He was losing a little less than a thumb's width an hour, and he had measured it four times to be sure.
Nessar lay in a concrete culvert under the Damascus road with the morning traffic of the siege going over him: carts, a tractor, boots, the tyres of a truck that made the whole pipe ring. Water a finger deep ran past him toward the plain. He had taken the shape he was made in, a Hinn's shape at rest, long and low, because it cost the least to hold. Even so, the edges of it would not stay where he put them. They thinned and drifted off him like smoke off a wick that has just been pinched. Where they went he could not follow. He had tried, the first night. There was nothing to follow. It went out.
He did the arithmetic again, because arithmetic was what he had instead of prayer. So much of him at the edge of the eastern hills. So much less at the river. At this rate he would be too thin to hold any shape by tomorrow's dawn, and after that he did not know. No one had built a table for this.
He lay still in the water and let the trucks go over.
They had caught him at the great joint under the border at the end of September, and kept him in the dark a long time before they did anything with him. They had opened him eleven days ago, as he reckoned it.
He had known they would. A network built to be illegible is illegible to its builder as well. When he had sent the last signal, the one that meant undo it, he had known he was sending it into a dark he could not see the far end of. His tenth had done what he asked. They had torn up the devils' roads behind the army, the safe houses and the relays, the names that opened doors. They had done it the way he had trained them, cell by cell, each knowing only the next. It had been very good work. He had been proud of it in the way he used to be proud of a clean calculation. He had not stayed hidden afterward. Some part of him had wanted to be found.
They came for him in the shapes they liked to wear. A drowned girl. A man with a shopkeeper's moustache. A face he had worn himself once, for a widow on the road: her husband, grey stubble and the mole by the mouth. That one did the talking.
"You were useful," it said, in the husband's voice. "You could have stayed useful."
They did not kill him. He understood why before they began. A dead traitor is finished, and a finished thing teaches nobody. A traitor who goes out slowly, a thumb's width at a time, can be watched, and other jinn can be shown him. So they opened him, the way you open the seam of a sack, and left him the seam.
He came out of the culvert at noon, when the light was hardest and the devils kept to shade.
Between the river and the walls lay the followers' ground, and he had to cross it. In the long day it had been dust like everywhere else. Now it was green. Barley stood to his shoulder in the shape he had, and a field of beans flowered beside it. Over the fields, at the hour he crossed, a low grey cloud let down rain in straight lines on the barley and on nothing else. A hand's breadth past the field's edge the ground was cracked and white. The rain stopped at the edge like a curtain on a rail.
He went along the dry side. He did not want that rain on him. He could not have said why, in figures.
The followers worked the fields with their sleeves rolled. Some sang. A woman carried water from a ditch that had not been there a month ago. She smiled at nobody as she walked, the smile of someone who had been told she was safe and had decided to believe it. He knew that smile. He had made it on a widow's face himself, with her dead husband's mouth.
He was halfway across when the child came along the path.
It was a boy of about six, barefoot, in a yellow shirt, with a stick he trailed in the dust. It walked the way children walk when there is no one to hurry them. It was not a child. Nessar knew that before he knew how he knew it, the way you know a stair is missing in the dark. The stick left no line in the dust. The feet left no prints.
He made himself small, smaller than was safe, and lay in the furrow under the barley with his edges going out of him into the wet earth. He thought of nothing. He had trained his cells to think of nothing when a hunter passed, and he did it now himself.
The child stopped beside the furrow. Its bare foot was a hand's width from him. He could smell what was under the face: hot iron, and a rot like old fruit.
It turned its head toward the barley. It looked straight at the place where he lay, and he lay there and leaked into the soil.
Then a man in the field called out to someone and laughed. The child turned toward the laugh as a dog turns toward a dropped plate. It went on down the path trailing its stick.
He stayed in the furrow until the sun was well down the sky. When he rose there was less of him than his figures had said there would be.
The east wall of the city was old stone over older stone, and below it ran a ditch half full of rubble and thorn. He reached it at dusk and could go no further. The wall was not hard to climb. He had climbed harder walls carrying more. He found he had no strength left to change shape again, and the shape he had could not climb. He tried once anyway. His edges went into the mortar and came away thinner. He stopped.
He lay in the ditch with his back against the bottom course and looked up at the top of the wall. Up there the guards' lamps were being lit one by one.
The call to prayer began above him. It came from a minaret somewhere inside the wall, very near, and then from another further off. The sound came down over the stone and into the ditch and over him, and he felt the air in the ditch change. Something that had been crouched in the thorn twenty paces off, something he had not seen, pulled away along the ditch fast and low and was gone. On the plain behind him the little fires of the followers' camp were coming up. He felt the things that moved between those fires draw back from the wall like a tide going out.
He did not draw back. He lay still and let it go over him.
He had heard the call every day of his life, and every day he had treated it like weather. For forty of those years he had heard it through the shuttered window of a sorcerer's room, five times a day. He had hated it. It went on outside, and nobody who made it ever came in. He had built his whole network on that. Silence is consent. Nobody came.
The call ended. A thumb's width more of him went out into the dark.
Someone was coming along the bottom of the ditch.
He heard her before he saw her, a careful tread on rubble. She came round the angle of the wall with a torch held low. A woman of no particular age, in a brown coat that would be forgotten the moment it passed, with a scarf over her hair. Her face was a plain face that no one would look at twice. He knew it at once. He had seen her wear that kind of face before, across a gathering hall, and she had looked at him then exactly the way she was looking at him now.
Ithra the Sila crouched on the rubble a body's length away and turned the torch so it lit him and not her.
"Nessar," she said. "Soren said you would come to the east side."