On the ninth day of waiting at the mouth of the Cave, a Jann with a clay tablet under his arm came out and told Rahma the Sila that the leader would see her now, as if she had only just arrived.
She had counted the days by the prayers. There was nothing else in the Cave to count them by. It had no sun and no call, only the water, running down black rock in a hundred places and keeping its own time. On the first evening she had asked a passing reader which way the direction of prayer lay, and he had looked at her the way a clerk looks at someone who asks for a form that has never existed. Nobody here knew. She had worked it out from the road she had come in by and prayed toward that, in a side passage, and jinn going by had slowed to watch her and then gone on.
Twelve weeks on the roads. Eleven tribes. She carried them in order, the way Awf carried his cord. On the nine days at the Cave's mouth she had said the whole of it over to herself until she could say it without one word too many, because the readers on the roads said the old Marid listened to every word and weighed the extra ones against you.
The Jann led her down through galleries cut so long ago that the tool marks had worn smooth, past halls where families were eating and halls where readers sat in rows over stone, and the deeper they went the quieter it got, until all she could hear was water.
Soren was sitting on a bench in a small chamber with a clay jar in the corner catching a seep from the wall. He was a Marid, and old, and he did not trouble to look like anything. Beside him stood a Sila in a plain grey form, a woman's shape with nothing in it to remember, and Rahma knew from the stillness of her that this was Ithra.
"Rahma of Nasibin," said Soren. "You've been patient. The purge has had my hours."
"Peace be upon you."
"And upon you." He said it correctly and without anything in it. "Sit, if you like."
She did not sit. She had decided on the road that she would say it standing, all of it, in order, before he could fold it into something smaller.
"In the spring a Hinn came to our gate," she said, "and asked passage for a few dozen jinn going up with no names on them. He offered a table right in Mosul and a debt cancelled for it. Our keeper refused him. He came back twice. Then he went south to the salt flats, where the gate sells. In the same week our messengers heard in the relay offices that children were being taken in the south, in houses that had never had a sorcerer through the door. Our council closed our gate to anyone going up unrecorded and to anyone carrying for the one who sent him."
Soren listened without moving. The water ran down the wall behind him into the jar, and the water in the jar stood a finger's width below the lip.
"Since then I have carried it to eleven tribes. The northern four closed their gates the same month. The two river tribes of the east said they would think, and they have thought, and they've closed theirs. Three tribes of the west said a gate is a gate and what passes through it is the traveller's own business. The southern twelve did not let me through their door." She took a breath. "The northern towns are quieter than the south. Our watchers say so. We don't know why. We think it's the gates."
"You may be right."
"I am asking the Cave to stand with us. Close your roads to carriers. Say at the tribes, in your own voice, that what is being done up there is a crime. They listened to you at the gathering. They would listen again."
"At the gathering," Soren said, "I named a crime that had a name and a face and a contract with his own mark on it. I named the sorcerer. I named the man who burned the boy, and I said he was not to be touched. Every clause had a weight. The tribes could see the weights."
"There are children."
"Yes."
He said it at once, flatly, and she understood that he knew, and had known for a long time, and had known exactly how many.
"Then why?"
"Because what you're asking for is a side." Soren put one hand flat on the bench beside him. "The Cave has held for eight centuries because it doesn't take one. Not on faith, not on tribe. Your people pray. Half my halls don't, and some of the ones who do would not pray beside you. If the Cave stands with the believing gates, the gates that don't believe will stand together against them, and they'll be glad of the excuse. I've seen the tribes split before. Three times. A river that picks one bank floods the other."
"The other bank is already flooded."
"Then I will not add to it."
"You'd add nothing. You'd only say it."
"When I say something, it stops being only said." For a moment his voice went somewhere far down. "I said it once this year. Look at what came of it."
Rahma did not know what had come of it, not all of it. She knew the purge, everybody knew the purge. She knew that the jinn going up unrecorded had started going up the week after the verdict, as if they had been waiting for it. She looked at the old Marid on his bench and thought, for the first time in twelve weeks, that she might be talking to someone more tired than she was.
"The network uses your silence," she said. "Everyone on the roads says so. They hide behind the purge."
"I know what they hide behind."
"Then you could take it away."
He looked at the jar. A drop fell into it, and the surface shook and settled.
"Thank your council," he said. "Tell Qasim the Cave honours what Nasibin has done and will not hinder it. Our roads will not be used against your gate. That I can give."
It was a road, and a long way short of what she had walked twelve weeks to ask for. She bowed, the full bow of a messenger to a leader, and he inclined his head, and Ithra moved from the wall.
The Sila walked her up through the galleries without speaking. She walked fast, for someone who seemed to take no trouble over anything, and Rahma had to lengthen her stride.
In a long hall by a seep in the eastern wall, a Jann of no rank was scraping green off the wet stone with a flat shell and humming to himself, the same five notes again and again. He looked up as they passed and smiled at Rahma, a sudden friendly smile, the way a child smiles at a stranger on a road.
"Tamar," said Ithra, without slowing. "He likes visitors. We have few."
At the mouth of the Cave the light of the upper road came in grey and thin. Rahma stopped on the threshold. She had a long way to go home and nothing in her hands to carry back but one sentence about roads.
"He knows," she said. "About the children. He knows how many."
"He knows everything that can be counted." Ithra stood just inside the shadow. Her borrowed face did not move.
"And does nothing."
"He does the things he can see the end of." Ithra looked past her, up the road, as if checking it for something. "Just now he can't hear anything that isn't already inside the law. Since the boy died he hears what has a clause attached to it. Nothing else reaches him."
"Will it open?"
"I don't know." Ithra turned to go back down. Then she stopped, and looked at Rahma properly for the first time, and her voice did not change at all.
"Come back when he can hear."