Marcus lifted a fig, pressed it with his thumb and put it back on the pile.
The market had settled into its middle hour. The early hagglers had gone home with their bargains, and the stalls were left to the people who bought what they needed and paid close to what it was worth. A boy two rows over had been calling the price of onions since before sunrise, and his voice had worn down to a rasp that still carried over the cart wheels. Marcus liked this hour. Nobody shoved.
The fig seller knew his face and nothing else. She weighed half a kilo on a brass scale. Years ago he had checked that scale from three metres away, without touching it and without her knowing, as he checked every instrument he relied on. It was honest. He had never needed to check it again, and he looked at the needle anyway.
"Good ones today," she said. "My brother's trees are on a well."
"Then I'll be back for more."
He paid in exact coin so there was no change to wait for. He took the paper bag and moved on through the smell of cut mint and diesel.
The fee had come the day after the work ended.
He never collected in person. An intermediary in the next town had held the deposit for months and released it within hours of completion, through the same channels as always. Marcus had known the job was finished before any message reached him. The binding register he kept at home had gone slack. There was no sound to it and nothing to see. For weeks he had carried a thin, steady tension under the breastbone, like a held breath he no longer noticed, and then one evening it let go.
The possession had run to its end. The reciter had come, as Marcus had known he would. The work was done.
Vessa the Hinn had confirmed it the same night. She came as she always came, as a small shift in the air of the front room, a draught from a window that was shut, and she stood at the edge of the lamplight and gave it to him in short pieces.
"The reciter came. He didn't stop. It burned. The woman lives. The stone is on the floor where you said."
Marcus had been sitting with a glass of tea going cold in his hand. He remembered smiling, a small private movement at one corner of his mouth, the smile of a man who hears that a parcel has arrived. Vessa had watched him do it and said nothing about it either way. He paid her and she went.
He did not think about the young one. He could not have said the name now if a stranger had stopped him in the copper row and asked; it had been short, and it had served. He had not thought about him since the morning after the binding, when he scrubbed the figure off the stone floor on his knees, unrolled the rug over the pale patch and made himself breakfast. The boy was in no condition to come back and complain. Marcus had not needed to be present for any of what came after. That was the reason he favoured the method. He set the parts in place and walked away, and the parts finished the work without him.
Other men of his generation kept jinn as some men keep dogs. They took partners and associates, used the same creatures for twenty or thirty years, learned their moods, owed them things. The creatures in turn came to expect more than the written terms. Marcus had watched that habit end three of his contemporaries. In each case a jinn who had served loyally for decades found some breach, real or imagined, invoked some protection Marcus thought sentimental, and finished the arrangement in a way that finished the man too.
He took no partners. He made pacts with the young ones, whose hunger could be felt from three hundred kilometres off, and he loaded the risk into the early clauses where the hunger kept them from reading closely. Once the pact was executed and closed, nothing was left behind that a surviving party could pull.
Tools are kept in a drawer and oiled. The young ones were timber, used up in the making of the piece. In forty years he had gone through somewhere between sixty and ninety of them, and he could not have written down the last ten. He kept no records, because records were what other men hanged themselves with.
He would have been surprised to be called cruel. He never gloated over the ones he used, any more than a cabinetmaker gloats over shavings.
His father had taught him to keep his name off things, and his father's father had taught his father. The family had done this work since before the jinn had a registry to keep names in.
He took the long way home, past the copper sellers, because the morning was good and he had nowhere to be until noon.
At the end of the copper row a man sold charms from a folding table, blue glass eyes on string and brass hands with an eye in the palm. Two pieces on the back corner had been made by someone who knew a little. The seller lifted a brass hand toward him, smiling, and Marcus shook his head and walked on.
He had honoured the terms. He was as sure of that as he was of the brass scale. The pact said what it said. The jinn had agreed and signed, and been placed in a house that matched the description of the work. Whether a reciter was likely to be called to that house was nothing the pact required him to raise. The term had ended before its ceiling, which the terms allowed.
Jinn law, as far as Marcus cared about it, was a municipal code. A careful man satisfied it the way he satisfied the building inspector, by meeting the letter and offering nothing more.
The registry was the law. Every sorcerer who ended badly had ended in its entries, his name tied to some pact a council could point at. Marcus's name sat there too, under thirty years of small jobs, each one registered, each one closed on time, a column so clean that a careful young jinn could read it and think he had found an honest man. The real work had never gone near it. As far as he was concerned, that kept the real work clear of the law. The councils could talk about older ledgers and deeper layers and things written where no one could see them. He had heard that kind of talk all his life. It came from old men in robes. In forty years, not one of them had shown him a page.
To a man of his habits, a ledger nobody could show him was as good as none.
He turned into his street. The neighbour's grandson was washing the step next door with a bucket and a broom too big for him, and Marcus stepped around the water and nodded to the old man in the window.
His rooms were cool after the street. There was a letter on the floor inside the door, slipped under it sometime in the night. He stepped over it first. He set the bag of figs on the narrow table by the wall, beside a folded cloth. It was the cloth he had been drying his hands on the evening the boy came, two weeks ago. He had folded it once and put it down. It had stayed there since.
He picked up the letter.
No stamp. A name he didn't know, and an hour in the afternoon. In the corner someone had drawn a small mark in soot, three strokes and a hook. Humans did not write that mark. It told him the client was one of them, young, and alone. Marcus read the letter twice. Then he folded it into his pocket.
The binding register sat on its shelf in the back room, a flat dish of dark stone with threads laid around its rim. He touched the newest on his way past, as he did every morning. It lay slack and dry under his finger. Nothing had pulled on it since the evening it let go.
The oldest thread on the dish was another matter. It had been taut for forty years, a grey line drawn so tight it hummed if you breathed on it, and it ran off the rim and along the skirting to the cream-painted door at the end of the back room, the one with no handle on this side. He did not touch that one. From behind the cream door came the small sound it made most mornings, something heavy shifting an inch on bare boards, and then nothing. He didn't open it. He had not opened it in a long time.
He filled the kettle and set it on the flame. While it heated he washed the brass tray, dried it, and laid two glasses on it. He set one on each side of the low table. The cushions were where they had been for thirty years. The rug was the same rug, faded to the colour of weak tea.
The kettle began to tick, then hiss. He poured.
His own glass, he drank standing, looking out at the neighbour's wet step. Then he bent and turned the second glass a quarter turn toward the empty cushion. He left it there, steaming, for a guest who would never be able to lift it.