Four days the Ghost of March had given them, and a table to fill; the greater part of that time the company spent not at the table but abroad in Constantinople, carrying his invitations and quarrelling gently over whom to carry them to. The bald temptation — to bring Mira herself to the gathering, a diviner of terrible power set down among the city's masters — was weighed and set aside, for she is as frightened as she is formidable and knows not the half of what she can do. Hano 'the Widow', lately turned, they would not invite, judging her now more spoiler than ally; Giannis the Cut was a bridge already burned and left to smoulder. What they wanted instead was breadth: a voice for the Undercity and its half-human folk, a voice for the faithful, and — if the dead Osman's papers would yield it — a living remnant of the Lodge of Byzantia. They divided the city between them and went out.
Jean-Zera Mongé began with Ashraf, the late polymath's ill-tempered tortoise, who greeted his questions with the sigh of a creature resigned to being pestered until it answered. Persuaded — for it is easier to talk than to be dogged — Ashraf gave from memory the roster of the last meeting he had troubled to attend, decades gone and the refreshments poor: nine members besides Osman, described not by name but by feature. From that thicket Jean-Zera drew out four worth the chase: a Warden, a heavy-set Egyptian of middle years whose trade ran on great quantities of wax; a slim young Frenchman, whom Ashraf could not say was a true initiate or merely a guest sent on behalf of some kindred order on the Continent; a Fenariote widow of the close-knit Orthodox families, in her sixties, the order's walking encyclopaedia and the sort who does the real work while others hold the titles; and, as an afterthought, that Armenian up from the mint. The Lodge, Ashraf let slip, had not survived its own falling-out — misplaced funds, a spouse gone astray, a member using methods forbidden two centuries since — a rupture that came to its head at the catastrophe the city calls the greatest good, and none of them had spoken since. Osman's vast correspondence, he suggested, might be sifted for the rest.
So Jean-Zera sifted it, two days at the labour, learning to sort the reams by the very stationery the writers favoured. From the Orthodox pile a name rose: Chartophylax — a woman corresponded with about the turn of the century, and after her one styled Magus Chartophylax, the heir, to whom Osman had written condolences on the loss of both parents, and counsel on a matrimony, an inheritance, and certain challenging discoveries amongst the mother's effects. A flurry of letters, then a long trailing-off — a lead to be set aside for Gizem Faruki in time. The Armenian's letters were of another temper entirely: frosty, curt, deliberately vague, reading for all the world like a householder writing to a contractor. The most striking was recent — some two and a half years past — and it turned on the accessibility of the room: Osman pressing that it be made accessible, that there were problems with it. A magical hand, then, and — Jean-Zera thought — the sanctum itself. The Armenian had a name: Bedros Kuyumcuyan.
Gizem Faruki took the hardest errand, and the one she had been half-warned against: Ahra 'the Wolf'. The invitation opened a floodgate. Ahra has laboured, she said, to rebuild the order that died when the Janissaries — her own father among them — were destroyed by the Sekban at the greatest good; and now some faceless nobody who will not show his face, fielding an army of goons who ape the Sekban, presumes to gather the city under a motley banner. Where is this meeting? I will come, and I will show them what true order this city demands. She came away invited and furious both, and Gizem came away with a colder gift, delivered by the Keeper only once she was streets clear of the room and her failed reading of the woman: the Ghost of March is Alemdar Pasha; the Ghost killed Ahra's father; and Ahra does not know it.
To the Undercity's other voices Gizem went more gently. She found Kore at rest between performances, the great orcish Mervhan finishing a meal at her side, and asked her to sit at the table as a representative of the folk below. Kore was honoured, and unguarded: she told, for the first time, how she had found Alemdar half-dead after the greatest good and nursed him back to life, and how it was upon his recovery that he took up the leadership of the Undercity and its Justice for the differently-made. She gave his cause a warm and unhesitating second. Gizem, reading the room in her own art, saw what Kore is — no plain singer but something near a bard, her voice a power in itself; a champion like that, set behind any accord, could carry it.
Sidra al-Najjar carried the same errand to two more. At Papa Mert she waited in the periphery while he ground at his pestle, and had for her invitation the old apothecary's grim comfort: the best thing is to be beneath Allah's notice; the next best is to be prostrate before Him — and we have both failed at the first. He would come, he said, for her sake and no other's. Then to the intersection where Sharif the Strong Fur holds his court over a platter of milk. The cat knew everything already — teased her about the girl you brought to the city, proved he had heard of the party's other magic-user — and agreed to attend on a condition set like a purr: bring the crown; I will not take it, but it will prove useful. His price for the secret of who had told him of Mira remains the Crown of Sargon itself, a bargain still unstruck. He accepted a piece of baklava besides.
The last of Gizem's errands was to the faithful. Her local leader, Sadullah Efendi, is a mild-mannered man whose gentleness is a lure — the Keeper laid down the death card for him, transformation and its danger both — for beneath the softness runs a theology quietly revolutionary, said with so deft a touch that only the careful listener sees how far it goes, and how far it might carry him toward the authorities' notice. Her old mentor, Anna, drew the Ace of Wands reversed: a woman who broke the barriers of her sex for herself yet could never make her vision reproducible past the one-to-one. Gizem chose Sadullah, the stronger tie. He would come and make the case for mutual respect, he said, but pledge his community to nothing and take no part in treason.
Jean-Zera Mongé closed the run-up with the transactions that suited him. To Chique Manu he brought both the invitation — accepted at once, for the schemer likes to be early where change is coming — and a request: a line to the mint. Manu tensed at the ask until Bedros's name was spoken, then relaxed and wrote a letter of introduction to the man's family, with the address of their villa; he mentioned, too, that his own father had lately come looking for Jean-Zera, a thread the bard was in no hurry to take up. Then Jean-Zera saw off his own father, Claude Mongé, packing to sail: he pressed on him a lesser book from Osman's shelves and a handful of ancient coins from the Basilica catacombs — a reverse of the trinket a parent buys a child at the quay — and Claude departed with the tide, the promised legal antiquities-line to the Padishah still to be proven. Last, to Bedros's villa with Manu's letter in hand: the assayer took him in warily, would not speak plainly in the street, and confirmed within what the letters had implied — the Lodge is all but dead, riven at the greatest good, and he and Osman and one other were the neutral brokers who could not mend it. Skeptical of any good coming of it, he nonetheless agreed to attend as Jean-Zera's guest, and to draw in what other elements of the Lodge he could.
Then the table itself. In a neutral, well-kept tavern that passed for derelict they gathered about a great round board: the company seated together, Chique Manu and Bedros Kuyumcuyan on their flank; the Ghost of March and Kore across; one chair left empty for the Wolf. Sidra al-Najjar had cast enhancement upon her own tongue before sitting; Jean-Zera Mongé laid silent lines of Message and a hand-signal between them all. It was Sharif the Strong Fur who leapt onto the board and opened it — you may wonder why I have called you here — styling himself the gatekeeper between the upper city and the lower; and Sidra read in him a plain interest in keeping the two cities apart, for a gate is worth nothing once the wall is down.
Then the Ghost set out his platform, plainly, for clarity's sake: freedom of movement for the non-human, disguised above and free below; the abolition of the Janissaries entire; the Sultan subdued, not destroyed; a foreign policy of soft power; and — taking on himself some responsibility for what the Padishah has become — a military coup, followed by an assembly of the people, defended by the army and underwritten by a consolidation of the wealthy. His Sekban stand ready to effect it, he said, with the table or without it; it is already in motion. Kore gave it a strong and personal second. Bedros Kuyumcuyan, put on the spot to introduce himself, deferred in a panic and begged to speak later.
The company worked the room rather than the man. Gizem pressed him to explain the coup and what would govern after; Miray Ruba Mata Biru asked what violence would buy that the present state did not already hold — and the hard truth came clear, that Alemdar could not be argued out of his coup, and the only question left was whether to steer it or to break with him. Chique Manu flattered and leaned toward the coming winner. Gizem, shrinking into the part of the frightened child, asked only that people like her be safe, and the Ghost warmly seconded her. Sadullah Efendi rose to say he would be no partisan and take no part in treason, and would excuse himself before any plot was hatched — but he begged the room for mutual respect, that no deed be done in a people's name that the people must then answer for. Jean-Zera spoke for the mystical tradition passed down unto Byzantium and beyond, nodding to Bedros, and held that any council of leaders must seat both cities. Bedros himself stood at last, trembling: of a tradition older than the Ottomans and certain to outlast them, his care was for reconciliation after rupture; if a quorum could be reached, he said, there were levers that might be pulled to make the transfer of power smooth and bloodless — but only on the council's agreement. Papa Mert rose only to say he was there for the Undercity, and for the girl who was as a daughter to him, and sat back down.
Into that came Ahra 'the Wolf', late, armed men ranged in the hall at her back. She surveyed the table and scoffed — this is your council? — and the Ghost answered her cold: he had hoped she would see reason and fold her efforts into his, but they had progressed far past her feeble attempts at suborning crooks and liars. It landed as an insult, and was meant to. Her own platform followed, its opposite in every line: the non-human confined below; the Janissary Hearth restored; the head of Bergüzar on a spike and the Harem dissolved; a hard hand abroad; and the Padishah put down for a strong man in his place — one Bayezid, whose candidacy she would carry. Three futures stood plain upon the table now: the Ghost's, a pluralist coup toward an assembly; Ahra's, an anti-magic, monarchist coup toward an oligarchy under her pretender; and the Padishah's, the weary status quo with a tightening grip on magic.
The company made their stand and no more. Miray put it to both principals that the magical and the non-human have a right to exist, that secrecy is itself the wound, that the old blood between Janissary and Sekban is real but bottomless — and that the two of them were the pieces that would not fit, and must themselves choose when it ended. Jean-Zera declared that any order worth the name must let magic out of the Undercity's walls, and that if the room would not move that way he would remove himself from it. Pressed to a reckoning of leanings — the Ghost, the Wolf, or the Padishah — they held their noses and leaned to the Ghost as the least of the evils: he alone was not the enemy of their kind, and for the common man, they judged, little enough would change whichever way the throne fell. But they would not bless a violent coup. They would carry its ideals and leave before they were made complicit in its blood.
So they excused themselves before the room could turn, Sadullah Efendi and Papa Mert rising to leave with them while Bedros stayed behind to follow up in his own time. Sidra bore away the Crown of Sargon still un-traded — though at Sharif's whisper she had slipped it on beneath her scarf during the sitting, to what end the cat did not say. And Jean-Zera pulled one last thread loose on the way out: he learned at last what Bedros Kuyumcuyan is — an assayer at the mint, the very man who warrants that a coin is true metal at its true worth. A quiet fact, and one with a long fuse.
They came away, then, with no coalition sworn and every future still open: a coup already rolling that none of them could halt and none would bless; three irreconcilable banners; new voices won to the table — Kore, Papa Mert, Sadullah, Bedros, and the ever-transactional Manu — but bound to nothing. Mira stayed hidden and unshown; the Crown stayed theirs and Sharif's price unpaid; the Lodge lay half-mapped, the mint newly interesting, and beyond them both the palace and the Haseki Sultan waited on whatever the company decided, at last, that they were for.