The joint was where three roads met, forty fathoms under the desert, and it hummed like a cable under load.
Nessar laid his attention along it the way an engineer lays a palm on a bridge to feel the traffic. A road of the devils is no road a human would know. It has no surface. It is a seam pulled taut through the low strata, a line along which a jinn can move ten days' distance in an hour without being read by anything that is not looking for it. Each end of it comes up at a gate the devils hold, where what travels it can go out into the world. He had surveyed this one himself, in the master's camp, under the long noon. He had picked the joint because it carried the most. Now the Dajjal's army had crossed into Syria, and everything that fed it from the south ran through here: messengers, the fast devils, the ones who carried what the camp needed carried quickly, and the spent ones going back down to the gates to rest.
He could feel them go through. Each passing was a small heavy slur in the seam, like a cart going over a loose plank.
"Now?" said the Jann from the southern desert, at his shoulder.
"Wait for a gap."
They waited. The traffic thinned. Something large went through, slow, dragging, and was gone toward the north.
"Now."
They cut it together. It was like untying a knot you tied yourself and remember tying. The seam gave. He felt the three roads go slack at the joint, the tension running out of them in both directions like water out of a cut hose. Somewhere north of them a devil in mid-passage found itself standing in the ordinary ground of the world, ten days from where it meant to be, and screamed.
The Jann laughed, short, the first time Nessar had heard him laugh.
The reports came in through the traffic as they moved. He had taught them to send that way, small and plain, in the noise.
A face had come off in a town on the Euphrates. The cell had gone back to the household it had fooled, a man whose dead brother had walked into his kitchen in the long day and told him to go and meet the one-eyed man. The jinn had stood in that kitchen again in the brother's face and let it go. The man had thrown a chair. Then he had sat on the floor.
Two roads cut in the east, clean.
The one in the policeman's shirt sent nothing. Nessar listened for him through three joints and a long sleep under a sun that did not set. Then a report came from someone else entirely, a cell he had not heard from in two years, which had read the signal in a well in Mosul and gone to work without asking anyone. It had cut a road he had forgotten laying. It signed with the old marks, slightly wrong, the way a hand signs that has not written in a long time. He had built the network so that he would never know how many cells there were. He found he was glad, now, not to know.
One of the eleven caught. The river Hinn, the younger of the two. The other sent it in three words, taken at the ford, and then nothing more for a long while.
Then the old woman.
The young jinn who had worn her since the start of the long day had gone back to the daughter's house. The face would not come off; it had grown on too long. So the jinn had stood in the daughter's doorway and let her see it fail. The henna slid off the hands. The jaw went. The daughter had stood at the stove with a pan in her hand and watched her mother's face come apart in her own doorway, and then, the report said, she had put the pan down and said, "I knew. I knew she would never have told me to go."
Nessar read that one twice.
He thought, between joints, about the widow. He had worn her husband for eleven weeks. He had stood beside her on the road when the rain came down on the welcoming side and the dust on the other, and he had told her in her husband's voice to step to the left, and she had stepped to the left. He could go back. He knew where she was. He could stand in her door in no face at all and tell her.
He could not. The face was gone, folded somewhere in a dead sorcerer's nephew's belongings or worn by a devil in a field. Without it he was only a Hinn in a doorway. She would not know what she was looking at. It would have been for his own sake, not hers. He had spent eighty years building things so that he would not have to stand in front of what they did.
He sent the eleven on to the eastern roads. He kept the last one for himself.
The great joint lay under the border, where every road of the south came together before it went on into Syria after the army. He had laid it at the height of his usefulness to the camp, in one long sitting, and Julian had come to watch. He had said in his flat English voice that it was very elegant. It was. It was the best thing Nessar had made since the sanctuary, and he had made it for the master.
He had built the sanctuary to the negative of the rooms where a sorcerer had kept him for forty years: every wall where that man had had a door, every door where he had had a wall. For eighty years he had thought of it as an escape. Going down toward the joint he saw that it had been a copy, turned inside out and still the same size. The joint was a copy too. He had laid it for a new master with the same eagerness to be of use that the sorcerer had spent forty years training into him.
He went down to it alone. It was enormous, a knot of eleven seams pulled into one. It hummed so deep that the stone around it shivered, and grit ran down the walls of the cavity in thin dry streams. The devils went through it in a stream.
He had known it before he came down. Every cut was a signature. A road can only be cut at a joint, and only by someone who knows where the joints are, and only six beings in the world had ever known where these were, and four of them were with the master. Each joint the eleven cut drew a line on a map nobody had drawn, and the lines all pointed back to him. The boy-faced one had said as much in the tunnel, and Nessar had told him yes.
He cut it anyway. It took a long time. He worked the way he had once worked the sanctuary's severe clause, one thread at a time, without hurry. When the last thread went, the whole great knot unclenched at once. He felt the south go slack behind the army like a sail when the wind drops. Behind him, the length of the desert, things stopped where they stood.
He stayed a moment to feel it. He allowed himself that.
Then he felt the other thing, under the silence where the hum had been. A presence. Close. It had been there a while, and he had been too intent to read it, and he had built a network on the principle that nobody reads what they are not looking for.
He turned.
The devil sat on the stone of the joint behind him with its knees drawn up. It wore the face: grey stubble, the mole at the corner of the mouth, the widow's husband's eyes, moving too fast. Behind it in the dark of the knot others were coming in, one and then several, with the slowness of things that have already won.
"There you are," the face said, kindly, in the husband's voice. "Your supper's been cold for days."