The stranger came up the dry riverbed an hour after the night prayer, walking as if the stones belonged to him, and Rahma the Sila saw his hands before she saw his face.
They were open and empty and held a little forward, the way a merchant shows a gate guard he carries nothing. She had seen a thousand pairs of hands at this gate and most of them did it. Few did it so well.
"One," she said over her shoulder.
Awf the Ifrit did not look up. He was sitting on the lip of the old spring with the record cord across his knees, the long grey cord of the gate with its thousands of small knots, and he was tying the evening's last crossing into it by feel: a Jann of the eastern tribes, going up to visit a sick cousin in Mosul, back in nine days. His fingers were thick and very slow. He had kept the Nasibin gate for six hundred years and had never once tied a knot wrong.
On the human side the spring had been dust since the second dry summer. The river that ran out of it, down through the town and across the wire into Syria, was a ditch of white stones where boys rode motorbikes. On this side the gate still breathed. Rahma felt it at her back, cool, like the mouth of a cellar.
The stranger stopped at the line of white stones that marked the threshold and bowed to Awf, and then to her, a smaller bow, correctly judged.
"Peace be upon you."
"And upon you peace," Awf said, still tying. "Your business."
"Travellers. A few dozen. Going up."
"Names."
"That is the business," the stranger said pleasantly. He was a Hinn, she thought, wearing a better courtesy than his kind usually bothered with. "They would prefer to go up without being tied into your cord. Family matters. You understand. The tribes are talking of nothing but the purge, and a jinn with a cousin in the wrong house would rather not be counted this month."
Awf finished his knot. He laid the cord down beside him, coil on coil.
"Where are they going?"
"North. The towns along the wire. A few to the river cities."
"To do what?"
"To visit."
"For how long?"
The stranger smiled at Rahma, as if she would see the joke even if the old one didn't. "Longer than nine days. They would pay for that too. A table right in the Mosul markets, the old covered one, in perpetuity. Or a debt we hold over the eastern Jann, cancelled in your name. Your people have not been rich since your grandfathers' time. I am told the roof of your prayer hall leaks."
It did leak. Rahma had held the bowl under it herself in the winter.
"Every gate sells," the stranger said. "The sea gate sells. The gate under the salt flats sells to anyone with a coin."
"Then go by the sea," said Awf.
"The sea takes a third of them."
"Then they are not visiting cousins," Awf said, and for the first time looked up, "because no one sends his family a road that eats a third of the travellers to keep their names out of a cord."
The stranger's hands stayed open. His smile stayed on. But something at the edge of him thickened, a heat that had not been there, the way the air over a brazier thickens before the coals show red, and Rahma moved half a step so that she stood between him and the spring.
"Think about it," he said. "I'll come back."
"Come back with names," said Awf.
The council sat after the dawn prayer in the hall under the gate, eleven elders on the old mats and the rest of the tribe in rows behind them, and the bowl under the leak in the roof was dry. The leak had not dripped since November.
Rahma sat with the messengers by the wall. She had prayed the dawn prayer above, in the back row of the women's section of a mosque in Qamishli, in a shape like a schoolteacher, as she did most mornings when the watch let her. She still had the smell of that mosque on her, carpet and rosewater and the diesel of the street outside. Nobody there had ever looked at her twice. The imam was a young man with a careful voice who taught after the prayer three days a week, and she liked to hear him correct himself.
Awf told the council about the stranger in the fewest words that would carry it.
Then old Juwayriya the Jann, eldest of the messengers, who had come in from the southern relay offices the night before, told them what the clerks were saying under the talk of the purge. A boy taken on his walk home from school, in a port city in the far south. A girl of nine. Possessions starting in a hundred places at once, in houses that had never had a sorcerer through the door, and every one of them quiet and careful, with nothing to read on any record.
"Carriers," said one of the elders, and the word went round the mats.
"We don't know that."
"We know a Hinn with a merchant's manners wants a few dozen jinn up into the towns along the wire with no names on them, in the same week," said Awf. "I don't need to know more than that to know what I'd be tying into my cord if I tied it."
"The law of the gate is lawful business," said Qasim the Marid, who was the eldest, and who spoke slowly because he was choosing every word. "Lawful business through, harm turned back. It doesn't ask us to guess. We've never closed this gate to a whole kind of traveller."
"We've never been offered a whole kind."
"And if we close it, and they're only what he said? Families. Frightened of the purge."
"Then they can go up with names," said Awf, "like their grandmothers did."
Someone at the back recited under his breath, in Arabic, the verse they all knew from the chapter of the Jinn: "And among us are the righteous, and among us are [others]not so; we were [of]divided ways." Nobody said who it was meant for. Rahma thought it was meant for all of them.
Qasim put his hands flat on his knees. It took him a long time to decide, and nobody hurried him, because he had been at the gate when the Messenger of Allah was still alive among the humans, and when he decided, it stayed decided.
"Lawful business through, with names," he said. "Anyone who asks to go up unrecorded is turned back, whatever he pays. Anyone carrying for the one who sent this Hinn is turned back. Awf keeps the gate. The young ones watch the sand to the south, as far as we can reach without a gate. We don't go further than that, and we don't go hunting."
"And the roof?" somebody said.
"The roof has leaked for two hundred years," said Qasim. "It can leak for two hundred more."
Awf found her at the spring that afternoon, sitting on the white stones with her feet in the cool that came up out of the gate.
He sat down beside her, which took him some time. His left hand had been burned in the old war and did not close all the way, and he held the cord in his right.
"He came back," he said.
"With names?"
"Without. Twice. Once at noon, once an hour ago. The second time he didn't bow." Awf tied nothing. He only ran the cord through his fingers, knot by knot, the way an old man tells his prayer beads. "He went south when I turned him away. Toward the salt flats."
"Then they'll get up anyway."
"Some of them. Not through us." He was quiet a while. "It isn't enough for one gate to close. You know that."
"I know."
"Qasim wants word carried. To every tribe that will hear it. That the believing tribes have closed their gates to carriers, and why, and what Juwayriya heard in the south, and that we ask the others to do the same." He looked at her sideways. "You're the fastest we have. And you can sit in a hall full of old men and not fidget."
"Which tribes?"
"All of them. The north first, they're nearest. Then east, then west, then the southern twelve, if they'll let you through their door." He put the end of the cord into her hand and closed her fingers round it, a thing he had never done before, and then took it back. "And last, the Cave."
"Soren."
"Soren," said Awf. "If he stands with us, the rest will follow by the next new moon. If he won't, you'll want to have heard all the others first, so you know what you're asking him to give up."