The mattress had been turned. Naim could tell by the label, which was on the wrong end, and by the faint brown ring that showed through the ticking from underneath, the size of a coin, where something had bled once and been scrubbed and turned to the wall.
He sat on the hard chair beside it with his hands on his knees. He had sat there most of the night before, while the dark lasted, and all of the light since, and he had learned the room the way he had once learned the cells of a binding: by touch, by edge, by what pressed back.
There was not much to learn. A narrow bed with no sheets on it. A wardrobe with a cracked mirror. A window with a cotton curtain, which Fatima's mother had told him had snapped outward that night as if someone had flung it, and which now hung still, with a blanket pinned across the glass behind it against the sun. The ceiling had a crack running from the light fitting to the corner. He had looked at that crack for hours. He did not know if it had been there before.
His back ached. That was new. In the Cave they had washed him and fed him, and Soren had sat with him through the worst of the remembering, and somewhere in those weeks the ache had come and not gone. A Jann of his grade did not ache from sitting in a chair. He noted it the way he had noted the cold of the binding in its first year, and put it aside for later.
What he had come for was not in the room.
He had expected something. He did not know what. A heat left in the floor, a mark in the plaster, the smell a jinn leaves in a place where it has been afraid. He was a Jann of the old grade, unforked, in the shape his kind was made in, and in his long life he had stood in a hundred rooms where jinn had died and felt them in the stone afterwards like a draught under a door. He had felt nothing here. A patroller of the Cave had lifted the jewel from the corner two springs ago, and it lay now in his coat in a fold of cloth, cold, telling him nothing. The ember had torn out through the woman's collarbone and gone wherever embers go. The reciter had read the room clean.
His son had died on that mattress and the room had kept nothing of him, not even the cold.
The door opened behind him. He knew her step by now.
Fatima came in with a tray. She stopped just inside the door, and he heard her breath go in and stay in, and he understood that she had not been in this room since the night. Then she came on. She set the tray on the floor by his chair, and then she did a thing he had not expected. She sat down on the bare mattress, on the edge, with her feet together and her hands in her lap.
"I sleep in my mother's room," she said. "Since then. Mother says I should come back in here and I keep saying next week."
He did not know what to answer. He had been out of the habit of speech for forty years, and the habit came back slowly, like feeling into a numb hand.
"It's a small room," he said.
"It was always small." She looked at the crack in the ceiling. "I used to count the lines in that when I couldn't sleep. When it was happening, the weeks before. There were other things in me then, before him. They weren't like him." She put two fingers under her left collarbone, through the cardigan, and pressed, the way people press a bruise to see whether it is still there.
"How were they?"
"Hot. Pleased with themselves." She turned her hands over in her lap. "He wasn't pleased. He came in all at once, like someone falling through a roof, and he was frightened. He didn't know where he was. I could feel him looking for the edges. Like a person in a strange room at night feeling along the wall for the switch."
Naim held still.
He had been good at stillness. Under the binding it was the one thing the sorcerer could not take, and he had kept it the way a prisoner keeps a coin sewn in a hem. He kept it now. He sat with his hands on his knees and let her words go into him and did not move, and the stillness held, the way a dam holds, with the whole weight leaning on it.
She had brought tea. Two glasses on the tray, with sugar already in, and the steam going up straight in the still air of the room.
She picked one up and held it out to him.
He looked at it. A thin glass, gold rim, the tea the colour of a horse's flank. Then it was not that glass. It was another, on a table of dark wood under a lamp with a green shade, and across the table the sorcerer was pouring a second for himself and smiling. Marcus always poured for both of them. He always asked first how Naim had slept, though Naim did not sleep, and then he asked about the boy. What did he like? What did he want to be? What did he dream about? He asked gently, the way a man asks after a friend's child, and the binding drew the answers up out of Naim like water from a well, bucket after bucket, while the tea went cold between them and the sorcerer wrote in a small notebook with a silver pen.
He heard the glass rattle. It was in his hand, and his hand was shaking so that the tea slopped over the rim onto his knee, hot, and he could not put it down. He could not make the fingers open.
Fatima took it from him.
She did not say anything. She took the glass out of his hand the way you take something from a child who has picked up a knife, and she put it back on the tray, and she pushed the tray away under the bed with her foot where he could not see it. Then she sat back down on the edge of the mattress and waited.
It was a long time before his hands were still again. She did not look away from him once in all that time, and she did not reach for him either.
"What was he like?" she said at last. "Your son. I only had him for a night. I'd like to know who it was."
Naim opened his mouth to tell her.
He would tell her about the young one, the one Soren had raised. About the Cave and the schooling and the councils, and the off-registry work he had taken that night because he wanted something badly enough to hide it. He had heard all of that in the Cave, from Soren and from Ithra, piece by piece, the way you hear the news of a town you used to live in. Soren said the boy had grown tall. Ithra said he had been quick at the readings.
But that was not his. He had not been there for any of it.
He went looking for what was his, and he found how little there was. A small boy at the mouth of the family's hollow, too young yet to hold a shape for long, fraying at the edges when he laughed. A small boy who would not go into the inner rooms after the lamps were put out. A small boy who held on to the hem of his father's form all the way down the long gallery to his sleeping niche, every night, and made his father leave one lamp burning at the end of it, and woke in the deep hours and called out if it guttered.
That was all. Forty years, and the sorcerer's notebook, and then a mattress turned to the wall.
"He was afraid of the dark," Naim said, "when he was small."