The girl from the Cave would not let go of Rahma's sleeve, so Rahma the Sila sat down on the platform beside her and let her keep it.
She was five or six, a human child, one of the family the Cave had sent down in the night with fifty jinn and a handful of other humans, all of them cold and quiet and smelling of the long passages. The eastern gallery had been ready for them since the evening by the clock: a cistern the length of a street under the eastern quarter, forty columns in five rows holding up the vault, and the water lying a hand deep between them, black and still. The believing jinn of the city had built stone platforms along the walls above the water. Rahma had spent the clock's night carrying blankets to the dry end.
The child could not see her. She had taken Rahma's sleeve in the dark of the conduit because a sleeve was there, and she held on to it now with her eyes shut, half asleep, and Rahma kept her own shape close and plain so that what the child held would stay a sleeve.
"Is it morning?" the child's mother whispered, to nobody, to the dark.
"Nearly," Rahma said, aloud, so the woman could hear. "I'm of the jinn. Of Nasibin. You're safe here. The dawn prayer is soon."
The mother flinched, and then nodded into the dark, the way they all nodded the first time. She had been told on the way down. She would be told again in the morning. Hisham's rule.
Rahma heard the water move at the far end.
Two came down the last conduit. The first was Hisham, stooping under the low arch out of habit, though he could have made himself any height. The second came behind him folded small, a great deal smaller than he was, she could tell, the way you can tell a river from a ditch even when both are in the same channel. He walked in the water carefully, like someone who had forgotten it could be walked in. One of his hands was closed.
She knew him before she saw his face. She had stood in front of him twice.
The first time, in the first summer of the wave, he had heard her out in his long gallery with his elders around him and said the Cave kept itself apart, politely, as if he were turning down an invitation to a wedding, and she had walked home through four gates with the council's word still in her mouth. The second time, the next spring, he had listened to the end, and asked how big, and she had not been able to tell him. Since then she had carried word between the Nasibin and the Cave a dozen times, and never once seen him leave it.
Soren the Marid walked the length of the gallery behind Hisham, between the columns, and the jinn of the city came out of the dark to look at him. He looked back at every one of them. She felt it when it reached her, a cool, close attention that went over her the way a hand goes over a wall in the dark to find the door, and passed on. He went on. If he knew her he gave no sign, which came to the same thing for a messenger.
Her cousin from the third gallery came and sat on the platform beside her. She was the one who kept the rolls, a small thin Sila who had looked Rahma up and down on the first day and found her mother's line on a sheet of skin older than the city walls, and had laughed out loud.
"That's him," her cousin said. "Isn't it? The one from the Cave."
"Yes."
"What's he holding?"
Rahma did not know. She had seen him close that hand when he reached the dry end, as a man closes his hand over a coin in a crowd.
The young Jann gave the call from the platform at the head of the cistern, by the time the humans above had worked out and sent down. His voice went up into the vault and came off the forty columns and lay on the water, and the water shivered with it. The child let go of Rahma's sleeve at last, in her sleep.
Rahma went to wash. The channel ran clean along the western wall, and the jinn of the city went to it in a line, and she went with them and knelt and did what she did every morning: the hands, the mouth, the nose, the face, the forearms to the elbow, the head, the ears, the feet. Further down the channel she saw him kneeling. He was doing it badly. He was watching the old ghul beside him and copying it, a moment behind, and he had his face wet before his hands. He set down whatever he carried on the ledge, a small dark thing, and picked it up again the moment his hands were washed, as if he could not bear to have it out of reach.
She could have gone and shown him. Four steps along the channel. She had shown human children in Qamishli and jinn children on the river and a farmer's old father under the bridge at Nasibin, who had prayed all his life and still forgot his ears.
She did not go. He had not asked anyone.
They made rows. Hisham stood alone at the front, under the little arch somebody had cut into the far wall a thousand years ago to face Mecca. Behind him the rows formed across the platforms, shoulder to shoulder, the Marid of the old river families, the Hinn, the city's Sila in their grocer's and schoolteacher's shapes, the patroller from the Cave, a human father with his boy, the old ghul who washed the city's dead. Six rows, then seven.
Rahma stood in the last of them, between her cousin and a Hinn woman of the city, with her feet on the cold stone and the water at the edge of the platform in front of her.
She felt him come and stand behind her.
He made no sound. She felt it in her back, between the shoulders, where his shadow fell. It lay across the last row from behind, heavy and cool as wet sand, and she knew without turning that it was darker than the lamps had any business making it. Her cousin's shoulder stiffened against hers. The Hinn woman on her other side drew one sharp breath through her nose and let it go.
Nobody turned round.
Hisham raised his hands and said in Arabic that Allah is the greatest, and the rows raised their hands, and Rahma raised hers, and the weight on her back did not move. Hisham recited the Opening in his rough, careful voice. Then a short chapter, not a long one, because there were humans in the rows who were cold. They bowed. She bowed, and the shadow slid off her back onto the stone in front of her and lay there beside her own, long and dark, and then, when she straightened, came up over her again like water rising.
Then all of them together went down into prostration.
Her forehead was on the stone. The whole cistern was full of backs, the soft sound of seven rows going down at once still in the vault above them, and the only thing in the gallery still upright was behind her. She knew it the way she knew the gate at home was open, by the air. He was standing. He had not gone. His shadow lay along the floor past her, past her cousin's spread hands, almost to the row in front, and on the stone beside her face she could see the edge of it, very still.
She said the words of the prostration into the stone, three times, slowly. Then once more for him, which she had not meant to do.
They sat. They stood. The second unit, the same. At the end Hisham turned his head to the right and gave the greeting of peace, and to the left, and the rows turned their heads after him, right and then left, and on the left, at the very edge of her sight, past her cousin's shoulder, she saw a tall shape standing behind the last row with its hands at its sides and one of them closed.
Then the prayer was over, and the rows breathed out, and the cistern was full of the small sounds of people getting up.
Beside her, her cousin began to turn round.
Rahma put out her hand and laid it on the thin wrist, lightly, and held it. Her cousin looked at her. Rahma shook her head.
She knew what it was to stand at the back of a room where everyone else knew what to do. She had done it in a human shape in a human mosque in Qamishli for a year before she dared to ask the imam a question, and every time someone had turned round to smile at her, kindly, to help, she had wanted to walk out into the street and not come back.
She gathered up the child's blanket from the platform, and folded it, and did not look back at him, so that whatever he did next would be his own.