Ejder-i Derya is a steamer of no government's flag — a vessel outside the writ of the state, and something informal, perhaps even illicit, in her business, for her captain is a Greek veteran of the smuggling trade. She is fitted with decks for cargo, for sleeping, and for the parlour, and bears passengers of every description; Osman Hamdi Bey kept a private room aboard her whilst humbler travellers shared the common berths. At her heart lies the Parlor Deck, a spirited quarter where the company gathered about oblong tables at cards and dinner whilst a band filled the air with music — a place of easy society and good fellowship, quickened by the gaming table, if wanting the privacy of finer accommodation.
She proved, however, no mere conveyance but a stage for the unlooked-for. So it was when Osman Hamdi Bey was accosted by a woman in seeming distress and led with others to look into a nearby cabin: what appeared an innocent errand turned of a sudden to peril, for the woman showed herself a wicked Shade, and there broke out a struggle of spell and steel. The scene grew the tenser when a working cast by a Singer plunged the deck into darkness and confounded their handling of the threat.
Worse followed. A spell rebounded from a ritual circle and broke open the hull, so that the ship began to take on water and to founder, and the company roused the captain and sought help in haste. In the course of that same trouble a djinn was banished, and a woman who had served as a decoy in an exorcism made her escape by teleportation together with her confederates. The hull, breached though it had been, afterward showed as though it had been magically remade whole; and the captain gave out that the emergency was past, and that Ejder-i Derya would make straight for Constantinople.
Upon reaching Constantinople matters of some moment followed, not least the coming of Crown Prince Abd-ul Mejid, who told the crew of the Caliph's death and drew Osman Hamdi Bey into the business. The ship served thereafter as the stage for further dealings and errands, amongst them the charge to recover a stolen journal that had clouded Osman's memory; her passage was given over to discussion, to planning, and to preparation for an infiltration of the city's criminal underbelly, the first thread of which led to Hano "the Widow."