The water under Damascus was moving, and Soren had forgotten that water could move this way, slowly and in the dark and all in one direction.
He came down the last conduit behind Hisham, his shape folded small for the low roof, one hand closed on what he carried. The channel was Roman at the bottom and older at the sides, cut stone over cut rock, and the water ran along it ankle-deep and black and very cold, going somewhere it had been going for two thousand years. He could hear it before he saw it. Above them, through the stone, he could hear the city: carts, a generator, a loudspeaker testing itself. The sun of the third day stood up there somewhere over the domes and roofs. Down here there was no sun.
In his closed hand he held Naim's ember.
It was the size of the top joint of a thumb, smooth, dark, a little warmer than the air. He had picked it out of the sand beside Fatima's knee under the broken bridge while the reciter was still reading, and he had carried it since without putting it down. It did not glow. It carried no message. He knew all that. He had read the lore on embers as a student, centuries ago, and on the road from the broken bridge he had gone through everything he had ever read on them, and found nothing that told him why Naim's ember had stayed where it fell. The boy's had not. The patroller had found the boy's jewel in the middle of the bedroom floor that night, and no ember anywhere. Soren did not understand it. He had told Naim he would find out.
They had drunk from the cistern under the old market once, he and Naim, two young jinn on registered work for a merchant of this city who wanted his warehouse kept dry. Naim had lain on his back on the wet stone afterwards and said the water tasted of the hills. Soren had said it tasted of old lead. They had argued about it for a whole night, and in the morning the merchant had paid them both, and neither had given way.
"Here," Hisham said.
The eastern gallery was a cistern the length of a street, with a vaulted roof held up by forty columns in five rows, each column taken from some older building and none of them matching. The water lay in it a hand deep. Along the walls the believing jinn of the city had built platforms of stone above the water, and on the platforms the Cave's people slept.
He saw them before they saw him. Two jinn of the cistern hall who had stood with the gallery elder at the door, and had come anyway. The patroller. A family of humans from the outer galleries, the mother he remembered and, curled against her, the girl who had touched his shadow; she was asleep with her thumb near her mouth. Fifty, sixty more. Ithra had sent them in the night. Some of them looked up at him. Nobody stood. That was right. He had told the Cave it would not command them here.
"We've given them the dry end," Hisham said. "The humans feel the cold."
"So do some of us."
He walked the length of the gallery behind Hisham and the believing jinn of Damascus came out of the dark between the columns to look at him. He read them as he passed, from long habit. A Marid of high grade, older than Soren, with the drowned look of the old river families. Two Sila who kept human forms out of courtesy to the refugees, a grocer and a schoolteacher. Hinn, many of them. And at the end, by the last column, an old ghul, the first Soren had seen at close range in a century, grey and hunched and slow, with grave dirt under the nails of its hands.
"He washes the dead," Hisham said, seeing him look. "The city's. Since before the long day. Nobody else would go into the cemeteries."
Soren reached for the mark. He reached for it in every one of them, in the ghul hardest, because ghul are fed by graves and fear and the mark grows easily on them. The cold of a devil's crystallisation over a jinn's type was the easiest thing in the world for a jinn of his grade to read. He found it in none of them. He found, in the old ghul, something he had no category for, a kind of plainness, as if the creature had been scrubbed.
The ghul looked at him and bowed its head a little and went back to its column. Hisham did not explain it, and Soren did not ask. He had spent eight centuries reading jinn, and he did not know how to read that.
They kept the dawn by estimate, as the humans above did. The believing jinn had men among the humans who brought down the times from the Mahdi's camp, and when the time came a young Jann climbed onto the platform at the head of the cistern and gave the call to prayer.
He gave it in Arabic. Soren had heard the call ten thousand times, coming down into the Cave from the human city above it, thinned by rock, part of the noise of the upper world like rain or traffic. He had never stood in the room with it. Allah is the greatest. The voice went up into the vaulting and came back off the forty columns and lay on the water, and the water shivered under it in rings. I bear witness. The jinn of the cistern were already moving to the washing, a thin channel along the western wall where the water ran clean. Come to prayer. Come to success.
He went to the washing because he did not know what else to do with his hands. He put Naim's ember on the stone ledge above the channel. He did what he saw the others do, the hands, the mouth, the face, the forearms, the head, the feet, in that order, and he did it badly and the water was cold. The old ghul was beside him. It did not watch him. It washed its grey hands for a long time, between the fingers, under the nails.
He took the ember back.
They made rows. Hisham stood at the front, alone, facing the blank wall of the cistern where somebody had cut a small arch into the stone. Behind him the rows formed across the platforms, shoulder to shoulder, Marid by Hinn by Sila, the schoolteacher, the grocer, the patroller from the Cave who had come in at the end and stood at the end of a row as if he had always stood there. The ghul. A human father from the Cave, with his boy. Six rows, then seven.
Soren stood behind the last.
Nobody had asked him to. Nobody turned to look. He stood on the stone with the ember in his closed hand and the water a hand deep in front of him, and his shadow, which the lamps had no business making so dark, lay forward across the backs of the last row like a coat thrown over them.
Hisham raised his hands and said in Arabic that Allah is the greatest, and the rows raised their hands. Soren's hands did not move. Hisham recited the Opening; Soren knew it the way he knew the shape of the cistern above the Cave, from outside. Then he heard words he did not know. The rows bowed. He did not bow. They straightened. Then, all together, with one soft sound like a wave going down a beach, they went down into prostration, foreheads to the stone, and the cistern was full of backs.
He stood over them, the only thing in the room still upright. He did not know what to do with his knees, or whether a Marid who had led a cave for eight hundred years without once doing this was permitted to begin at the back of a stranger's congregation with a dead friend's ember in his fist.
He stayed standing, and he did not leave.