The file of the six had been kept in the lowest niche of the records gallery, and it came out cold enough to ache in the joints of Soren's fingers. He carried it up to the reading stone in the map chamber, sat, and laid both palms flat on the cover until the cold went out of it. The chamber was empty. Ithra's display still hung along the wall, three hundred and fifteen dots gone dark. Nine still burned, each with her small ring beside it, and six of the nine were in this file.
He had marked these six "observe, do not act" in the first phase of the purge. He did not mean to change the mark. But the cases at the edge of a reach tell a leader where the edge is, and he had not had a quiet hour to read them since the first week. Now the quiet was all he had. The six were scattered, no two in one country, the youngest in his forties and the oldest past eighty. Three had worked the same branch of the craft as the dead man in entry eighty-seven. One had worked a branch his readers had never managed to name.
He opened the first.
A man in the Andes, sixty-one. Eleven pacts of the hidden pattern in thirty-five years, four of them ending in jinn deaths at the mortal grade. The assignee had gone to him and the closing had not held. The readers' note gave the reason in three words: forbearance, case level. Soren had first met that phrase as a young jinn and taken it for a clerk's excuse. He knew better now. Above jinn law sat a judgment that was Allah's alone, and it did not weigh a man one act at a time. It weighed what had surrounded each act, what else he had done and who else had been touched, and it weighed things Soren had no means to see. Sometimes it let a man go on whom a narrower court would have ended. Soren had never once resented it. He set the page down.
The second was a small man with a large inheritance. Three pacts, one death, a careful life kept out of sight. Four hundred years ago his father's line had made an agreement with a party the readers could not identify, older than the registry and older than any contract form the tribes now used. It promised the male line shelter from certain unseen harms in return for duties the covenant also named, and the readers had confirmed that every one of those duties had been kept for four centuries. Soren had thought once of sending them to dig out the other party's name. He had decided against it. A verdict made under the pact law could void only what the pact law had made. This was older.
The third was the woman, and he had kept her case close since the first week. Her record was small: three pacts, one death. What came after was not small. For twenty-seven years after her third pact she had sent a large part of her income to the families of the jinn she had bound, through channels those families had built for their own needs, so that they took her help for years and never learned whose hand it came from. His readers had traced it coin by coin. Jinn law did not let a kindness cancel a concealment. It had no column for it. Yet something had answered her. The assignee's report said his work kept turning aside from her, the way a stream turns at a stone it cannot see, and the readers wrote forbearance again, finer this time, shaped to her own acts.
The fourth and fifth were marked in a different hand: protection not fully read.
The fourth was a man in North Africa. Four pacts, two deaths. He had saved no one and kept no families. He came from no covenanted line, and by every measure the readers carried he was one more of the class the purge had closed in its first ten days. The assignee had stood in the same street as the man for most of an afternoon, and had not finished.
The fifth was an old man in South Asia. Two pacts, one death. The assignee had followed him through a morning market and written it down afterward in his own words, which the readers had copied whole into the file:
"He stopped at a tea stall and paid with coins from a paper twist. I was eleven paces behind him and closing. At the corner of the stall I went to take the next step and it was not there. Nothing pushed me. Nothing held me. I knew how to walk. I could not find the step to walk with. I stood by the stall until he had drunk his tea and gone."
Soren read it twice. He put a finger on the line "I could not find the step to walk with" and kept it there. The old man had gone home with his tea in him and never learned he had been guarded.
The sixth was the simplest and the one that sat worst with him. A man in a remote part of Central Asia, travelling and out of reach when the closings ran, back within reach now. Getting to him would need a kind of searching the tribe had not used at scale in decades, a searching that went through every house on a road to find the one. Using it for one man would teach every hunter after him that it could be used. Soren had left the man alone for the price of the method, and he had written that plainly at the top of the page, so that no reader after him would think a shield stood there.
He closed the file and kept his hands on it, and the thing he had read past twice came clear.
The fourth and fifth had been guarded in the same way. Neither protection had touched the sorcerer, his body or his house or his ground. Both had reached into the hunter and taken a step out of his will. Almost every protection the records listed worked on the target or the ground around him. To go into the one who comes, and remove a choice from inside his own mind so cleanly that he can write it down afterward without fear, needed a power that stood closer to a person than his own breath.
He had heard of such guards once, and from the humans' side. Long ago, in his years of registered pact work, he had stood outside a house where an old woman recited at night, and he had asked a believing jinn of that district what the verse was that made the room so hard to enter. The jinn had told him it was a verse in the chapter of Thunder, and told him what the humans understood it to say: that every person has guards, one after another, before him and behind him, who keep him by Allah's command. Soren had taken it as a human comfort. He had worked eight centuries since and never seen a guard of that kind stand between a sorcerer and the hunter the law sent after him. He had come to believe they stood aside for that, when the matter was decreed.
For these two they had not stood aside.
He sat with the water dripping in the seep behind the map and turned it the only way it would turn. If it was them, they had been told to keep these two men, and whoever told them had a use for the men that was not finished. He could not imagine what use a practitioner in North Africa and an old tea drinker in a market could be to anyone above the tribes. He did not try for long.
He took the pen from the stone and wrote one line at the foot of the file in the old hand the deputies could not read, and marked it for his own eyes.
"Two of them are being kept. Whoever keeps them is not done with them."
He put the file back in the lowest niche himself. On the display along the wall the two lit dots for North Africa and South Asia burned a little apart from the rest, and when he went to the door he found he had backed the whole way out of the chamber so as not to turn away from them.