Osman's Journal is an artifact meant for a community leader — a false version of the thing, which is to say it may hold nothing genuine. The journal figures in a stratagem of Sidra al-Najjar, Jean-Zera Mongé, and Gizem Faruki to treat with the kavalan of Egypt, an assassin; its part in their design is no small one, bearing as it does upon their dealings with the community leader and with the assassin alike. It serves them as an instrument for finding their way through the tangled politics that surround the kavalan's doings, and the consequences these may bring.
More lately, Osman’s Journal has been known for a tome that holds the whereabouts of the sister of the Padishah's consort, a diviner of great power — one whose very existence is said to bar the consort's full arcane strength and to thwart the Padishah's grand design. The journal is locked by mundane and by arcane means both, though Osman Hamdi Bey allowed that another road to its contents exists. He bequeaths his manor, its secret compartments and its artifact vault, to his friends. The journal was found hidden behind an open book held out by a bust in Osman's library, and beside it a sealed letter to those same friends, folded about a black queen chess piece with a coiled metal serpent within. In the letter Osman gives it to be understood that he is likely dead, and charges his friends to seek help of an ally in unlocking the journal's secrets, the key to the diviner's whereabouts being enclosed.