Ithra set the folio on the low stone between them and waited for Soren to sit before she sat.
She had come to his quarters instead of calling him to the map chamber. The chamber no longer needed visiting, she said at the door, and this was the last of them. For a month her reports had come once a week, because the closings had slowed to that pace. She told him it was the last plainly, the way she told him everything, and then waited to be asked in.
His quarters were the plainest rooms in the Cave: a bench, a low stone, a chest, a fissure high in the rock where grey light came down from the upper world at certain hours. In the corner a seep dripped into a clay jar he had set there three hundred years ago. He had chosen these rooms because nothing in them asked anything of him.
The folio was thin for what it held. Leaves of pressed reed, bound with a cord, three hundred and fifteen names.
He read them in the order she had set them down. She had not sorted them by country or by name. She had listed them as the assignees finished, so the folio was the campaign itself, day after day.
The first was a man in a country Soren had not set foot in for a hundred years, who had begun his dealings with jinn in the 1970s of the human calendar and hidden them for half a century. The last was a woman in her seventies, one of the barriers. His readers had worked at her for weeks before they got through, and hers had been the last closing of all, nine days ago.
Between them, three hundred and thirteen more. The six under protection from outside jinn law were not here. Ithra kept them on a list of their own, as she should.
Ninety-five percent. He read the number the way he would read the depth of a well by the length of wet rope.
Each entry gave a name, a country, a date, a line on method where it differed from the standard, and a word or two on how the closing had gone. Ithra used a small vocabulary. Proportionate. Proportionate, without complication. Proportionate, with secondary barrier. Proportionate, with assignee replaced. Down page after page the same few words lay like stones set in a riverbed, and the reading ran over them smooth.
Not one entry used a word that meant the rule had been broken. Soren saw it and said nothing. Behind him the seep dripped into the jar.
Halfway down the fourth leaf he came to Marcus.
He had not been looking for it. Ithra had put the name where the order put it, in the first week, the eighty-seventh closing, with nothing beside it to mark it out.
Marcus Gardner. Country of residence withheld by standard convention. Closed day four, phase one. A bench in a park three streets from the house. Method standard. Proportionate, without complication.
Under it, in the assignee's own cramped hand, one line Ithra had copied faithfully because she copied everything: "Visited the dwelling after the hour. Wards down at the hour of closure. Inner workroom door standing open, from the inside. Floor circle scuffed outward. Smell of singed hair and a room shut for years. No occupant found. Noted."
He read it at the pace he had read the eighty-six before it. A sorcerer's wards fell when the sorcerer did. Doors held by them swung. A circle drawn to hold something would break the way an ice sheet breaks when the river under it moves, from the middle out. He had seen the same in a dozen entries already: proportionate, wards collapsed, premises empty. The assignee had been young and thorough and had written down what his nose told him.
He did not stop on it. The campaign had been built to reach the pattern Marcus belonged to, and in the list Marcus weighed no more than any other. Ithra's order said so. Soren did not want his own eyes saying otherwise.
He remembered the first time he had seen that name, in the depths, in the knot of the weave that the Unnamed let him carry back, Kael's pact laid open in it like a gutted fish. The sorcerer had believed that what he kept off the registry was out of the law's reach. The weave had kept it anyway, every word and the intent under every word. And here it was again, on a reed leaf among eighty-six others, in Ithra's even hand.
He turned the leaf.
The rest took two hours. He set two entries apart.
One, two-thirds of the way through, was a man who had hidden the humans he trained as well as the jinn he bound. Seven apprentices had come to light at his closing. Ithra's readers had put them on a watch list. They were outside the campaign and would stay outside it, but they would be watched as they grew. Some were young. Some might never take up the trade.
The other was near the end. When the assignee arrived, the sorcerer's wife had been in the house. She had no part in his practice. She had not died, but when his defences came apart something in her mind had been shaken loose, the way a shelf of jars comes down when the wall behind it cracks. The note said she would recover within weeks.
Soren held that one longer.
"The assignee foresaw this."
"He foresaw the risk. Not this harm."
"It came from the sorcerer's own defences."
"Yes. Any closing of that man would have done the same to her."
"Put it in the record."
"It's in the record. Marked unavoidable."
He nodded and went on. The last leaves held nothing he needed to stop for.
He left the folio open on the stone at its final leaf.
Three hundred and fifteen was larger than any campaign of its kind in recent generations of jinn law. Some in the tribe's deep past had been larger, under other rules. He did not compare them. What he would have wanted remembered was the word repeated down every leaf. In three hundred and fifteen closings no assignee had stepped outside the bounds he set. Campaigns this size almost never kept to their rule so cleanly.
He closed the folio and tied the cord.
Ithra had not spoken since the wife. She sat across from him in her own posture of waiting, matching his stillness without copying it, and the silence went on for most of an hour. Neither of them counted it. The seep counted it for them, drop by drop.
"Thank you," he said at last.
"Yes."
"The report is complete. The campaign is closed. I need no more reports in this file."
"I'll archive it."
"With the authority mark, in the deep record. Send the tribes the ordinary notice and nothing more."
She rose when she was ready, the way a visitor rises when her errand is done. At the threshold she stopped.
"Soren."
"Yes."
"At the end of a work this size, you're allowed to sit with it longer than you usually let yourself."
"I know."
"I'm not telling you to."
"No. You're offering."
"I'm offering."
"Then I accept."
"Good," she said, and went.
He stayed on the bench with the closed folio in front of him. There had been no ceremony, and he had ordered it that way from the start. The verdict had been spoken before the gathered tribes; the end was only the remedy finished, and a finished fact needed no drum. It had come as a thin folio on the weekly day, carried into an ordinary room by the counsel he trusted most.
By the measure he had built the campaign with, it was enough.
He sat on with his hands on his knees, the way he sat when a reader had not yet finished speaking.
The grey light from the fissure moved across the floor at its usual pace. Nothing came. In the corner the seep went on dripping, and the water in the clay jar stood level with the lip and trembled there.