The humans went out first, in the morning, and Soren stood aside at the outer door to let them pass.
They came up the long trough of the passage in families, with their bundles and their rolled blankets and their cooking pots tied to their backs, blinking toward the light at the top. Word of Lud had come into the Cave in the night on a dozen tongues at once, the way water comes into a cellar through every crack together. By the dawn prayer the humans knew it too. Nobody had told them to leave. They had begun to pack. Soren had come home from Damascus on the morning Nessar went out, because there was nothing of Nessar to carry and the door was his to keep.
The fold of the door stood open. All five bars were drawn back and held. Beyond it the slope went down into a sun that rose and would set, in a sky that had been white and flat for longer than the youngest of these children could remember. The grain carts were gone from the dust below. So were the devils who had sung the terms.
A girl went past him on her father's shoulders, holding a candle stub in her fist. She looked down at the floor as she passed, at the place where his shadow lay across the stone, and lifted one hand off her father's hair to wave at it. He did not know if it was the same girl. He did not know how to wave back. Then she was out in the light and gone down the slope, and the passage was emptier.
By noon the outer galleries were bare stone and cold ash and a few things left behind: a shoe, a plastic comb, a child's drawing of a cave with a sun in it, which nobody could have seen from inside.
By noon, too, the others had begun to come up the slope.
They came singly at first, and then in knots of three and four, the way debris comes down a river after a dam has gone. Soren knew what they were before they were halfway up. The weave carried it ahead of them like the smell of standing water. These were the jinn who had gone to the road in the long day, who had run with the camp through the year, who had worn the faces of fathers and drowned children and carried grain on carts that left dust behind them. The camp had broken at Lud, and now its jinn were scattered across the world like a tipped basket of seed, and some of them had remembered where they had come from.
They stopped at the threshold. None of them crossed it.
The first to speak was a Jann with a dead woman's face, a pleasant face with lipstick on it, slipping a little at the jaw.
"We ask the Cave's protection," it said. "Under the old law. Anyone who comes to the door and asks."
It was the old law. Soren had taught it. He had also taught that the Cave weighed what came to its door, and that a leader of his grade could read the devil's mark at close range, as cold and wrongness, the way a hand reads the cold of deep water. He could read it now. It lay on some of them like a skin of ice on a pond, thin and new. On a few it lay thick.
He could read the mark. He could not read what it meant to do. Damascus had taught him how little of anyone he could read.
Behind him, inside the door, stood the gallery elder whose hands had drawn the fourth bar against him in the week-long days. The old Jann had come up from the galleries at dawn without a word and taken hold of the bar beside Soren's, and had held it since. He had not apologised. Soren had not asked him to.
"Take off the face," Soren said.
The Jann with the dead woman's face went still.
"Whoever comes in comes in its own shape. Leave what you borrowed on the slope. That's all I'll ask."
He had not decided it in advance. He heard himself say it and knew it was right, the way you know a footing is sound under water before you put your weight on it.
The Jann put its hands up to its own jaw. For a moment Soren thought it would refuse. Then it took hold of the dead woman's face at the edges and peeled it away and held it out from itself as if it did not know where to put it down.
Underneath it was young. The shape under the face was thin and grey and shaking, and its own features were so faint from a year of disuse that it looked half rubbed out. It let the face drop. The face fell on the slope and lay there with its lipstick in the dust.
"Come in."
It came in. It went past him down the passage without looking back, touching the wall as it went.
After that it went on through the afternoon. They came to the threshold and he said the same thing to each of them, and most of them did it. Faces went down onto the slope one after another: an old man's, a soldier's, a child's with a gap in its teeth. The jinn under them came in thin, bewildered, some of them weeping in the way jinn weep, without salt. He let in a Marid who had once sat on his council. He let in two Ifrit who would not meet his eyes and a ghul who stank of the road's graves and asked, at the threshold, whether there was work.
One did not.
It stood at the door in the face of a dead imam, a heavy kind face with a white beard, and it spoke in the imam's voice, unhurried, as if from a pulpit.
"You've grown pious, Marid."
Soren said nothing.
"They're saying you stood in a row in Damascus behind a lot of praying jinn, with your hands at your sides like a boy at his first lesson." It smiled with the imam's mouth. "Is that the new law?"
"Take off the face, or go."
It went. It turned and went back down the slope still wearing the imam, and at the bottom it stopped, and looked up at him, and then it was gone over the ridge. Soren watched the place where it had been for some time. Beside him the gallery elder let out a breath.
"Is it true?" said the young one with the faint face.
It had not gone far down the passage. It stood a few paces in, with one hand still on the wall, and it was looking at him.
"In Damascus. Did you pray with them?"
"I stood behind them," Soren said. "I didn't know the words."
The young one considered that. Then it nodded, as if it had been told something useful, and went on down toward the galleries.
The light went orange on the slope and then grey. The faces lay all down it in the dust, dozens of them, like masks after a festival. The line had thinned to nothing. The gallery elder shifted his grip on the bar, waiting for the word to draw the fold shut for the night.
Soren did not give it. He did not know why. He stood in the door and looked down the slope into the dusk, as he had looked down the passage on the day the Dajjal walked out, with no plan for what lay beyond it.
He thought of Nessar in the outer gallery in Damascus, asking him whether a jinn who had never asked forgiveness could still ask now. Soren had told him the only thing he knew, that the rows overhead had never once sent him away. Nessar had been quiet a long time after that. Then the last of him had gone into the dark of the vault, and if he had asked, he had asked where Soren could not hear.
Something was coming up the slope.
It came slowly, in its own shape. It was a Jann of no great height, grey with road dust from head to foot, with no face in its hands and none on its head but its own. Halfway up it stopped by the place where the imam's face had not been dropped, and looked at the faces lying in the dust, and stepped round them.
Soren knew him by that, by the care of it, before he knew anything else.
Tamar came to the threshold and stopped where the others had stopped. He was thinner. There was a cut across one forearm that had closed badly. He did not ask for the Cave's protection, or say anything at all. He stood in the dusk and looked at Soren, and Soren looked at him, and the fold of the door hung open between them.
Soren stepped back from the threshold to make room.
Tamar came in. He went past Soren and past the gallery elder without a word, down the long trough of the passage worn by twelve centuries of jinn coming home, and Soren watched him go until the dark of the passage took him.
"Draw them," he said.
The bars went across, one by one. The fold of the door thickened and grew opaque, and the slope and its faces were gone. Soren stood with his hand on the cold of the last bar.
From far down in the Cave, from the direction of the eastern seep, he heard the hum begin.