In the depths of the Undercity, Sidra al-Najjar, Jean-Zera Mongé and Gizem Faruki rehearsed the shape of their errand: to identify the assassin sent by Kavalan Pasha, to hold the Memory-Wipe Scroll in reserve until they had learned his plan, and to keep by them the fake copy of Osman's Journal intended for Aziz Sefa Bey. They marked, too, a troubling silence — the Janissaries who had defected alongside Alexander had gone down into the catacombs and not come up again. Affirming that most passages beneath the city were old cisterns and interconnecting tunnels, some of them older than the church itself, they fixed upon the Basilica Cistern — the Yerebatan Sarnıcı — as their point of entry and began the descent.
They came down into a chamber fitted with hoist holes in the floor and metal rings for rigging, and a door that stood shut but unlocked. Passing it and advancing with torches and such darkvision as they had, they came upon a freshly slain young Janissary, a lad of some seventeen or eighteen years, his sabre still at his side, laid near a stack of stone piping in a pool of his own blood — and about him the signs of very recent struggle. Sidra put her thaumaturgy to a jammed door and flung it open with such drama that they judged it could not have been used in some time, unless it had been sealed by magic; within lay an old storeroom of stacked wooden chests, out of one of which a Giant Spider lunged at Sidra and then withdrew, an ugly little "spider-in-a-box" left as a snare for the unwary. They pressed on to another door, and behind it a steep stair descending to a corridor with a further door standing slightly ajar. Miray Ruba Mata Biru felt a palpable ill humour bleeding from the right-hand way; Sidra saw a human skull upon the floor shift as though something moved it; and the trio drew into a tight formation, watching both before and behind.
Jean-Zera examined a reinforced door, likely barred from the far side, and tried it — whereupon an arrow trap loosed from the doorway and struck Gizem before the lock gave. Beyond stood a Human Skeleton in the shadows, and Gizem closed at once to grapple it, wrenching one arm clean off and setting to its dismantling. Then a second thing confronted her: a desiccated undead humanoid, shrivelled and taller than a man ought to be, that spoke in an archaic dialect of Turkish and pronounced a curse to make every wound she took bite the deeper as it pressed her in close combat. Sidra invoked Sacred Flame against it; Jean-Zera struck it with Chill Touch to lay disadvantage upon its next blow; Gizem shattered the skeleton at last, scattering its bones across the floor; and Sidra hurled Fire Bolt — a first that missed its full effect, a second that caught — until the desiccated foe went up like dry leaves and burned to ash within the half of a minute.
No sooner was the fight done than a living Janissary opened fire upon them from behind. Jean-Zera advanced to parley and named him: Alexander, a defector in his early thirties, who ordered them to be gone and swore they had seen nothing. Gizem rushed to disarm his repeating handgun and was shoved off; Jean-Zera then loosed a burst of dissonant, unnerving words to drive the man back, and together they wrestled him down and secured him without recourse to lethal force. In that grappling Sidra found upon her tongue, unbidden, a magical language near to Arabic — a genie's speech — that pinned Alexander half-raised against the wall until she stilled the influence in herself. Freed to speak, Alexander told them that Ahra 'the Wolf' and her man had killed his wife, Nadia, in cold blood for the crime of using magic. When the party proposed that he set his vendetta aside and mentor a young person struggling with power she could not govern, he agreed — provided Ahra never learned of it and his own whereabouts stayed hidden. He allowed that there had been four defectors in all, and that some had met grim ends in these tunnels; and Sidra, to forestall further reanimation, went a little way down the corridor and burned the other corpses with Fire Bolt.
It was not enough. A Giant Skeleton, some seven and a half feet of it, assembled itself out of the very bones about them, gathering more as it rose, wielding a length of metal pipe for a club and sprouting extra arms. Miray channelled a radiant Moonbeam down upon it; Jean-Zera flung Vicious Mockery and unsettling words and then washed the thing in Faerie Fire to expose it; Gizem closed in melee, striving to wrench apart its ribs and joints. The skeleton hurled loose bones to distract the front line and swung its pipe in heavy strokes; Alexander loosed his gun, suffered a misfire, reloaded and later landed hits from the flank; Sidra let go a Thunderwave that the creature braced itself against as it drove the party back. With the advantage that the Faerie Fire lent them and their melee concentrated upon it, they battered the thing to collapse — but not before it seized Gizem and hurled her clear over Alexander into a wall, so that she briefly lost consciousness. Then it fell apart entirely, and the company gathered up its enormous skull and bone fragments as proof of the deed.
Jean-Zera saw Alexander away to a safe corner of the Undercity, where Papa Mert, a fixer of good local standing, gave him lodging for three days, a disguise kit and a shared cloak. Miray bore the giant skull and the rest of the remains to Hano 'the Widow', the bounty broker, who took the trophy and paid two hundred gold, and gave besides a scroll bearing two instances of Exorcise Djinni. Miray then took her ease at a bath-house in the company of a friend, where they talked of soft power and of the true power that stands behind a throne, and considered the reputedly affectionate match of the Haseki Sultan Bergüzar Hatun. Jean-Zera, for his part, made a study of the Janissaries — that former corps of the elite — and of the Sekban who serve as the guard in their stead, noting the shift toward modernisation under the Padishah's line. Through the operatives of his family's network he learned that Kavalan Pasha was a disgruntled man who had sent his agents on ahead, and by those same contacts a meeting was arranged at The Pearl, an upscale brothel and massage parlour kept by Mistress Manukian, to treat with the representative of the assassin.
As they made ready, Miray scouted in the form of a fox near the fountain outside The Pearl and marked two well-dressed men shadowing Jean-Zera from separate vantages. Within, in a curtained booth, Jean-Zera met The Assassin of Kavalan Pasha and proposed his aid — misdirection, compensation, even relocation abroad. The representative disclosed a decoy plot: to leak word of a strike upon Mustafa Pasha, the vizier, at Topkapi Palace, the better to flush out the responses of the powerful, whilst keeping the true target and place undisclosed; and he set the timing before the paşa's meeting in two days' time. To guard their own interests and yet let the ruse run on unhindered, the party then invoked the Memory-Wipe Scroll and erased from the man his recollection of all that had passed between them. After some half an hour within The Pearl, they withdrew, regrouped, and took a long rest against the next turning of the affair.