The grinder ran for seven seconds, the way it always did.
Marcus Gardner set the pot on the back ring and rinsed his cup while the water came up. Three minutes. He had fixed the grind years ago and never found a reason to change it. The telephone rang while the coffee was still settling, and he let it ring twice before he picked it up, because a man who answered on the first ring sounded as if he had been waiting.
"Mr Gardner? It's Rauf. About the wall."
"Of course it is," Marcus said. "Has he built it higher?"
"Another course of brick. Last night. My wife can't see the street from the kitchen."
"Then by Friday he'll want to take it down again. Leave it with me."
Rauf apologised twice for bothering him and agreed to the fee before Marcus finished saying it. Marcus put the receiver down and drank his coffee at the table by the north window. Across the narrow street a woman beat a rug over her balcony rail. Thirty years in this house, and nobody on the street knew what he did. He liked them for it.
The workroom was the back half of an ordinary house, and that was the point of it. A trained eye would have found the double inlay in the walls, the inner circle sunk into the floorboards and the three brass instruments set flush beside it. Anyone else would have seen a man who liked bare rooms.
Beyond the workroom was a second door, painted the same cream as the wall, with no handle on this side. He did not look at it. He never needed to. The binding behind it sat under his breastbone like a swallowed stone, and had for forty years.
He set Rauf's payment in the centre of the circle, a folded paper with the man's name on it and a cheap gold cufflink Rauf had been proud to give him. He drew the first boundary, spoke the openings in their order, and reached for Vessa the Hinn.
Usually she came as a small push of air against his cheek, before he had finished asking. The air in the room stayed where it was.
He sat back on his heels. Vessa had other contracts, other errands, bad days. He closed the opening, reset the boundary and reached for a middle-grade operator he had used for a decade, a dull, steady jinn who had never once been late.
The line was dead. Clean, at that. A storm in the medium frayed a line; this one ended the way a cut rope ends.
He tried a third, of another lineage and another pact class, a channel he had opened a hundred times. Dead.
Marcus put both palms flat on the boards. A gathering of the tribes could empty the channels for an afternoon. He had seen it once. There was another explanation, and his training made him look at it, though he would have liked to leave it alone. He reached past every operator for the oldest pact he held, a low arrangement with a family of jinn he had not called on in eight years. He wanted only the registration from them, the standing answer that told him the pact still existed and bound both sides. For forty years it had come back to him like an echo off a well wall. He listened down the well, and the echo never came.
The stone under his breastbone was still there. He pressed two fingers to it through his shirt and felt the old weight, and behind the cream door something shifted on the floor with the sound of a sack being dragged a few inches. The compound binding was his own work, knot on knot, nothing a registry had ever seen. Of everything he held, it alone still pulled. He picked up the cufflink and put it in his pocket without thinking why.
He left the boundary open. If he was right, it no longer did anything. On the step he looked up and down the street: the rug, the balcony, a moped coughing at the corner, the sun where it ought to be. Distance was the first rule of his trade when he did not understand something, and he walked at the pace he used for the bread shop, passed the bread shop and kept going, three streets to the little park, and sat on a bench under a plane tree.
There he read his own pacts, one by one, the way he would read a stranger's. He had kept no records. He had never needed them; he remembered every warrant he had ever drafted, the way a locksmith remembers keys.
He found it at the newest. The young one, the Jann boy, unforked and eager, who had sat across the brass tray from him and left his tea untouched out of good manners. Kael.
Marcus held the pact up in his mind and read it as a hostile jinn would, a trained reader with a grievance and time. The location warrant described a house. It did not say the house had been visited before, by Marcus, for three weeks. It did not say the family had a reciter they trusted, a man who had cleared a cousin there in the spring and a neighbour's boy in the autumn, and who would come the same night if they called. Marcus had known both facts when he wrote the warrant. Disclosure made bargaining slow, and young ones signed faster when the picture was simple.
He had used that warrant shape for years. Sixty pacts, ninety; he had never counted. Some of the boys had died, and the deaths had brought a cold season and nothing more.
Somebody had read the clause at last and called it what it was. He could guess the word: concealment of a mortal risk. Under the old law that voided a pact back to its signature, and a void that size would run outward, along every pact cut to the same pattern, until it reached the man who had cut them.
He thought about running. The void was against him, personally, under a law that ignored borders. A new pact under a new name was worse. Any jinn worth signing would read him first, find the void and refuse, and the asking would mark him further.
He thought about the house. If this was what he feared, it would go where his will sent it, to Julian, his brother's boy. Julian had spent his summers here. At thirteen he had sat at the kitchen table while Marcus turned the pages of the calf-bound ledger for him one at a time, the names in columns going back through copies of copies to a court where sorcerers had worked for a king. The boy had taken it for an old man's hobby. The ledger was in the cabinet in the workroom now, and the key was on the ring in Marcus's pocket.
He thought longest about finding whoever had done this and offering terms, because he had talked his way out of narrow rooms before. Then he remembered the boy's face over the tea glass, the hunger in it, and he knew the boy had belonged to someone. He had charmed widows over tea. Whoever had found this clause had read it the way he would have, slowly and with a grievance, and that kind of reader did not drink the tea.
He did not pray. Years ago his prayers had become furniture in his practice, words set in an order. He had built a life on the idea that he would never need them any other way.
The sun slid along the bench. A boy went by on a bicycle with a crate of bottles clinking on the back. A woman in a grey coat came along the far path with a shopping bag, a leek sticking out of the top. Within the hour, he felt it come.
It was small. A man without his training would have missed it: a change in the air at the far end of the bench, as exact as a seal pressed into wax. He knew it at once for something of a far higher grade than any jinn he had ever bound. He kept his head still. He sat as a man sits on an ordinary afternoon and let it arrive, and he could not have said whether he had a choice.
He waited for pain. There was none. His chin went down to his chest. The bag rustled on the path and stopped.
"Sir?" The woman had come halfway across the grass. "Sir, are you all right?"
He meant to tell her yes. It was the charming answer, and he had always known the charming answer.
He could not find his mouth. Under his breastbone the stone he had carried for forty years turned over once, heavily, like a sleeper, and slid loose. Three streets away, behind a cream door with no handle, he felt the thing he had kept on the floor of a dark room get to its feet.