The light came in under the kitchen door first, a thin line of it across the tiles, and Soren watched it the way he would have watched water rising in a cistern, for the rate.
It widened. It crept up the leg of the table and onto the cloth. Outside, over the flat roofs of the east side of Karachi, the sky had gone from grey to yellow, and the call to the dawn prayer had come and gone from three mosques at once, ragged, as if the men giving it had forgotten how a night ends. The sun came up over the water tanks on the house opposite. It was the first sunrise the city had seen in a year. Soren had felt the night through the house's stone, the cool of it, a thing he had not known he missed.
The line on the tiles reached the third tile from the wall.
It stayed there.
He waited. Water rising in a cistern slows near the top, and a careless reader takes the slowing for a stop. He gave it the time it would take a man to say the dawn prayer twice. The edge of the light sat on the third tile, on a chip in the glaze shaped like a fingernail, and did not move.
Across the table Ahmed had seen it too. He had his notebook open, the one he had shown Soren the night before, and he had turned to a clean page past the word. He was writing a column of numbers.
"A day like a month," Ahmed said, without looking up. "After the day like a year. It's in the same hadith. The companions asked about the prayer, and they were told to estimate." He drew a line under the column. "I've done it once. I can do it for a month."
Soren looked at the man's hands. They were steady. They had been steady over the bed upstairs on the night the boy burned.
They had been at it since before the light. Neither of them had slept. Upstairs Fatima slept, and in the room that had been hers that night, on a chair by the bed, Naim sat bolt upright and did not sleep, though Soren had seen his hands shake with the want of it.
"They came twice," Soren said. "They'll come again. The mark under her collarbone burns them, and they don't forgive what burns them. The Cave has a door that holds."
"The Cave is full of jinn."
"And of humans now. Three hundred, in the outer galleries."
"Who chose to go there. She has spent a year being afraid of what she can't see." Ahmed put the pen down. "You want to carry her down into a hole in the ground full of the thing that frightens her. No."
"You have five reciters."
"I have five reciters who stood in a basement door with me and did not run."
"One of the jinn at that door stopped of his own accord. You were fortunate in who came."
Ahmed looked at him. It was a long, plain look, the look of a man reading a meter, and Soren let him read. He knew what Ahmed saw. He had taken the form he kept for human rooms, an old man in a grey coat, broad in the shoulder, nothing in the face to remember. It was a good form. It had one flaw he could no longer mend: the shadow it threw on the kitchen wall was denser than the window allowed, a dark like deep water under a jetty. Ahmed's eyes went to the shadow and came back.
"Fortunate," Ahmed said, "is not the word I'd use."
"Then use yours."
"Allah turned him back." Ahmed said it the way he would read out a blood pressure. "My voice was only the asking. If He wills it again, He'll turn the next one back in this kitchen as easily as in your cave. If He doesn't, your cave won't help her."
Soren had heard that argument from the Cave's own believers for eight hundred years and had never found the flaw in it. He had also never found it a reason to leave a door unbarred. He said so. Ahmed said that barring a door was not the same as carrying a woman underground, and Soren said that a door was a door, and they went round the same channel twice more, the way two currents meet in an estuary and turn each other without either reaching the sea.
Fatima's mother came in then with a tray. She was a small woman who had stopped being afraid of Soren at some point in the night, or had decided to behave as if she had, and Soren respected either. She put a glass of tea in front of Ahmed and a glass of tea in front of Soren and went out again.
Soren did not touch his. Among his kind a glass left full was a courtesy to the house, and he had kept the custom eight hundred years. He thought, against his will, of another glass of tea on another table, a glass the boy had not touched either, in a sorcerer's rooms, the evening he said yes. The tea in front of him gave off its steam. The light on the tiles did not move.
"I'm staying here."
She was in the doorway in her mother's cardigan, barefoot, with her hair down. Neither of them had heard her on the stairs. She put her hand flat on her chest, below the left collarbone, where the scar was, and kept it there as if she were holding a door shut.
"It's my house," she said. "He's upstairs in my room. Your friend. He sat with me all night, and he didn't once try to tell me what to do." She looked at Ahmed, then at Soren. "Put your reciters on the door. Put your jinn on the roof. I don't care. I'm not going into a cave and I'm not going to his basement. I'm going to make breakfast."
She went past them to the stove.
Ahmed opened his mouth and shut it. Soren found that he had nothing to say either. It was the first thing in nine hours of talk on which the two of them had no disagreement, and it had come from neither of them.
The back step faced a narrow yard with a tap and a drain and a line of washing that had hung in the noon for so long the colours had gone out of it. Ahmed sat on the step with his notebook on his knee. Soren stood. The sun stood above the wall where it had stood for an hour, bright, ordinary, a morning sun at the angle of half past six, and the shadows of the washing lay across the yard and did not shorten.
Ahmed spoke without looking up.
"I need to ask you something, and then I'll go home and sleep." His thumb was on the edge of the notebook, holding it closed. "For a year I've been asking Allah what I burned that night. Last night you told me his name. You didn't tell me what he was."
Soren watched the washing.
He could have told him a great deal. That the boy was of a line older than Adam's children. That he had left a jewel, which his father now carried in a fold of cloth, and an ember, which had torn out of the woman and gone wherever embers go. That a sorcerer had bought him with a glass of tea and a hint about his father, and that the father was sitting upstairs. That the boy's guardian had known the father might be alive and never said so, and that the silence had been a door left open for anyone to walk through.
All of that was true. None of it was what the man had asked.
Soren had read the boy's case in the weave, clause by clause, and he had read his face under the Cave's lamps since the boy could walk, and he knew which reading was the true one.
"He was a boy," he said, "who wanted to be worth something."