was who kept such powerful and such criminal company. Sidra worked quietly against them: a whispered blessing laid upon Jean-Zera, a silent thread of thought opened to coordinate with the others, and then a charm cast upon the lead agent before her that turned his reading of the pair from knowing accomplices into a couple of naïve bystanders — for he had taken her at first for Jean-Zera's confederate, or else a girl the man was selling. Jean-Zera turned dissonant whispers upon the agent seated with Sidra and sent him breaking away in flight, opening a gap in the escort's hold.
For all that, Jean-Zera was guided into a waiting carriage, within which an older man already sat — spectacled, grey-bearded, and plainly a person of authority, whom the half-elf recognised as the head of the secret service of A Certain Community, a learned and many-tongued chief of state security. The official pressed him to serve as a "guiding voice," to prevail upon Osman to abandon his "ecumenical flights"; decrying cacophony, he insisted the Empire's harmony demanded a single strong voice and the precedence of the "humans of the Empire," and bade Jean-Zera keep their words from Osman and from Claude Mongé alike, for the service, he said, would come by whatever it required regardless. The coach did not turn toward any government house but drew up instead at the gate of Giannis's residence in a district of quality — a deliberate stroke, that, to knot Jean-Zera publicly to Giannis. When a house-guard asked the carriage to move along, the official re-entered it, but not before sending "hello" from one Kavalan Pasha, the embattled Egyptian governor entangled with the foreign powers, and hinting that Claude Mongé might be caught up in the same trouble; and Jean-Zera stepped down warily, avoided the guards, and set off in another direction under a tail plainly meant to be seen.
Others had not been idle. Miray Ruba Mata Biru, wild-shaped into a great monitor lizard and clinging to sheer walls, had shadowed the carriage across the rooftops; a leap meant to span a street was fumbled off an awning, but the druid recovered the roofline and pressed on — and there a cat sharing the same roof let fall the curious warning that one ought not to "eat the red eggs." Gizem's attempt at a shortcut was blocked by a street festival, through which she pushed to rejoin Sidra whilst keeping the carriage's corridor in view. When an agent whistled up two young men in the guise of shoppers to flank Sidra and Gizem, Sidra veiled the two of them so that they left no trace, weaving through the crowded market to hold the carriage in sight and slip the pursuit; Jean-Zera ran a roundabout course until his own tail was lost, and he and Miray came at length to the Leaky Pit to rejoin the others.
It was there that Matilda Manukian made herself known, tapping Gizem upon the shoulder, allowing that she knew they had been seeking her, and offering the company safe passage. In Eminönü, behind a restaurant, she pressed a pattern of bricks and the very roadbed sank to disclose a stair — a secret shortcut down to the Leaky Pit. She described the way onward, by the Thieves Bazaar to a trio of joined buildings that the Ghost of March held, counselling them to announce themselves at the first and ask for an audience; and with that she took her leave for other business of her own.
What remained was reckoning and preparation. The company took the measure of A Certain Community — that it set its face against all pluralism, held humans first, and would stoop to magic to smother the magical — and saw plainly that it was working to undermine Osman; the carriage's calculated stop at Giannis's gate they read as a stroke meant to tarnish him and to poison any future fencing of artifacts through his hands. The cat's warning came round again when Ahmet relayed it, and Sidra and Gizem tied the "red eggs" to a door near the Hagia Sophia strewn with red Easter-eggshells out of a legend of the last patriarch — "Avoid the door. Don't eat there," Sidra said, whilst Gizem wondered aloud whether a ghost lay behind it. Weighing the interests of the Ghost of March, the Janissaries, Osman, and A Certain Community, they set themselves to back Osman's pluralism for the sake of the non-human and the magic-worker. At the Shapeshifter a dwarf proprietor saw to their disguises — Jean-Zera made over on the instant into a Turkish man, his hair dyed black and his beard and ears amended — and Gizem ordered a "shadowy camouflage" cloak cut to draw the eye past its wearer, the tailoring to take a day or two. And at the last, debating whether to win favour by tending the Undercity's sick cats first or to go straight to their errand, they chose to proceed, and to seek the Ghost of March.