The heat had spread again overnight. Soren was running one finger along its newest edge, where it had crossed a river his readers had drawn in blue chalk, when he smelled diesel in the chamber and knew Harun had come in.
The map on the slab belonged to his readers. His own, the one with three hundred and twenty-four lines on it, lay rolled in a niche of the archive with a cord around it: three hundred and twelve lines struck through, twelve left standing. They had built this one to follow Nessar's surge through the human cities, and it looked like the weather charts humans pinned up in their stations. Heat lay across a whole country, brighter over some cities and dimmer over others, and nowhere was it gone.
"You've moved the lamps," Harun said.
"The readers moved them. They wanted to see the south."
Harun the Sila had not finished coming out of the shape he wore up there. The edges of him still held a man's outline, a sandal strap, a cuff frayed at the wrist, and he carried the city in with him: diesel, frying oil, a sweetness Soren could not place. He stood outside the inner circle, one of the readers Soren had sent up when the surge began to stand at street level, watch, and touch nothing. He came to the chamber when he had something. He had come four times in six weeks, and three of those had been worth the walk.
"What have you brought?"
"A man."
"Crossing into our business?"
"No. Doing something I haven't seen done."
Soren took his finger off the map. Of the two reasons an observer came to him about a human, that was the rarer. He sat down on the stone bench beside the slab, and the water that ran down the chamber wall went on running behind him.
"Describe him."
Harun began with the outside, the way readers were taught, keeping himself out of it: middle years, a shirt washed thin, a walk nobody on a bus would look at twice.
"He's working in a district the surge hit hard. Eastern side of the city, old flats, a school they've turned into a shelter. He isn't a reciter, not the way the humans mean it. No bag, no bottles of water, no shouting over the bed. He goes to the afflicted and changes what's around them. Then the jinn leave."
"Leave."
"Walk out. I watched three, close. Two broke the same day. The third was a light hold, and I didn't stay to the end, but it was going."
"What does he change?"
"Where the girl sleeps. Which uncle stays in the room and which one gets sent for bread. Something the mother has been not saying for a year, he gets her to say it. Prayer times kept to the minute for seven days. Different every house." Harun turned one hand over, an old human habit he had picked up and could not put down. "And he names them. Jann, Hinn, a ghul once. He gets the kind right before he does anything. I've seen your best readers get it wrong at that distance."
"Does he recite?"
"Sometimes. Short passages, the ones that kind of jinn can least stand. Low. He doesn't raise his voice. Mostly he doesn't need to."
"And the jinn, before he starts?"
Harun was quiet long enough for a drop to fall from the wall and strike the basin.
"They go still before the recitation. Every time. He comes through the door, and they let go a little and wait, the way a dog goes flat when its owner comes home. The recitation, when it comes, is only agreeing with something that's already happened."
"They know him."
"They know him."
"By what?"
"I can't read it. I looked for a line, a human house with standing. Nothing I can see. Rank, office, a mosque behind him, no. I know every family of reciters in that region by their signature, and he isn't one of them." Harun's outline flickered at the cuff. "I've got nowhere to put him."
Soren chose the next question as he would choose a stone to step on in fast water. Harun read well. Whatever the question gave away about what Soren already suspected, Harun would carry out of the chamber with him.
"Have you seen one like him?"
"Not living. In the old shelves there are a few lines about men the humans call the appointed. Very few. What I saw fits them, as far as I could see. Fitting isn't proof."
"No."
"I can only tell you what I saw."
Soren stood and went back to the slab and looked at it without reading, the way he looked at the surface of the basin, for something flat to think against. The heat was Nessar's work, and nothing had pushed back against it yet. The hospitals had run out of beds and the reciters were going under in their own appointment books. And in one district of one city a man in a thin shirt walked into rooms and the hold broke, by a sign Harun could not read, which meant no jinn reader could.
Something the jinn had not made, then. Soren held the thought at that depth and let it go no deeper. He had learned in his first century that there were orders above the law, and that they showed themselves when they chose. Guessing at them had never once helped the Cave.
"Does the network know about him?"
"Not yet. Probably."
"Probably."
"My brother-in-law hums by the eastern seep, and a lot drifts down there. Nobody's mentioned him."
Soren's finger, which had found the river again, stopped on it. He said nothing, and Harun went on.
"I don't hear all their channels. In the ones I do, he isn't there."
"How long?"
"Until he gets loud enough that someone trips over him without looking. Human scholars have started going to him. One old sheikh sat with him two days and came out and phoned everyone he knew." Harun let the cuff of his borrowed shape fall away at last. "A few weeks. Then every observer in the region will look that way. Theirs too."
"And when they find him?"
"They can do things to a man like that which you won't. Their planners keep their plans a long time."
Soren let the water fill the space for a while.
"Watch him. Don't go near him. Don't help him, even if you're sure he needs it. Every seventh day you come to this chamber and nowhere else, sooner if anything changes. No other jinn hears this from you. Not your wife's family. Not the readers."
"Not the elders?"
"No one."
Harun inclined his head. At the arch he stopped.
"He looked at me," he said. "The second house. I was a man by the stairs with a newspaper. He looked straight at me the way you'd look at someone who'd come in without taking his shoes off. Then he went back to the girl."
He went out. Soren stood with his palm flat on the cold slab, as he had stood on the night Kael died, when the patroller put the boy's jewel into his hand and he held it until it was as cold as the stone.
Alone, he filed it the way he filed anything he would need on a day that had not come: one thread of attention set on the man, one point at which attention would become action, and the actions it might become.
The point was simple. When the network found the man, Soren would move.
He laid three answers side by side, and none of them cancelled the others. He could reach the man himself, by some channel that left neither of them exposed, though he doubted a human who looked at a Sila like that would open a door to the leader of a jinn cave. He could guard him from a distance, with Cave jinn placed along the roads the network was likeliest to use, and never let the man or his people know. Or he could prepare the tribes, a word to each elder in turn, so that when the man stood in the open the jinn would meet him as something to reckon with and not something to hunt.
Contact would draw every eye that followed Soren onto the man, and a guard meant taking jinn from work the Cave already lacked hands for. The tribes would cost him most: he would have to speak before he understood, and in eight centuries he had not done that once.
He let himself think one thing further, and only once. The humans had been drowning for six weeks, with no ordinary answer left to them, and this was what had come up out of the water. It had not come by accident. He would not say that aloud, and he would not write it anywhere.
He bent to the map again. In the lower corner, over the eastern side of one crowded city, where his readers had chalked a school, a patch of heat the size of a thumbprint had gone dark.