A Certain Community is the clandestine service of the Empire — a secret constabulary and intelligence bureau in one, a web of spies and agents that goes about its work well outside the formal apparatus of the law, and that instils a quiet unease in the few who know it exists. At its head stands Aziz Sefa Bey, a man of high education and many tongues, who holds the interests of the Empire's humankind above all and sets his face against pluralism. Its creed is a single, harmonious voice in the councils of governance; its especial dread is the sway of the magical orders, against whom it will not scruple to turn magic itself; and it reckons the present hour a chaos precisely for its multitude of voices. Osman Hamdi Bey is no master of it, but a patron who works through it — invested with the authority to deputise whom he pleases and to furnish such men with resources and a free hand for their errands — and one whom the Community's own leadership is given to faulting for the very ecumenical breadth of his sympathies.
Of late Osman Hamdi Bey has set agents to the recovery of his stolen journal, a matter grown urgent with the recent death of The Caliph, whose passing has opened a vacancy of power that draws the Community into the shifting business of the state. The agents are bidden to work their way into the dealings of sundry figures of the underworld — Hano "the Widow", Giannis the Cut, and Chique Manu amongst them — the better to gather intelligence and restore some order. The Community, for its part, keeps its own watch upon Osman and his affairs against the suspicion of corruption, and has taken pains to bind the name of Jean-Zera Mongé publicly to that of Giannis, the sooner to blacken his repute and hobble whatever dealings he might yet essay.
In their first meeting with Ahra "the Wolf," a captain of the Janissaries, the agents learn that their cooperation with A Certain Community will run beyond the mere recovery of the journal to a work of criminal infiltration meant to see the Janissaries regain their strength — the agents' purposes thus falling into step with the Community's own broader design of keeping the Empire in some semblance of stability.