The gallery elder drew the last bar back, and Soren came in out of the dark with the words turning in him.
He held them the way he had held the discipline of return at the bottom of the weave, like a bead between two fingers, afraid to put them down in case they rolled away. The Opening. The words for the bowing. The words for the prostration, and for the sitting after it. He had them in order. He had had them in order since an hour after the night prayer in the cistern under Damascus, and he had said them over to himself the whole way home through the layers, and they were still there.
Hisham came in behind him and stood in the passage looking down the long trough of worn stone, the way a guest looks at a house he has heard about for years.
"It's deeper than ours," the Ifrit said.
"It's older."
"That isn't the same thing."
The gallery elder looked from one of them to the other and drew the bars shut and said nothing.
Soren had gone to Damascus to ask. He had gone out through this door before dawn two days before without telling the deputies where, because he had not known how to say it. He had found Hisham by the forty columns and said, plainly, that he did not know the words, and asked to be taught them. Hisham had not laughed. He had sat Soren down on the stone platform above the water between a Hinn child and a human boy from the quarter overhead who were learning the same thing, and he had taught the three of them together, one verse at a time, saying each line in Arabic and making them say it back. The child had learned it first. The human boy had learned it second. Soren had been last, by a long way, and the child had corrected him twice.
He had known these words once. Eight hundred years ago, before the Cave and the councils and the law, he had said them five times a day without thinking. Then there had been the leadership, and the hours had filled, and he had stopped one season meaning to start again the next. He had not started again. The words had gone the way a craft goes out of a hand that stops using it.
They had come back slower than he had lost them. But they had come.
Ithra was in the unrecovered hall with the ember in her hand.
She was sitting on the stone below the deep wall, with the keeper's lamp beside her, and she did not get up when he came in. She looked at him the way she had looked at him across nine centuries, a look that did not soften and missed nothing. He thought she had probably been sitting there all night.
"You went to Damascus," she said.
"Yes."
"To learn the words."
It was not a question. She had read it off him at the door, the way she read everything.
"Yes."
She held out her hand and opened it. Naim's ember lay on a twist of blue cloth, dark and smooth, the length of the top joint of a thumb. He had carried it from the dry riverbed under the broken bridge to the gallery under Damascus, and given it to her there when he could not carry it any further, and she had brought it home.
He took it. It was a little warmer than the air of the hall.
The keeper lifted his lamp to the wall. Kael's jewel was back in its niche at the height of a standing Jann's shoulder, green and small and cold, catching the light. A hand's width to the left of it was the other niche, the larger one, with the dust of decades in it and nothing at all on its lip.
Soren looked at it for a long time.
"I told you not to cut it."
"You did."
He did not say anything else about it. He reached up and set the ember in the niche, on the old dust, beside his ward's jewel. It sat there dark next to the green.
Then he said the name once, aloud, in the cold of the hall, as the rite required.
"Naim."
He did not say anything after it. The rite asked for nothing after it. The keeper stepped forward with his little iron tool and began, slowly, to cut the name into the blank lip of the niche, and Soren stood and listened to the scratch of it until it was done.
The call came while he was still standing there.
It came from the long hall, above them, and it came down through the stone of the Cave the way the human city's call had come down to him for eight centuries, thinned by rock. But it was nearer than the city. It was inside. Soren turned his head before he knew he was turning it.
The keeper was no longer beside him. Soren had not heard him go.
He went up. Ithra went with him. In the long hall the lamps had been lit along both walls, and in the cleft high in the roof where the Cave opened on the upper world, a grey had begun that was not lamplight yet. At the head of the hall, on the old step where the tribes' speakers stood to address the gathering, the keeper of the niches stood with his bent back and his hands raised to his ears, giving the call to prayer in Arabic.
Soren had never heard him do it. Nobody in the Cave had. He stood at the foot of the hall and listened to the old voice go up into the dark of the roof, cracked and steady. Allah is the greatest. Come to prayer. Prayer is better than sleep.
They were coming in from the galleries. The returned jinn from the road came first, thin and grey and faintly drawn, some of them still touching the walls as they walked. The young Jann who had asked him at the door whether he prayed came in with them and looked at him once and looked away. Cave jinn came after, more than he would have guessed, from the cistern hall and the western galleries and the deep rooms: a Marid who had sat on his council for three hundred years, a family of Ifrit who argued about passages, the patroller who had brought him the jewel. Tamar came up from the eastern seep with his forearms wet.
They washed at the seep. The water came down the rock in its thin skin and filled the stone lip and ran over, and they went to it one by one and washed in the order Soren had learned in the cistern the night before, hands and mouth and face and arms and head and feet, and the floor of the gallery went dark with the water they spilled.
Soren washed with them. He took his time and got the order right.
Hisham went to the front, alone, below the step where the keeper had stood. The rows formed behind him. Soren did not go to the front. He had stood at the front of this hall for eight hundred years and never once like this, and the place at the front belonged to the one who knew the words best. He went into the second row and stood where there was room. Tamar was on his right. The young returned Jann was on his left, so close their shoulders touched. Behind him he heard the rows go on filling, and somewhere at the back, with the others, Ithra.
Hisham raised his hands and said in Arabic that Allah is the greatest.
Soren raised his hands.
He stood through the Opening, and this time he knew it from inside. He stood through the passage Hisham recited after it, which he did not know, and let it go past him like water. When the rows bowed, he bowed, with his hands on his knees and his back level, and said what Hisham had taught him to say. When they straightened, he straightened.
Then the rows went down.
He went down with them. His knees found the stone. His palms found it, flat, on either side of his head, and then his forehead, and the cold of the Cave's floor came up into his face, the old mineral cold he had sat on for eight centuries and never once put his face to. He said in Arabic, with the rows around him saying it, glory be to my Lord, the Most High. He said it three times. Tamar's shoulder was against his on one side and the young Jann's on the other, and the whole hall was down on the stone together, and nobody was standing over them.
He opened his eyes against the floor.
Beside his right hand, on the stone, lay his shadow. The lamps along the wall had thrown it out long and heavy across the floor, as long as his body, as heavy as anything that size must be. It reached under Tamar's knee and over the wet print of the young Jann's palm. He looked at it for the space of one breath, the way he had not let himself look at it since the fifth descent.
It was as dark as the lamplight made it, and no darker.