The light had come in another hand's width since the last count, and Soren the Marid stopped on the outer threshold to look at it.
It was human light, the noon of the city that lay against the Cave's mouth, and for three months it had not moved. It lay across the first flagstones like water spilled on a floor and left to stand. The jinn of the Cave had always kept their own pale even light inside and let the human day come and go at the door like a tide. This tide had come in and stayed. Each week it reached a little further along the stone, the way standing water finds the cracks, and each week the young ones sat closer to its edge and watched it.
Thirty had gone through it. He had the names. Four of them were his own clerks. One had left a note on the desk in the clerks' square hand, saying that the master on the road kept no registry. Soren had read it first as an insult and then as a reason. A Cave that could not say which of its own had sold a ward to a sorcerer had no ground to tell its young to stay out of the light.
He turned his back on the door and walked down to the elders' chamber, and his shadow went down the passage ahead of him, heavier than the lamps could account for.
The elders were waiting. Varan and Oren, elder Jann both, sat on the reading bench with their hands folded, the two oldest readers in the Cave, who had confirmed the void with him the spring before last. The keeper of the niches stood by the wall because he always stood. Harun the Sila had come in from the human world an hour before and still wore the dust of a road on the edge of his borrowed coat. Soren had asked him to come. It was right that family be present.
Soren did not sit.
"The rite closed with a name for the sorcerer," he said. "It did not close with a name for the one who pointed him. Ithra gave me four. Two were cleared before the purge closed. One has answered since. I am going to give you the last."
Varan's eyes moved, once, toward Harun, and back.
"In the months before he died, the boy sat at the eastern seep most evenings. The water runs down the wall there and he used to race the drops. He talked while he did it. About the archives. About training early. About his father." He let that sit. "One jinn sat at the seep every one of those evenings. He hums there. He has hummed there for ninety years. He heard everything the boy said, and nobody else did."
The keeper shifted his weight against the wall.
"Twelve days before the binding, that jinn went up into the human city without a registered errand and came back the next night. He has not said where he went. In the hum, when the whole Cave sat for the boy, he stood at the seep with his eyes shut. I looked at him four times." Soren heard how thin it sounded, said aloud, and said the rest anyway. "The sorcerer knew what the boy hoped for. Someone gave him that. I name Tamar the Jann."
Nobody spoke. Harun looked at his hands. His sister had married Tamar a century ago, and in a century Harun had never once, in Soren's hearing, said anything warm about him. He did not say anything now.
"Bring him in," Oren said. "We'll hear him before we hear any more about him."
Tamar came in wet. He had been at the seep, of course. He was a narrow jinn with a long jaw and the patient stoop of something that had lived a long time in low passages, and water ran off the ends of his fingers onto the floor of the chamber. He looked at the elders, and at Harun, and then at Soren, and he waited to be told.
Soren told him. He gave it in the same order, the evenings, the city, the hum, and he did not make it louder.
Tamar listened to the end.
"I sat by the seep," he said. "I always sit by the seep. The boy talked. I didn't listen to half of it. He talked about his father the way they all talk about fathers."
"The city."
"I went up to look at the sea." He said it as plainly as the rest. "I go every few years. I don't register it because there's nothing to register. I stood on a wall and looked at it and came back."
"And the hum."
"I shut my eyes because he was dead." For the first time something moved in the long face. "I didn't sell him to anyone. I liked him. He used to splash me."
That was all. He did not argue the points or ask what the penalty was. He stood with the water running off his hands and looked at Soren, and Soren found that he had nothing to set against it but the same four facts, which had seemed to him in the long nights like the four walls of a room and now, in the chamber, looked like four stones lying on a floor.
He had come too far down this channel to climb out of it on a look.
"You'll be held in the lower gallery," he said. "No penalty. No name leaves this chamber. Until the matter is closed."
"Closed by who?"
Soren did not answer that. The keeper stepped away from the wall and touched Tamar's elbow, and Tamar went with him without being pulled. At the door he looked back once at Harun. Harun did not look up.
When they had gone, Varan unfolded his hands.
"In eight centuries," he said, "I have watched you read a contract twice before you trusted it. You read that one once."
"I read it every night for three months."
"That's still once," Varan said, and did not explain. Soren looked at the wet prints Tamar had left on the floor. They were drying already at the edges, the way everything in the Cave dried, slowly and from the outside in.
He heard the chain before he saw her.
It came down the passage from the outer threshold, a light dragging sound with a ring in it, and under it something else: a breath that was not a breath, wet and uneven, the sound a jinn makes when it has forgotten that it does not need to breathe. The lamps in the passage dipped as it came. The keeper, halfway back from the lower gallery, flattened himself against the wall.
Ithra the Sila walked into the chamber in her own shape for the first time in months. She looked worn thin, like the young carriers when they came home spent. In her left hand she held the end of a chain, and Soren saw at once what it was made of: thin pale links of her own substance, each one a shape she had worn and folded down small, a teacher's wrist, a grocer's thumb, a cousin's ring finger, joined end to end. It had cost her to make. It ran back from her hand across the floor to the door.
At the other end was a jinn on all fours.
It was the colour of old plaster. It had a shape, but loosely, the way a coat on a hook has the shape of a man. One shoulder was too high. The face was turned down and away from the lamps, and from it came the wet breathing and a smell of tea gone cold and old wax, and under them the closeness of a room that has held something for years.
Varan stood up. Oren did not move at all.
"I found the tracks at the sorcerer's house," Ithra said. "I followed them for twelve weeks. He was sleeping in a drain under a bus station. He bit me twice." She lifted the chain an inch, and the thing at the end of it flinched and went still. "He was in that house a long time, Soren. Since before the boy came to you."
The jinn on the floor raised its head. One eye found the lamp and narrowed against it. The other was swollen shut. Soren looked at the face for a long moment and could not make it into anything.
"Who is this?"
"It's Naim."