Deep in the prison beneath the Basilica Cistern, the company's charity was repaid, as charity so often is, with an unpleasant surprise: the prisoner in the red dress whom they had loosed was no wronged captive but a grotesque sorceress wearing beauty as another woman wears a shawl. To the rest of the party she appeared a handsome creature in her middle thirties — red-haired, gowned in red, a pearl at her throat — but Jean-Zera Mongé, whose gift for piercing an illusion announces itself as a curious buzz at the edge of hearing, a sense turned back upon itself, chose to look upon her true face, and beheld the most grotesque caricature of a head one might imagine. Where the old tales had always seemed to exaggerate their swamp-witches for effect, here was the thing itself, and no exaggeration at all. Sidra al-Najjar, for her part, crushed a Nazar bead — one of those blue glass eyes the people hang against the evil gaze — and blew its dust across the sorceress to hamper her; and Jean-Zera, exchanging one prepared working for the spell of Command, pointed to the folded paper in her grip and spoke a single word, "give me." Unable to refuse, she pressed Osman Hamdi Bey's sealed letter into his hand before the fight had rightly begun. When he then moved to shove her from her feet, she answered the shove with a spell, and Jean-Zera found himself standing upon four hooves, a goat.
What followed was a graceless melee. Gizem Faruki lunged and grappled the fleeing hag, landing a stunning blow; but in that instant she too glimpsed the true face beneath the glamour, failed her nerve, and clenched the shrieking creature in pure terror without daring to strike — the more so on discovering the skin beneath her hands to be cold, clammy, and damp — until fear compelled her to let go, and two flailing swings found only air. Miray Ruba Mata Biru had held a Moonbeam ready, and loosed its five-foot shaft of light upon the doorway as the sorceress broke for it, keeping the beam upon her whilst a well-turned deception hid from the hag which of them was the caster. Sidra hurled sacred flame — a fair two dice of it as the creature failed her ward — and then, by an irony the night seemed fond of, failed to perceive the truth through the illusion, and so fought on believing she battled a beautiful woman. Jean-Zera, reduced to a goat but by no means to silence, worked his unfamiliar mouth around the words of a vicious mockery and bleated them out; the hag shrugged off the sting and was, understandably, unintimidated by a goat. She proved no shapechanger but a raw spellcaster whose glare could bring a faltering foe straight down — it felled Gizem, who had first resisted it, and Sidra both — yet the Moonbeam ground her low, and it was the goat that ended her. Charging a full twenty feet across the cell, Jean-Zera rammed her flat, and the party finished her where she lay at her last two points of life.
The victory was a hollow one. Searching the body they found nothing worth the taking — only rags gone to age upon a frame that had not aged at all — and the cell itself bore no feeding-slot, no bedding, no privy, no residue of magic or malice: a chamber suspiciously clean and empty, as though it had never truly held a soul. It was, the Keeper himself allowed, an encounter of all risk and no reward. And with Jean-Zera fixed in goat-shape for the better part of forty minutes, and no ready means to reverse it, the exhausted company judged the empty cell as sound a hiding place as any — no guard, no Bichura of the house-spirits, no Medusa nor Merrow was like to follow them there — barricaded the door, and took what rest they could.
It was rest less than restful, their constitutions strained, their sleep steeped in the magic that bled through walls plainly built to contain it. They shared a vivid dream of the harem of the Topkapi Palace: a younger Padishah Abd-ul Mejid — the Sultan of an earlier day — watching from a balcony as servants bore nargile, the water-pipe, whose smoke drew glowing charms like henna beneath the dreamers' skin. Among these appeared the Eye of Solomon, the sign at the heart of some magical pact then being sealed, its terms hidden from them. An older instructress schooled a circle of young women to master their anger and to wield their words — "it is your words that hold the most power" — invoking the names of Hurrem Sultan and Kösem Sultan before them, and declaring that by the order of Padishah Mahmud II they would learn to gaze upon the world and the future with "eyes spying," as one dreamer's own eyes turned white. And when the teacher called out a name, the dreamers understood, with a lurch, that they themselves were the one being called: "Bergüzar" — and the woman whose youthful face had haunted their sleep for weeks at last had a name and a beginning, levitating amid rising stones and flowers, the hands of a clock-tower spinning, as they woke.
They turned now to the one door they had left shut: a massive, foreign-wrought portal ringed with chains and locks, an incongruous montage of styles rather than any single vision, projecting the strongest anti-magic field in all that prison and yet leaking a low thrum of power through it. Jean-Zera's detect magic read both the field and the leakage, the source of the pulse they had felt in their bones. Piecing together the diary of Petrus Gyllius — circa 1544, and near ninety minutes' labour to unravel — they learned its history: under Emperor Justinian and Queen Theodora, the emperor's own magi had subdued and sealed a she-devil beneath the city. A chain running through a winch beside the door proved a mechanism rather than a trap. And in the neighbouring cell a burly, bearded grand vizier of the age of Mehmed the Conqueror — a man who had waited so long upon release or execution that he still spoke of the Conqueror as one who might yet change his mind, and whose eyes had yellowed and narrowed to a serpent's slit — named the prisoner without hesitation: behind the great door lay "the Shamarin," a massive serpent-woman, one of "the true devils of the old world," and he warned them against her.
The opening of the door became its own ordeal. Jean-Zera's Mage Hand guttered out against the anti-magic of the portal, and the cursed keyring fell from it; when he took the ring up, another man's certainty flooded into him, and he was Manuel — a Byzantine cataphract, sworn guardian of the prison, granted for the delusion a great temporary vigour and warded workings, and resolved that no prisoner should ever walk free. His own friends found themselves arguing their innocence to a companion who no longer knew their names. Only by producing Osman's sealed letter, and the mark of the Loremaster of the Lodge of Byzantia, did they persuade the deluded guardian that they came on lawful business — to speak with the prisoner, not to loose her, and that the opening of the door would only lower the anti-magic without setting her at liberty. Sidra sent a message cantrip toward the door — "a friend of Osman's family, we seek your assistance" — and drew back no words, but a rumble that shook the walls. Then Manuel drew the great door open, upon a wash of pale green light, the field falling as runic chains from the four corners held their prisoner taut for a failsafe.
Beyond it reared the true The Shahmeran, a serpent-woman raising herself twelve feet from a vast coil in that pale green glow. "Unbind me," she said, "and I will help." She had known Osman in life and spoke of him in the past tense, observing that his first duty had been to a state which "inherited my bindings," and that he had never been at liberty. When the party balked, she plunged the chamber into a magical darkness — cover, she offered, for any among them who might wish to disagree with the rest unseen — turned Sidra into a lizard, and turned aside every spell they threw, each casting rebounding upon its own author. Miray took the shape of a giant crab, for its blindsight and its claws, and worked toward the chains; Gizem warded the doorway with see invisibility; a charm sent the wandering Manuel off into the dark. Consulting her djinn, the spirit bound within her, Sidra learned the serpent only by reputation — exceptionally adept in magic, yet one of whom "there are always repercussions to her actions," and who had once "fought and lost." Still the Shahmeran pressed her case: she had drawn forth great magic from the earth to defend Constantinople against Justinian's conquest, and sought now to shelter all the city's people — human and magic-touched alike, of every faith — against the heirs of Justinian, who had turned that gift against their own.
She asked only that a single chain be broken. Miray the crab snapped one clean through, and Sidra severed the magical circuit of a second; the Shahmeran counted the bargain kept twice over, two of the four chains now inert. When Jean-Zera chanced a Spirit Guardians against her, she counterspelled and poached the working for herself, and the rebound pared thirteen from his utmost vigour until it should be mended. Then she took up Osman's Journal, its pages turning at her word, and where the party and every scholar before them had failed she unpicked its cipher as easily as a puzzle-box in the hands of one who helped design the box — a Lodge working that "rewrites the fundamental rules of communication," a thing as simple, to her, as turning oneself to air. "Some of us," she said, "know the magic the lodge was built upon." She named "Karya," a child's name, and "Bergüzar" as one and the same person — the Haseki Sultan Bergüzar Hatun, the Padishah's diviner-wife — and confirmed Mira as her sister. The journal's secret, she read aloud, was this: Mira's living presence smothers Bergüzar's full, Theodora-like power as a diviner, the nullifying effect swelling the nearer Mira draws, and this alone stays the Padishah's grand design. Osman had kept Mira alive but far distant, hidden her whereabouts in the journal beneath both mundane and arcane locks, and erased even his own memory of her; the very disturbance at the archaeological dig that had first drawn the party into all this had been a rebound of Mira's own magic. Her location the Shahmeran gave up freely — a farm not far from the dig at Thymbra Farm — and she urged them to keep the diviner alive, or bring her to the city to check Bergüzar, rather than see another Theodora rise. Should they wish to reach the Shahmeran again, she added, they need only ask Sidra's djinn.
They spent a scroll of Greater Restoration to lift the cataphract's curse from Jean-Zera, restoring him to his own mind and body and mending his diminished vigour in the same stroke; they came, in the doing of all this, into their sixth measure of strength; and they turned at last toward the surface, and toward Mira.
They did not go straight for her. The cats' coveted prize — the Crown of Sargon, marked below the Maiden Tower — still waited, and the company turned there first. The way in was held by mechanical wardens whose gaze could turn living flesh to stone; but the party drew no weapon upon them, talking them down instead, and left the puzzled automata a pair of magical spectacles in the bargain, the wardens turning the things over and wondering what they were even meant to be. They pieced together the tower's old legend along the way — that it had once caged a maiden imprisoned by her own father, the Byzantine basileus Emperor Constantine, her keeping bound up with the serpent-dragon Yutba — and, descending a little from the wardens' post, came to a majestic door worked all over with coiling serpents, the threshold of the trials to come. There, for the night, they stopped. (This closing stretch survives only as the following session's spoken recap, and is set down here in brief.)