Ithra the Sila came down the stair into the outer gallery carrying something in her arms that weighed no more than a coat.
Soren stood up from the wall. The gallery was a long vault under the old city, older than the streets over it. Its stone sweated in the cold. The believing jinn of Damascus had given it to the people Soren had brought, out of courtesy and with some doubt, and his people slept along it in rows, as the humans slept in the grain halls overhead. A few lifted their heads as Ithra passed. Most did not.
She laid her burden down on the stone at his feet.
It was Nessar. Soren knew him by the set of what was left, the long low line of a Hinn at rest, though there was little enough of it. The edges of him were going. They lifted off him as Soren watched, thin as the steam off a cup, and went into the dark of the vault and were not anywhere.
"In the ditch under the east wall," Ithra said. "Where you said."
"How long?"
"He says by morning. He has worked it out."
She stood back. She did not leave.
Soren looked at the thing on the floor for a long moment before he moved. In the Cave, eight centuries of the dead had come home to him as jewels and embers, small hard things that could be set in a niche and kept. He had never watched one of his own kind go out like this, by evaporation, the way a puddle goes off a flagstone in the sun until there is only a darker patch, and then not that. There would be nothing left of Nessar to put in any niche.
Soren knelt. He was a Marid, and what he was made of had always moved like water under his will. He put his hands around the edges of Nessar the way a man cups a spring to drink from it. He tried to hold them in. They went out between his fingers as if his fingers were not there.
"Don't," Nessar said. His voice was very small. "It's not a leak you can stop. They built it well."
They talked through the night, because there was nothing else either of them could do.
Soren had expected anger and found none. Nessar spoke the way he must once have spoken to his own cells, laying out a structure one beam at a time. The words came slower as the night went on. Soren began to wait for each of them as you wait for drops from a slow tap.
"After your verdict," Nessar said. "The gathering. I left early."
"I saw you leave."
"I know you did. I counted on that." A little more of him lifted and went. "You named the sorcerer and you named the reciter, and you asked the hall for a crime, not a war. And then you watched me make a war out of your crime. Every city. Every child under the minimum age. You had the reports. You had Harun. You knew."
"I knew."
"And you said nothing."
"I said nothing."
Nessar was quiet for a while. Then he made a sound that might have been a laugh in a jinn with more of himself left.
"I built on that silence," he said. "I want you to know. It was load-bearing. I built the whole surge on the one thing I was sure of, which was that you would sit in your cave and say nothing. You were the most reliable part of the design."
Soren took that and held it. It went down through him the way cold water goes down through a well, and it reached the bottom, and it stayed there.
"I have asked myself why," he said. "For a long time. Whether I kept quiet to keep the tribes together, or because some part of me wanted them to suffer. The humans. For the boy."
"Which was it?"
"I don't know. I have stopped expecting to know."
"That's honest." Nessar's shape shifted on the stone, settling lower. "I'll give you one back. I told myself silence was consent. Human silence. For eighty years I told everyone. Nobody came into that room in forty years, so nobody had the right to complain when I came into theirs." He stopped to gather himself. "Then I wore a dead man's face for a widow on the road, and she went to the camp because of me. It was the same thing. I was the sorcerer. I'd only changed sides of the table."
"Naim," Nessar said after a while. "The one the sorcerer held. Your old comrade. Ithra told me he was in your cave."
"He died. On the road, near the border. I held him."
"How long did the sorcerer have him?"
"Forty years."
Nessar's shape did not move. A long thread of him lifted off and went.
"Forty," he said. "That's the number, then. They must all teach each other." He was quiet. "Did he hate them? At the end. The humans."
"He asked for his son."
Nessar said nothing to that. Soren had not expected him to.
Ithra had sat down against the wall, a body's length off, with her hands on her knees. She was wearing the plain face she had worn in the ditch. She had not taken it off. Soren did not ask her to.
They did not forgive each other. Neither of them offered it, and neither asked. They set it down between them on the stone like two clerks closing a long account, item by item, his silence, Nessar's surge, the children in the hospitals, the widow, the boy in the yellow shirt who was not a boy. When it was all set down it lay there between them, and it was large.
Some time before dawn the believing jinn began to stir along the gallery.
They rose in ones and twos and went toward the far end, where a stair went up into the cellars of a mosque. Soren had stood behind them there for the dawn prayer every day since he came to this city. He had stood at the back with his hands at his sides while they bowed, because he did not know the words. Sometimes he did not know where his hands went. They had never once told him to go away. On the first morning a young Jann had come back down the stair afterward and shown him, without being asked, where the hands go: the right over the left, here, on the chest. Soren had thanked her. He had not done it yet. It seemed to him a thing you should not do with your hands until you knew what you were saying with them.
Hisham, the Ifrit who had first come to the Cave as their envoy, stopped beside him on the way to the stair. He looked down at Nessar and then at Soren.
"Will you come up?"
"Not this morning."
The Ifrit nodded as if that were an ordinary answer, and went on.
The gallery emptied toward the stair until it was the three of them and the sleepers who were not believers and did not rise. Far overhead, through the stone, Soren heard the first faint scrape of feet on a mosque floor, many feet, settling into lines.
Nessar's shape had gone thin as paper. Soren could see the floor through the middle of him now. The low line of the Hinn was only a line, drawn in something grey that would not last.
"Soren."
"I'm here."
"They're going up to pray." The words came one at a time with long gaps between. "I've never. Not once. A hundred and something years. I never asked anyone for anything I couldn't take." He was quiet so long that Soren leaned closer. Then: "You went up there. Ithra says. Every morning. You stand at the back."
"I stand at the back."
"Then you'd know better than I would."
Overhead the feet had gone still. Soren waited.
"A jinn who never asked forgiveness," Nessar said. "Not once, in his whole life. Can he still ask now?"