Three days after the gathering, Soren drew the last line on the map and the line held.
It was a map of pacts. Over seventy-two hours he had pulled it together from the records of every chamber that had received notice of the voiding, and the voiding had made those records many. A pact voided once at mortal grade threw its shape across the whole body of law. Any pact with the same shape could be found, read for the same concealment and voided by any reader with the standing to do it.
The sorcerers had never understood this. They thought each pact stood alone, one instrument with its own terms, unrelated to the others they had signed with other jinn in other years. The registry did not keep pacts one by one. It kept them by pattern, and once a pattern was proven fraud in one case, the whole field could be searched for it.
He had searched. The matches ran across the map like seepage along the cracks of an old floor.
Ithra the Sila stood at his shoulder. She had come straight from the gathering, and since then they had spoken only what the work needed. Her report on the pointer had taken one breath: four candidates, the narrowing still running. He had set it aside. The pointer would be named when it was named.
Kael's jewel was still in the fold of his robe. The fortieth dawn had come up while the hall emptied, and the keeper of the niches had been waiting at the foot of the stair with his palm held out, and Soren had walked past him. Evidence, he had told the old jinn, until the pointer had a name. The niche in the deep wall stood cut and empty.
Along one edge of the map the practitioners ran by region. Along the other they ran by grade of concealment: mortal, lesser, none. The mortal column was long. He had not expected it to be short, and still the count stopped him.
Three hundred and twenty-four.
Three hundred and twenty-four sorcerers in the territories the map covered, whose pacts carried the clause that had killed Kael. Every one of them had lost the law's protection at the moment of recognition. Every one of them was now open to the ordinary movements of law, and the ordinary movements were all he had promised the tribes.
He assigned by fit.
The strongest jinn of the Cave went to no one for being strong. A sorcerer in a crowded city drew an assignee who worked unseen in crowds. A sorcerer in a walled compound in the hills drew one trained for isolation. A sorcerer whose protection rested on other instruments besides the voided pact drew a reader sharp enough to tell which of those instruments were live and which were dead weight left in the floor. A sorcerer far from any gate the tribes held drew one with strength for the road, because every assignee would go up through a held gate with its passage written down, do the work on what it carried, and come back down to rest.
Each pairing showed on the map as a thin line from the assignee's place among the tribes to the target's place among humans. As the lines gathered, the map filled with branching vessels, the kind he had seen once in a drowned man's wrist under water.
The tracery took him four hours. He stopped when every name had a line.
"Pace," Ithra said.
"Parallel."
She nodded and asked nothing more. Parallel meant every assignee moved at once. It was harder to coordinate and harder to warn against. A sorcerer would hear that a colleague had died, reach for his own channels, and find the assignee already in the room. No warning would outrun the line. A slower pace would have let the early deaths travel ahead as rumour, and the later targets would have run, or hidden, or signed with new jinn under new names.
Parallel also told the world how large it was. He had weighed that and accepted it.
He did not call it mercy.
"You distinguish," she said. Her eyes stayed on the map.
She did not say from what. He knew.
"I distinguish."
"Say it for the record."
Records outlived the jinn who made them. Someday the long reading of law would weigh this campaign beside another run in the same season under colours close to his, and Ithra was giving him the chance to set his limits down in his own words before someone set them down for him.
"Targeted by reading. Each target named, each pact voided by its own reading, each response matched to its target. Nothing against anyone outside the class of named concealers. The class does not grow. No remedy beyond what the law allows for mortal concealment."
"Civilians."
"None."
"Apprentices."
He took a moment over that one.
"An apprentice who has signed a pact of the pattern is in the class. One who has not signed is outside it. If they sign, they cross. That is law. My preference has nothing to do with it."
"Human institutions. Police. Governments. The reciters."
"None. Whatever help those institutions gave the sorcerers is a human matter, and the law does not reach it."
She took it in and did not press. The record existed now, with her as its witness.
She did not ask about Nessar the Hinn. She had seen him at the gathering and seen him leave by the side passage, and she had read the meaning of that the same way Soren had. The answer to her unasked question was already on the map, in the class rule and the apprentice rule and the civilian line.
Under law the difference would hold. His campaign would be found authorized and Nessar's would not. Humans would see one tide. Sorcerers dead of nothing, and their neighbours entered by jinn in the same half year, would reach them as a single water rising from the unseen side, and two currents inside it would be a matter for jinn historians.
He had asked himself, more than once in the seventy-two hours, whether that was reason to wait. It came out the same every time. This class had killed jinn at mortal grade for generations, and the law had never moved because each pact was read alone and none showed a clear breach. The pattern had always been there. Kael's death was the first time anyone read it against the whole class. If he held back because outsiders might confuse his work with Nessar's, he would be letting their confusion decide whether the law ran at all.
He answered himself again, here, with the map finished: no.
He sent the command openly.
He had the standing to do it under his own name, so he did not hide it in signals the way Nessar had. The command went down the tribal channels once, carrying his name and the authority of the voided pact. For each assignee it gave the target, the grade of concealment confirmed and the scope of the response. The scope was narrow. Every assignee already knew it, and they were already in place.
They moved.
It was morning in some human cities and night in others. Most of the three hundred and twenty-four would notice nothing at first. One would reach for a bound jinn to do some small job and find the channel dead. He would try a second, and a third, and then the channels he kept for emergencies, and somewhere in that run of silence he would understand, or fail to, before the assignee arrived. He watched the finding run on its own terms, the way a reader watches a sound judgment go out into the world, with neither pity nor pleasure in it.
He did not follow any single line. The assignees knew their work, the targets were exposed, and the results would come back through the ordinary reports. He stepped back from the map and felt the chamber go quiet as the signal left it.
On the floor at his feet his shadow lay darker than the chamber's light could make it. It had been that way since his first descent, and it was darker now than it had been before the last one. Ithra's eyes went to it and came away. She said nothing about it, as Varan and Oren had said nothing.
"The human institutions will hear of you," she said. "One of them will put enough of the pattern together to recognise it."
"I know."
"They have no way to reach you."
"I know."
"That won't stop them trying."
"I know."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she turned to the business she had come with.
"The pointer. Four names still. I'll have it down to two before the first phase closes."
"Good."
"When he is, you'll want his case kept apart from this."
"Yes."
"He's no sorcerer."
She waited until he looked at her.
"No," Soren said. "He is one of ours."