Julian unscrewed the cap of his uncle's fountain pen, drew a ring round a dot on the map, and turned the map so it faced Nessar.
"There," he said. "Under the old caravan station. The one with the cistern."
Nessar the Hinn did not need the map. He had read that stretch of road the week the camp turned south. A ruin of mud brick and coral stone, a well head, a cistern cut into the rock below it, and in the cistern, on the side of the world men do not see, a small knot of believing jinn who had taken in others. Forty, perhaps fifty, with a handful of humans living in the roofless rooms above them. They kept the prayers by estimate like the humans did. They sent runners ahead of the camp.
"They're telling the villages to shut their doors," Julian said. "Three this week. We arrive with grain and the water trucks and the doors are shut and the old men are on the roofs reciting at us." He capped the pen. "It's embarrassing."
Nessar considered telling him that the old men on the roofs were what kept the doors shut, and the runners only carried the news. He didn't. Julian did not take corrections from the help.
The tent was cool. Julian kept it cool with a generator and two jinn of the tenth, who stood in the corners holding the air still because he had asked them to. Nessar had given those two to him himself. They were good at it. Julian had a folding desk and a leather chair and a thermos of tea. He held a cup with the little finger crooked, and he said "please" to servants in a way that meant the opposite.
"Break it or empty it?" Nessar said.
"Is there a difference?"
"Emptying is quiet. They scatter, and you hear of them again in a month in another place. Breaking is loud."
"Loud," Julian said. "He wants it heard about down the road. He was quite clear." He smiled at Nessar the way you smile at a contractor. "You're the expert. I'm told you were the best there was."
"I'll need one face."
"Take whatever you need from the pens." Julian was already turning back to his papers. "Do it tonight. Or whatever we're calling it."
He built it on the walk out, the way he had built the lattice eighty years ago, from the joints inward.
A refuge like that had one door on the jinn side, a seam in the cistern wall where the old waterline was. It had a watch at the door and a watch at the well head. It had a rhythm. The believers prayed at the estimated hours, and between the sunset prayer and the night prayer, by their reckoning, there was an hour and a half when the watch was thinnest, because the young ones went up to the well head to look at the sky out of habit, waiting for it to change. Every refuge he had read on this road had the same hole in the same place. It was a human hole. They had caught it from the humans they prayed with.
The rest was the face.
The camp's devils kept the ones they caught on the road in a hollow behind the water trucks. They called it the pens. A week ago they had brought in an old Jann woman, a midwife from the cistern, who had gone out to deliver a child in a village and been taken on the way back. She had died in the pens two days later, of what the devils did with their time. Her face was still there. The devils kept faces the way Julian's uncle had kept jewels.
Nessar took it on in the dark behind the trucks. It went on cold, like a wet cloth, and then it fitted. For a moment he could feel her habits in it: a squint against light, a soreness in the jaw, a way of pressing the lips together before speaking. He set those to work. That was all a face was, after the first dozen. A set of habits you borrowed. On the walk down he told himself what he had told himself on the first day, in the devils' tent, when they asked him to wear a drowned man for his widow. A face was a means. A means had no opinion about its end. He had built a network on that sentence, and it had carried weight for eighty years, and he leaned on it now and felt it hold.
He walked down into the cistern at the hour the believers' reckoning called eight in the evening, alone, with the five cells of the tenth folded into the rock behind him, and knocked at the seam with an old woman's knuckles.
"Who is it?"
"It's me," he said in her voice. "Open, I'm cold."
The seam opened at once. Nessar had known it would. A young Jann stood in it with his arms already out, and his face did a thing Nessar had seen human faces do on the road, many times, when he came to them as someone they had buried. It came apart with joy.
"Mother," the young one said.
Nessar stepped in and held the door.
He did not watch the rest. He had designed it, and he knew it by heart. He stood in the seam with the son's arms still round him and counted, under his breath, the way he had counted the seconds of the signal on the night of the verdict, and the cells came through the rock on either side of him and did what they were made to do. It sounded like a wind going through a room full of paper. It took eleven minutes.
Afterwards he walked the cistern with a lamp and counted embers for the report.
They lay where the jinn had been. They were lightless things, a little warmer than the stone, most the size of a date stone, some smaller. The camp would want a number. Julian would want a number, so that he could carry it in a sentence. Nessar counted forty-four and wrote it on the back of his hand. The son's lay just inside the seam, where he had been standing with his arms out. Nessar stepped over it.
The cells were already gone, back to the road. They had swept the place before they left, the way he had taught every cell he ever made to sweep: walls first, then the floor in a spiral inward, then every recess at the height of a child. He had built that last rule himself, eighty years ago, because a Hinn could fold itself into the grain of stone and stay there for days, and he knew that because he had done it, as a captive, in the walls of a sorcerer's house, for nine days once, listening to the man look for him.
There was a water jar at the back, a big clay one, and behind the water jar a hand's width of shadow where the cistern wall bent.
He held the lamp to it.
The ember was the size of a lentil. It had set halfway out of the stone, as if the child had begun to unfold to see whether it was over. He knew the type before he knew he was reading it. Hinn. Young, and forked too early, the way children forked on this road after a year of hiding. It had done the hiding perfectly. It had done it the way he would have taught it to.
The sweep had found it anyway. His sweep.
He stood a long time with the lamp. The cistern dripped somewhere. He thought of the nine days in the walls, and the sorcerer's slippers going past, and the sorcerer's voice saying "Come out, come out," pleasantly, in the voice Julian used for servants.
Then he reached up to take the face off.
It was simple. He had done it dozens of times. You found the edge at the hairline and peeled, and the face came away cold and you folded it and gave it back to the pens. He found the edge. He pulled. It did not come. He pulled harder, with both hands, and the skin under his fingers was his skin, and it held.
He lifted the lamp to the polished side of the water jar. An old woman looked back at him, with her lips pressed together the way she pressed them before she spoke, and his own eyes in her face.