The humans had gone up, and the dry end was all blankets.
Rahma the Sila came back down through the door in the crypt wall with the stone closing behind her and stood a moment on the last step, letting her shape go. Six days she had worn it at this end of the long hall, for forty humans who could not see in the dark, and now there was nobody left to wear it for. The platforms were bare stone and folded blankets and a tin cup. Somebody had drawn a pair of feet in chalk on the edge of the stone, five toes each, very carefully, and written something under it in Persian that she could not read.
The cellar families of Bab Touma had gone up their own ways, to their own roofs. The households from the priest's crypt she had taken up the stair herself, the old rabbi last, one step at a time on his stick. The priest had been waiting at the top with a lamp, though it was the clock's morning and the sun stood over the city. He had counted them as they came out. She had counted them as they went down, six clock-days ago, with something still knocking at his church door. The numbers were the same.
A tall jinn was waiting for her by the first column with his arms folded: an Ifrit, she saw at once, the close hard fire of one who had been made for fighting. His fire had seams in it. Old ones, healed long ago, the way a broken bone heals with a ridge you can feel under the skin.
"All of them?" Hisham said.
"All up. The priest has his. The others have gone home."
"Then I need you at the other end."
She had thought of them as the believing jinn of Damascus. That was how the council at Nasibin spoke of them, and how the messengers spoke of them on the river roads: the ones under the city, who kept the old water and prayed in the great mosque unseen. She had brought her humans up through their galleries twice now, once out of the long day from the north, and once down out of the first night, and both times she had kept to the dry end and asked nothing. She had not been further in.
Hisham took her further in. They went down a conduit with water running along the bottom of it, ankle-deep and black, under vaults the humans had built and forgotten, and older vaults under those. On every pillar at every turning someone had cut a mark into the stone, small and neat, at the height of a jinn's shoulder. She stopped at the fourth one and put her fingers on it.
It was the mark of the Nasibin gate. Three arches and the line of a river.
"Who cut this?"
"My grandmother's grandmother. Or hers." He did not stop walking. "We came down from Nasibin when this city still had Roman walls. A family of us, for the water. We married here. Some of the city's own people married us. Your council has never once sent a messenger who asked." He glanced back at her. "You're on our rolls, you know. Your mother's line. There's a cousin of yours on the third gallery who keeps the rolls, and she'll want to look at you."
Rahma took her fingers off the stone. She had been a messenger between tribes since before the wave. She had carried councils to the Cave and to the river houses and to the old families of the north, and she had always arrived as a stranger, and been asked her name and her business, and given them. She had not known there was any city where she would not have to.
"I didn't know," she said.
"Nobody up there remembers. Nobody down here forgets." He seemed pleased by this, in a dry way. "It's all one tribe. It's only a long way round."
At the far end of the gallery, under the Street Called Straight, the platforms were filling with their own kind. Jinn had been coming in from the east since the light came back, in ones and twos, from the Nasibin houses along the river roads, and some of them had not stayed ahead of his devils on the way. A Jann lay on the stone with his shape gone thin and grey down one side like a burned page. Two Hinn sisters sat holding each other's hands and not speaking. The burned Jann asked her for water as she passed, in the voice of someone much older than his shape, and she knelt and held the cup for him while he drank, and he told her the name of his house on the river, which she knew. Hisham went along the platforms naming the rest to her, house by house, and she put each name away where messengers keep names.
"Count them for your council," he said. "And count these." He showed her a second platform, where four lay under cloths. "Nasibin should know what the road costs."
He had prayed behind the human at the gate. He told her so at the end of the gallery, without her asking, the way a man tells a stranger something he has not yet found anyone to tell. On the first morning after the city's gate was opened, the man they called the Mahdi had gone up to the old mosque at the clock's dawn and led the prayer, and Hisham had stood in the back row of the humans, unseen, between a soldier and a boy.
"He recited a short chapter," he said. "There were old people in the rows. That's all. I've stood behind a great many imams."
Before she could ask him what he meant by that, the young Jann came down the conduit at a run, splashing, and stopped and spoke to Hisham low and fast.
Hisham listened. Then he turned to Rahma.
"The watch on the south conduit. Someone's coming up the old channel from the coast road. Alone. A Sila." He paused. "She's carrying the Cave's mark. Openly. She hasn't tried to hide it."
"The Cave doesn't send anyone."
"Then it's the first time." He looked at her, measuring. "You've been to the Cave. Twice, your council says. They know your face there. Go to the cistern under the old market. That's where the south channel comes in. Meet her and bring me what she wants."
"And if she's not from the Cave?"
"Then you'll know before she does. You're a Sila."
The cistern under the old market was the oldest water she had ever stood beside. The roof was a low vault on squat pillars, and the water filled it from wall to wall, still and black and so clear that her lamp went down into it and lit the floor a man's height below, where a broken jar lay on its side. Overhead, through the stone, she heard the market: shutters, a cart, a radio, the loudspeaker of a mosque testing itself with one click. On the seen side it was still the same long morning it had been for six days. Down here it was only dark.
She sat on the step where the south channel came in and waited.
She heard the visitor before she saw her, a long way down the channel: the soft, even sound of someone walking in water who did not want to be thought to be creeping. Then the light changed at the bend. A form came round it, a woman's form, tall, plain, in a grey coat a little too heavy for the season, with the Cave's mark on her as clear as a seal on wax.
Rahma stood up. She knew the face. It had walked her out of a gallery once, in the summer before the wave, past jinn who would not look at her, and at the outer door it had said, "Come back when he can hear."
Ithra the Sila stopped at the foot of the step with the water round her ankles. She looked tired. She looked, Rahma thought, like someone who had been sent and had not liked being sent and had come anyway.
"Rahma of Nasibin," she said. "I thought it might be you." She did not come up the step. "I've brought a question from the Cave. He asked me to put it to you myself. He has never sent anyone with a question before."
"Ask it."
"How many can you hold?"