Three of them walked through him before he had gone a hundred paces, and none of them looked back.
Nessar the Hinn had spent eighty years making himself a thing that could not be bumped into. He had built a network whose every cell passed through the ground of the world like ordinary traffic, a courier here, a tone there, nothing anyone would turn to look at. He had trained the habit so deep that he still moved like that now, along the edges of things, at an angle to the flow. It made no difference. The layer above the road was so crowded that the edges had their own crowd.
They had come from everywhere. He could read them as he passed, as an engineer reads the loads on a bridge: Ifrit fed fat on the surge, ghul from the grave districts with their long hands, Marid who had not left their waters in a thousand years, and under every type the same dark seam, the devil's mark, laid over them like tar over stone. They pushed and sang. Some of them fought, briefly, over nothing, and broke apart laughing. No one organised them. They flowed in one direction, the way water flows downhill without a plan, and below them, in the human layer, the road ran west with its dust and its crowds, and over one side of it hung the rain.
He had never seen so many of his kind in one place who did not care in the least who saw them.
At the bend where the road went down into a dry valley, a pavilion stood in the air. It was made of stretched shadow pegged to nothing. Two ghul sat at the entrance, one on each side, and as he came they both turned their heads together.
"Nessar," said the left one. "Asked for."
It was the second time he had heard his name in the mouth of a stranger since the dream. He did not like it any better.
The one who received him lay on cushions of nothing much in the middle of the pavilion, an old Ifrit, broad and heavy, with the mark on him so thick that Nessar could hardly see the type underneath. He was eating something. He did not get up.
"The architect," he said. "Sit."
Nessar sat. He had prepared the offer the way he prepared everything, in clauses, and he gave it in order. He had a tenth of what he had once had. It was the best tenth: the cells that had held their discipline when the surge broke, that had never crossed into cruelty he had not authorised, that did not know each other and could not betray each other. They could reach households in forty cities without a single human institution seeing them come. They could find the ones who hesitated. He called it what he had always called it.
"Correction," he said. "As a service. Wherever the master's people are refused, my cells can go in first and make the refusal cost."
The Ifrit listened to the end. Then he laughed. It went on for some time.
"Correction," he said, wiping his mouth. "Your little secret houses. Your cells." He waved a hand at the wall of the pavilion, at the road beyond it. "You've seen what's out there. He tells the sky to rain and it rains. He tells the ground to grow and it grows. Men walk out to meet him by the village. What's a cell for, Hinn? Who needs to be made to suffer, when you can make them wet?"
Nessar waited. A receiver who laughed at an offer was still a receiver, and the laughing was not yet a no.
"Some refuse," the Ifrit said, more quietly. "Not many. The ones who refuse, refuse for a reason. They've got someone. A dead mother who taught them to pray. A husband in the ground who'd be ashamed of them. A son." He leaned forward. "Do you know who they'll open the door for? The dead. You put the son on the doorstep and let him say, mother, go to him, it's all true, I've seen it, and she walks out to the road on her own feet. That's the work. That's what you were asked for."
"I'm Hinn," Nessar said. "I don't wear faces. Send a Sila."
"Sila are proud. They copy a face and they keep a bit of it and it shows. Men smell it." The Ifrit smiled. "You don't copy anything. You go where you're not seen, and that's the half of it they can't do. The face, we give you."
"I was asked for by name," Nessar said. "By him. I'd hear the work from him."
"Would you." The Ifrit picked something from between his teeth and looked at it. "I've been with the road since the island. He's never once looked at me. He doesn't look at any of us, architect. He walks, and we go where he walks, and when he wants a thing done he says it to the air, and someone does it. You'll hear the work from me."
The rack stood at the back of the pavilion, behind a fold of the shadow wall, and he smelled it before he saw it: talc, and cold earth, and the sweetish smell of a sickroom after the window has been shut too long.
There were perhaps forty faces on it. They hung on pegs like masks in a shop, but they were not masks. They were faces, emptied, each one the exact thickness of a face. An old man with a white stubble. A girl of eleven or twelve with a chipped front tooth. A woman with kohl still at the corners of her eyes. A young man with a scar through one eyebrow who had been, Nessar thought, about twenty. They moved a little on the pegs, though there was no wind.
He reached out and touched the young man's cheek, and drew his hand back. The face was hot. It was a dry fevered heat, like a forehead.
"Old work," the Ifrit said behind him. "Older than your fathers. Older than theirs. We didn't make the craft. We only found it lying about."
Nessar turned the young man's face on its peg. Behind the ear, along the line where a face meets the side of a head, ran a seam. It was finer than any stitch he had ever seen, finer than a hair, each loop set at the same angle as the last, and the thread was a colour he had no word for. Whoever had made the first of these had been patient beyond anything he understood, and he had built a network over eighty years.
He stood and looked at the seam for a long time.
He had worn another's will for forty years. A sorcerer had kept him in a jar of rooms and sent him out to do work he never chose, in the shape the work required, and he had hated each piece of it and done each piece perfectly. He had built everything since on that hatred. He knew precisely what was being asked.
He also knew the numbers. The road was going to win where it was refused and where it was not. The master's people would reach every city, his tenth or no tenth. A network that stood aside would be crushed by a swarm that did not even notice it, and a network inside would still exist when the swarm moved on. It would still have its cells and its channels. It would still have him. There would be an after to this, as there had been an after to the sorcerer. You survived into it by being useful now.
It was a means. A means was a thing you put down when it was finished.
"Which one first?" he said.
The receiver did not answer. He did not need to. Nessar lifted the young man's face from its peg himself, felt the fever of it against his palms, and raised it to his own, and the seam behind the ears drew closed against his head with a small sound, like a breath held in.