The news came up from the deep rooms the way water comes up through a cellar floor: first a darkness in the stone, then a shine, then everybody's feet were wet.
Soren felt it before anyone spoke. He sat in his place in the gallery with the cold of the rock against his back, and the murmur in the passages below changed pitch, like a stream finding a new channel. Young voices. Fast voices. The sound of jinn who had been out on the seen side and come back through the gate with more in their mouths than they had taken out.
The passage seller came up the long stair with three of the young carriers behind him. He was a Jann of the deep rooms, broad and pleased with himself, who had sold passage rights in the Cave for longer than most of its members had been alive. He bowed to Soren at the proper distance. He did not wait for the proper silence after it.
"There's a gate at sea," he said, "taking living humans across."
The gallery went quiet. Soren let it.
"Shayatin hold it," the seller went on. "An old gate, on a shore in the west. It has been taking them over since the summer. Not one or two, stolen out of a bed. Whole companies, paying. Cockerels, ewes, open tables, a household's name. And carrying goods after them, water, food, by the load." He spread his hands. "And from there they go out past the open water. To the dead place."
"Which dead place?"
"The rock out past the edge. Where nothing has lived since anyone remembers. Where the old ones used to say not to go." The seller's eyes shone. "They need guides for the crossing out there. The gate's own people can't carry them all. Feral things in that water, and thieves. They've lost humans on the way. They're paying the guides who bring them through what they'd pay a tribe for a season of table rights."
One of the young carriers behind him nodded, too fast. Soren knew him: a Jann of forty years, quick, careless with his strength, always spent and always hungry. He had come back through the Cave's gate last month so drained that he had lain in the outer gallery for a week like a coal gone grey.
Soren looked at the light on the floor of the gallery, the bar of human daylight that came down the shaft each noon and lay there. It had not changed. The world over his head was still the world.
But the rock out past the edge.
He had sat in this gallery four days without sleep after the wave last summer, while Ithra the Sila told him what the old readers believed had been let out. He had listened, and turned it over, and set it down where he set things he could neither believe nor dismiss. He felt it now, under the seller's words, the way a diver feels a cold layer under warm water.
He stood.
He did not stand often in the gallery. The murmur in the passages stopped. Jinn who had been half listening turned round. In the niches along the wall the old ones raised their heads.
"Hear this, all of the Cave," he said.
He let the words go out over the rock and fill it, slow, as he had been taught to let a ruling fill a room.
"No one of the Cave carries for that gate. No one buys passage from it or sells it anything. No one guides a human across the water to that rock, for any price, for any table. If a human of that company comes to you asking, you do not answer. If one of that gate's people comes to you offering, you do not answer."
The passage seller's face did not move, but something behind it shut.
"With respect," he said. "Our young are hungry. Since the wave there is less on the tables up there. Fewer houses leave food unnamed. Half our carriers come home spent and lie in the outer rooms. Here is a paying road."
"It pays now."
"A human kept on our side is a debt someone carries," the seller said. "Let it be them. Let the shayatin carry it. We only take the fee for the crossing."
"Then let the shayatin carry the fee as well."
The young carrier behind the seller opened his mouth. Soren looked at him, and he closed it.
"You don't know what's out there," Soren said, lower, to the young one, and to all of them. "I don't know either. When I don't know what a current is, I don't put my children in it."
He sat down.
The murmur came back slowly into the passages, lower than before. The seller bowed at the proper distance, and this time he waited the proper silence, and went down the long stair without looking back. Two of the three carriers followed him. The third stayed by the gallery wall a long moment, looking at the bar of daylight on the floor, and then went down too.
Soren did not watch which way they went. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the empty stair, and he counted the ones he knew had come home spent that month. Eleven. More than in any month he could remember. The tables up there were thinning, the seller was right about that. Fewer houses left a pot uncovered and unnamed since the wave. A hungry jinn far from a gate weakened, and a jinn that spent itself to nothing on the seen side could die there, and he had forbidden the one road that was paying.
He sent for Ithra.
Ithra came back the next night.
She came up the stair in the shape she preferred for the seen side, a middle-aged woman in a brown coat, the kind of woman nobody looks at twice in a market. She let the shape go as she crossed the gallery floor and was herself by the time she reached him: composed, tired, with the dust of the upper world still on her.
"The gate is where he said," she told him. "An old shore gate, held by a household of shayatin that took it from another household in a debt two centuries ago. They do take humans across. They have since the night before the wave."
"The night before."
"The night before," Ithra said. "I bought their record."
"And our carriers?" he asked.
"Two of ours were on that beach when I left," Ithra said. "They had not crossed. They were sitting on the stones, watching the water, the way the hungry watch a kitchen door."
"Did they know you?"
"They saw a woman in a brown coat." She did not smile. "They will go across, Soren. Not tonight. When they are hungry enough."
He did not ask what she had paid. She would not have told him, and he trusted her more for it.
She held out a strip of something pale, folded many times, that was neither paper nor skin. Gate records were kept that way, in the old manner, the marks pressed in rather than written. It smelled of salt and of the hands it had passed through.
Soren unfolded it on the stone beside him.
Most of it was what any gate's record was. Marks for crossings, out and back. Marks for loads. The names of the gate's own people, going out to raid and coming back heavier. He read down it the way he read a current, letting the eye go loose, waiting for the place where the water turned.
On the night before the wave, it turned.
A company of eleven, the record said. Humans. Living. Carried across with the holder's leave, passage bought on an old account, paid in blood at the waterline. Ten arrived on the far side. One was taken on the open water. The record did not say by what.
The account was an old one. The record gave its name, as gate records gave the name of whoever had first opened an account, so that the holder would know whom to come to for the debt. Soren had heard that name spoken aloud in this gallery, by his own mouth, at the gathering in the spring. He had named it as the name of a sorcerer whose pact he had read in the weave, and he had watched the room take it, and in the purge that followed he had seen that man closed.
It was pressed into the record now, after that man's death, in the holder's hand, plain.
Gardner.