The stranger had brought water, and he would not put it down.
Ithra came down the passage at Tamar's call and found them facing each other across the outer threshold, the Cave's doorkeeper inside the light and the stranger outside it. The stranger was an Ifrit. She read it off him before anything else, the hard, close-grained fire that combat feeds, and the old seams in it where it had been broken and set. He held a clay jar against his chest in both arms the way a man holds a child he has carried a long way.
Tamar had his hand flat on the stone of the doorframe. He had sat in that doorway a day and a night by the refugees' clocks since the bars came down, and the devils on the slope had sung at him and thrown words and, once, a borrowed child's voice crying for its mother, and none of them had come up past him. He did not look round at her.
"Says he's from Damascus," Tamar said. "Says it's water."
"What's your name?" she asked the stranger.
"Hisham. I come from the jinn who pray under Damascus." He lifted the jar an inch. "From the cistern under the old market. Your leader will know the taste, if he ever drank there." Ithra knew the cistern. A month ago she had stood in it to her ankles and asked a Sila of Nasibin how many they could hold. This, then, was the answer, and it had come with a jar.
She took the measure of him the way she would take the measure of a witness. His form was steady. His signature did not shift when Tamar's hand moved on the stone. He carried no mark that she could read, and she could read most marks; the cold of a devil's crystallisation would have shown at this distance as plainly as frost on a pane.
"Let him through," she said.
Tamar stepped aside one pace, exactly one. As the Ifrit went by him, Hisham said in Arabic, "Peace be upon you."
Tamar did not answer at once. Then he did, the full answer, peace and Allah's mercy and His blessings, in the same tongue, without turning his head from the slope. He stepped back into the doorway once the Ifrit was past.
She did not take him to Soren. She took him to the small chamber off the gallery where she had questioned the jinn of the Cave after the boy's death, and sat him on the bench where she had sat them.
"Tell me what you're offering," she said. "Then tell me what you want. Then tell me who sent you and who didn't."
He set the jar on the floor between his feet at last. He answered in order, as if he had been questioned before and had found it went quicker that way.
The offer was plain. Under Damascus ran a city of old water: cisterns, conduits, Roman channels and older ones, galleries the jinn of the city had kept for longer than any human dynasty had kept the streets above. The believing jinn there would give the Cave one long gallery under the eastern quarter for as many as it needed to send, jinn or human. And they would stand. The man the humans called the Mahdi had camped outside the city and the gate had been opened to him. The one-eyed man's camp was coming north. When it came, the jinn who prayed under Damascus meant to stand behind the humans who prayed above it.
"And what do you want from us?"
"Your leader's name. The tribes listen to it. Half the jinn of the north are on the road to the one-eyed man, and the other half are hiding in their wells. If Soren of the Cave stands with us, some of the hiding ones come out."
"Who sent you?"
"Our council. Eleven of twelve."
"And the twelfth?"
"Went to the road," he said. "His sons went first."
She wrote nothing. She had never needed to. She held each answer against what Rahma had told her under the market, and against what the refugees had said coming in, and found nothing that did not fit. A good liar fits too. A liar leaves things out, and so far this one had left out nothing, not even what the twelfth had cost him.
Partway through, he stopped.
"Which way is Mecca from here?"
She did not know. It was not a question anyone in the Cave had asked her in a thousand years. She said so.
He did not seem surprised. He went out to the gallery mouth, where a seam of the human world's daylight came down a crack in the rock, and he stood there a while with his face turned up into the light. The sun had stood in the same place for three days, which made it no use as a clock and a good enough mark for a direction. He judged the angle of the crack, then something she could not see. He turned until he faced a blank stretch of the gallery wall where the old seep had stained the stone green.
"It's past the afternoon prayer by our count," he said, to no one. He had been counting hours on his fingers since he came in, she saw now, the way the humans were doing. "Near enough."
He prayed there on the bare stone. Three refugees on their blankets watched him without knowing what he was; to them he was a thin man in a dusty coat praying in a cave, and one of them, an old man, got up stiffly and went to stand beside him and pray too, a little behind. Two jinn of the Cave passed along the gallery and slowed and went on. Ithra stayed in the chamber doorway and did what she had always done, which was watch.
She had stood in the house of the woman the boy was burned out of, in a borrowed face, and listened to the father reading Quran in the courtyard. She had not felt then what she felt now. She could not have put it in a report: the old man beside Hisham standing up without being asked, as if he had been waiting.
Soren received him in the gallery. Four elders sat with him, fewer than there had been before the door. The gallery elder's seat stood empty. No one had decided yet what to do about the party that had drawn the bars, and no one would decide it today.
Hisham set the jar at Soren's feet and said what he had said to Ithra, in the same order, in fewer words.
The elders asked for terms. They asked who would command, and which galleries, and whether the jinn of Damascus would answer to the Cave's law or their own. They asked for guarantees. One of them asked, with care, whether the man at the gate was what the humans said he was, and Hisham answered that he did not know what the humans said, only that he had prayed behind him once at the dawn prayer, and the man had recited a short chapter and not a long one, because there were old people in the rows.
Soren said nothing through all of it. He sat in the posture Ithra had seen him hold through a thousand councils, still as deep water, his shadow across the stone behind him heavier than any lamp allowed. He had not touched the jar.
Then he did. He leaned forward and took the stopper out and put two fingers in and touched them to his mouth.
Ithra watched his face. It did not change. But she had served him eight hundred years and she knew what it looked like when he was somewhere else, and he was somewhere else, under a market she had stood under herself and had not known he knew.
"I drank this," he said. "A long time ago. With Naim."
The elders waited. Hisham waited.
"The Cave will send who wants to go," Soren said. "Jinn and human. The Cave won't command them. They'll answer to whoever they stand behind." He put the stopper back. "And I'll come myself."
The western galleries would hear it within the hour. The elders were already looking at one another. Ithra looked at none of them. She was counting, and the count came out the same however she ran it. In eight hundred years Soren had not gone anywhere he could not come back from before the Cave woke. On the day the Dajjal walked out he had stood on the outer threshold for an hour and then come back in.