The girl was awake when Soren passed, and she was looking at his shadow.
She lay on a folded blanket against the gallery wall with her mother asleep behind her, one arm over the child's middle like a bar. The outer galleries of The Cave had never been made for humans. They were cold, and the floor sloped toward the old seeps, and the only light was what the humans had brought: phone screens turned down low, two camping lamps, a candle somebody's grandmother would not be parted from. Three hundred of them lay in rows down the long stone, in coats, under rugs, on the flattened cardboard of cooking-oil boxes. Most slept. Outside, the sun of the third day sat in the sky over the city as if nailed there, and in here was the only dark in Karachi.
He kept no form among them. They could not see him. The girl could see what he left on the floor.
It lay across the stone from the candle, longer than the candle allowed and denser at its heart than any shadow of a standing thing should be. He had carried it since his fifth descent. Jinn of the Cave looked away from it. The girl did not. She put one finger out from under the blanket and touched the edge of it where it reached her, and drew the finger back, and looked at the tip.
Then she smiled at the place above the shadow where his face would be, if he had one she could see, and closed her eyes.
Her finger had gone into it the way a child's finger goes into still water to see if it is cold. He stood there longer than he meant to. In eight hundred years no human had touched any part of him. This one had wanted to know if he was cold.
Ithra found him in the gallery mouth. She had kept a human shape since the door was opened, an unremarkable woman in a grey scarf, so the refugees would have someone to bring their questions to. She did not drop it to speak to him.
"They've sent terms," she said.
"Who has?"
"The ones on the slope. Forty, perhaps fifty. Devils from the road, the sort that came down with the grain carts. They sang it at the door an hour ago so everyone inside would hear." She gave him the words flat, as she gave every report. "The Cave is old and has its own law, and the master has no quarrel with it. Hand out the humans and the Cave will be passed by. Keep them and the Cave will be counted with them."
"And inside?"
"Inside, some of ours were listening." She named three, then a fourth. Elder Jann of the western galleries. A Marid from the cistern hall who had never once disagreed with him in council. "They aren't devils, Soren. They're frightened. They say the humans make the Cave visible. They say you opened the door without asking the tribes."
"I did."
"They also say you have been praying."
He said nothing to that. He had not been praying. He had gone twice to the deep chamber and stood beside the stone ring with nothing to read, and asked for something with words that did not come. If that was prayer, it was the worst ever made in the Cave, and he had told no one. Ithra had read it off him, as she read everything.
"One of the humans asked me today whether we sleep."
"What did you tell her?"
"That some of us don't."
"How many with them?"
"Thirty when I left the hall. More since, I'd think." She looked down the gallery at the rows of sleepers. "They're not coming here. They're going to the door."
He went the long way, because the short way ran through the humans and he would not run through them.
Halfway up he passed the eastern seep. Water still came down the rock there in a thin skin and gathered in a stone lip, and for longer than Soren had led the Cave someone had sat beside it in the evenings and hummed. The hum had no words and no tune anyone could name. Soren had put it in an accusation once. He had told the elders that a jinn who sat by the seep and hummed, and looked where Ithra said he looked, had a reason to be watched. Tamar had stood in the council hall and said, "I hum because my mother did." It had been true. Soren had needed months, and Naim's confession, to hear it. The lip was full now and nobody sat there. The water ran over the edge and down the passage floor ahead of him toward the door, finding the low places.
The passage to the outer door climbed. It was the oldest cut stone in the Cave, worn into a trough down the middle by twelve centuries of jinn coming home. He had walked it the night the patroller brought him Kael's jewel, and on the day the Dajjal walked out of his prison he had stood at the top of it with no plan. He knew how long it took. He went faster than that, and still he heard the bars before he reached the turn.
The outer door was not wood or stone. It was a fold in the ground of the world that the Cave's first elders had set and every leader since had kept, and it was held shut by bars of law that only the Cave's own could draw. Thirty-odd of his jinn stood in the last chamber before it. They had drawn three of the five. The fourth was moving under the hands of the gallery elder as Soren came round the corner, and it slid, and the fold of the door thinned like ice going grey before it breaks.
"Stop," he said.
They turned. Some of them had been his for four hundred years. The Marid from the cistern hall would not meet his eyes. The gallery elder did, and kept his hands on the bar.
"You let them in without the tribes," the elder said. "We'll let them out the same way."
"They'll kill them on the slope."
"They'll kill them somewhere. That isn't ours to carry. The Cave is ours to carry." He drew the fourth bar. "You taught us that."
He had. He had taught it for eight hundred years. The law was on the elder's side if he answered with the law. There was his grade. He was the strongest jinn in the chamber by a long way, and he could have broken the elder's hands on the bar, and in the morning the Cave would have been two caves.
He was still choosing when the fifth bar went.
The door opened. It did not swing. It thinned until there was no fold left, only the outer threshold and the light of the third day pouring up the passage, white and flat and hot. The jinn in the chamber flinched from it. On the slope below he could see them now: forty or more in the half-shapes devils wear by daylight, smoke with elbows, faces borrowed from the dead and worn badly, and in front of them the grain carts from the road with their wheels sunk in dust. Their song came up the passage with the light. It was the terms again, in a dozen borrowed voices, and one of the voices was a child's.
And in the doorway, between the Cave and the slope, with his back to Soren, stood a Jann.
Soren knew the set of the shoulders before he knew anything else. He had sat across from them in council and named the jinn they belonged to as a traitor, on the evidence of a hum by the eastern seep. He had stood before the tribes afterwards and apologised, the first apology of his rule. He had watched those shoulders walk out to the road.
Tamar did not turn round.
"Shut it behind me," he said. "I'm not coming in."
"Tamar."
"I've been out with them. I know what they're carrying." On the slope the child's voice started the terms again, and Tamar shifted his weight to the front foot. "Draw your bars, Soren. Go and sit with your humans. I've got the door."