The dog next door began barking before Ithra the Sila had reached the gate.
She had chosen a shape for the street that nobody would look at twice: a woman of fifty in a navy raincoat, carrying a clipboard and a ring of keys, with reading glasses on a cord round her neck. The keys were real. She had taken them from a locksmith's board in the town an hour ago and would put them back. The raincoat was a mistake. Nobody wore one under this sky. The sun stood at the top of it, white, as it had stood for days, and the little front gardens along the street had gone yellow at the edges.
The dog did not care about the raincoat. It stood behind its fence with its legs braced and barked at her, then past her, at the house.
A man in shorts came out of the neighbouring door with a hosepipe.
"Sorry," he said. "He's like that with this house. Has been since the day Mr Gardner died." He looked at the clipboard. "You from the solicitors?"
"Yes," Ithra said. "An inventory for the estate."
"About time. Somebody's coming for it, they said. A nephew." He turned the hose on the yellow grass. "Months he's been barking. Barked all that first night. I thought someone had broken in. Went round with a torch. Nobody there."
"Which night?"
"The day he died. That night." He shrugged. "Dogs know, they say."
She thanked him and let herself in.
The hall smelled of a house shut in the heat. Letters lay fanned on the mat where the flap had dropped them. She crouched and read the envelopes without picking them up. A gas bill. A solicitor's letter to the executors of the late Marcus Gardner. A catalogue. A second letter from the same solicitor, newer, addressed to a Mr Julian Gardner at this address, "to await arrival". She noted the name and left it where it lay.
She went through the house in the order she had gone through a hundred houses. Who, then how, then what was left.
The front room first. A rug, cushions, a brass tray. Two tea glasses on the tray, and in the bottom of each a ring of brown where the tea had dried away, more than a year of it, in two neat circles. The sorcerer had poured them for someone who had not come. She knew this tray. She had read it in the knot Soren brought up from the weave: this was where Kael had sat and left his tea untouched out of good manners. She did not touch it either.
The kitchen. A coffee press with a skin of mould on the grounds. A cup by the north window.
Then the workroom.
It was the back half of the house, plain, with a wooden floor. A trained eye would see the rest. A double inlay ran round the walls under the plaster, a line within a line. A circle was set into the boards, and three small instruments were sunk flush with the floor at its points. The boundary had been left open. She felt that at the threshold. A circle left open has a draught to it, faint, like a door ajar into an unheated room. Nothing came through it now. Whatever had been on the other end of it was dead or gone or voided, and the instruments in the floor were as cold as nails.
None of that was why the assignee had written three lines.
The cold was in the back wall, low down, where the plaster met the skirting. She smelled it before she saw it.
Every investigator of her grade knew the smell of captivity. She had met it in cellars and in bottles and once in the hollow of a tree. It was not a smell to a human nose. To her it lay on the air like old smoke on a coat: stillness gone sour, a fire kept so low for so long that it had forgotten how to be fire. It came off the wall in a band at knee height. It was the oldest she had ever met.
She knelt.
The plaster had a hollow in it, the size of a man lying on his side with his knees drawn up. The inside of it was smooth, as smooth as the inside of a shell, without a crack or a chip. Nothing had broken out of this. Whatever had lain here had been let go, and had slid out the way a stone slides out of mud when the water comes back. She laid her hand flat in the hollow. The plaster was cold. Under the cold was the shape of the one who had lain in it, pressed into the wall over years like a sleeper's shape in a mattress.
She measured the hollow with her forearm, out of habit. Four lengths, and a little over. Then she read it as she would read a jewel.
A Jann, unforked. High grade. Old, older than most of the elders in the Cave. Something in it that she knew from the tribal histories more than from any meeting: a stillness under binding, a refusal to thrash, that had been held up to young jinn as an example. And something else, under that, that she knew from much nearer.
She took her hand away. She did not let herself say it yet.
The trail began at the foot of the hollow.
It was faint after so long, but the house had been shut and nothing had walked over it. She could read it as a tracker reads a dry riverbed. It did not stand. It went along the floor on hands and knees, low, out of the workroom and down the hall. She followed it bent over with the reading glasses swinging on their cord. It went into the kitchen and stopped at the cup by the window for a long time. She crouched where it had crouched. Something had knelt on these boards with its face close to the rim of the cup and stayed there, the way a dog stays with its nose in a coat its master has left on a chair. It came out again. It went into the front room and stopped at the edge of the rug.
There it turned back. It went round the rug, keeping to the bare boards, the whole way round, as far from the brass tray as the walls allowed.
She stood in the doorway and looked at the two glasses for a while.
The trail went to the front door. On the mat, among the letters, it was upright for the first time, a single print of something standing. Then it went through the wood. She opened the door and followed it out onto the step, where it was fainter, and down the path to the gate. The dog had stopped barking. It stood at its fence with its ears flat and watched her follow nothing. The man with the hose had gone in and left it running on the grass.
At the gate the trail went left, toward the end of the street, and thinned into the heat.
She stood on the pavement in her raincoat with the sun overhead and let herself say it.
She had held Kael's jewel in her own hand in the first week of the forty days, to read what Soren could not bear to read twice. She had walked the room where he died. She knew his grain the way she knew the grain of her own shape: young, unforked, of a small sublayer, and under it something long and old and odd that every reader had put down to some Jann lines living long. The grain in the hollow was the same grain. Older. Worn down by years of plaster. The same.
At a dawn more than a year ago she had asked Soren what he would do if the pointer's trail led back to the pass in the third offensive. He had looked at the water in the seep and said nothing.
The trail out of the sorcerer's wall was Naim's.