The imam was explaining the difference between a debt and a gift when the floor of the other world moved.
Rahma felt it through her knees. She was sitting behind the women's screen at the back of the mosque in Qamishli in the shape she wore among humans, a young woman in a grey coat with ink on her fingers. The imam kept the old men for a lesson after the dawn prayer, and she liked his lessons. The carpet under her was still. The fans turned. Under all of it, on the side of the world they could not see, the ground had shrugged once, from far off, the way a sleeping animal shrugs off a fly.
Behind the screen four other women had gone still at the same moment, and on the far side of it so had a man by the pillar. All of them were of Nasibin. None of them looked at the others.
The imam had felt nothing. He lost his place, and found it again.
"A debt," he said, "you are asked to repay. A gift you are only asked to thank for."
Rahma got up quietly and went out to the shoe racks.
In the courtyard the light was grey and the air was already hot. She let her eyes go through to her own side of the world, the way her people could from anywhere, and the sky over the town was full of devils.
They were going south-east. More than she could count, high and low over the rooftops, in streams that crossed and joined like starlings at dusk, all bending toward the flat country and the road. They did not look at the town. They poured past it with a noise she felt in her teeth.
When she came back for her bag, the imam was standing by the gap in the screen, looking at her. He knew her face. She had asked him a question in the spring, after the lesson, about the man the Messenger of Allah had warned of.
"You're leaving early," he said.
"I'm sorry. Something has come up on the road."
He held her eyes a moment longer than a man should hold a stranger's, and then he went back to his lesson.
The council met at the gate at noon by the human clock, out on the white stones instead of in the hall under them. Nobody could remember the last time it had met in daylight.
They came up out of the hall and down the banks, Jann and Hinn and Sila and the two old Ifrit of the mill ruins, until the head of the dry riverbed round the old spring was crowded on the side humans do not see.
Awf the Ifrit stood with his back to the spring and told them what the watch had brought in.
"He came out at first light at the dry well in the ruin, a day's walk south-east of us. The devils' crossing." Everyone at the spring knew that well, an old gate the devils had taken by debt and held ever since. "There are humans with him, a few, and a great many of the other kind. He's walking east. The first village he came to went out to him and it rained on them. The second shut the road with a tractor. When the watch passed it at noon the wells there were bringing up sand."
"In the spring," Awf said, "his people asked this gate to let him out this way. We refused them. So he came out of the hole in the ground instead, a day south of us." "Now I'm asking the council to open this gate."
An old Sila near the front stood up. She was Rahma's mother's aunt, and she had sat on the council since before the city had its human name.
"Open it to what?"
"Both ways. To any of our kind running from the road. And to humans."
The riverbed stirred.
"We don't take humans across," the old Sila said. "We never have. A human kept on our side is a debt somebody carries, and they see nothing and can't come home unless they're brought. That's the devils' trade. That's what the sea gate does."
"The sea gate sells it. We'd give it." Awf's voice did not rise. "The debt, we carry. The whole tribe, between us. I've counted what the tables hold and what the seep gives. We can carry a good many."
"And concealment? We hide from them. Our grandfathers heard the Quran recited and nobody saw them listening."
"Concealment was for when they could manage without us." Awf put his burned hand flat on the lip of the spring behind him, as if to feel whether it still breathed. "They can't now. If a jinn comes to a human door today in a human shape and says nothing, how is he different from what's on the road? I won't have it said that Nasibin came to them wearing faces." He turned to the whole riverbed. "Whoever goes up, goes in a human shape, so as not to frighten them. And says at the door what they are. Plainly. Before anything else."
It went on a long time. Rahma sat on a fallen block of the old embankment and listened, and did not speak, because she was a messenger and messengers carried councils, they did not make them. At the afternoon prayer the council prayed in rows in the riverbed and sat down again. Awf answered every question with a number.
When Qasim the Marid, eldest of the council, put it to them, it passed. The old Sila was the last to raise her hand.
Awf found Rahma afterwards on her block of stone.
"The tractor village," he said. "You know it."
"I've been through it."
"Go and tell them."
The tractor was still across the road when she came to the village. Somebody had let its tyres down so that nobody could move it in the night.
Behind it the houses stood with their doors shut. The sun stood high and white over the roofs, too high for the hour; she had noticed it on the road and put it away to think about later. In the square two women were winding up a bucket from the well, and when it came over the rim it was half full of grey sand. One of them tipped it out on a pile of other sand.
Rahma went to the first house with a light in it and knocked.
The man who opened it was a farmer of forty with a cut on his hand tied up in a rag. His wife stood behind him with a baby, and behind her an old man sat on a mattress against the wall with his stick across his knees.
"Peace be on you," the farmer said, warily. "If you're from the road, we already told them."
"I'm not from the road." She had thought on the way about how to say it, and in the end she said it the way Awf had said it at the spring. "I'm of the jinn. Of the jinn of Nasibin. This shape is so you won't be frightened. Our council has opened our gate to anyone running from him, our kind and yours. Come across with us until it's over. You'll eat and have water, and nobody will ask anything of you."
The farmer did not move. The wife's arms closed round the baby.
On the mattress, the old man laughed. It was short and dry, and not unkind.
"In seventy years I've never had a jinn knock," he said. "They come in without knocking, my mother used to say." He leaned forward on the stick. "Say the testimony."
Rahma said it, in Arabic, without hurrying. That there is no god but Allah, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.
The old man listened to the end with his head on one side, the way a man listens to a well to hear whether there is water at the bottom. Then he looked at his son.
From the mosque across the square the loudspeaker clicked. The call to the sunset prayer began, thin and cracked, by the clock. Rahma saw the farmer's eyes go past her to the doorway, to the street, to the west. She turned.
The sun had not moved. It stood where it had stood at noon, white over the dead fields, and the call went on underneath it and finished, and the sun stayed.
They came in the farmer's pickup, all of them in the back with two mattresses and a sack of flour and the bucket from the well, which the wife would not leave.
At the spring the riverbed was still full on her side of the world. The council had not gone home. They stood back from the threshold in a wide half-ring, in their own shapes, which the humans could not see. Awf stood on the white stones with his lamp, though there was no need of it.
The family climbed down and stood on the dry bank looking at a dry hole in the ground, a line of white stones and a sleeping dog. The farmer looked at Rahma.
"Hold my hand," she said to the old man. "Don't let go of it until I say."
His hand was hard and light, like a bundle of sticks.
On the threshold Awf lifted his lamp, and for the first time in the gate's long life he asked a human the gate's question, in the same voice he asked it of princes and of thieves.
"Name and business."
The old man could not have heard him. He answered anyway, as if he had. He gave his name and his father's name, and then the one word.
"Refuge."
He stepped through.