Soren the Marid was listening to a three-hundred-year-old complaint when the patroller came.
Two jinn of the lower tier sat before him over a passage dispute, the kind he had settled a thousand times. One family had used a route since before the last war. Another claimed it now because the surface had shifted above it. Even their irritation was familiar, the irritation of jinn who had known each other too long to fight cleanly and not long enough to let it go.
He heard them with the outer part of his attention, the part a leader keeps for this, and underneath it he thought about water. A seep had opened in the eastern wall a century ago where there had been none. Every morning Tamar, a Jann of no rank, scraped its green off the rock and hummed his five notes. Soren had watched the stain spread for a hundred years. Water always found the weak line in stone. It never needed to hurry.
A shape moved at the mouth of the gallery, and he lifted his head.
A young patroller stood there, a Jann of the outer watch. He had been running most of the night, in whatever way jinn run, and his form had worn thin with it, frayed at the edges like cloth rubbed on stone. He held a small cloth bundle close in his palm, as if it weighed more than it should.
He waited. He would not speak in front of the two disputants until he allowed it. That was the form, and he was young enough to know it and old enough not to break it.
Soren raised a hand to the pair.
"Later."
They went without argument. They could feel the air in the gallery had changed, even if they did not yet know why, and jinn of their standing did not test a leader's air.
The patroller came forward, lowered himself to the stone at the proper distance and waited to be asked.
"Speak."
"A scatter signal resolved at a third-registry watch post four hours ago. Human world, three thousand miles east. I was the nearest patroller, so I went."
He nodded once.
"A possession ended in burn, inside the host. The reciter was human. He doesn't know our protocols, but he's competent and devout. He left the house when it was done. The host is alive. She'll recover."
None of that needed the bundle. Soren did not ask. The patroller would get to it.
"I swept the room. The residue was clean, hot metal in the air and the cold through the wall where the jinn had been. An ordinary burn. The signal should have closed there."
"But."
"There was a jewel on the floor."
The patroller unfolded the cloth.
The stone in his palm was the size of a human fingernail and dark green. He could feel the cold of it from where he sat, colder than the Cave, colder than a jewel had any reason to be.
He did not reach for it.
"Where on the floor?"
"The middle of it. Between the bed and the door, in plain view."
Jewels that came loose in a human room rolled into corners and under furniture. A patroller could spend a night on his knees looking for one. This one had been lying where the first jinn through the door would see it, set out like a cup on a table.
"Whose?"
"I couldn't be sure of the line by holding it, so I found a second watcher. A local, low tier. She was near the house when the channel came down into it earlier in the evening. A binding carries the name it was given in consent, and she heard the name as it passed."
The patroller stopped and took a breath. He had carried the next sentence for four hours.
"The name was Kael."
Soren did not move.
Then he held out his hand, and the patroller laid the jewel in it, and he closed his fingers.
The signature resolved in him the way signatures always had, completely and at once. A Jann, unforked, young grade, with the ward-tag of his own line attached, and the particular weight a jewel takes on from the one who carried it. Kael had carried it.
He kept his hand closed. Around him the Cave went on with its business. Somewhere below, a family was eating. Deeper down, an old one hummed over a piece of carved stone and missed no note. Far above, in a city he would never see, a young woman was alive and empty, probably asleep by now, with a stranger's death drying on her sheets.
He opened his hand. The jewel lay green and cold on his palm.
"The registries."
"I checked both on the way. Nothing under his signature in the human sorcerers' registry, and nothing on the jinn parallel. Both clean."
"The host."
"An ordinary neighbourhood. Thin warding, open sky within two streets. No protective practitioner within a quarter mile."
"Council?"
The patroller hesitated, choosing his words.
"The watcher saw no jinn of elder standing near the house for three days before. If he consulted anyone, it wasn't anyone who would have stopped him."
Everything he needed was now in the gallery with him. A young jinn under his care had died unregistered, in a host he had reached through no process Soren had built to protect him, burned in a room by a reciter who had walked in expecting an ordinary night. A jewel lay where jewels never lay. Someone had chosen every piece of it.
Grief would come. First came recognition, cold and exact, like the moment a man sees the crack he has been sounding for years open along the line he always feared, and sees how little his watching held back.
"And the reciter?"
"He recited over her the way his people do. Nothing else. No binding, no bargain. It was lawful."
"Then he is no business of ours. Thank you."
The patroller rose. He did not ask what Soren would do, and Soren watched him go back into the passages. Then he set the jewel on the stone in front of him so that he could see it as well as hold it.
He knew why Kael had gone. He could see the boy on the lip of the upper gallery, pacing three steps to the edge and three steps back, the habit he had picked up the year his mother died and never lost. Soren had walked past that pacing for longer than some of the Cave's young had been alive, and told himself it was youth.
It had been written in every look the boy gave him, every eager thing met with patience. Soren had read it and chosen patience, and patience had been right until tonight.
The question was who had pointed.
A human sorcerer did not find a young jinn of Kael's exact kind on his own. Someone had told him which cave, which ward, which father's name and which wound could be turned. The pointer could be human: a broker or a sorcerer with better access to the jinn world than any untaught human should have. There were a few such humans, and most were already watched. It was more likely a jinn, one working off the registry or someone standing close to one. Pointing a human at one particular young jinn was jinn craft. It had been done before. The ones who did it were known to him, and there were not many of them.
He began the list. He did not write it down. Each name came with its standing, its history and its capacity for this, and he moved through them as he moved through an arbitration, slowly, refusing to settle on the first answer.
The first name on the list was not the one he would have expected.
He did not flinch. He kept it, moved past it, and went on to the end. When he came back to the top, it was still there.
The weave was already moving. A death with this signature did not stay inside one jinn's hand. In an hour the young ones would feel it, and in two the elders.
At the mouth of the gallery, the first of them had already stopped and was staring at the jewel.