The women's section of the mosque was a long room behind a wooden screen, and Rahma the Sila knelt in the last row of it, by the fan that did not work, in the shape of a schoolteacher of about forty with a grey cardigan and tired feet.
The form cost her nothing she could feel. It never had, here. She had worn it most mornings for three years and had given it a few small habits so it would not look new: a way of pushing up the sleeves, a pair of glasses she took off to read. Nobody had ever asked her name. In Qamishli that summer nobody asked anyone anything they did not need to, because everyone was busy being thirsty.
The dawn prayer was done. Through the gaps in the screen she could see the backs of the men's rows breaking up, some going out to their shops before the heat, most sitting where they were. On three mornings a week the imam taught after the dawn prayer, and on those mornings perhaps forty men stayed and a dozen women, and Rahma.
He was a young man with a careful voice. He had been teaching his way through a book of hadith since the winter, a chapter at a time, and he never skipped one because it was hard. Last week he had finished the chapter on the signs before the Hour. This morning he opened the book at a new chapter and was quiet for a moment, looking at it.
"The Dajjal," he said.
A fan turned on the men's side. Somebody's phone buzzed and was silenced. A child asleep in the women's row woke and was hushed.
One of the old men in the front laughed, a short nervous sound, and then stopped.
He read in Arabic, and then he explained, the way he always did, sentence by sentence, and Rahma listened the way she listened at council, keeping it in order.
He read that the Messenger of Allah mentioned the Dajjal one morning, and sometimes described him as insignificant and sometimes as very significant, until the companions felt as if he were in the cluster of date palms nearby. He read that the Dajjal would appear on the way between Syria and Iraq and would spread mischief right and left, and that the Messenger of Allah told the servants of Allah to adhere to the path of truth. He read that the companions asked how long he would stay on the earth, and the answer was forty days: one day like a year, one day like a month, one day like a week, and the rest of the days like their days. He read that whoever among them lived to see him should recite over him the opening verses of the chapter of the Cave.
He stopped there and put his finger on the page.
"Between Syria and Iraq," he said.
Nobody laughed this time. Qamishli was a town on the way between Syria and Iraq. Half the men in the room had cousins on the Iraqi side and trucked melons over the border road when the border let them.
"Don't make a story of it," the imam said. "People like to make it a story. Some say he won't come out until people stop thinking about him and the imams stop mentioning him from the pulpit. That report is weak, and I'm not teaching it to you as a fact. But I'm mentioning him anyway." He looked up from the book. "Learn the ten verses. Teach them to your children. That's what we were told to do, so we do it."
Then he recited the opening of the chapter of the Cave, slowly, and had them repeat it after him a verse at a time, the men's voices first and the women's after, ragged at the start and then together. Rahma said it with them. She had known it for three hundred years. She said it as if she were learning it.
When it was finished the men began to get up. The women behind the screen gathered their bags and their sandals. Rahma stayed kneeling, and when the imam came along the side of the screen toward the door, as he did every morning, she spoke through the gap.
"Sheikh. May I ask something?"
He stopped. He did not look through the screen, out of courtesy, only turned his head a little toward her voice.
"Ask."
"The warning. Is it only for people?" She chose the words as carefully as she had chosen them in Soren's chamber. "The jinn. Are they told about him too? Are they meant to run from him?"
There was a pause. She had asked him strange things before, over three years, a question every few months, about the direction of prayer on a moving ship, about whether a debt to a dead man's son was owed in full. He had always answered. He had never once asked who she was.
"I don't know," he said. "I'll tell you what I do know. The Book says a group of the jinn listened to the Quran and went back to their people." He recited it in Arabic, from the chapter of the Jinn, for her alone: "Say, [O Muhammad], 'It has been revealed to me that a group of the jinn listened and said, Indeed, we have heard an amazing Qur'an. It guides to the right course, and we have believed in it. And we will never associate with our Lord anyone.'"
He stopped.
"So they hear what we hear," he said. "When the Messenger of Allah warned, I think anyone listening was warned. More than that I won't say, because I don't know it."
"Thank you, Sheikh."
"Learn the ten verses, sister."
"I will," said Rahma, who had known them since before his grandfather's grandfather was born, and he went out into the grey street to open his brother's shop.
She walked back to the gate the long way, along the dry riverbed, because she liked the walk and because the form liked it too, the sore feet and the smell of the bakeries starting up.
The town was waking. A shutter went up. A man hosed a step with water he could not spare and then stopped, ashamed, and coiled the hose. A water truck had stopped at the end of the bridge, and a line of women with plastic cans was already longer than the truck. Boys rode a motorbike along the white stones of the river where the water used to be. On a wall someone had painted a slogan for the new government on the Iraqi side, and someone else had painted over it, and the first slogan was coming through the paint.
She had carried Soren's one sentence home in July and given it to the council in the hall under the gate, word for word, and Qasim had listened to it with his hands on his knees and said that a road not used against them was a road, and better than none. The north had stayed quiet. The wave had gone down in the south as well, in the last weeks, faster than anyone could explain, and on the roads the messengers said that the network's carriers were coming back down through the sea crossings thin and quiet and not boasting any more. Nobody knew why, and Rahma did not pretend to.
At the wire she let the form go. It went off her like a coat. She crossed in the way her people crossed, and the cool of the gate came up to meet her from the old spring, and she was on the white stones of the threshold among her own.
Awf the Ifrit was sitting where he always sat with the record cord across his knees. Two of the young watchers were coming in from the sand to the south, dusty and pleased with themselves. A family of eastern Jann were waiting with their names ready to go up for a wedding. Old Qasim the Marid had come out of the hall to sit in the cool, which he did now on mornings when the heat was bad above.
"Well?" said Awf, without looking up. "What did your imam teach?"
"The Dajjal," Rahma said.
Awf's fingers stopped on the cord. He did not look up. Neither did Qasim.
She never knew afterward which of them felt it first. It came up through the white stones and through the soles of her feet and through the old spring at her back, a long slow lift, the way a moored boat lifts when a ship has passed far off in the dark. Then it went down again.
Every jinn at the gate had turned the same way, toward the west, toward the sea that lay hundreds of kilometres beyond the hills and the wire and the dry plains. The Jann family had turned. The young watchers had turned. Awf had turned, with the cord fallen out of his hand.
Far to the west, the sea had moved.