Nessar laid the fortieth summary on the reading stone beside the thirty-ninth and put a fingertip on each curve.
Since the peak he had made the deliverer score the summaries into thin slates, one for each summary, and he read them by touch as often as by sight. The thirty-ninth he had held for a full day before he let it mean anything. One slate could be noise. Two leaning the same way made a slope. Under his left finger the groove of the fortieth ran down the same way, only steeper, and the edge of it was sharp where the scorer's tool had bitten deep.
The reading chamber of the sanctuary was cool and bare: a stone to read on, a stone to write on, a lamp, nothing on the walls. Nessar the Hinn had set its proportions himself, the negative of every room he had been kept in. The low ceiling of the sorcerer's cellar was a high one here. The cellar's single door was three openings here, none of them closed.
The humans called it a surge. In his own records it was the correction, and for eight slates he had felt the line flatten under his fingers, tip, and fall faster. Now each slate's fall was larger than its rise. His cells still worked at their trained pace, opening houses the way they had been taught. The counter closed them faster.
He kept his face still, though no one was there to see it. In forty years under the sorcerer he had learned that a feeling shown was a feeling used, and the habit had outlived the man by eighty years. A slate was data. Data gave options. Options gave a decision. He ran the order now, the way he always had.
At the present rate the surge would stop counting for anything within months. He worked out the number and did not write it down. A tail would linger for years, a few stubborn houses in a few cities, but as a weight on the human world it would be gone.
He picked up the chalk.
On the writing stone he drew the first fix as a single steep stroke. Speed. One pressure signal through the same old channels that had carried the signal to begin, and the cells would work faster. Their training allowed it.
Against it he set the seventeenth slate, where he had first felt the drift: small departures from protocol, and since then larger ones. Cells doing harm the protocols forbade. Deaths off the list. Faster work would mean sloppier work, and sloppy jinn guarded themselves badly against recitation. Speed would feed the counter. It would also breed the kind of operator who deserts later and talks.
He wiped the stroke out with the side of his hand.
The second he drew as many short lines pulled into one knot. Mass them. Take the cells off their scattered houses and throw them together at a district, a hospital, a school.
But he had built the cells so they could not be steered quickly. They did not know each other. Their protocols were trained in and deaf to outside instruction, so that a captured operator could betray no one. A new order needed a new kind of signal the cells had never learned to hear, and building one would take longer than the slates gave him. A cell handed orders it had not trained for would carry them out badly, and the confusion would travel faster than the order.
He wiped it out.
For the third he drew a circle and then a dot in the middle of it, and looked at the dot a long time.
The observer reports lay open on the reading stone. His watchers had found no centre to the counter. It was built of small cells too, each knowing a few neighbours. There was only the man: Muhammad, one point in the world, which could in principle be reached.
One report he had read four times. A watcher at the gymnasium window had seen the man, late at night, take a string bag of oranges and cut two of its knots with a borrowed knife while the old sheikh watched. The bag had held. The watcher had written it down because it seemed strange, and had not understood it. Nessar understood it.
His cells were trained for possession. They had no skill at hunting one named man: no scouting, no protocols. And the counter had already grown past him, into his first circle and the leaders they trained. Remove him and it would go on angrier. Nessar had studied enough human movements to know what a dead founder does for the people who loved him.
He rubbed out the dot. The circle he left a moment longer, then rubbed that out too.
The fourth he could not draw at all. Talks. His faction had never once considered it. The man would not bargain with an operation like his, that much was plain from every report. Soren might. But to sit across from Soren, Nessar would have to say in the open that the surge was his, and that sentence would give Soren standing under jinn law to move against the whole network. Opening talks was the first move of a surrender.
His procedure kept a fifth and sixth fix for emergencies. He chalked them out of habit and saw they were the first two again with the edges sharpened. They would end the same way and cost more.
He wiped the stone clean and set the chalk down square to its edge.
The surge could not be saved.
He took it the way he took weather.
The surge was one operation. He had spent eighty years building the network for a purpose, to make the human world answer for its long silence about what sorcerers did to jinn, and no single operation had ever carried all of that. This one's end left the purpose standing. The network would end if the purpose was won or if something stronger broke it, and neither had happened.
So he turned to what came next, and held three shapes for it loosely, like stones in one palm.
A slower surge, years long, low and selective, too quiet to raise a counter. It would mean retraining every cell. Or a narrower target: leave ordinary families alone and go after the men whose silence had kept the trade alive, the religious men who never named a sorcerer, the officials who had profited, the scholars who had written it all down and done nothing. Fewer would die, and the cost would fall on the right necks. Or nothing. Keep what was left and wait. Soren's purge had cleared this generation of sorcerers. Another would come in thirty years or fifty and do something that called the tribes together, and Nessar could outlive the wait.
He chose none of them. The surge was still falling, and its last weeks would show him what the next world looked like.
Then, as he had once before, at the seventeenth slate, he let himself think about the man.
The counter had cells and links between neighbours, local authority under a shared method, no centre to cut, growth by training. Nessar had worked those principles out alone, over decades, from the shapes of the jinn who came out of their sorcerers alive. The man had reached them in weeks. The report gave no sign he had studied the network or copied it. He had looked at a sickness and tied a net.
Nessar had never believed it was ordinary human skill, not from the first report. Something above jinn affairs and human affairs alike had put this man where he stood and was moving him faster than men move. Nessar did not know its name. His analysis would have found a counter to it if one existed, and had found none.
What he felt turned out, when he looked at it, to be the regard one builder has for another whose wall stands straighter than his own. The man was taking his work apart in front of him. The craft was good. He would not lie to himself about that, and he would say it to no one.
He drew the observer report back across the stone and found the line he had already read three times. The counter's first cells had begun training ten days ago.
Under his fingertip, the groove of the fortieth slate ran on down to the edge.
Nessar had needed eighty years.