The water came down over his head and he counted it.
One. The bowl was clay, and the hand that held it was old and spotted and did not hurry. Two. The water was cold in a way he had forgotten water could be, cold from deep stone, and it ran down his neck and over the high shoulder that would not sit right and onto the floor, and it took a grey colour with it. Three. He had counted everything for a long time. Steps to the wall. Breaths of the kettle. Times the man said "well, now" before he asked for something. You counted because counting was a thing that was yours.
Four.
"That's enough for the head," the old one said. "Give me the arm."
He did not give the arm. He watched the old one's hands. The old one waited, and after a while Naim the Jann put the arm out, because that was what the waiting was for, and the bowl tipped again over his wrist and the grey ran off it.
There had been a chain. It was gone now. He could feel where it had been, a cool band round his middle, like the pale skin a ring leaves. The woman with the chain had been patient with him in the drain. He had bitten her. He remembered the taste, which was like nothing, like biting a shadow, and he remembered that she had not hit him back.
"Do you know where you are?"
He looked at the chamber. Low roof. Stone with a damp shine. A lamp in a niche, pale and even, and the light from it did not move or flicker the way the man's lamps had. Somewhere a long way off, water running down a wall.
"Underground," he said. His voice came out of him rough and too loud, a door that had not been opened in years.
"In the Cave. You've been here before. A long time ago." The old one set the bowl down and wrung a cloth. "Do you know your name?"
He knew it was in him. There was a place where it sat. His tongue kept going to it like a gap in his teeth. The woman had said it in the drain over and over, and in the passage coming down, and he had heard it said in another chamber to a big jinn who had not known him. He tried it in his mouth now and it fitted, but loosely, like a coat someone hands you off a hook.
"Naim."
"Good," the keeper said, and dried his hair with the cloth, roughly, like a father with a child after a bath.
Something was wrong in his body, and it was not the shoulder.
He sat on the stone bench with the cloth round him and felt it. A heaviness. It lay in his arms and in the back of his neck and behind his eyes, and when he lifted his hand to look at it the hand shook and the shaking did not stop when he told it to. He had been bound and starved of his own will and made small and folded into corners. He had been hurt in all the ways a jinn can be hurt. He had never once in all of it been tired.
He did not know that word for himself. Jinn did not tire. Men tired. The man in the house had tired, every evening, and rubbed his eyes under his glasses, and said he would sleep now, and Naim had listened from inside the wall to his feet going up the eleven stairs, and had not understood it then either. He turned the hand over and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else.
The smell came then, from nowhere, from inside him: tea. Black tea with too much sugar, stewed in a pot, and a brass tray, and a man's clean cuff. His whole body went tight. He was on his feet with his back to the wall before he knew he had stood, and the cloth was on the floor.
"There's no tea here," the keeper said from the door. "There's nothing here but water."
He stood against the wall and breathed his pretend breaths until the smell went. It went slowly. Under it, as it went, there was a voice, pleasant and patient, and he could not catch the words, only the shape: a question, and then another, and his own voice answering, and the answering had been the one good thing in a day. Then that was gone too, and he was in a stone room with an old jinn holding a bowl.
The big one came in without knocking.
He filled the doorway and the lamp dimmed on his side. His shadow came into the chamber ahead of him and lay across the floor too dark, ink on water before it spreads. The keeper picked up the bowl and the cloth and went out past him, and did not look back.
The big one sat down on the floor across the chamber, with his back to the far wall, so that his head was lower than Naim's. Naim noted it. A captive notes where everyone puts their head.
They looked at each other.
He knew the face. Not by name. His feet knew it, as feet know a stair in the dark. There was a lamp in it, a different lamp, a long time ago, and a document spread between two pairs of hands, and this face bent over the document beside his own, and a voice saying, "Again. Read it again from the third clause." Two jinn reading a contract twice because once was not enough. A river town. Rain on a roof.
"You read slowly," he said.
Something moved in the big face, in the place where a smile would have gone.
"So did you," the big one said. "It's Soren, Naim. Soren of the Cave. We worked the river pacts together. Before the war. Before you stopped."
Soren. Yes. The name went into the place where the face was and fitted better than his own had.
"I looked for you," Soren said. He said it to the floor between them. "After the pass. For years. I went over the ground of it stone by stone. There was nothing. No body. No record. I told the tribes you were taken, and I didn't believe it, and then I believed it, and then I stopped saying it."
The pass. A wind, and the sound of rock coming down, and then a hand pulling him up out of the rubble, a man's hand, clean, and the man's face smiling down at him as if they were old friends who had met by chance.
Naim shut his eyes.
"You don't have to tell me anything tonight," Soren said.
But there was something. It was further down than the pass, further than the tea, so far down that he had stopped going there in the man's house because going there hurt too much and the man had liked it when he went. It came up now through the cold and the tiredness and the smell of stone. It was small. It was a small shape in a doorway at night, a child standing in the doorway of a sleeping room with the dark behind him, not crying, because he was trying very hard to be brave, and saying in a very small voice that the dark had come into the room again.
He had sat up with the child. He remembered that. He had sat on the floor by the bed with his back to the wall, as Soren sat now, until the child slept.
He opened his eyes. The big jinn was watching him, carefully, as you watch a man walk toward the edge of a roof.
"There was a boy," Naim said.
Soren did not move.
"Mine. My boy. He was afraid of the dark." The name was nearly there. It was in the same place the hurt was, on the empty street where he had said it out loud without knowing why. He reached for it and it slid away, and what he caught instead was the question, whole and plain, and he held it out across the chamber with both hands, like a thing he had been owed a long time.
"Where is my son?"