The young ones went up to the well head at the same hour every day, to look at a sky that never changed, and Rahma went with them because she could not stop them.
There were three of them that day, two Jann and a Hinn girl, all of them young enough to have forked on the road. They sat on the rim of the old well in the ruin of the caravan station with their legs hanging over the dark and their faces turned up, waiting for the white to go blue, for the blue to go dark. It had not in eleven months. They looked anyway. Rahma had told the house twice that it left the watch thin between the sunset prayer and the night prayer. The house had agreed both times, and the young ones had gone up both times, and she had gone up after them.
Below them the cistern held the house. It was a Nasibin house, one of the many the council had opened along the roads, under the coral-stone walls where caravans had once watered their camels. On her own side of the world, forty-seven jinn lived in the rock-cut cistern, believers of a dozen tribes who had run from the road. On the seen side, in the station's roofless rooms above, under palm-leaf awnings, lived fourteen humans who had shut their doors to the camp and lost their wells for it. They prayed together at the estimated hours, the two kinds, in two rows that only one row could see.
"Look," said the Hinn girl, and pointed.
An old woman was coming down the path from the road.
Rahma knew the walk before she knew the face. A little bent, a little quick, the hands pressed together in front. The young ones knew it too. They were off the well rim and halfway to the path before Rahma caught the nearest by the arm.
"Wait."
"It's Grandmother," the boy said. "It's Grandmother, she's come back."
She was the house's midwife. She had gone out a week ago to a human village to deliver a child, and she had not come home, and the house had said the funeral prayer for the absent over her two nights ago. Her son had not prayed it. He had sat by the seam in the cistern wall, at the old waterline, where the door was, and said she would come.
The old woman went past the well head without looking up at them. She went down the cut steps into the cistern. Rahma heard her knuckles on the seam, and her voice, cracked and cold, asking to be let in.
Then the sound came up the shaft.
It was like wind through a room full of paper. It went on and on. The young ones stood rigid on the path with Rahma's hands on them. She did not let them move. She did not know why she did not, only that the sound was wrong, that it had a shape to it, an order, that it went round the cistern from the walls to the floor in a spiral as if somebody were sweeping. She counted under her breath without meaning to. At eleven minutes it stopped.
Nothing came up.
A long time later a lamp came up instead. The old woman came out of the cistern steps carrying it, alone, and set it down on the well rim, and stood. Rahma saw her face in the lamplight. It was Grandmother's face, the lips pressed together the way she pressed them before she spoke. But she did not speak. She stood with her hands at her sides looking at the lamp as if she did not know what it was. Then she turned and walked back up the path to the road, toward the lights of the camp on the plain to the north, and she did not look back once.
Rahma went down with the lamp. She made the young ones stay at the top.
The cistern had been swept. That was the first thing she saw. Every mat and pot had been moved, and the floor was clean, as if the place had been made ready for guests. Then she saw the embers. They lay where the jinn had stood, on the floor, in the corners, along the walls, dull things a little warmer than the stone. She counted them because somebody would have to say the number. She went round the walls first and then the floor in a spiral, and found herself doing it in the order the sound had gone, and stopped, and went on.
Forty-four.
The midwife's son's lay just inside the seam, where he had stood to open the door. She knew it by where it lay. Behind the big clay water jar at the back, in a hand's width of shadow where the wall bent, there was one the size of a lentil, set halfway out of the stone. The Hinn girl's little sister. She had been good at hiding. She used to fold herself into the grain of the rock when the young ones played, and nobody could ever find her.
Rahma looked for one more. She went round the walls again with the lamp. There was no ember for the midwife anywhere in the cistern.
She was still looking when the trucks came.
They came down the road from the camp with their headlights on in the daylight and a loudspeaker on the first one, playing a song. Men got down from the backs of them in pale clothes, laughing, carrying jerrycans that were not water. They walked into the ruin on the seen side, among the palm-leaf awnings and the humans' bedding, and began to pour.
Rahma went up the steps and crossed at the well head, where the house kept its way through, and took her human shape on the run, a young woman in a dark coat. It cost her nothing. She would have paid anything.
The humans were already on the roof of the old gatehouse, the only roof left in the station. Four of them, three men and an old woman, standing in a row, reciting. The rest were in the courtyard below with their children, not knowing where to go. She went to them and said what she was, plainly, in two words, because there was no time for more, and told them the wadi, the back wall, now. They went. She carried a child and dragged a man who would not leave his father, and behind them the awnings went up all at once with a sound like a great breath drawn in.
The men on the roof kept reciting. She heard the opening of the chapter of the Cave from the wadi, four voices together over the fire, and then three, and then the shots, and then none.
She counted again at the bottom of the wadi. Ten alive, and four children among them. Fourteen had lived in the house.
The council met on the white stones at Nasibin at the hour the clock called noon of the next day, and Rahma stood with her back to the old spring and gave the count the way messengers give a message, exactly, adding nothing.
"Forty-four of ours," she said. "Four of theirs. The house is gone. The door was opened from inside, by the son, to his mother's face." She stopped. "His mother has no ember in that cistern. She walked out of it and up the road to the camp."
The riverbed was silent.
A Hinn of the mill stood up and said what she had known somebody would say. That the doors brought the road down on them. That the devils knew the houses now. That forty-four was a war's count, and the Nasibin had never been at war with anything but their own hunger, and they could close the doors and go back to being unseen, as their grandfathers had been, and the road would pass them by.
Others nodded. Rahma watched them nod.
Awf the Ifrit did not answer him. He looked along the riverbed for the old Sila, Rahma's mother's aunt, the one who had sat on the council since before the city had its human name, and who had been the last to raise her hand the day the doors were opened.
"Well?" he said.
The old Sila stood up slowly. She looked at Rahma, at the soot still on her hands from the wadi.
"Ten of theirs walked out," she said. "Tell the next house to change its hour."
This time her hand was the first one up.