The rug was rolled against the wall and the tea tray was gone.
Marcus didn't look up when Kael came in. He was on his knees on bare stone that had been scrubbed pale, finishing a figure in a dark wet stuff that smelled of rust and lamp oil. The shape might have been an eye or a mouth, and every line of it leaned away toward somewhere else. At its three narrow points sat a river stone, a knot of black thread and a scrap of paper folded so many times it had become a pellet.
Nobody else was on the floor. Kael had expected the woman to be here, and corrected himself at once: Marcus had said from the start that the host was elsewhere and the work would travel.
Marcus nudged the river stone the width of a fingernail and murmured to the figure, as a carpenter talks to a plank before he cuts it. The words came low and rhythmic, in an Arabic older than any Kael had heard spoken.
"Stand there."
He pointed at the edge of the figure without lifting his head. The ease of the tea room had gone out of his voice. Kael settled where the finger pointed, and the lines under him drew tight around the spot like a knot pulled shut.
"When I open it you'll feel pulled. Don't fight. The channel does the work. You'll arrive spent and you may black out. That's expected. When you wake, you'll be inside her. Settle behind the eyes. Don't push her down. Let her sink. You'll feel my will the whole time. At the end it opens again and you come back."
He might have been explaining how to read a passage claim.
He laid both palms flat on the stone, shut his eyes and began again, louder, each syllable turning like a key in a stiff lock. The air thickened around Kael until there seemed to be no gaps left in it. A line appeared in the figure that nobody drew. It had been in the floor all along, and the working had peeled the cover off.
The pull came. Kael had pictured a door he could step through. What came was gravity. It hooked the middle of him and hauled, and his edges squeezed in like a fist closing, and the room dropped away.
The channel had length and no walls he could feel. He was crossing distance in the human world without passing through any of it, and the will at the anchor end was steering. He could feel that will around him like a hand at the small of his back in a crowd. It was the only landmark he had, and he leaned on it.
Exhaustion came in layers. Effort first, then strain, then a feeling of being rubbed thin, his edges smearing like chalk under a thumb. He reached for the hand at his back. It was there, steady. He trusted it.
And then it wasn't there. No tug, no warning. Behind him the channel closed, smooth and unhurried, a door easing shut on its own weight.
At the last edge something tore away from him, small and cold. His jewel. He felt it come loose and drop, and he had no hands to catch it.
Then black.
A heartbeat came back first. It wasn't his; he had no heart. It filled everything, wet and relentless, shoving hot blood through channels as wide as corridors.
The senses followed, all of them wrong. He was behind closed eyelids, and the eyes were closed because the body was asleep. Its thoughts moved under the sleep like fish under ice. Sound came through bone: a fan ticking, a window open a crack, the far roar of a city he didn't know. A sheet lay on bare arms and a mattress pushed up into a back. The whole body dragged down on itself with a weight he had never felt in his own world. Her wrists ached, a deep bruised ache, as if hands had pinned them hard and not long ago.
Under all of it was her fear.
She hadn't gone anywhere. She was pressed against the walls of her own mind like an animal backed into a corner, and her fear tasted of copper and salt, and of bile at the back of a throat that was his throat now. She was trying to wake. She was trying to make a body answer that no longer answered her.
She was supposed to sink. She was trapped, the same as him.
He found the narrow place behind the eyes and above the heartbeat and held it, as Marcus had told him. It was cramped and close, but he could hold it. He had his father's stillness.
He opened her eyes a sliver, the way a sleeper checks the hour. A small room. A dark lamp. A wardrobe with one door that didn't shut. A curtain breathing in and out at the half-open window. A framed photograph on a low dresser, too far to make out.
He reached down the pact thread for Marcus, carefully, then hard, stretching against the edge of the body toward the place where the sorcerer's will should be.
Nothing at the other end. He reached again, and it cost him, and still nothing, as if the thread had been cut or never tied.
Beneath him her fear jumped. She had felt the empty place too.
The room was full. He hadn't seen it until now.
A drifter clung to the ceiling. Two more hung by the far wall. A scavenger crouched in the corner by the wardrobe, patient as anything that has found a meal and doesn't want to spook it. Out in the hall a passerby paused and gave him the short nod of one jinn to another.
He signalled all of them at once. I'm here. I'm bound. It's gone wrong.
The scavenger looked up, and for an instant the fear in the room pleased it. Then it lifted its head at a sound Kael hadn't heard and left its corner. It didn't run. It thinned out in the direction of away, as a jinn does when it wants to be anywhere else. The drifter on the ceiling watched it go and followed. The two by the wall traded a look and went together. The passerby didn't come back.
He called again, wilder. I'm alone. I don't know where I am. Answer me.
One figure was left.
It stood at the head of the bed and it had been standing there the whole time. He couldn't have seen it until he met the condition for seeing it, and he had met it by entering her. It had the shape of kin, edges held the way his were held, eyes where eyes belong. Its touch on his attention was wrong in a way he had no training for, like a hand brushing him from a side that didn't exist.
Her qareen. He had heard of them all his life and never seen one, and the recognition arrived with fear already inside it.
It didn't look at him. Its face was turned a little aside, listening, alert and unafraid, like a dog that has heard its owner's car two streets off.
Kael listened where it listened. Below, somewhere in the house, a man's voice was reciting Quran in Arabic, low and steady, with the small pauses of someone reading from a page.
The qareen leaned toward the voice like a plant toward a window. Every jinn with no business here had left this house ahead of that voice. This one had stayed because it belonged to her.
The corrections came one after another, each shutting a door he had taken for open. The sorcerer wasn't holding the anchor and was never coming back. The channel had been built to close. Marcus had wanted nothing from him except that he be here, in this body, in this house, with that voice below and no thread back to anywhere.
He stopped reaching. He held the centre with his father's stillness, which was still his.
Downstairs the recitation broke off mid-verse. A door opened. Two sets of feet started up the stairs, one light and quick, one heavier and in no hurry at all, and the qareen at the head of the bed closed its eyes.