The carrier came through the gate on his knees, and the gate let him.
Rahma the Sila saw it from the white stones of the threshold, where she had sat with the night watch since the night prayer. On the seen side the gate at Nasibin was an old spring at the head of a riverbed that had been dust since the second dry summer, with plastic bags caught in the dead reeds and a dog asleep in the hollow where the water used to come up. On the side humans do not see, the spring still breathed, cool, like the mouth of a cellar, and it was a door. It had been a door before there was a town. Her people had held it longer than anyone on the council could count, and they held it the way their grandfathers had taught them. Whoever came with lawful business went through. Whoever came to do harm found that the spring was only a hole in the ground.
This one had found it a door. That was the first thing she knew about him.
He was a Jann, young, from the river tribes of the south by the cut of his shape, and he was spent. She had seen spent jinn before. This was worse. He was thin to the edges and grey where he should have been bright, like a coal on the side away from the bellows. He crawled over the line of white stones and lay down with his cheek on the stones.
Awf the Ifrit got up from the lip of the old spring with a lamp in his good hand and the record cord over his shoulder. The gatekeeper had kept the gate six hundred years and moved like it. He held the lamp over the carrier and looked a long time.
"Water," he said.
Rahma brought it. The carrier drank with both hands, like a child, and spilled most of it down himself.
"Name and business," Awf said, when the bowl was empty. It was the gate's question, asked of princes and of thieves in the same voice, and his thick fingers waited on the cord for the answer.
"Of the lower river." The carrier did not give a name. "Business, I don't know. I want to go home. My own people's gate won't take me."
"Why not?"
The carrier looked at the lamp and not at either of them.
"I carried for the sea gate."
Behind Rahma, along the threshold, the watch went still.
He told it lying down, because he could not sit up.
There was a gate on a shore in the west, held by a household of devils. Since last summer it had been taking living humans across. Not stolen ones. Paying ones, in companies, with cockerels and ewes and their own water in drums. From the gate they had to cross the open water to a rock past the edge of things, and the gate's own people could not carry them all, so it hired guides. It paid a season's table rights for one crossing. He had been hungry. Everyone on the lower river was hungry. Fewer houses left a pot unnamed since the wave, and the tables had thinned.
"I took six across in the autumn," he said. "Old men, mostly, in good coats. One had a stick. They were sick on the water the whole way. I wasn't let past the landing. You don't go past the landing. But you can see from it."
"See what?" Awf said.
"Tables. Long ones, laid out on the black rock, no name on any of them. Smoke from the slaughter. And the humans kneeling in rows, all facing the same way, into the haze." He stopped. His hands moved on the stones. "Something was in the haze. You could feel it pull. Like water going down a drain, and you on the edge of it. It was eating. Not the meat. The kneeling. Every time they put their foreheads down it pulled harder."
Rahma found that she had put her own hand flat on the stone, as if the ground might tilt.
"Did you go back?" Awf asked.
"Last month. Once more. There were jinn from the Cave on the beach by then, sitting on the stones, waiting to be hired." The carrier shut his eyes. "Then I came here. I couldn't go home with it on me."
Awf set the lamp down. He did not tell the boy he had done well, and he did not tell him he had done wrong. He tied no knot for him. He told him to sleep in the hall under the gate, and two of the watch lifted him and carried him down.
When they had gone, the gatekeeper stood with Rahma on the threshold and looked out at the dry riverbed.
"Six nights ago," he said, "a company came to this gate asking to buy passage outward. Not for themselves. For one who would come out the other way, within the year. A great one, they said, and his court. They offered more than this tribe's tables bring in ten years." He picked a dead reed off the stones and turned it in his fingers. "We sent them away. They laughed. Devils laugh when you refuse them, as if you'd made a mistake they'll enjoy later."
"You didn't tell the council."
"I told the council. The council told me to wait and see what else came through." He looked down the steps to the hall. "This came through."
"Where do I go?"
"The Cave. He says the Cave's young were on that beach."
Rahma said nothing for a moment. In the summer before the wave she had gone to the Cave with the council's word and stood in a small chamber in front of the old Marid, and he had heard her out politely and given her a road the Cave would not use against them, and kept the Cave apart, as it had always kept itself apart.
"He didn't hear me last time," she said.
"Then say it better." Awf dropped the reed into the riverbed. "Go at first light."
It took her four gates and the long dark between them, and she came to the mouth of the Cave on the second night with her strength worn thin.
Ithra the Sila was waiting at the threshold, in her own shape, as if she had known. Perhaps she had. The Cave's gatekeepers recorded who came in, and word went up the stair faster than any messenger.
"You came back," Ithra said.
"You told me to. When he could hear."
Ithra looked at her for a moment with the tired, level look Rahma remembered. Then she turned and walked up the long passage, and Rahma followed.
"He's been sitting with a strip of gate record for a week," Ithra said over her shoulder. "Reading it. He doesn't read anything for a week. Let's find out."
The gallery was cold, and the shaft in its roof held a small square of night. Jinn sat in the niches along the walls. Soren sat in his place with his hands on his knees and a pale folded strip on the stone beside him.
Rahma stopped at the proper distance. She gave the greeting of peace, and he returned it in full. Then she gave the message the way messengers of Nasibin are taught to give a message. She gave the council's words first, exactly, and then the carrier's words, exactly, in the order she had heard them, without adding a word of her own. The gate in the west. The paying companies. The guides. The landing, the tables, the rows facing into the haze. The pull. The devils at the Nasibin gate six nights ago, asking passage outward for a great one and his court, within the year.
When she had finished she waited for him to thank her and send her down the stair.
He did not move. He was looking at the bare floor under the shaft, where the noon light would lie tomorrow.
"Your carrier," Soren said. "Did he see a name? A mark on a drum, anything."
"No names. Old men in good coats. One with a stick."
Soren unfolded the strip beside him with one hand and laid it on the stone so that she could see it. It was a gate record, pressed in the old way. She could not read the hand. He put his finger on one place in it and left it there.
"Eleven humans crossed the night before the wave," he said, "on an account in this name. The man who opened it is dead. I watched him closed." He took his finger away. "Your council refused passage outward."
"Yes."
"Then they will look for another door." He said it the way a man says the river is high. He did not say what he would do about it. He was quiet so long that one of the old ones in the niches shifted, and Ithra, by the wall, did not.
"How big?" Soren asked.
Rahma gave him the carrier's words, as she had been given them.
"The first time, in the autumn, its head was up in the haze. Above the smoke. He couldn't see the top of it."
"And last month?"
"Last month he could see its face."