The crossing back to Constantinople was the easy part; the question of what to do with their passenger was not. Mira came into the city a wanted woman — the most powerful fugitive in the land, and a face, mercifully, that scarcely a soul had ever seen, for she had passed her whole life shut within her house. The company turned the matter over as they walked. The Undercity's bath-houses, first mooted as a place of studied discretion, they now mistrusted: where the servants of the palace go to gossip, the spies of the palace go to listen. The quarter the Ghost of March held they liked no better, for it would put her within arm's reach of Kore and of the sheltered Shehrazat, and so of everyone who owed the Ghost a debt. They had coin enough now to take a safehouse of their own, and a fixer in Papa Mert who had hidden such a charge before; but it was Jean-Zera Mongé who named the better answer. Osman Hamdi Bey's own house stood all but empty, watched by no one, its comings and goings near to nil — and its library was a prize in itself. Mira solved the difficulty of the threshold as only she could: a ripple in the air, a silence, and she was simply gone from sight. So it was that four travellers and one invisible diviner came unremarked to the dead polymath's door.
They had scarcely crossed it before the plan was complicated by a voice from the next room. Jean-Zera, is that you? What are you doing here? It was Claude Mongé, the antiquarian's own father, arrived some day or two before and making free of the cellar. He is not a man easy to look upon, and knows it, and has learned instead to command a room by other means — a charm he switches on like a lamp, so that its absence is the more marked, and an aristocrat's gift for dismissing a person with the set of his shoulders. Mira slipped up the stairs unseen; Claude took the three strangers for a family his son had gone and started, was corrected, and swept Jean-Zera off to the study to talk business. The business was a reckoning. By burning his own bridge to Giannis the Cut — the fruit of that carriage-ride with Aziz Sefa Bey that set him down at Giannis's gate, and the meeting he had then abandoned — Jean-Zera had frozen the whole of his father's smuggling of antiquities out of the city, orders unfilled and operations suspended, and the fault laid at his feet. He weathered it. He proposed, in place of the fence, a legal trade: a direct line to the Padishah and the officially sanctioned removal of treasures, with his own sketchbook to serve as catalogue and provenance, that the pieces might be sold direct to the buyer. A borrowed word of Sidra al-Najjar's guidance did not hurt his tongue. Claude, flipping through the notebook and finding no buyer yet against any of it, gave his son two nights: let the relics of the crypt be in his hands before he sailed, and the folly would be forgiven; let the line to the Padishah prove real, and he might even be congratulated. Over the days that followed his hired men crated and carried the pieces down to a brace of ships, and the father — who had seen a great many wonders — let slip an admiration for the sheer novelty of these, an admiration that turned, behind his eyes, to the ringing of coin. Into that same outbound cargo Sidra saw quietly stowed the Petrus Gyllius diary from the catacombs. A separate, obsequiously penitent letter to Giannis came back to the house unopened.
Mira, for her part, made her peace with the household. She came down at last and let her invisibility fall, and found in Ashraf — the late Osman's grievously ill-mannered tortoise — an unlikely friend, kneeling to offer him her fingers and to ask what he liked to eat, at which the creature warmed to her at once and made snide remarks about the others for good measure. From the terrace above she looked out for the first time upon the Bosphorus of her own city, and said only, It is really quite beautiful, isn't it, and that she had never thought it safe enough to come. She would keep clear of Claude, and did.
While his father drank, Jean-Zera set himself to learn the house. Pacing the exterior, he marked how snugly it sat against its neighbours — high, guarded places both, yet close enough that a bold man might cross from roof to roof — and then went through it level by level, reading each room for magic and for cleverer secrets besides. Two things would not resolve. Near the kitchen a span of wall some six feet by six accounted for nothing at all: no chimney, no room above or below, only sealed stone with no opening he could find. And in an upstairs bedchamber a false wall, worked by a neat gear, slid a bookcase aside to bare a cramped closet with a stool, a table, and a single, unmistakably magical book. He opened it, and it opened him — in place of pages a light poured out, and then he stood within a study set inside the study: a lush, timeless chamber ringed with shelves and hung with paintings he could not quite make out, its floor of stone, and about a great circular table thirteen chairs. Three parts in four of the shelving held not books but scrolls and parchment, some of them older than reckoning — hieroglyphs in one, and in another, when at length he found a hand he could read, an Aramaic rendering of the Book of Daniel a millennium and a half old. This was the sanctum of the Lodge of Byzantia, and the sanctum knew him for an intruder. A rush of air, and there stood at the table's far end a figure with the seeming of a man and none of his substance — white-winged, haloed in its own light, speaking a tongue he did not know and understood regardless. Are you here to walk with me up the steps of understanding? Jean-Zera, dumbstruck, gave an answer that was not the answer; the figure stiffened. The path is open to all, but walked only by the initiated. Come to me when you are ready — and it was gone. The book, he found, would come out of the closet with him: a thought took shape of a hiding-place for Mira within its pages, or a table at which the company might safely meet. The blind wall by the kitchen he left for another day.
Above ground, Gizem Faruki tended a quieter siege. Her baklava had found its way to the palace kitchens and, from a fifth of her shop's volume, grown into the better part of its custom — the door held open by a pregnant concubine, Gulnaz, who would have no one's sweets but hers, fresh the very morning they were made. By that road she had come to know the women of the household: Dilrûba the coffee-mistress, who carries the cup to the great ladies and hears every word spoken over it, and Emine the wet-nurse, nearest of all to the ladies themselves. The word this week was of a distress at the heart of the harem — the Haseki Sultan herself grown troubled, and her trouble setting the whole house on edge, some five days after the company's own return. Then came the meeting Gizem had been promised long before. A seeker named Rena, sent to her by Gülbahar, sat at her table and proved to be Emine under a borrowed name — the wet-nurse herself, drawn in secret to the Sufi way and terrified of it, wanting one gentle truth she might carry to yet another lady of the palace, pregnant and greatly distressed. Gizem gave it plainly over tea: that she had found no proof in scripture or in history that their master had ever damned the working of magic; that if all things are a gift and an expression of God, what is done by nature cannot damn; that Rumi is read anew each time and yields something new. The woman's fear eased by a degree, and she went — with the promise of a question at their next meeting. She did not see, as Gizem did, the slim-suited man who set down his coffee and rose to follow her out. Gizem followed the follower, and tracked him to the door of A Certain Community. The wet-nurse was watched.
Miray Ruba Mata Biru went looking for word of her own, among the bath-houses near the palace, and found the city's temper written in raids: four hamams (the bath-houses) struck of late by the agents of A Certain Community and the Bostanji Imperial Guard, for reasons no one could name. The mere asking of questions was enough to have her seized — six soldiers, an arm to either side, and a cell in a barracks compound — from which she made her escape as no cell was built to hold a druid, dwindling to a rodent and slipping out the window while no eye was on her. Worse than the arrest was the errand that had gone before it. She called upon Hano 'the Widow' as upon an old ally, and was let in to wait; and waiting, she read on the broker's own desk a standing note to another of her hunters — to watch a past associate suspected of being not wholly human, and to put them down the moment they became an issue, a fate framed uncomfortably like her own. Hano, when she came down, spoke warmly of a certain Murad, a hard-handed captain with a following of warriors and a settled hatred of spellcraft and of the non-human, whom she reckoned the strong leader the times demanded; the Padishah she thought acceptable but too much in his head, wanting more of the man of action. Miray took the lesson: the Widow, one of the very first friends they had made in this city, was no friend to their cause.
There was one druid, at least, still worth the finding. At the Ermeydani, the Undercity's fighting-pit, a goat had held its ring all afternoon, and the goat was Deniz. Miray put her name in, and in the ring hailed her in the old tongue, half-buried in common speech; Deniz answered in fluent Druidic — I didn't realise there were more of us here — and they had at each other, Miray a monitor-lizard snapping at a hock until the pit-men hauled her out for the crime of a conjured club. After, the two talked as equals. Deniz cares for nothing but her oasis and is wholly indifferent to who sits highest in the city, save that certain victors might threaten the deep places she keeps; she asked, twice and pointedly, whether Miray followed one Eve — you haven't eaten another fruit yet, have you — and, contented with the answer, allowed that Eve the Unchained does indeed menace the Undercity. Upon the true matter they found their ground: a balance in which no one is subjugated and no old score is settled by turning the wheel the other way. It was an accord, of a kind, and a first ally won among the few scattered druids of the city.
Down with Papa Mert, Sidra learned a graver craft. She lent her hands to his careful mixing — saltpetre, quicklime, sulphur, loaded by the barrel — and was shown at the last what it was: Greek fire, the old city-burning terror, and now a thing she could recognise on sight or brew herself at need. He gave her counsel with it, in his sparing way: that the powerful never cease asking, and that the wise seller keeps his distance and tells himself the money is enough. He gave her, too, a short curved dagger and a plain lesson in its use — strike here, thrust up, and twist — for a day when she could not simply walk away; and he named her, dryly, a city cat, for the way she came and went. Then she watched a cart of those same barrels loaded by tusked porters and trailed it at a distance, and saw it roll through the gate of the Ghost of March's own compound. She was still tucked beneath a stall in the çarşı (the covered market), scribbling her intelligence into a notebook, when her djinn stirred a warning and the bandaged figure himself stooped over her. I don't know how you've done it, but you've certainly done it, haven't you. He asked nothing of the how — a tap where a nose might once have been sufficed for tell me no details — only warned that the Padishah was turning over every brick and stone in the city, that the window was closing, and that the time had come to bring the parties together. Had the company not dealt, he asked, with Ahra 'the Wolf', with Hano, with Giannis, with Chique Manu, with Sharif the Strong Fur? Then let them carry his most cordial invitation: in four days' time, at a neutral, well-kept tavern that passed for derelict, he would gather all who were willing, and there they would decide the fate of the city. Sidra's message was already flying to Jean-Zera before the Ghost had walked ten paces.
So the company came back together with a great deal to weigh. They had a table set for them, and four days to fill its chairs with the powers of the city; a father appeased, for two nights at least; a wet-nurse under the eye of the secret service, and a friend within the palace at last; a druid half-won and a Widow turned; and, hidden in a book behind a wall, both the safest room in Constantinople and the strangest. There remained the question of the Crown of Sargon, now attuned and answering to Sidra: whether to keep it as a thing of power in their own hands, or to spend it to buy the loyalty — and the palace-spies, and the running interference — of the cats of the Council of the Ninth Life. Four days, and the most powerful fugitive in the land asleep a wall away.