The fig trees on the south side had dropped their leaves in the night, all at once, and Julian walked to the master's tent through a drift of them that crunched like paper.
He stopped and picked one up. It was dry right through, brown and curled, the way leaves go in an English garden after the first frost. Yesterday it had been green. The irrigation channel beside the path still had water in it, but the water had gone the colour of weak tea and did not move, and a skin of salt was forming at its edges. Further along the row the fruit hung shrivelled on the branches like small leather purses.
On the north side, where the master's tent stood, the trees were as green as ever. The line between the two ran straight through the camp like a property boundary.
Julian dropped the leaf and wiped his fingers on his trousers.
The camp was loud. It had been quiet in the dark, uneasy and quiet, and then the sun had come up at the end of that one strange night and stopped where it was, and some time in the long hours since, the quiet had turned. People stood in knots between the tents arguing in low hard voices. A woman was shouting at her husband that she had seen nothing, nothing, she had been looking at the fire. Two old men were not speaking to each other on purpose, back to back on the same carpet. By the water tanks four of the guards had a man down on the salt and were kicking him in a slow, methodical way, like men stamping out a fire.
"I saw it," the man on the ground kept saying, through his arms. "I saw the blade. I'm only saying what I saw."
Julian walked round them. It was not his business. Nothing in the camp was his business except the part he had been given, and he had found it wisest, in the court of a man like this one, to know exactly where his business ended.
His business was a ledger. It sat under his arm now in its oilcloth cover, the third he had filled since he drove east. His uncle Marcus had kept the same kind of book for forty years in the rooms in town, a column for each jinn, its name and its grade and its terms and what it owed. Julian had found the old volumes in the house after Marcus was gone, together with the family papers in their tin box, the line of the family traced back through a hundred hands to a court beside the Nile. He had read the papers in one night, in his dead uncle's chair. In the morning he had packed the car and gone to the men the papers named. They called themselves the Concord, and they had been waiting a long time for his family's heir. They had taken him across to the island with them, and he had knelt there beside them to the master, who was a giant then.
The master had no use for papers. But he had a great many jinn, and jinn had to be kept in order, and Julian kept them. He knew which ones would carry water and which would only carry rumour, which could be set to watch a road and which would wander off it, which needed to be reminded once a day whom they served. The devils despised him for it. He did not mind. His uncle had been despised by better.
The best page in the ledger had been the tenth. Nessar's people, the disciplined ones, the remnant of a network that had once covered half a continent. They had come to Julian with their own leader at their head, a Hinn named Nessar who thought like a civil engineer and never wasted a word, and they had done what they were told so well that Julian had sometimes been almost frightened of them.
He opened the ledger as he walked and looked at their page.
It had been silent since the night. He did not know how else to say it. A column in his uncle's kind of book was not only ink; it answered when you ran your thumb down it, the way a pulse answers. Every other page in the ledger answered him. The tenth's page lay under his thumb like paper.
He closed the book and went on up the green side of the camp to the master's tent.
The master had not slept. Julian did not know whether he ever did. But since the young man was thrown out on the road the master had not come out of the tent, and had not eaten, and had not spoken a word to anyone, and the people of the camp had felt it the way you feel a change in the pressure before a storm. The green side and the brown side. The beating by the water tanks.
The tent was dim inside, the sun kept out by heavy rugs. The master sat in the same plain wooden chair they had carried in from the fire. Behind him, at the edges of the dimness, the devils stood or crouched in their various shapes, more of them than Julian had ever seen together, and the tall old woman among them, and all of them were still. Along the left wall the men of the Concord stood in their good suits, Edwin Sallow among them with his own ledger open on his arm. None of them looked at Julian.
Julian looked at the master's face, as he always did, and saw what he always saw: an ordinary face, tired, with one ruined eye like a grape in water, and above the eyes a plain forehead with nothing on it. People in the camp talked about a word. Julian had never seen any word. He had decided long ago that it was something the believers told each other to keep their nerve, like a lucky coin.
The master did not look at him.
"Where is your Hinn?" he said.
Julian had prepared for many questions. He had not prepared for that one.
"I don't know, sir," he said. "He hasn't reported since the night. None of the tenth have."
"No."
That was all. The master went on looking at nothing. Julian stood with the ledger under his arm and felt his shirt stick to his back.
The old woman came out of the shadows. She moved like a heron in a shallow, one long step and a pause and another, and she held out her hand for the ledger. Julian gave it to her. He did not think about whether to. She opened it on her palm to the tenth's page as if she had known all along exactly where it was.
"He took his face off," she said, to the master, not to Julian. "In front of nine of us. Then he walked out into the marsh, and the rest of them went after him in the morning. They're gone, all of them."
She laid her other hand flat on the page.
Julian watched the ink go. It did not fade. It ran, as if the page had been held under a tap, the names and grades and terms of thirty-four jinn sliding down the paper in grey streaks and off the bottom edge and onto the rug, where they left no mark at all. When she lifted her hand the page was white. She closed the book and gave it back to him. Against the wall Edwin wrote something in his own ledger, a single short line, and blotted it.
"You won't need that page," she said.
The master spoke once more. He did not raise his head.
"Go."
Julian went.
His own tent stood near the edge of the green, where he could see both sides of the camp. He had chosen the spot himself. It had seemed clever at the time.
He ducked under the flap and stopped.
There was something on his bed.
At first he took it for a cloth, a damp grey cloth someone had left folded on his blanket, and he was already turning to shout for his boy when he saw the shape of it. It lay spread flat on the pillow, a little longer than his hand. It was soft and pale, with a sheen on it like the skin on boiled milk. There were two holes in it, and below them a ridge, and below that a mouth, slack and a little open, a grown man's mouth with a chipped front tooth.
It had been laid out with care, smoothed flat, the way a tailor lays out a pattern for the cutting.
Julian knew it. He had seen it every evening for two months, at the fire, beside the widow, with her hand on its arm. It had looked at him across his own ledger the night he gave its wearer the order to break the refuge of believing jinn, and had said, in a dead man's voice, that it would be done by morning.
Nessar's face lay on his pillow, empty, with its mouth open toward him.