Beyond the serpent-carved door where the previous night had ended — a great portal that Jean-Zera Mongé read as an incongruous montage of styles rather than any single vision, and which pushed open easily onto a long hall of paired doors with a further set at its end — the company pressed on toward the Crown of Sargon the cats so badly wanted. They found the Maiden Tower to be no ordinary keep but a passage through the ages, each door opening upon a chamber of some vanished civilisation and a test of a different virtue; and so long as they met each with curiosity and restraint rather than force, not a blow was struck against them.
They began in a Babylonian larder, its impossible spread of fruit, produce, and flowers in terracotta pots — figs and pomegranates and citrus straight from the branch — kept from rot not by any magic in the food but by a rough yet powerful lapis-lazuli jewel suspended above. The room gave off a heavy, faintly narcotic fragrance, like a master perfumer's blend, that whispered to Jean-Zera what a fine place this would be to lie down and sleep. Two great inset stones bore cuneiform and an abstract figure of authority the party took for Marduk, patron deity of Babylon; Sidra al-Najjar and Gizem Faruki recognised the Babylonian work and made their rubbings. Judging the jewel to hold a contained and possibly volatile power — the sort of thing one does not strike with a stick — they studied the room some ten minutes, ate nothing, and were gently ushered back into the hall.
Beyond the next door lay a silent, tomb-like Sumerian chamber where two inlaid statues, a warrior-king and a goddess, turned to face the travellers and spoke a tongue understood in the mind: the man was Gilgamesh, the woman Ishtar. "Travellers, tell me of your great sports," said the one; "you have been on long dreams — tell me, where have you been?" said the other. Jean-Zera obliged with tales of his wanderings through Egypt and the Middle East, whilst Gizem answered with a whirling dance and Miray Ruba Mata Biru hung back with Sidra — whose djinn muttered a caution that "one of my brethren is furthering" and were best avoided. The chamber's lower walls held the corpses of retainers laid in repose amid grave-goods of gold, jewels, and instruments, cuneiform at the statues' feet. Gilgamesh granted a blessing of fortune, a re-rolled attack or save, and Ishtar a blessing of compassion, a bonus die to the party's checks; yet the dead king was so delighted by his audience that Jean-Zera, failing his own composure, could scarcely bear to leave, and quit the room only when the closing door released him.
The third door opened upon the last surviving fragment of the Library of Alexandria, kept by the ghost of an ancient initiate. Miray, scouting ahead in a small shape, found shelves upon shelves and a spectral figure moving among them — a librarian who greeted them in tongue after tongue until he lit upon one they knew, and named the place "the last fragment of a once much greater collection," all he had been able to preserve, bidding them read as long as they liked and take away nothing but copies. Here the party lingered longest and most gladly, for once in a room that was not trying to kill them. Splayed upon a table lay the Septuagint, the early Greek rendering of the Hebrew scriptures; asking after the crown and after druidic lore, Miray was shown journals and memoirs of the order and a shelf of high spell-scrolls — of draconic transformation, of animal shapes, and a mind-affecting working — in a section the librarian unlocked. Sidra let her djinn read to her from the works of Hermes Trismegistus and early Qur'anic texts, the spirit shaping images in her mind as it went; Miray, with the librarian's leave won by Jean-Zera's persuasion, copied out a druidic spell-scroll over several hours, taking only the copy and leaving the original as bidden; and the whole company, finding the place safe and on no clock, rested and researched among the shelves — Gizem's scholarship well rewarded by the long hours there — coming away the wiser, and into their seventh measure of strength, before they moved on.
The trials went on, and the deeper chambers tested skill and judgement rather than main force. In a felt tent thick with the smell of horses and airag, the fermented mare's-milk of the steppe, three warriors set the party three contests. Handed a short bow in place of her crossbow, Gizem answered the champion's three shots with three of her own, one arrow driving clean into the fletching of his, dead centre — Robin Hood's own trick — and was welcomed among "fellow archers." A second warrior poured out the airag and asked who would drink: Sidra tried, and her stomach tried harder, and the sight of it coming up again ended her contest; but Miray the druid met the cup as only a wild sort of drink, new but not strange, and was told with a laugh that it was "not for the faint of heart" and she would "get used to it in time." At the last a shaman traded spells with Sidra, matching her flame, and bade her work a divination; she asked her djinn, wordlessly, how she might know the right path, and felt only warmth and validation, whilst the old shaman put his own question to the opening sky and waited, and waited, and finally shook his head. "It appears you have received an answer," he said, "and I have not" — and the brotherhood honoured the party.
Onward. An opulent Persian council-room set out its little armies to relive the debate before the Battle of Ankara, four centuries dead; there was a pull to reach in and mend the old defeat, to save the home that fell, but the party understood these for memories rather than a battle to be won, declined to meddle, and were released with the tower's approval. In a cemetery of worn stones a feeble voice posed its riddles — what is greater than the Padişah, and heard God, then Death, for "Death has conquered even I"; what is greater than the sea, and heard "truth," to a begrudging respect — until, asked to choose between truth and freedom, Miray answered "freedom," and the voice allowed that the greater freedom stands higher even than the throne. A Song-dynasty lord poured tea and asked the hidden secret of the blade: the party reasoned over the way of the sword and the blade of grass, that a tool is neutral and made cruel or kind only in the hand that wields it, Jean-Zera laying his little-used sword upon the table beside his staff transformed to a living branch and letting the two speak for themselves; and the lord, satisfied by their willingness to reason it out, added six characters of calligraphy — his own name, and the charge his mother had once set upon his back: "serve the country with utmost loyalty." And in a cold prehistoric cave hung with ochre handprints the company found two of the earliest people dead beside two open graves; not knowing their rites, Gizem and Jean-Zera washed them with snow, laid them out to look powerful and ready for whatever came after, and set beautiful stones and coins in their hands, silver upon the eyes and one beneath each toe — honouring the dead, and leaving some archaeologist of ages hence a very confusing dig indeed.
At the last, a door opened not upon a room but upon the summit of a vast ziggurat above the clouds, the air gone thin, where a crowned skeleton sat in fine cloth with the Crown of Sargon upon its brow — a heavy golden band worked with a crude serpent, plainly and strongly magical, the prize the cats had sought and the Blue Rider had marked "below the Maiden Tower." Their patience through the trials had not gone unrewarded: when a black dragon dived from the sky to defend the crown, it came stripped of its terror and much of its strength, and the party found themselves immune to its dread. Jean-Zera's attempt to talk the beast down failed; Miray answered with moonbeam, Gizem leapt astride it to strike at its eyes, and Sidra took up the fallen crown as the hard fight against the acid-breathing dragon began — its breath dropping Miray and Jean-Zera, Gizem hammering it with stunning strikes from its very back, the others' spells wearing it down. The prize the cats had named was theirs at last.