The battle for the Crown of Sargon ended atop the cloud-wreathed ziggurat with the party battered but victorious. The black dragon, diminished though it was, fought on and dropped its foes with acid breath; Miray Ruba Mata Biru and Jean-Zera Mongé, both felled by that breath, made their death saves and dragged themselves back into the fray — Miray flinging her oldest and most obscure curses as dissonant whispers, insults that had long since lost their bite in the modern age hurled all at once as a blast of arcane noise, whilst Jean-Zera struck from the ground with chill touch. Gizem Faruki clung to the beast some forty feet up, climbing to the back of its head and then to its very eyes at the risk of a bite, landing stunning strikes and flurries as it strafed the summit. Sidra al-Najjar answered its bite with a hellish rebuke, forcing it to spend the single legendary resistance its weakened state had left it. The turning point, though, was the crown itself.
Sidra set it upon her brow in the thick of the fray, and the artifact answered with two rebounds. The attunement demanded a hard arcane reckoning, and the miss cost her thirteen hours of short-term memory: like the man in that film who cannot recall why he stands in the diner, she found herself looking at a downed Miray and a dragon banking toward her with no notion of how she had come to be there at all — only that, apparently, she had got herself into shenanigans. Even so disoriented, she read the field, saw Miray fallen, and spent a working to raise her and steady the line. Then came the second rebound, and something far greater. A further attunement, aided by the djinn itself, wrenched the spirit that had lived inside her for as long as she could remember bodily out of her — a punch, she said, that sends the soul flying out the other side, a sudden cold nakedness where a companion of years had been — and there it took shape at her back, larger than life and kind of face, a being at last unto itself, its first act a fury on her behalf against the dragon that had hurt her. The severing remade her: from a djinn-possessed sorcerer she became a djinn-master warlock, her spell-list broadening to command, bane, augury, speak with dead, and bestow curse, her body no longer prey to the monthly decay of the mortal shell it had suffered. Newly crowned and steadied by the crown's authority, she raised a beacon of hope over her crew and then simply told the dragon — down to its last nine points of life — to stop; and it did, folding its wings and settling before her with a ferocious, baffled look, before a word more sent it off into the clouds. "You survived and thrived and took the crown and attuned to it," the Keeper allowed, "and didn't even kill the dragon — which, to me, is a superior victory." With the crown she then sensed and opened the way, and the tower let them go.
The change in Sidra ran deeper than any wound. Asked what had passed between them, the freed djinn found the words: "You were a home that I had made, in the way you have seen those crabs that take on a shell. You were a friend — and now you are holding a leash." Where it had once worn her like a hermit-crab's shell, now she held it, in its own telling, as one holds a leash. It gave her a name at last — Faravi, "the imagined" — and took the shape, more or less, of a larger-than-life man with a kind face and a shirt left a little too open, a thing strange to behold but not distressing. It confessed itself grown fond of her over their years together, and promised only that it would not harm her; that it said nothing at all of her friends did not go unnoticed. To her new station as warlock came new gifts: an arcane proficiency and a deeper knowledge of djinn-kind, the power to yield her body to Faravi for a burst of force-laden attacks, and an unfathomable nature that turns aside enchantment and divination cast against her — though should she ever fail to hold the leash, Faravi might seek to repossess her. "We may still get up to some mischief, however," it allowed.
Resting afterward at Osman Hamdi Bey's house, the company turned to the meaning of their shared dreams. Poring over the visions with the aid of a spell to sharpen his wits, Jean-Zera pieced it together: the dreams were no gift and no warning, but a rebound — a psychic bleed-over caught when the four of them had first passed near Mira's home by the archaeological dig, where the diviner's magic and her sister Haseki Sultan Bergüzar Hatun's were locked in a struggle carried in their shared blood, and the party had walked full-face through the backwash of it. Whether the visions were true events, or Bergüzar's own coloured impressions, or something further removed still — how many levels down from the truth they lay — none of them could say.
Whilst they made ready to sail, they probed the affairs of the palace. Miray worked her old bathhouse contacts and picked up the servants' guarded excitement over a pregnancy and a possible heir "not a blood relation" to them — pieces enough to sense a coming child tied to the palace, unspoken but keenly watched. The talk placed Padishah Abd-ul Mejid as leaning toward openness — to magic, to non-humans, to modernisation, with an eye toward a greater Ottoman Empire — though he had solidified no position, whilst the traditionalists warned against becoming "too much like England or France" and Aziz's faction pressed its own line. Gizem arranged, through the palace kitchens, for a single written appeal to be relayed to the head of the Harem, framed as a Sufi women's plea for protection and a question of where the Sultan stood on those who practise magic. And Jean-Zera read Osman's diary at his library and confirmed the dig had been almost entirely a pretext: Osman's true purpose had ever been to find Mira, whose existence he had pieced together from fragments the tight-lipped Bergüzar let slip, never naming her sister directly.
Then, the night before they left, came a last and darkest dream. They looked out again over the Bosphorus, but upon an ashen, ruined age — the buildings changed, no longer of the nineteenth century — Sidra marking foreign ships upon the horizon and Gizem strange aircraft in a grey sky, all of it bearing ill. Bergüzar rushed to the throne room to find her own crowned son seated in his father's place, and begged him, "Don't do this." He only smiled and began to say, "I wish—," and the dreamers, the mages among them recognising a Wish spell, magic at its very uttermost, woke drenched in cold sweat to an after-image of the sea rising to swallow the fleets, the city cracking open, the aircraft plucked from the sky, and complete darkness falling over all.
They crossed by ship in a day and a half — Sidra's memory restored to her along the way — and landed near the archaeological dig, the journal's directions setting Mira's house to the north-east. Striking out overland with Jean-Zera to navigate, they were not the only ones bound for her door. Approaching a clearing near the old dig, Gizem marked a conspicuous absence of birdsong, and then, in a low branch, a rifleman with his weapon already trained upon Jean-Zera. The first volley struck Jean-Zera and Gizem before they could react — Sidra warded by a shield of faith and her djinn's nudge, Jean-Zera's own Shield coming a beat too late to stop the round. But Gizem caught a bullet from the air and flung it back with lethal force, near knocking its shooter from his tree, pure pre-conscious divine instinct — she muttered her "right enchilada" and carried the favour, "Allah's favour," through the rest of the fight — then ran the prone gunman down. Reaching into the ambushers' thoughts through the crown, Sidra found their leader calm and unhurried, mildly surprised the party had come so far and certain his men would finish them; probing deeper, she named him Aziz Sefa Bey, head of a certain community, come to kill Mira before the party could reach her, and messaged the crew.
Aziz strolled into the middle of the firefight with cane and monocle and put two shots at Jean-Zera's feet, not even trying to kill — "I would have thought you would have learned from our last meeting" — to which Jean-Zera answered, "it's good that I'm a slow learner." His shooters stood revealed as elite of the Bostanji Imperial Guard, a secret-service escort at his side. Miray cast speak with animals and called the frightened birds to swarm the ambushers, but they only scattered from the danger, and she took to cover to answer Aziz with unsettling words and dissonant whispers. Gizem knocked out and disarmed the prone gunman, kicking his rifle into the trees, then rode up on the guardsmen and with a critical stunning strike knocked two of them senseless, head to head; Jean-Zera's rebukes and whispers and Sidra's hellish rebuke, evil eye, and moonbeam downed several more, including a stalker who had crept in under magical invisibility. Shaken and outmatched, Aziz worked a ring into a cloud of fog and vanished; and with their leader gone and two of their number down, the surviving guardsmen stood down and let the party pass. The way to Mira lay open at last — and the race for her was now in the open too.