The boy drank first, as she had told them, in small sips, and the old man last.
Rahma watched the water go down in the bottle. Five of them. A man who had carried his son and his bags up a mountain and could not stop his hands from shaking now that he had put them down. His wife, who had been reciting under her breath on the road and had stopped when she saw the stone. A young woman who had looked at Rahma's feet before she looked at her face, and the old man whose arm she held. The boy, ten or so, who was the only one of them who stared openly, as boys do.
"You said a way," the old man said when he had drunk. His Persian was a scholar's, careful. "Under the road."
"My people hold doors," Rahma said. "We're the jinn of Nasibin, on the old border with Iraq. Since he came out, our council has opened them to anyone running from him, our kind and yours. There's one under this road at the next bend. It goes a long way, west, and it comes out at Damascus." She looked at each of them in turn so they would see she meant it for each of them. "When you go through, you'll be on our side. You'll see only what I let you see. I'll let you see a road and a light. Don't let go of each other's hands. Don't step off where I step. And if anyone calls you by your name while we're down there, don't answer."
"Why not?" said the father.
"Because I won't be the one calling."
The old man and his daughter looked at each other. Something passed between them that Rahma could not read.
"We have a rule like that," he said. "We don't greet anyone at night unless we know him. In case." He gave the bottle back to her. "I'm Nissim Hakimi. This is my daughter Esther. These are our neighbours, the Karimis. Reza. Zahra. Omid."
She gave him her own name. It seemed right to, after his.
The door was a culvert, a concrete pipe as tall as a crouching man that ran under the road where a stream had once come down the mountain. On the seen side it was full of dead leaves and a broken plastic chair. On her side it was a door of the Nasibin, one of the many their council had opened on the roads that ran west, and someone was already in it.
A Jann woman crouched in the mouth of it with a child pressed against her, and behind her, folded up small against the curve of the pipe, an old Hinn with his eyes shut. All three of them were spent nearly grey. The woman saw Rahma and put herself in front of the child.
"We're believers," she said quickly. "From the valley below the pass. They came for my husband to carry water for the camp and he wouldn't, and they took him anyway. They'll be back for us." She looked past Rahma at the humans. "You're taking them through?"
"I'm taking everyone through."
The humans could not see the three. Rahma told them, so they would not be frightened by what they could not see brushing past them in the dark. The young woman, Esther, nodded slowly. The boy asked if the jinn child was his age. Rahma asked, and the Jann woman, after a moment, said that by human years, yes, about that.
Then she took the old man's hand, and the old man took his daughter's, and the daughter took Zahra's, and Zahra took her son's and her husband's, and Rahma took them across.
She let them see a road.
It was dry stone, pale, going down and then level, with a light ahead of them that was always the same distance away, like the light at the end of a long corridor. That was what the Nasibin doors were for their own people too: a way, kept and named, under the roads of the world. On either side, where she did not let the humans look, the far side opened out wide and grey and full of things moving.
The jinn woman walked behind with her child, and when the old Hinn could not walk, she and Rahma took his weight between them. The humans did not ask why Rahma's free arm was held out at that angle. Carrying humans across cost the one who carried them. Rahma had known that since she was small. She had not known how much it would be, five of them and a long way, and by what felt like the second hour she was thinner at the edges than she had been since the night she went to the Cave.
They walked. The humans grew tired and did not grow hungry, and the father kept touching his stomach as if something had gone missing from it. The boy slept on his back for a while and woke and walked again. Time on her side did not run for humans as it ran for them, and she had been told so all her life, and now she watched it. The old man said once that it must be night by now. She did not tell him what night meant up there.
At the place where the Nasibin way crossed an unguarded one, the voice came.
It came from the grey to the left, low and close, a woman's voice, old, with a crack in it. It said, in Persian, "Zahra. Zahra, my girl. I followed you. Wait for me."
Zahra stopped. Her hand went loose in Esther's.
"Mother," she said. "That's my mother. She stayed. She wouldn't come."
"Zahra," said her husband.
The voice said her name again, nearer, gently, as a mother says it to a child who has woken in the night.
Rahma could see it. Zahra could not. It stood at the edge of the Nasibin way in the shape of a small old woman in a black chador, with its arms held out, and it could come no closer than the edge, because the door turned back what came to do harm, and it had come to do harm. Under the chador its feet were not a woman's.
"Don't answer," the old man said. He had not let go of his daughter's hand. His voice was very quiet. "Zahra. We don't greet at night anyone we don't recognise. My teachers said it. Your grandmother would have said it. Your mother is in Isfahan at your brother's well. Hold Esther's hand."
Zahra's lips moved. Rahma knew the words. They were the opening of the chapter of the Cave, in Arabic, and Zahra said them under her breath without stopping, all ten verses, with her eyes shut, while the voice called her name four more times and then stopped calling.
When Rahma looked again the edge of the way was empty.
They came up under Damascus.
The door there was a cistern under a house in the old city, its basin long dry, its walls cut from the rock in some other century. It belonged to the believing jinn who prayed under Damascus, who were Nasibin's people, and one of their watch was waiting at the foot of the stair. He was young and broad and took the old Hinn from Rahma's arms without a word.
"How long have we been?" Rahma asked him.
He told her the human date. She stood still and counted it, and it was more than a month since she had sat down on a white stone in the mountains with a bottle of water.
"You've got five of the clay with you," he said. "Not of the faith."
"Three of them are. Two are Jews."
He thought about it. "The priest at Bab Touma," he said. "He's got a family from the dry side in his crypt since the winter. He gives water at his side gate. Nobody counts who goes into a church."
She told the humans plainly how long it had been. The father sat down on the cistern step and put his face in his hands. Esther said nothing for a while, and then asked what day of the week it was, and when Rahma told her, she nodded as if she would write it down later.
She took them up into the city at an hour the clock called evening, under a sun that stood where it had stood in the mountains. The old city's lanes were narrow and shuttered and very hot. Washing hung dead still between the balconies. They passed a fountain with no water in it and a man asleep on a step with a newspaper over his face. Nobody looked at them. Five more people in dust were nothing new in Damascus.
The church had a side gate in a high wall, with a chain on the inside and a tap beside it on the street, dry. Rahma stopped a few paces short of it.
"Knock," she said to Esther. "I'll go now. It's better he opens to you."
"Will we see you again?"
"If you need us."
The young woman knocked. Rahma walked back down the lane. At the corner she turned.
The gate had opened on its chain. An old man in a black cassock stood in it with a lamp he did not need, looking at the five of them, and then past them, up the lane, at her. He could not have known what she was. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he lifted his right hand and made the sign of the cross over the air between them, slowly, the way his kind bless a traveller going away.