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four gathered today.
    “Is Ahmar joining us?” asked Nerium when Siavush was nearly finished. She kept her voice light despite her lingering unease. If he’d found signs of her tampering, he surely would have said something by now.
    Shirin shrugged. “I’ve heard nothing.”
    Siavush stopped chanting and finally turned from the wall. His face too was drawn and damp, his warm copper skin lusterless with fatigue. He held himself straight against the strain, but the glitter of his rings betrayed shaking hands. “She’s busy dealing with the destruction in Ta’ashlan. I speak for her.”
    “I’m glad to know how seriously she takes this,” Nerium said dryly. “But of course, I already knew that.”
    Siavush frowned. His weight shifted as if he meant to step forward, but thought better of it. No one wanted to stand close to the lip of the pit. “We all take our mission and oaths seriously. A lapse in the seals is nothing trivial. But it’s remedied now.” He waved to the newly replaced diamond. “The seals will hold, with vigilance. Ahmar will replenish our diamonds.”
    Nerium wanted to turn away from the faith in his voice, the affection he still felt for his teacher. Those too would wither with time, but the reminder of her long-faded youth stung.
    “With vigilance.” She snorted. “With the vigilance of Qais, you mean, while you and Ahmar sip iced wine in the comfort of the cities.”
    “I’m hardly sipping wine here, am I?”
    “No,” she acknowledged, smoothing her tone. “Your sense of duty is not in question. But all of our burdens could be lessened if we stopped binding ourselves to this carious corpse of a place, and to an expensive and antiquated method of vinculation.”
    “There is little profit in changing methods that still work,” Siavush said, “and a great deal to risk if something goes wrong. One broken seal is enough to loose the ghost wind—imagine what could happen if we removed them all. Ahmar and I—”
    “You’ve made your feelings clear. As has Ahmar, with her absence from this meeting. If not for my oaths, I would be happy to let you fail. Luckily for the rest of the world, I won’t.”
    Siavush’s face pinched. “What have you done, Nerium?”
    “I’ve acted, as we should have long ago. I’ve summoned an entropomancer, a vinculator. The best candidate I’ve found in thirty years to help us deal with our burden.”
    “That stormcrow spy? You risk everything we work for. We won’t allow it.”
    Nerium smiled, sharp and cold. “The majority is mine, Siavush.” She glanced at Khalil and Shirin, who each nodded slowly.
    “Nerium is right,” Khalil said, knuckles whitening on his cane. “Something has to change.”
    “Enough argument.” Shirin’s voice cracked. “Let’s finish what we came to do, and get out of this tomb.”
    Nerium nodded. “Yes. Let’s.” She often wondered if the founders of Quietus called themselves the Silent ironically, or if the quarreling had come later.
    Siavush frowned, but finally nodded. The four of them positioned themselves evenly around the black pit. They didn’t hold hands, but their magic commingled and flowed into a circuit.
    Her blood beat hard in her ears; under its rhythm, a different music swelled. As she turned her attention to the oubliette, the whisper grew, became a song. Polyphonic, discordant, inhuman, but its meaning was clear nonetheless—loss and loneliness, exile and longing. It scraped and shivered over her skin, ached in the roots of her teeth—it would take them apart, if they let it, layer by layer, muscle and bone, until all that was left was dust.
    They hadn’t let it yet.
    Sleep was the only mercy they could grant Al-Jodâ’im, bound as they had been for centuries. Her tampering had disturbed their rest years before they might have woken on their own. But since her colleagues refused to consider the evidence otherwise, she had no choice but to force the issue. She quashed a pang of guilt before it