Soren tied off the last thread of the summons himself and let it go, and felt it run out into the dark toward the north.
A leader of his rank did not usually do this work. Deputies sent the threads, counted the answers and made the room ready. When the leader did it with his own hands, everyone who felt the tug knew the matter would pass through no deputy at any stage. He did not have to tell them that. The threads carried one weight only. Be present.
They carried no agenda. An ordinary summons named its business, so each tribe could send the right elders and the experts could prepare. Soren sent no business. He sent the summons to every tribe at once, and that told them more than an agenda would have.
It was the thirty-seventh day of the forty. Ithra had sent no name. On the fortieth the rite would close, and his answer to the lost ward was due, and he would give it with the one name he had.
They came across the third night and into the dawn.
He had chosen a long natural hall deep in the Cave, old enough that its walls still carried scratched marks no living jinn could read. It filled the way such halls always filled, one by one and then in knots. Three came together from the west because their threads had tangled on the way and they had decided not to untangle them. A single elder came from the Northern Reach, alone, because northern elders always travelled alone and arrived ahead of their kin.
Soren stood at the far end of the hall. He greeted no one. A leader who has called a gathering stands where he can be seen and does not talk until it begins. The arrivals saw him, took their places on the curved stone benches along the walls, and did not come near him. Anyone who had thought this would be a social evening stopped thinking it after one look at his face.
He read them as they came. He kept his reading flat, as he had read the sorcerer's pact. He meant to see what was in the room and not what he wished were there.
The eastern tribes came first in the second wave. Their elder, Halim, an old Jann, had carried a grievance against the west for nearly four hundred years. At ordinary gatherings Halim came early and stood where everyone could watch him come early. Today he came early and took a bench near the back wall and sat without a word. His eyes went once to the floor at Soren's side, where the lamps threw Soren's shadow heavier than they should, and came away.
He had read the summons correctly.
The western tribes came after. Their elder, Noresh, a Jann two centuries younger than Halim, had inherited the grievance from his predecessor and never asked for it. He and Halim had not shared a room in sixty years. Noresh crossed the hall and took the bench directly opposite. Halim inclined his head the smallest fraction. Noresh returned the same fraction. Without a word said, the grievance was set aside for as long as the gathering lasted.
A young jinn had died, and two old enemies had agreed to put their quarrel down for one night. Soren noted it, as he would note the level of a river before a flood, and took no comfort from it.
The southern tribes came next, in a larger party than he had planned for. They were the oldest lineages among the living jinn. By custom they travelled in threes, an elder, a second and a witness, and Soren had expected two such threes. Four arrived. Twelve jinn from the south. They had decided this gathering deserved double attendance, and they wanted it on record that they had come doubled.
One of the twelve stepped away from the others as they entered and took a bench alone along the eastern wall. It was Ithra, the Sila.
She did not look at him, and she was not supposed to. Her presence without a report meant only that she had come on her tribe's schedule and would find him afterward. It meant also that she had nothing yet she would trust to a thread. He gave her the same courtesy back and did not look at her.
The Cave's own jinn had taken the benches nearest the entrance, as hosts did. Tamar sat at the end of the third row with his flat shell tucked into his belt, humming under his breath, five notes and five again. Beside him sat his wife's brother, Harun the Sila, who spent more of his years watching human cities than living in the Cave and still smelled faintly of diesel from the road in. Soren's eyes crossed him once on their way along the row. The humming stopped. When Soren looked again, Tamar was studying his own hands.
The northern elders came last. They always did. Their territory lay farthest from every other, and they arrived when the distance let them. Three of them crossed the hall in silence, sat along the back wall without consulting anyone, and folded their robes around themselves in the layered northern way. Then they went into the stillness that was their tribe's way of paying attention.
The hall was complete.
Not every tribe had come in person. Some had sent deputies and some had sent regrets, and he had expected both. He counted by weight. East. West. Four southern threes. Three northern elders. Two independent lineages that owed no tribe anything and had come as witnesses, because a finding against a sorcerer needed witnesses of their standing. It was enough. Whatever he said in this room would be known in every chamber of standing by tomorrow night.
He did not speak yet.
A hall this size, after this many arrivals, needed time to come to rest. The last threads of travel had to fade from the latecomers. The early arrivals had to finish taking stock of the late ones. He knew the interval by feel. He had led four gatherings like this in his long life. A voice that came before the settling went into the hall like a stone into silt, and came back thin.
While he waited, he looked for the thing he had come to look for.
The faction was there. He had known it would be. Its members could not stay away without drawing notice, and long ago they had decided never to pay that price. Their leader, Nessar the Hinn, among the older jinn in the hall though not the oldest, had taken a bench along the central wall. From there he could see three quarters of the gathering. His second sat beside him. Two rows back sat three more of his inner circle, spaced so that no one standing where Soren stood could draw a line from one to another without crossing innocent benches.
They had placed themselves as a hunter sits in a blind, to watch the game come down to the water without being seen.
Soren read them anyway. Nessar had arrived composed. The second's eyes were not on Soren. They rested on the moderate elders among the southern threes. Nessar already knew what the verdict would be, then. What he wanted from this night was the moderates' reaction to it. The three in the second row each looked unremarkable, and they were too alike in it. They were trained watchers trying hard to be nobody.
Soren changed nothing in his plan. He had built it with the faction in mind from the start. He let what he had seen settle into the decision he had already made.
The hall went still.
He stepped one pace forward from where he had stood all night. He did not raise his voice or his hands. That single pace was the signal they had been waiting for.
The hall came to attention in layers. East first, as always. West after. The southern threes drew into focus one by one. The northern elders had been attending from the beginning, and they only let the rest of the hall catch up.
Nessar came to attention last. It was half a second late, on purpose. It was a small discipline of his faction, to show that their obedience was never automatic. No one in the hall missed it, and no one acknowledged it. Soren did not either.
He felt Kael's jewel against his chest, inside his robe. He drew a breath and let the first words out into the hall.
"A young jinn under my care is dead."