The farmer's heels drummed on the stone, and his brother lay across his shins to hold them.
Ahmed knelt at the man's head. He had washed for prayer at the trough in the yard an hour before and had not broken it since, and the cold of that water was still in his wrists. The hall had been a grain store once. Its vault went up into dark, and under it two hundred people slept on blankets in rows, and the rows nearest this corner had sat up to watch.
"Every night," the brother said. "Our father, at his feet. Our father died in March. He stands there and asks him to open the gate."
"Which gate?"
"He doesn't say. Just the gate."
Ahmed laid his palm flat on the farmer's forehead. The skin was dry and too hot. The eyes under the lids were moving fast and both together, which was the first state, the shallow one, and he noted it. At the outer corners of the eyes the skin was creased in fine lines darker than his sunburn, fanning out to the sides only, and he noted that too. He had been noting such things for all the years of his practice, and lately he had come to distrust the noting, the speed of it. He made himself look a second time. The first state. Nothing settled in there yet. A thing come to visit, wearing a dead man's face.
Before he began he did the thing he had added to his method this year. He waited, with his hand where it was, for the length of one long breath, and listened for anything in there that asked him to stop, a plea or a please. Nothing asked. The heels drummed and the brother grunted and the people in the near rows held their blankets to their chins. He recited the Throne Verse in Arabic. Then the last two verses of the chapter of the Cow. His voice went up into the vault and did not come back. He kept on with the last three chapters of the Quran, slowly, the way his teacher had taught him, each word given its full length.
At the second chapter of refuge the farmer's heels stopped. He breathed out through his teeth, a long rough sound like a sack dragged over a floor. Then his eyes came open and they were only a tired man's eyes.
"Is he gone?" the brother said.
"Say the evening remembrances with him. Both of you. Every night, before you lie down." Ahmed took his hand away. "It came because he was frightened and it could see that. It isn't your father."
He did not know if the brother believed it. He wrote the case in the notebook by the lamp on the pillar: the hall, the row, the man's age, the first state, the face of a dead father, the hour. Nine forty. The fifth tonight in this hall alone.
The five came in one at a time as the night went on and gave him their counts. The youngest had been sick in the yard after a hard case and was ashamed of it. Ahmed told him he had been sick in a yard too, in his second year, and it was true. He did not tell him the rest of his second year.
There were more cases since the siege closed. The devils had come with the camp the way flies come with a herd, and the walls did not stop them. They came over in the dark with the faces of husbands and fathers and drowned children, and they found the frightened and spoke to them in voices from home. Ahmed had heard a woman in the women's hall say it plainly, that the devils on this road wore the dead, and he had let it stand, because he had seen what she meant. He wrote down only what he saw.
Fatima sat against the wall by the lamp with her knees drawn up and her own column in the back of his notebook.
She had started the column herself in the first week of the march, when the ache under her left collarbone had woken her three nights running and she had noticed it came and went, came and went, like something passing on a road. She marked the hour and a number from one to ten. Ahmed had told her once that it was not a medical instrument. She had said that neither was he.
"How is it?"
"Seven," she said. "It was eight at the sunset prayer. It goes up at sunset." She turned the page toward him so he could see the column. "Every night. Up at sunset, worst between nine and one, down before dawn. I could set a clock by them."
He looked at the column and then at her. She was twenty-seven. She had been twenty-five when he walked into her bedroom on the east side of Karachi and recited until the thing in her burned. The scar from that night was the size of a fingernail, raised and pale, and she pressed two fingers to it now through her shirt without seeming to know she did it.
They did not talk about that night often. They had talked about it once, properly, after Soren told him what it had been. A boy. A boy who had wanted to be worth something. Ahmed had sat at Fatima's kitchen table with his hands open on the oilcloth and she had told him what she had felt from the inside, and neither of them had pretended it was less than it was.
"I keep thinking about the old one," she said. "His father. On the sand."
Ahmed nodded. He had been ten paces away, reciting, while Naim died between Soren's hands and hers. He had not looked up until it was over. When he did, the old one was gone, and Soren and Fatima were kneeling over a hollow in the sand.
"His lips were moving at the end," Fatima said. "With the reading. I thought it was the boy's name. Then I thought it was the words."
"Both, maybe."
"Kael," she said, as if to try how it sounded in her own mouth. Then she wrote the hour in the column. Ten past ten. Seven.
He found Mariam in the hall by the east wall an hour before dawn, because she was awake and standing, and in a hall of two hundred sleeping people that was the first thing he saw.
She was ten. She stood in her socks between her father's blanket and the wall with her arms by her sides. Her father lay on his back with his eyes open. He had been that way since the camp in the long day, fed and placid and mostly silent, and he did not stop her standing or ask why she stood. For a whole season she had turned at every call to prayer to face the north-east wall, away from the direction of prayer, and nobody had been able to turn her. Then she had stopped. Since then she listened.
"It's going to start," she said, before Ahmed reached her.
He looked at his watch. Four minutes to the call.
"How do you know?"
"The air goes thin before." She frowned, looking for the word. "Like before a bell. You know it's going to ring because the room goes thin."
He did not know what to write for that. He crouched beside her so his head was at her height, and they waited. Somewhere at the back of the hall a baby complained and was shushed. The lamp on the nearest pillar had burned low. Fatima had come along the row behind him with the notebook against her chest and stood a little way off.
The call came from the minaret of the mosque nearest the wall, and then from another further in, the two voices crossing. Mariam did not turn. She stood with her face lifted a little, the way a child stands at a window to hear a parent's car in the street, and her lips moved with the words. She knew them all now. She had learned them in a month from listening.
When it finished she let out her breath.
"It's louder here," she said. "Louder than at home."
Behind him Fatima made a small sound.
He turned. She had her hand flat over the scar, pressing, and her face had the look of someone listening for a noise in the next room. She took the hand away, looked at it, and put it back.
"What is it?"
"It's stopped," she said. "Ahmed. It's not a one. It's nothing. It's never been nothing since the camp came."