The camp began long before its tents did. The eldest walked into it through a mile of what it had dropped: tyre marks, cattle dung, the paper sleeves of bread, a child's sandal, and then the first lorries pulled off the road with people asleep under them in the narrow shade. Nobody looked up. The humans could not see her. She had learned that on the road, from a woman who had walked straight through the place where she stood and shivered and pulled her shawl tighter and gone on.
The devils could see her. They were everywhere above the camp, thick as flies over a slaughter yard, and as she came in under them they drew back. A ripple went through them, as a crowd draws back from a stranger in old clothes who might be dangerous. Then one of them laughed, and others took it up, and they closed in again behind her.
She walked on. She did not hurry. She could not remember ever having had a reason to hurry, and she found she did not know how.
The words had come back to her slowly on the road, some of them. The long interval. The contained. The final expanse. A ring of seven around something that had hung silent for longer than the upper world had kept records. She had their meanings now, or the edges of them. She knew that she had stood at a door and that the door had opened. She knew it from the way the jinn on the road had looked at her, and from the one with the child's face she had met at the milestone. She had recognised its making the way you recognise your own handwriting on an old letter. It had smiled at her with the child's mouth and called her mother.
She felt him before she reached the inner camp.
It was the heat first. It came against the left side of her face as she turned a corner between two rows of tents, the heat of an open furnace door. She had felt it once before, on cinder, at the end of the long interval. Her feet stopped of their own accord. Around her the humans went on with their tasks, a man carrying two buckets on a yoke, a girl beating a rug against a tent pole, and none of them felt it, or all of them did and had stopped noticing it, as people stop hearing a road outside their window.
She went toward it.
The inner camp was a wide beaten ground in front of a great tent, white, with its walls rolled up. Humans in good clothes were gathering along the edge of the ground in a line. It was what they called evening, though the light had not changed. She understood from the way they stood, facing the tent, that he would come out and walk, and that they were waiting for it.
She did not stand with them. She walked out into the middle of the beaten ground, to the place where his road from the tent would have to pass, and she stood there.
The devils over the ground went quiet. She felt them lean down to watch.
She had thought about what she would do. On the road, through all the long estimated nights in ditches and under bridges, she had thought about it. She would stand where he had to see her. She did not know what she wanted from his seeing. The nearest she could come was the shape of the moment at the Prison, after the fifth step, when his attention had gone out over the whole world and through her, and she had stood inside it like a figure in a cold wind. She had not been looked at then. She had been passed through. She thought, on the road, that it had been because of the hour. A door does not look back at the hands that opened it while it is still swinging.
The door had finished swinging now. She had come to stand where it would have to see her, and be seen, once, by the thing she had given the long interval to.
She wondered whether any of the six had come this far. She had not felt one of them since the cinder. The second, who had let go first. The third, emptied of his steps. She had looked for their weight in the ground all along the road and found nothing, and she did not know whether that meant they were in their halls in the deep, or that she no longer knew how to feel for them.
He came out of the tent.
She could not see a body. She never had. The light showed her the shape that the humans saw, a short broad man on bowed legs, unhurried, but what her own sense gave her was height and weight and the heat, and the patience, the same patience she had felt come off him at the boundary like cold off a stone floor. He walked toward her down the beaten ground with the line of humans on his left lowering and raising their eyes.
She held still. She had held still at the bell for an age, and she held still now with everything she had.
He came on. Ten paces. Five. The heat was on her whole face. Three.
He stepped around her.
He did not slow. His weight shifted a little to the right, the way a man walking down a street shifts for a lamp post without breaking stride, and the heat went past her shoulder and past her back, and he was beyond her, still walking. His attention had not come near her. She had felt it go out over the line of the court, over the tent, over the camp and the road and the world, unevenly, reading. It had passed over her as it passed over the ground she stood on.
She stood in the middle of the beaten ground with the heat going away behind her.
The humans in the line had not seen her. The devils had, and they had stopped laughing.
The old one came down to her when the court had gone. He was an Ifrit, so broad and so dark with the devil's mark that she had to look a long time to find the fire under it, and he settled on the ground beside her like a tired animal lying down. He smelled of meat. He had a bone in one hand, from some animal the camp had eaten, and he worked at it with his side teeth while he looked at her. Above them the devils were drifting off in twos and threes. Whatever they had leaned down to see was over. The beaten ground was empty except for the two of them. A dog nosed at the place where the court had stood.
"I know you," he said. "Not your face. Your kind. You're one of the seven who stood round the bell."
"Yes."
"I was on the island before any of you came." He picked at his teeth with a long nail. "I sat by the chain for a thousand years, waiting. A lot of us did. We could hear him breathing. We could hear him ask about the date palms and the springs." He laughed, not loudly. "Then you lot came and did your little steps and the chain fell off, and you thought it was you."
"We fulfilled the decree."
"Did you. Did he ever hear of your decree? Or your prophecy, or your bell?" The Ifrit looked up at her with something close to pity, which she had not known a devil could carry. "He's never once looked at me either, old woman, and I've carried his water since the island. When the time came for the door to open, it opened. Somebody had to be standing near the lock." He spat out a splinter of bone. "And it wasn't you he walked out to. There were men on the rocks when the chain fell. Humans, old woman, brought across at a price, kneeling in the wet with their tables laid. He let them feed him for a year. He never looked at them either."
He got up, heavily. He brushed the dust off himself, though there was no dust on him that she could see. He dropped the bone at her feet.
"You were never more than a key," he said. "Nobody looks at a key once the door's open."