The road from the ambush was quiet, and the company made it quieter still. Of the Bostanji Imperial Guard left senseless in the grass they took a careful accounting: a long rifle of the new pattern — heavy, wanting both hands, its charge apt to redouble a lucky shot and good for six rounds before it begged reloading, which Jean-Zera Mongé claimed as something with more authority than the pistol that had served him ill; a scroll for the turning-aside of the elements; and, most telling of all, a silvered blade of a scimitar's make. A reading of that sword told the whole tale. These were men equipped to put down the uncanny — the non-human, the enchanted, the merely strange — for all the pious posturing their masters made in public against magic. One does not carry a silvered edge and a satchel of spell-scrolls to arrest a farmer's daughter; whoever these agents of A Certain Community served, he was content to take up the devil's tools against the devil. The guardsmen they bound, disarmed, and bundled beneath a bush to wake to their embarrassment, and, having taken the brief ease of a rest, the four struck out across the fields toward the house the journal had named. Miray Ruba Mata Biru drew a veil of silence over their steps, and they went unheard.
An hour and a half's walk brought them within sight of it in the failing afternoon: a modest farmhouse, set about with animals of every kind and description, from which came the sound of a young woman singing. To Miray's sorcerous sight the whole of the place thrummed — not this object or that, but the very walls and timbers and the air about them, suffused with a magic so thick it gave off a low creak of settling wood and a verdant, almost intoxicating scent of flowers. Here at last was Mira — sister to the Haseki Sultan, the diviner for whose sake Osman Hamdi Bey had spent his whole pretended excavation — and she did not wish to be found. Sidra al-Najjar sent a message ahead, gently: they had come on Osman's behalf, they were themselves of the craft, she stood in danger. The answer was a sharp go away and the slam of a door; a second message, offering only warning and help, drew nothing but a whimper — the small, broken voice of one long beaten down and near to panic. Gizem Faruki walked the perimeter and confirmed what they had hoped: they were the first to arrive, and but for the singing woman the house kept no company at all.
They chose, then, to wait rather than to press — to keep a watch from the trees at each corner of the property, the veil of silence yet upon them, and to leave upon the threshold a small offering of cloths wrapped in black and white, a courtesy from one order of the discreet to another. Once, as Gizem set the gift down, the boards of the veranda shuddered beneath them like the first premonition of an earthquake, and then settled. The waiting did not last. Down the track came a body of men larger than the one that had waylaid them — nine or more, ranged in three neat ranks of three — and this time no Aziz among them. One strode to the door and hammered upon it: by order of the Padişah (the Sultan), come out into our custody; do not make us come in. From within, only that whimpered go away. At his nod the others set their shoulders to the door and began to break it.
What followed can only imperfectly be called a battle, for the house itself was a third party to it, and no friend to anyone. Sidra slipped in by a back door into a dining room, and the reckoning began. It became apparent, by degrees, that they contended not with a haunting but with a living thing — the men afterward spoke of it as a manor made animate, gargantuan and untiring, deaf to poison and to the assaults of the mind and impossible to lay hold of. A piano wheeled upon its own leg to club Gizem in the side, and would have hurt her had she not turned the blow aside; a sugar-bowl gaped open upon the table and near swallowed Sidra's freed djinn whole before it wrenched itself loose; a candelabra took wing at Sidra's head, a chair thrust out a leg to trip her sprawling, and a wardrobe yawned open at Gizem's back and tried to eat her, and was cheated only by her quickness. Nor did the house want for larger servants. A great horned beast of the taxidermist's art stood in the hall, and Gizem, murmuring a verse of Rumi upon the dignity of the beasts of the field, coaxed the stiff and confused thing into lumbering life and danced it into the foyer — where, as two guardsmen heaved against the barricaded door, it met them coming through and dashed them both aside. The kitchen, when its turn came, rose against an intruder in the manner of a certain fable — stove and rolling-pin and carving-knife all at once — while the shutters of the music-room snapped shut upon a man before he could reach the piano at all.
Mira herself proved a formidable and frightened adversary, and the house her instrument. She wrapped herself in a blur that turned aside blows; she seized Sidra and Jean-Zera each in turn and, over their planted resistance, snapped them across the house like a released cord to set them where she pleased; she wore the faces of decoys and sent a phantom cat to twine, insubstantial, about their ankles and vanish. Upon Sidra she laid the cruellest stroke of the evening — a curse of the evil eye that took her voice clean away, so that for a long minute the sorceress could shape no verbal working at all, and was reduced to speaking within her own head to her djinn and, in petty consolation, to knocking the offending sugar-bowl to the floor and blowing a raspberry at an illusion that would not look at her. Twice Mira counterspelled the counterspell laid against her; once she stepped through a dimension-door to reappear at will; once she took a guardsman by the wrist and delivered a shocking grasp that near ended him. The men who hunted her were no common soldiery either — one bore the gift of the mage-killer, and struck at Jean-Zera the instant he misted away.
For all that, the company gave a better account of themselves than the chaos suggested. Miray, driven from her animals when they would not be roused against the intruders, called down lightning from a clear sky — little puffs of cloud that formed, threw their bolts, and dissolved, striking the clustered guardsmen again and again — and when a soldier lunged to snatch her by the wrist she ducked his grasp entire and melted back into the brush. Jean-Zera mocked the captain into the dirt with a cruel jest, borrowed an eagle's splendour to gild his tongue, and darted from room to room; Sidra mended her own hurts, flung fire through a cracked door, and loosed her djinn to harry the fleeing; Gizem jammed the piano-bench beneath the front doorknob, barred the kitchen, and set upon the captain — who had cleverly kept himself out of the fray, giving orders while better men took the wounds — until she had bloodied his nose. And when Miray at last put a ball of fire into the thick of them from the veranda, the affair was as good as decided.
Yet the victory that mattered was not won with fire. It was Jean-Zera who reached her. He drew out Osman's Journal and held it forth, and Mira knew it at once. Is my sister dead, she asked; and, are you trying to kill her; and, when he could only answer that he did not know and did not think so, she said the thing that undid the whole misapprehension: I am the dangerous one. She has had training. I have not. It is only me, here. Osman had visited her, she allowed — polite and kind, a man she had liked; he had taken his notes in that very book, and they had spoken of her; he had urged her to remain upon the farm and to seek out no one, telling her plainly that she was a danger to all around her should she leave, and swearing to protect her so long as she stayed. What she did not know was why — the matter-and-antimatter of the two sisters' shared blood, the interference that dampened the Haseki Sultan's power in her presence, which Osman had grasped and set himself to preserve. When Jean-Zera spoke to her, at last, not of politics but of the dreams they had shared — of a gifted child made to hide her gifts because others would only misuse them, which was the very lesson his own master had beaten into him — her eyes lit, and the fright went out of her by a degree. Is the one with the white hair your friend, she asked Sidra across the din; and being told yes, she said only, I will find you. She did. She touched Jean-Zera upon the arm — I will be right back — and stepped away and returned, and to each of them in turn allowed the truth: these were bad men, and you have helped. They were here to kill me.
That was no figure of speech. Upon the captain's belt lay the writ he had brandished — sealed, formal, drawn in its little fancy tube, about as official as such things are made — and it named no arrest merely, but a warrant to take Mira and to execute her, under the authority of the Padishah himself. Whether the order was truly the Sultan's will or only his seal set to another's purpose, the company could not yet say; but the meaning for Mira was not in doubt. The fight fallen quiet — the guardsmen down or fled, one of the runaways overtaken by the djinn, which had been told to finish him and had not paused to ask what was meant — the four gathered the frightened diviner into a council and laid before her what they knew: of Osman's design, which seemed for all its secrecy bent only upon her protection; of the strange arithmetic of the sisters' blood; and of the darkest of the shared dreams, that vision of a crowned son and a Wish that swallowed the sea. Mira, for her part, did not believe her sister wished her dead — only that there were those who would kill her to profit the Haseki Sultan, and that whether the great lady was party to it was a separate question, and one she could not answer.
Of the old wound between them she said more than she meant to, and the remembering of it came to Jean-Zera in pictures. They had been children when their father raised his hand to Karia — the name the Haseki Sultan had been born to — and their mother struck him down with a clock and killed him; and Mira knew, as only a sister could, that Karia had bent their mother's arm to strike the harder, though the death itself was perhaps further than the child had meant to go. There had been blame after that, and the ruin of a family laid at one small girl's feet; Mira left mad upon the stoop as Karia gathered her bags and went, and grief beneath the anger at the parting. She was not seeking a reunion; she was markedly non-committal upon the whole notion of it. Even so, the company pressed the gentle case — that the two had been close once, that the one now raised so high might yet miss the other, that it is always worth the speaking to family if one can — and put their minds to where a hunted woman might be hidden. Not the city, which Mira feared; not the farmhouse nor the dig near Thymbra Farm, too near and no place to live. Miray's inclination was for a hamam (a bath-house) down in the Undercity, those places of studied discretion where a face seen is a face forgotten, far enough from Mira's own home to break the scent and near enough to friends: Alexander keeps in the deep city another young woman likewise struggling with an unwelcome gift, and two such stories might make allies — though the shadow of the Ghost of March over that quarter gave them pause. The far horizon, if it could be reached, was the university and proper training, and a meeting of the sisters contrived out of the Sultan's sight.
The plan was scarcely settled before its cost was paid. As the talk turned kind, Mira's face crumpled about some grief shoved down out of sight, and a pulse of magic went off her unbidden and struck Jean-Zera and Gizem stone-deaf for the better part of the next few hours — the diviner's sorrow rebounding upon her would-be rescuers as surely as her fear had rebounded once into all their dreams. It was a plain enough warning, and a plainer one followed: this was already the second body of men out of Constantinople to come for her, and there would be more, and soon, and the company had no business lingering upon that veranda. So they resolved to take her up and carry her off — the most powerful fugitive in the land, the Sultan's own sister — down toward the sheltering dark of the Undercity, there to hide her and, in time, to bring the sundered sisters face to face. Only the house they must leave behind: bound, it seemed, to its own ground, and disposed to follow only if its mistress were stolen from it. A curious guardian, and, for once, an argument in the company's favour.