Soren the Marid read the last page of the record a second time, as he read everything that mattered, and when he reached the bottom of it the second time it said the same thing.
"I told him what the boy dreamed about."
Ithra had written it in the clerks' plain script, and under it, in the margin, the number of the drop at which it was said. Under that she had drawn the tray. She did not draw. She had drawn it anyway, a circle with two small squares on it, as if she needed to put it down somewhere that was not in her.
He set the record on the desk and laid his hand flat on it.
It went through him slowly, as cold water goes through cloth. A sorcerer who had never once been in the Cave had known what a ward of the Cave hoped for, and Soren had looked for the leak in the Cave because that was where water leaked from. He had not looked at the source. The source had been forty years in a wall, being asked about his son over tea, and had answered because answering was all of his day that was his. Soren knew that last part too well to think about it for long. He, too, had kept the boy's father shut away, the long search and the empty pass, and answered nothing when the boy asked. He had answered one thing, at least, when it was asked. In the side chamber, with the keeper's bowl still wet on the floor, Naim had asked him where his son was, and Soren had told him. It had taken the rest of that night, and most of the words he had, and Naim had not spoken again for three days.
And in the lower gallery Tamar sat with his back to the wet wall, as he had sat for thirty-one days.
"You'll tell them?" Ithra said from the doorway. She had not left. "About Naim?"
"No."
She waited.
"The tribes don't need his name," Soren said. "They need Tamar's. Said properly, this time, by the one who said it wrong."
The gallery filled faster than it had for the verdict.
Word had gone out that the leader of the Cave would speak on the matter of the pointer, and they had all come expecting a name. The young ones packed the steps by the eastern wall. The old ones took the stone benches. Halim of the eastern tribes had come in early and, for once, stood where he could not be seen arriving. Noresh of the western tribes sat opposite him, as he had at the gathering, and the two of them did not speak. Varan the Jann sat with the readers. Harun stood at the back by the passage mouth, alone, in his borrowed coat.
The keeper of the niches brought Tamar up from the lower gallery.
He came in as he had come into the elders' chamber, without being pulled, with the long stoop and the long jaw and his hands hanging at his sides. Somebody on the young ones' steps drew a breath. Tamar did not look at them. He stopped in the open floor in front of Soren's seat and waited to be told.
Soren stood.
He had stood once to pledge the rite. He had stood to give the verdict that began the purge. He had never stood for this, and there was no form for it, no old words laid down by his predecessors that he could take up and wear. He had looked for some. There were none. The Cave had a form for every kind of saying except the one he needed.
"Thirty-one days ago," he said, "I named Tamar the Jann before the elders as the one who fed the sorcerer what my ward hoped for. I named him on four facts. He sat at the eastern seep when the boy talked. He went up to the city without an errand. He shut his eyes in the hum. And I had a list, and his name stood first on it."
The gallery was silent. Even the seep seemed to have stopped.
"The pointer has been found. He is not of the Cave, and he did not walk free while he did it. I won't give his name today." He looked at Tamar. "Tamar sat by the water because he sits by the water. He went to look at the sea. He shut his eyes because the boy was dead. I read four stones on a floor and called them a room."
He heard his own voice go out into the gallery and come back off the far wall a little changed, as voices did there.
"I was wrong," he said. "I held you a month in the dark for my wrong. I ask your pardon, Tamar. In front of the tribes, since it was in front of the elders that I took your name."
Nobody moved. Halim's eyes had gone wide and stayed there. Noresh was looking at the floor as if something had been dropped on it that he ought not to pick up. On the young ones' steps a girl put her hand over her mouth. In eight centuries no one in that gallery had heard the leader of the Cave say those words, and Soren could see each of them looking for where to put them.
Tamar looked up at him for a long moment.
"All right," he said.
That was all, at first. Then the long face moved, a little, the way it had moved when he spoke of the boy splashing him.
"You looked at me four times," he said. "In the hum. I counted too. I thought, he's sad, he's looking for somewhere to put it." He wiped his hands down the front of himself, though they were dry. "I forgive you, Soren. It's done."
Harun came forward then from the passage mouth. He crossed the open floor with everyone watching him and stopped beside his sister's husband, and for a moment Soren thought he would say something to the gallery. He said it to Tamar instead, low.
"She kept your place at the table," he said. "Every night. She'll want you home."
Tamar nodded without looking at him.
The gallery emptied slowly. They went out talking low, and Soren knew the words would be in every tribe by the next turn of the clocks above, and he found he did not mind. Halim stopped on his way past and looked at him and opened his mouth and closed it again, and went on.
Tamar did not go back to the seep. He went the other way, up the long passage toward the outer threshold, and Soren followed him at a distance. He did not know why.
At the threshold the noon lay across the flagstones as it had for months, white and flat and unmoving, a hand's width further in than the last time Soren had looked. Tamar stopped at the edge of it.
"You can stay," Soren said behind him. "Your place is your place. Your wife is here. The seep is there."
Tamar did not turn round.
"I sat by that water ninety years," he said. "Then I sat in the dark a month for sitting by it. That's all right. I said it was all right and it is." He looked out at the white. "But I can't hear it any more, Soren. I go down there and it's just water on a wall. They say on the road nobody gets named for where they sit."
"They say a lot on the road."
"I'm only going to look," Tamar said, which was what the clerks had said, and three of the thirty.
He stepped into the light. It took him the way it took everything now, without a shadow, and Soren watched his long stooped shape go down the slope toward the place where the human city met the road, smaller and smaller, until the white closed over it and there was nothing on the path but the light lying there, waiting to come in another hand's width.