The news went through the Cave like weather down a valley.
Soren felt it leave him first, because it had arrived in him, and the weave carried it out from there. The details stayed his: the jewel, the woman, the verses. What travelled was the shape of the fact with nothing inside it. A thread had been cut. Someone they belonged to was gone.
He could follow it by what stopped. In the lower galleries a family meal broke off half eaten. The old one who had been humming over his carved stone let the tone die and set the stone down. Along the passages the small traffic of errands slowed and then turned, all of it, toward him, until the whole Cave was leaning in one direction like grass in a wind.
They came from every direction. The two disputants came back first, because they had been nearest. Then a knot of young ones came from the side galleries, Kael's age, who had grown up beside him and would now learn what that had and had not meant. The old ones came last from the deep rooms, slow and careful, like jinn who had felt many of these ripples and never found an easy way to feel one.
They filled the gallery where Soren sat. Nobody asked what had happened, because they knew that much. They asked how, first in silence and then out loud, the same question in many mouths.
Soren did not answer, and so the voices began to name what they could. Naming things felt like movement, and movement felt like control, which every jinn in that gallery wanted and none of them had.
A mid-tier from the deep rooms got there first, a big Jann who sold passage rights and talked the way he sold.
"He was under our register. If he took work, the register shows it. Show me the entry and I'll show you who to blame."
"There is no entry." That was the young female near the front, with her mother's hard mouth. She said it as if it scalded her. "I looked while you were walking up. He went without one. The keepers' book has him going up before dawn like any errand. A ward of the leader, outside every rule he was raised on, and not one of us asked him where."
Varan had come up from the readers' rooms with ink still in the creases of his fingers. He did not raise his voice. He never had.
"Then the pact was made where the register doesn't reach. The weave reaches it. The register only listens to it."
"Then read the weave, reader, and give us a name."
"The weave is not read from a gallery floor."
Oren was the last of the old ones in, and the slowest. She stopped where she was, among the young, and the young moved back from her without being asked.
"We missed it because we were not looking. A jinn his age goes quiet, and we call the quiet good manners. It was the sign." She let that sit, flat as a ruling. "And a human does not find one young Jann in one cave, under one leader's eye, by walking in the dark with a lamp. Someone handed him the lamp."
"Who?"
"I said someone. When I have more, I will say more."
The voices gathered speed with no target. No name had been given, so they ran at the shape of the question instead, and the shape was the scandal. A young jinn of a known line, under the Cave's authority, had died outside the protection the Cave existed to give, and nobody inside that protection had known until he was dead.
The reciter came up once, from a young one at the back, and Varan shut it down in a sentence: the man had recited over a sick woman in her own house, and lawful recitation answered to no jinn law. No one could name the sorcerer, and you cannot answer a man without a name. So they kept circling back to how.
They were waiting for Soren.
He had not moved. He sat where he had sat when the patroller came, the jewel closed in his hand, the stone cool under him, his mind still going down the list.
He rose the way he rose in council when he meant the room to understand he would say a thing once. The voices stopped.
"We will hold forty days."
The quiet in the gallery got deeper.
"Every cave that has buried one of its own has held forty days, and this one will too. The rite doesn't bend. It begins tonight and ends at the dawn after the fortieth day."
He let them hear the number.
"Inside those forty days I will find out what this was. If it was a setup, the answer will be proportionate to the evidence. If it wasn't, the answer will be proportionate to that. Until the fortieth day we hold. Nothing is done in the tribe's name. No covenant is invoked. No name leaves this Cave as a name to be answered."
He looked around the gallery.
"I'm not stalling you. The grief needs the shape of the rite, and the answer needs the time. I'm telling you both now so you know what I'm asking of you."
Nobody spoke. He sat down again.
He had risen only once, and sitting again was its own signal. The custom was to receive a pledge, never to question it, and they received it.
Only one of them came forward afterward. The keeper of the niches was older than the Cave's oldest tunnel, bent with it, and he stopped at the proper distance and held out his hand, palm up.
"The niche is cut. The rite wants its anchor."
Every jinn who died away from home and left no body got a niche in the deep wall, and a token in it, so the forty days had something to turn around. Soren knew what was in his own hand, and so did the keeper.
"Not yet."
"The rite. . ."
"The rite will have it. This is evidence before it's a relic. It will be in the niche by the fortieth dawn, and I'll set it there myself."
The keeper looked at the closed hand a moment longer, then lowered his own and went back to the wall. Several of the old ones watched him go. Nobody said that a leader carrying the anchor of his own ward's rite was a strange thing, though Soren could see a few of them thinking it.
An old one at the back drew a breath, and the hum began.
It started low and without words, as it always started, one long tone from a jinn who had done this before. Others came into it one by one, the old ones first, then the middle tier, then those of the young who could stand to. Soren watched Kael's age-mates try. One of them, a thin Jann who had once been caught with Kael racing water drops down the eastern wall, opened his mouth twice and could not find the note, and in the end only held his breath with the others. The hum filled the gallery as a slow tide fills a harbour at night, dark and patient.
Soren did not hum.
He sat in the middle of it and let it pass through him, and he went back to the list. Around him the tribe settled into the rite. Some sat down on the stone where they had been standing. Others leaned against the walls and let the stone hold them up. The young female with her mother's hard mouth pressed her palm flat on the rock and did not take it away.
He went through the names again, the way he had been taught to read a clause twice before trusting it. He checked each one against standing, against reach, against what he knew of their dealings outside the Cave. He set aside two that he could account for. He did not set aside the first.
He let his eyes travel the gallery as the hum rose, from face to face, the young ones in their knot, the old ones along the wall.
Near the eastern seep, where the new water darkened the stone, Tamar had closed his eyes. His name stood first on the list. He was humming with the rest, and under the long note of the rite Soren could hear the five small notes Tamar hummed every morning over the green on the rock.