Ithra the Sila came up out of the passage and across the worn stone and lowered herself onto the ledge beside him.
She sat the way she had sat in the same places for most of a thousand years, folding her limbs with no wasted movement. Her hair was bound back in the old style. Her face had the finish very old faces get, like river stone, and she had set it in the look she kept for council with him: listening, unhurried, ready to be told what he had decided before he said it.
He had not decided all of it. That was part of why he had called her.
"Kael."
She was not asking. She had felt the rite begin.
"Yes."
For a while neither of them spoke. They had known each other long enough to leave a fact alone.
He opened his hand without being asked. She looked at the jewel for a long moment and did not touch it.
"Where was it?"
"In the middle of the floor. Between the bed and the door."
"Jewels roll."
"This one didn't."
"Then someone wanted it found, and found quickly, and found by us." She leaned back against the wall. "A sorcerer who wanted to be forgotten would have let it roll under the wardrobe and stay there for a hundred years. This one wanted you to hold it."
He had thought the same thing an hour after the patroller left, and had not liked thinking it alone. Hearing it in her voice made it solid enough to work with.
They had met in the second war, when she was already old and he was not yet leader. She had been the one sent to read what was left of a village after an Ifrit raid, and he had been the young Marid detailed to keep her alive while she did it. She had told him on the first night that she did not need keeping. On the third night she had been right. Since then she had read for him whatever needed reading, and he had never once asked her how.
"You pledged the forty."
"I did."
"Then what do you want from me?"
"I need to know who the sorcerer is. And I need to know who pointed him."
"A sorcerer is a sorcerer. We know their shape. We don't usually need names before we move."
"We're not moving."
"Not yet."
"Not yet, and not the way the tribe expects. Kael had no name outside this Cave. Someone gave the sorcerer the cave, the boy and the wound, and told him what to say so the boy would sign without coming to me. Someone who knew what Kael wanted to hear, and knew it well enough to say it in his father's voice."
"And if you announce an investigation, they cover what's covered and bury what's buried, and we chase silence."
"Yes."
"So you won't announce it."
"No."
She nodded once.
"He used to bring me his questions about the law. Clauses, mostly. When he thought you were too busy." She looked at the floor between them. "I should have asked why he thought you were busy so often."
Soren had not known that. He put it beside the jewel.
"Tell me what to do."
"Three things. First, the registries, both of them. Confirm there's no pact under Kael's signature in the human sorcerers' registry or on the jinn parallel. I expect both to be clean. I want the clean confirmed by you, on record."
"Both. Second?"
"The room where he died. We have the jewel, but I want you in that room. The watcher we have is local and low tier, and what she saw is all she saw. I want the residue read by someone of your grade. Whatever the reciter left. Whatever was in the room before he came. Any signature at all."
"Third."
"The family."
She waited.
He had thought about this part through the hum, and he still did not like it. Sending a jinn to live among humans under a borrowed face was old practice and lawful, if it did no harm, but it put the one sent in plain reach of whoever came to that house. Reciters went back to check on the people they had treated. A man good enough to burn a Jann out of a body might be good enough to look twice at a cousin nobody had met, and Soren had no way to know what this one saw when he looked. Forty days in a borrowed shape would also spend her. She would have to slip home through the gate every few nights to rest, and every crossing went into the keepers' book.
"The host is a young woman. Her people are going to spend forty days nursing her back. In that time they're the nearest source we have for how she came to be chosen: who came to the door in the weeks before, what came near them without announcing itself, any stranger in the street or the quarter. I want someone living in that house through the recovery, and I want it to be you."
"A relative."
"Choose the form. I trust your choice."
She turned it over.
"A cousin from another city. Close enough that they take her in without a question, far enough that nobody in the house has met her lately or knows her mother's name. A cousin on the mother's side, I think. Mothers' cousins are never quite counted. I'll need a day to build her."
"Take it. The reciter will come back to see her. That kind always does."
"Then the cousin will make him tea and keep her eyes on the cups." A corner of her mouth moved. "Men like that look at the sick, not at whoever is pouring. I'll be pouring."
She let the smile go as fast as it had come.
"And the fourth thing."
He looked at her. She was looking back the way she had looked at him across council tables since before he led anyone.
"There is no fourth thing."
"There is. You haven't said it, but you're already bracing for it, and I want to hear it before I go. If the pointer's trail leads back to Naim, or to anyone tied to what happened to him, what then?"
He did not answer.
"You've carried what you suspect about Naim for decades. You never told me. I knew anyway. If this touches it, the answer will need more than you've decided. I need to know my orders before the answer comes, not after."
He looked down at the floor where the hum had been. The stone was cold again, as cold as it had been before the night began.
"I don't know what I'll decide."
"You'll have to."
"I know."
"By the fortieth day."
"By the fortieth day."
She had heard that tone from him across nine centuries, and she did not push.
"Quietly."
"Quietly. No one but you."
"And if I need others?"
"Then you decide. You carry my authority. Whatever you decide with it, I'll stand behind."
She rose and crossed the gallery without hurry or goodbye. At the mouth of the gallery she stopped for the change.
He watched it begin. Anyone who did not know the Sila fork would have missed the first small adjustments, the way her signature settled into the shape of the form she was building. Her height came down a little. Her shoulders rounded. The bound hair loosened and darkened at the temples with a grey that had not been there. She was making a woman somewhat past young and well short of old, the sort who could arrive at a human door as a cousin from elsewhere, be taken in, make herself useful, and be trusted enough to learn what the household did not know it knew.
She held the half-made shape there in the passage mouth and turned her head back toward him. Behind the shifting face he could still see her own, set the way it was set at council.
"One more thing. During the hum you looked at the eastern seep four times. I saw who was standing there."
He said nothing.
"I'll start somewhere else, so he doesn't feel me coming."
Then she stepped through, and the gallery held only Soren and the cold stone in his fist.