The bar of sun lay on the seventh flagstone from the gallery steps, and it had lain there for two days by the human clock.
Soren had watched it move for eight hundred years. The shaft at the mouth of the Cave opened on the edge of a human city, where a dry culvert ran under a road nobody used. Through it, every human morning, a bar of sunlight came down the slope of the entry and crossed the floor. It went the way a tide goes up a beach, slow and certain, stone by stone. At midday it touched the seventh flagstone. In the afternoon it climbed the far wall, reddened, and went out. The young ones set their hours by it without knowing they did. When it went out, the upper world was open to them, and they went up into its dark.
It had touched the seventh flagstone two days ago and stopped.
It lay there now, white, with dust turning in it. The stone under it had grown warm. Soren had put his hand on it the first night that was not a night and found it warm as a sleeping animal, and he had not touched it since.
"He doesn't need a pact," a young voice was saying at the far end of the gallery. "That's what they say on the road. He just asks you. Then you're free of them."
Three of them had come back from the upper world an hour ago. They were Jann, young, none of them two centuries old, and they stood in a knot by the eastern seep with the others crowding round. Their edges were bright and loose. They had the look of jinn who had stood too close to a fire and liked it.
"Free of who?"
"Of all of it. The registry. The reciters. The human law. No more hiding under their roofs when they read at us. He walks in the daylight and nobody can read at him. They tried, in a village. The man reading choked." The young one laughed. "And where he goes, it rains."
"Who told you that?"
"Everybody. Everybody on the road."
Soren listened from his seat at the head of the gallery and did not move. He knew the shape of what he was hearing. Water finds the lowest place in a floor. Every grievance the Cave had ever carried against humans, every binding, every burning, every night spent hiding from a voice reading in a bedroom, ran downhill toward that road. The rumour had been cut to fit them.
He lifted two fingers. The one who had been laughing saw it, and the knot by the seep opened to let him through. He came up the gallery and stopped short of the bar of sun, on the far side of it, so that Soren looked at him through the light.
"You saw this man," Soren said.
"No." The young one's edges dimmed a little. "Not him. I saw the ones who'd seen him. Their faces."
"Jinn?"
"Some. Old ones, with marks on them, the kind you tell us not to stand near. They were happy." He said it as if the word explained everything. "I've never seen the old ones happy."
Soren knew the marks he meant. He had read them on jinn in the purge, laid over the type like soot over a lamp glass, and he had sent his best assignees to stand near them so that the young need not. Devils were going to the road in daylight, gladly. He thanked the young one and sent him back to the seep, and watched the others close round him again, asking.
He called them all to the gallery at what the clock said was evening.
They came as they always came, in their families and their sublayers, filling the benches and the ledges and the dark beyond the lamps. Elders sat near him. The young stood at the back, by the seep. The bar of sun lay on its flagstone between him and them, and those who passed it walked round it as if it were a hole in the floor.
Ithra the Sila stood at his left, as she had stood for most of his eight centuries. She wore the shape she kept for the Cave, plain and grey and easy to forget, and her hands were folded in front of her. She had said nothing about the sun. She had said nothing about the rumours either, which meant she had already heard more of them than he had.
He did not rise for long. He had learned at Kael's gathering that the Cave listened best to a short speech.
"There is a man on the road between Syria and Iraq," he said. "The readers of every tribe have the same old pages about him. I read them as a student. You have heard what is said of him by the ones who follow him. I have heard it too." He let the gallery be still. "No jinn of this Cave walks that road. Not to look. Not to listen. Not to carry a message. Whoever goes, goes without this Cave behind them."
The silence after it had a weight. He could feel the young ones at the back pressing against it.
"By what law?" someone said, from beyond the lamps.
It was a fair question. For eight centuries he had answered every question in this gallery by naming a law. He had named the law that voided Marcus Gardner's pacts. He had built the purge out of law, clause by clause, three hundred and fifteen times.
"By mine," he said, and sat down.
Nobody spoke. He had led long enough to tell a gallery that has been answered from one that has been told to be quiet. This one had been told.
When it had emptied, Ithra stayed.
"They say on the road that he breaks bindings," she said. "That jinn held by sorcerers walk free when he passes. It is a good rumour. It costs him nothing to start."
"It has already happened once without him," Soren said.
She waited.
He was thinking of a report he had read in the last week of the purge, among hundreds. One of the assignees had gone to the sorcerer's house after the closing, as they were told to, to see that nothing was left running. The assignee had written three lines. The workroom boundary had been left open. The instruments in the floor were dead. There was a cold in the back wall of the workroom, low down, that the assignee could not account for, "possibly residue". Soren had marked it noted, not pursued. He had been closing a sorcerer a day.
"Marcus's house," he said. "Go and see what is left in it. Everything. The walls."
Ithra looked at him for a moment longer than she usually did. She had asked him once, at a dawn more than a year ago, what he would do if the trail led to the pass where Naim fell. He had not answered her then. He did not answer her now. She inclined her head and went.
He sat alone with the bar of sun.
At the clock-hour of sunset, the hour when the light should have climbed the far wall and reddened and gone out, it lay where it was. Soren watched the dust turn in it. By the eastern seep someone was humming, low, the same five notes over and over. It was Tamar, a Jann of the eastern galleries, who hummed there most evenings, and Soren noted without wanting to that Tamar had not gone up with the others.
The patroller came in at the bottom of the steps. He was the same young one who had brought him Kael's jewel in his hand on the first night of all this, and he still walked into his presence as if the floor might give way.
"I've counted the sleeping places," he said. "Twice. Every gallery, every sublayer, the outer ledges."
"And?"
"Thirty are empty," he said. "They left by the culvert, a few at a time, while you were speaking. Nobody stopped them." He looked at the bar of sun on the floor and then back at Soren. "Two of them were elders."