Out on the street a motor idled and a child kept shouting one name. Kael crossed the doorstep, and the noise cut off as if a palm had closed over it.
The wards took his measure. He had felt wards in the rooms where Soren heard sensitive cases, but those had been laid by many hands in agreement, and you could feel the seams where one jinn's work met another's. These had no seams. One mind had laid them, layer over layer, close as the pages of a shut book, so that nothing said inside would leak to the street. They pressed him once, all over, and let him through.
He did not walk. A crossed jinn moves without weight or footfall, and no human eye sees him unless he spends strength on a form. In this house the wards did the seeing for the man who had laid them.
The man came out of a back room drying his hands on a cloth, as if Kael had caught him at the dishes. He was older than Kael had pictured and nothing like the sorcerers of the stories, the bony ones with rings on every finger. His beard was trimmed close. His shirt was clean and ironed flat at the collar. He looked like a man who taught arithmetic to bored boys, or kept a shop that sold pots and brooms.
"You're younger than I was told."
He said it the way a man notes the time. Kael almost answered that he was old enough, and stopped, because the man wasn't measuring him against anything. Soren measured him every day, and every measurement ended in not yet. This man had looked once and taken what he saw.
"I was told you have work."
"I do. Come and sit. We should talk properly before either of us decides anything."
Marcus folded the cloth in half and laid it on a narrow table by the wall. The room behind him held a faded rug with a border of interlocking squares, two cushions and a low table with a brass tray. On the tray stood a pot and two glasses, poured, one on each side. Steam stood up from both.
Kael looked at the second glass. He could not drink it, and the man knew he could not. Soren had taught him the courtesy once, in a lesson on how the old sorcerers received a jinn: a clean glass, filled, left alone. A careless host forgot it. A vain one made a show of it. Marcus sat down, tucked a cushion under one knee and lifted his own glass, and for the rest of the evening his hand never went near the other one.
"I'll tell you what I need. Then you tell me whether it interests you. I already know you can do it."
He took his time over it. Kael had heard Soren slow down the same way with frightened petitioners.
"I run extended bindings. Weeks. Sometimes months. Not the short jobs the small men pay for. A working like mine needs a human host at the far end and a jinn of composed lineage to hold her through the whole of it, while I do the real operation from this room. I'm the operator. The jinn is the component. Without the right component the working doesn't hold."
Component. Kael turned the word over. It set him inside the shape of the work, a part the operator could not do without.
"The host."
"A woman. A household with a quarrel in it, no violence. You go in and you hold. My working changes how that house is arranged. When it closes you leave, she wakes, and the quarrel has tipped."
"What happens to her while I'm there?"
Marcus let the question sit before he answered. He seemed to want Kael to see him not reaching for a lie.
"She carries the weight. A long possession leaves the host emptied out. She'll be tired for weeks after you go. Most recover. Some don't. My bindings have a long record, and the numbers are what they are."
"Has anyone I'd know held one for you?"
"I can give you two names. Both established, both in the registry. Either would speak for the work."
The old work was in the registry, where anyone could check it. Marcus left Kael to walk to the next question by himself.
"And this one? Will it be registered?"
Marcus met his eyes. His manner warmed by a degree, an older one letting a younger one into the room where things get decided.
"No. This one stays between us. The registry has been kind to me because I've been careful with it. It also thickens a working. Witnesses, caps, scope clauses without end. When I want a clean arrangement, I make it between two parties. The terms are generous and nobody else looks."
He drank, and set the glass down without a sound.
"Your councils speak against it. They have to. From the registry they can't tell a bad actor from an honest man who doesn't want an audience, so they paint the whole category."
Somewhere at the back of Kael's mind a pattern stirred, each worry named and soothed in one breath, the way Soren worked a table. He noticed it, and it changed nothing. He had wanted to hear every word.
"How did you know my father?"
He hadn't decided to ask. The question had been sitting in his throat since the tea was poured.
Marcus didn't blink.
"I knew him before he chose service."
A door opened in Kael onto a corridor he had never seen. Before. His father's life had a before, so it had an after, and a choice between them, and the choice had come earlier than the pass. He wanted to ask what service, and what came before it. Marcus was already talking.
"You carry what he carried. The stillness under a binding. Another young jinn would lose a host the first night. You won't."
Nobody had said it out loud before. Soren praised in general terms. The elders looked at Kael and saw Naim standing behind him and kept their mouths shut about it. This human had needed ten minutes.
"What would I do?"
He kept his voice level, and it cost him.
"Enter through a channel I open. Arrive at the host, settle behind her eyes and hold. I run the working from here. You'll feel my will the whole time, like a hand at your back. When it closes, the channel opens again and you come home. The reward goes into your standing, and anyone who reads the weave will see it. A hundred years from now you'll sit at the long stone, and they won't begin until you're in your seat."
The skin along Kael's arms went tight. A long stone table that would not start until he sat down. He had said that once, small, with grit in his hair, to one person. He looked at the man across the tray and decided that was what being seen felt like.
"How long?"
"Three weeks. A day over, perhaps. I hold the anchor and you travel. The transit is hard. First-timers often black out when they arrive. That's normal. When you wake, you begin."
Every answer came at the temperature he needed. If there was craft in it, he could not find the seams, any more than he had found them in the wards.
Soren's word from the council came up once, dangerous. Kael looked at the folded cloth on the side table and the level way the man spoke, and let the word go under. A dangerous man would have hidden the cost to the woman. This one had set it on the tray beside the tea.
"I want to do this."
Marcus nodded once and didn't smile.
"Good. I'll send word when the channel's ready. It won't be long. Come as you are."
Neither of them celebrated. Kael was already somewhere else, in a future room where Soren looked at him and saw a jinn in his own right. He turned for the door. Behind him the second glass sat on the tray, full to the rim, its steam gone.
Marcus spoke again as Kael reached the doorstep, in the same even voice he had used for the terms.
"What happened to your father after the pass fell is less settled, in some of the circles I keep, than your establishment would have you believe. That's for another evening."