The voice came down the shaft at the hour the sun should have been setting, and it used his name.
Nessar lay along the floor of the tunnel with his form pressed thin against the old mortar. The channel had carried water to the fields above for six hundred years and then stopped, and the dry had left a fine grey silt that took no print. He had picked it for that. He had picked it also for the shafts. Every forty paces a well came down from the surface, and each one let in a column of light so thick he could have leaned on it.
"Nessar," the voice said again. "Come up. Your supper's cold."
It was a man's voice, middle-aged, a little hoarse from cigarettes. He knew it well. He had worn it for eleven weeks on the Dajjal's road. He had used it to tell a widow her husband had come back from the grave, and to tell her where to stand when the rain came. Then he had taken that face off in front of the master's devils, and they had not taken it from him, so on his way out of the camp he had laid it on Julian's pillow, where the order for it had come from. Someone had picked it up since.
He did not move. A Hinn lives by moving where nobody looks. A whole network had been built on that principle, and it held in a ditch as well as it held across a continent. Keeping his attention below the surface of the silt, he let his own signature go flat and ordinary, the tone of a minor jinn sleeping off a long day in a cool place.
The face came to the lip of the shaft. He saw it upside down against the white sky: grey stubble, the mole at the corner of the mouth, the eyes the widow had wept into. The devil inside it had not learned the eyes. They moved too fast.
"She asks after you," it said. "Every day. Where's my husband gone again."
Then it went away along the field toward the next shaft, walking the way the husband had never walked, too light on the dry clods.
They came in over three sleeps of the day like a week, while the sun hung in the same quarter of the sky. He had sent the call in the oldest form he had, a set of marks scratched into ordinary traffic that only the tenth had ever been taught to read. Thirty-four had worn those marks when the tenth was his. He waited for the number to come back to him and knew before the first arrived that it would not.
Eleven came.
They came one at a time, as he had trained them, and each settled at its own distance in the dark of the tunnel without greeting the others. The cell from the river towns came first, two of them, Hinn like him. Then a Jann from the southern desert who had never forked and was proud of it. Then three who still wore faces.
He had not expected that. He had forgotten, or arranged to forget, what it had cost him at the end. The three sat against the wall in the shapes of the dead: an old woman with henna on her palms, a boy of about fourteen, a man in a policeman's shirt. They were tired. He could see it in how the faces slipped at the jaw, how the boy's mouth showed for an instant something behind it that was not a boy's.
"It won't come off," said the old woman, in a young jinn's voice. "I've been trying since the camp."
"How long did you wear it?"
"Since the start of the long day. For her daughter. The daughter says yes to everything now."
He did the sum without wanting to. The tenth had worn faces in nine districts. Each face had been chosen for one household. Each household had been walked, smiling, toward the rain on the welcoming side of the road. He had drawn up those placements himself, in the master's camp, with the same care he had once given the cells of the surge. He had been good at it. Julian had praised the efficiency in front of the devils, and he had felt the praise land somewhere he did not inspect.
"The other twenty-three," he said.
The Jann from the desert answered. "Nine went over to the devils at the camp. They were offered rank. Six are dead. I saw four of them die. The rest I don't know."
"The devils are wearing your face," said one of the river Hinn. "The one you left."
"I heard it."
He thought best in structures, so he gave them one. Above them the light in the shafts did not change. Somewhere on the surface a dog barked at intervals.
The tenth had built three things for the master. He laid them out in the silt with his finger, because the eleven needed to see them and he needed to see whether they stood up. The first was the faces: every household where a dead parent or a dead son had come home and pointed down the road. The second was the roads. The master's devils moved with his camp through the low strata on paths the tenth had surveyed and laid, the way Nessar had once laid paths for the surge. Supply, messages, the fast movement of the worst of them. The third he did not draw. It was the habit he had given the devils, the method itself, the idea that cruelty could be run on a schedule.
"You can't undo the third," the desert Jann said.
"No."
"Then why the other two?"
He did not answer at once. The honest answer was that a widow on the road had said yes to a one-eyed man because of a face Nessar wore, and that he had stood beside her when she said it, and that afterwards he had remembered his own forty years under a sorcerer with a clarity that had not dimmed since. He had not chosen to remember. It had come up through him like groundwater through a cracked floor. He had built the correction on the grievance of those forty years, and on the road he had done to a widow what had once been done to him.
None of that was for them.
"Because we laid them," he said. "Each face goes back to its household and comes off in front of them. If it won't come off, you go back anyway and let them see it slip. Each road gets cut where we surveyed it, at the joints, so they can't patch it from one end."
The boy-faced one spoke for the first time. "They'll know it's us."
"Yes."
"They'll come for us the way they're coming for you."
"Yes."
Nobody argued. They were the disciplined tenth. He had picked them for that, eighty years ago and again in the camp. They would cut the roads because he said so, the way they had worn the faces because he said so. He did not like knowing that. He left it where it was.
The devil with the husband's face came back past the shaft once more before he finished. It did not stop. It hummed something the widow's husband had probably hummed, a wedding song, flat on the high note.
Nessar composed the signal while it passed.
He had sent one signal in his life that mattered. On the night of Soren's verdict he had left the gathering early and put a single shape into the ordinary traffic of the jinn world, and cells he had never met had read it and risen in many cities at once. It had taken him decades to design a shape that plain. He used the same one now, the same weight, the same rhythm of nothing-in-particular that any jinn might send to any other about a debt or a wedding. Only the content was turned.
The eleven watched him. The old woman's henna had slid half off her hand.
He sent it. It went out through the tunnel and up the shafts and into the noise of a world full of jinn running toward a one-eyed man and away from him, and it was as small as a cough. Somewhere a cell he had not heard from in a year would read it.
It said: undo it.