On the eleventh day the lines stopped pulsing. For the first time since the signal went out, Soren could hear the water running down the chamber wall, a thin sheet over black stone, the sound he had stopped hearing after his first century in the Cave.
He stood in the chamber of the map and read it the way he read a pool for what moved under it. A working line beat faintly from assignee to target. A line whose remedy had been given and reported dimmed to a low, steady glow, like a coal under ash. Three hundred and eight of the three hundred and twenty-four glowed. A few had closed faster than he had projected and a few slower, where a target's habits made the work hard. Taken together, the campaign was on time.
Each closed line had its entry in the reports, all in one flat form: a name, a place, an hour, remedy given. He had read entry eighty-seven on the fourth day. Marcus Gardner, who had written the warrant for Kael's pact, had died on a bench in a park three streets from his house, without pain, as specified. Soren had set nothing beside the entry. It sat among the others, and he had gone on to eighty-eight.
Sixteen still beat, faint as moths. Sixteen was five in every hundred, near the middle of what he had expected before he drew the first line, and the sixteen were not scattered. Four had been moving when the campaign began, between houses or countries for reasons of their own, and an assignee could not act on a place that would not hold still; those would close when they stopped. Six had kept a second set of protections beside the voided pact, bought from sources other than the jinn they had bound. His readers were picking those apart one knot at a time. Three had already given. Three were of a make his readers had never handled. The last six were the ones he had come down to look at.
These six had not hidden or run, and they kept no second instrument. Their pacts carried the same concealment as the rest, the search had found them, and they had been assigned like every other name. The assignees had gone, taken position, and come back with nothing done.
He had picked those six assignees himself, from the steadiest operators the Cave kept, jinn whose records over decades held no failure he could find. Six of them failing the same way in six countries was a finding. He read their reports again.
"The target was present and readable. My instruments were whole. The moment came and passed while I stood in position, and nothing was done."
"I withdrew. I do not know why. I reached for the act and the reach did not finish."
"Something stood around the target that I have never read. It let me come close and look. It did not let me act."
He went into their lives. The first was a man of seventy-four in a mountain town. He had signed ten pacts of the pattern since he was twenty-six, and his record was dull in both worlds. Sixteen years ago a child in his village had gone down a well, and the old man had brought her up alive by a means nobody there could explain with rope. Something had weighed that night, somewhere above the law, and the weight had not lifted when his pact was voided. His assignee had walked into it like a fish into a net it could not see.
The second was a woman in her fifties who had signed three pacts of the pattern in the middle of an ordinary career. For thirty years since, telling nobody and gaining nothing, she had spent much of what she earned on the families of the jinn those pacts had bound. Jinn law did not let one act be set against another. Something did.
The third man's record had taken weeks to build, in a country where records were thin. His father's house had made an agreement four centuries ago with an authority Soren's readers could not name, in a form older than every standard contract the registry held. The law recognised it without enforcing it, and it still covered the man at its far end. He had done nothing to earn it.
The last three were stranger. Two of their reports, from places a continent apart, said the same thing in nearly the same words. The protection had not stood around the target or in the room. It had stood inside the assignee and turned his attention aside at the moment of the act, the way a hand turns a sleeper's face from a lamp.
Soren knew that mode. He had read it once, in a record older than the Cave, about an order he did not name aloud, because he was not sure the name belonged in a jinn's mouth.
Ithra the Sila came in without being sent for. She had read the last pulses from the doorway and walked straight to the six lines, and she stood with her hands behind her back, the way she stood when she had come to argue.
"You're reading the six."
"Three I understand in part. Three I don't understand at all."
"Then send me. The well man first. I've stood in rooms with worse."
"No."
"Say why. Not to me. For the record."
He looked at the line that ran to the mountain town, a pale thread in the dark of the map, still beating. It had beaten like that for eleven days, as steady as the old man's pulse must be. Somewhere a man of seventy-four was drinking his morning tea with a jinn's death sentence lying unserved beside his cup.
"The law authorised a remedy for mortal concealment. Where it was given, it was lawful. Where something older or higher stopped it, stopping is lawful too. The law does not reach above itself, and I won't reach above it on its behalf."
"Some in the hall would push through."
"I know."
"Nessar's people won't even see a ceiling."
"I know that too."
She had not expected another answer. She had come to set it down, so that when the record was read one day the reader would find the campaign had met a ceiling and stopped beneath it.
At the door she turned, a pause of her own, learned in a long working life beside him. Her hand was on the rock of the doorframe. The water ran over her fingers and she did not move them.
"Some of the six will matter later."
"One of them belongs to something I don't read. When it moves, it won't move for us."
"And the pointer. Two names left out of the four. Days now, not weeks."
"Then that reading starts when this one ends."
She went. On the floor beside the map his shadow lay heavier than three hundred lit lines could account for, and he did not look at it.
He drew a second mark beside each of the six. In the working script of the Cave it meant observe, do not act. Readers of standing would watch the six for as long as the six lived. No assignee would go near them again.
Then he counted, because the count was owed. Three hundred and eight closed. Four moving, which would close when they stopped. Three broken barriers, their lines already dimming. Three barriers no reader of his could open, and six held by something above the law. When the moving four and the broken three were done, the campaign would stand at three hundred and fifteen.
No jinn reading a new pact would sign that clause again in this generation. The men who had lived by it were finished in eleven days. Sorcery was not. Other patterns lived, cut a little differently, and he would come to them in other seasons.
The readers had totalled one more figure he had not asked for. Over the last century the voided pattern had killed sixty-three jinn. Kael was the sixty-third.
Soren did not weep. He had wept, after his fashion, in the hour the boy died, and not since. The campaign belonged to the law and the tears to his grief, and he kept the two apart the way a channel keeps sweet water off the salt.
Before he left he took up the two reports from a continent apart. At the end of each, the assignee had added a sentence nobody had asked for, in a different hand and a different dialect, the same words.
"When it turned me away, it knew my name."