Sitting fourteen ended at the forty-first drop, when Naim put his hands over his ears and turned his face to the wall.
Ithra the Sila stopped speaking at once. She had learned in the first week that if she went on, even softly, he would be on the far side of the chamber with his back in the corner and his teeth showing, and the next sitting would be lost as well. So she sat on the bench with her hands in her lap and counted the drops at the seep, which she could hear from here if she held still, and waited.
At the sixtieth drop he took his hands down.
"Thank you," she said. "That's enough for today."
She went out past the keeper, who sat on a stool outside the door with a bowl of water on his knees as he had sat outside every sitting, and walked up to the clerks' alcove, and wrote it down.
She wrote everything down. The record was in her own hand, in the clerks' plain script, so that Soren or anyone after him could read it without her. Fourteen sittings. Never more than sixty drops. What Naim could say, and what he could not, and what he had done with his hands while he said it. On the facing page she was building the sorcerer's house out of what he gave her.
A grinder, run every morning, seven seconds. A kettle. Eleven stairs, the fourth one loud. A front room with a rug. A workroom with a wall, and in the wall a space the shape of a jinn, which she had seen herself: a hollow in the plaster, smooth as the inside of a shell, still holding his outline when she put her hand in it. From inside the wall he had heard the house for forty years. He knew its sounds as a sailor knows weather. That part came easily. Every sitting gave her more of it.
Tamar was still in the lower gallery. She passed the mouth of it each time she climbed to the alcove, and each time he was sitting with his back to the wet wall and his eyes shut, humming to himself. She had told Soren what she thought of the four facts. He had listened and said that the matter was not closed. She had stopped arguing and gone back to the record, because the record would close it or nothing would.
It was the front room he would not go into.
Each time she brought him to the door of it, by a sound, by the rug, by the smell of the kettle, he stopped. His hands went up, or his eyes went somewhere she could not follow, and the sitting ended. Fourteen times now. She had been patient fourteen times. She looked at the half-drawn plan of the house on her page with its empty front room, and then she got up and went to find a brass tray.
The keeper did not like it.
"He'll go to pieces," he said, when she came back down with it. "You know he will. You've seen him with a cup of water."
"I know," Ithra said. "I'll stop if he does. Stay by the door."
She had borrowed the tray from a family in the outer galleries who used it for weddings. It was round, a little dented on one side, with a pattern of leaves hammered round the rim. On it she set two small glasses of the kind humans drink tea from, empty and clean. She had thought about filling them and decided against it. She wanted the shape of the thing and not the smell.
She carried it in and set it on the floor in the middle of the chamber, between the bench and the place where Naim sat against the far wall, and sat down on the bench, and said nothing.
He looked at it.
For a long time nothing happened. Then he went down. At the door the keeper half rose from his stool, and Ithra lifted one finger without turning her head, and he sat again. He did not fall. He lowered himself, very slowly, from sitting to lying, until his cheek was on the stone floor and his eyes were level with the rim of the tray, and he lay there and looked at the two glasses from below, the way a thing on a floor looks at a table.
She understood then that he had seen it from there. Not from a chair.
"He let you out in the evenings," she said.
Naim's lips moved before any sound came.
"Out of the wall." His voice was a scrape. "After his supper. He'd say, well, now. He'd put out two glasses. One for him and one for me." His eyes did not leave the tray. "I can't drink tea. He knew I can't. He poured it every time. He said it was manners."
"Where did you sit?"
"On the floor. By the tray. He made me small for it. He liked me where he could put his hand on my head."
Ithra did not write anything. She did not move at all. At the door the keeper had set his bowl down on the stone without a sound.
"What did he talk about?"
"He asked," Naim said. "He didn't talk. He asked."
"What did he ask?"
Naim was quiet for so long that she began to count the drops again without meaning to. Twenty. Twenty-five. Somewhere out in the gallery a young jinn laughed and was hushed.
"About the boy," he said.
"Your son."
"He knew there was a boy. I don't know how he knew. The first night he asked his name, and I didn't say it, and the hold in me pulled so tight I couldn't see. So I said it." His fingers moved on the stone, very slightly, as if smoothing a cloth. "After that he asked something every night. Small things. What he liked to eat. Was he afraid of the dark. What he wanted to be. Who his friends were. He never wrote any of it down. He was always kind about it. He said, it's good for you to talk about him, it keeps him close."
Ithra had sat across from a great many people and heard them confess a great many things. She had learned to hear the place in a voice where the thing being said changes weight. She heard it now.
"It was the only thing," Naim said. "Every day in the wall, the whole day, nothing was mine. Then the tray, and the question, and for the time it took me to answer him, I had my boy in my mouth. I could see him. I wanted it. I wanted the evenings." He shut his eyes. "After a few years I didn't need the hold to make me answer. I'd answer before he finished asking."
The tray lay between them, dented on one side, with its two clean empty glasses. Ithra looked at it and saw the man she had spent the forty days of the rite tracing through the records, a patient man with a trimmed beard who served tea, and saw him put his hand on this jinn's head on a floor somewhere, and ask in his pleasant voice for one more small thing.
She had told Soren, in the first weeks of the purge, that the pointer was one of four. She had been looking among those who walked free.
"Naim," she said. "What else did he ask you?"
He opened his eyes and looked at her over the rim of the tray, and she saw that he knew exactly what he was about to say, and had known it since the drain under the bus station, and perhaps since long before.
"Near the end he asked one more time," he said. "The same question as the first year. As if he'd never asked it. And I was glad to be asked." His mouth worked. "I told him what the boy dreamed about."