Ithra the Sila set the report on the desk with both hands, the way she set down anything heavy. Three weeks of the human world, bound in the grey cord the readers used for pages meant for the deep record. The cord was damp. Everything in the Cave was damp in this season, when the seep in the eastern gallery ran fast and the walls sweated.
"The network's observers are reading the same pages," she said. "Our taps caught them copying the village sections two days ago."
Soren the Marid untied the cord. The tribal chambers were quiet at this hour, and someone had trimmed the lamps along the far wall to a blue stub. He read at the pace his office required, one line, then the next.
The readers had been told to watch the houses the surge had left, and they had watched them the way they watched a pact, without opinion, noting the hour. A string of villages in the dry hills where no family named what had happened to it, though nobody had ordered the silence. A boy of fifteen in a port city who thanked his mother for the salt in the voice he kept for teachers. A grandmother who had sewn her grandson's name into the hem of every shirt he owned. A man who slept in his car outside his own house and went in only to wash.
They had set it all down in the same flat hand they used for the price of grain.
Soren had sent readers into the upper world for centuries, to count pacts and to price the charms sold in back rooms. He had never before this summer asked one to watch a dinner table.
"They were cut deeper than their words go," he said. "So they close over it and say nothing."
"Yes."
"The ones who cut them weren't mine." He turned the page. "I saw the knife come out, and I kept my eyes on the other hand."
Ithra had stood in this room the night he signed the purge order. She did not answer, because he had not asked her anything.
"You wanted to hear how he reads it," she said. "The one who built the network."
"Yes."
She pulled a stool to the desk and sat with her hands flat on her knees. She had spent the summer inside the network's traffic, in the small rearrangements its cells used to talk without seeming to. Nobody in the Cave knew its rhythm as well. Once she had told him that after enough weeks of it she caught herself thinking in its cadence and had to walk the outer terrace until the wind blew it out of her.
When she spoke for the network's leader now, her voice went level and dry, and the pauses fell where an engineer's would.
"Before the summer these villages didn't know what we can do. Now they know, and they'll never say it. Their grandchildren will grow up inside the not-saying and know it too. That's the gain. The silence carries the lesson further than any cell could."
Soren turned the page. The human institutions. Some of their religious bodies had put out statements that missed the truth by a mile; a few came nearer. The ones that had worked beside the counter came nearest, and even they had no word for the thing that had gone through their towns. Under the statements the readers had gathered the private cost. One man had left the mosque he grew up in. A woman had stood at its door three Fridays running and not gone in. Others had gone the other way and now rose in the night to pray.
"They were asked a question," he said, "and nothing they had answered it for everyone. That sorting will run for a generation. Their trust comes out of it lower than it went in."
"He'd call it a crack in the wall that kept us quiet for centuries. They'll patch it from inside, and it won't close." Her own voice came back for a moment. "He'd be pleased with the cracks."
"And the dead?"
The engineer's voice again. "The design was built to carry them. He enters the figure in his planning book and carries it forward."
The count was on the last page. Soren read it twice and it stayed the same. He wrote it into the margin of the ledger in his own hand, as he had written the purge's figure, three hundred and fifteen closed, on another night at this desk.
Somewhere across the world, in a sanctuary whose door Soren had never seen, the same figure was going into a different book. One book held it as a debt. The other held it as a price paid.
"The same number," he said.
"The same number."
She left him with it. He sat a while with his palm on the bound pages, then got up and carried them to the deep record himself instead of calling a deputy.
The deep record was a narrow gallery behind the chambers, cut so long ago that the tool marks had worn smooth as river stones. One lamp hung at its mouth. He walked past it, and his shadow went ahead of him along the floor, heavier than one lamp should make it, its edges sharp a hand's width past where the light gave out. Among the dozen lamps of the chambers he had stopped noticing it. Here he could not.
The purge ledgers took three shelves. Each closing had its line: the sorcerer's name, the pact, the day of the closing. He had read every line before he sealed the books. Nowhere in them was a column for the people who lived next door to those sorcerers, and until this summer he had not thought to want one.
He slid the report onto the shelf beside the ledgers. It was the thinnest thing there. He stood with two fingers on its cord, the way he would rest a hand on the shoulder of a reader who had brought bad news and was still waiting to be sent away, and he did not send it away for some time.
Somewhere in those books was a page for a young Jann who had left the Cave one morning without a word to anyone. Kael had been his ward. The page said the boy's death had opened the case that voided the sorcerer's pact. It did not say that Soren had read the boy's name off it, in this gallery, with a steady voice, and gone on to the next page.
He knew which book it was without counting along the shelf. He left it shut.
Ithra came back faster than he expected, and she did not knock.
"The sanctuary," she said. She held a tap slip, the thin kind the readers' frames printed, still curled from the drum. "We've had his signature fixed since the peak of the surge. It's been drifting for weeks, a little at a time. I put it down to traffic."
"And now?"
"Now the readers see an old jinn living alone in a small recess. That's all." She held out the slip. "No arrest. No fight. Nothing to say anyone took him or that he died."
Soren took it. The line ran level across the paper, the trace a place leaves when nothing in it is moving.
"He's gone," she said, "and he never walked out of the door."
"He went before the end. While his cells were still failing."
"Before most of them knew there was an end. He planned to vanish long before this campaign started." She took the slip back and folded it along its crease, once, edge to edge. "Do you want him found?"
Soren looked past her, through the gallery's mouth, at the three shelves and the new grey bundle on the end of them. The level line on the slip was still in his eye. The one who had built a thousand cells had never once sat still without a reason.
"No," he said. "I want to know what he's waiting for."