Declare

Ishmael stepped down from the saddle to the sand. His hand brushed the rifle stock that swung by his hip, but he left the weapon slung over his shoulder.

Hale noted the instinctive gesture and bared his teeth behind the flap of his kaffiyeh. The rifle could be of no use against something made of water and wind. The makeshift tinfoil ankh would have been a comfort-but he told himself that this djinn was apparently confined to this water, and probably diminished in power.

Ishmael had plodded several steps down the sand slope from the crest, and his robe was suddenly flapping as he stepped into the localized whirlwind. He scowled back over his shoulder at Hale. "Come over here!" he snapped in Arabic.

Hale took a deep breath. "Aye aye," he said hoarsely in English, boosting himself down from his saddle. The crusty sand was jagged under the soles of his bare feet, and he walked carefully down the slope to halt beside the old man. He was squinting now against the flying sand.

With a crash that almost made him jump back, the crudely formed eyes and lips broke apart into spray like wave-tops sheared by a gale, and for several seconds the space for ten feet above the pool was blackly opaque with whirling water; it looked like glittering smoke and hissed and crackled like a heavy rainstorm.

The separating and reforming sheets of black water were whipping past only a few yards in front of Hale's face, and the reek of sulfur filled his head. His knees were shaking-it was a moment-by-moment struggle for him not to break and run away.

Beside him, Ishmael called out in Arabic, "O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?" Though loud, his voice was thin against the wind.

Abruptly the spray fell back, and the black water was a rushing whirlpool now, with a column of steam spinning above a tapering hole in the center. And from the wobbling hole echoed a deep oily voice like shale plates sliding in a cave: "Return, and we return," it said in Arabic. The funnel of water shook as the steam was sucked down into it, and then the voice said, "Keep faith, and so will we."

Hale's heart was thudding in his chest, and he knew that it was fear that had narrowed his vision and made his fingertips tingle, but with an electric exhilaration he knew too that there was no place on earth where he would rather be right now. He was sure that after this was over he would forget, as he had forgotten before-but in these rare moments of confronting the supernatural he always surprised in himself a craving to get farther in, to participate knowledgeably in this perilous, vertiginous, most-secret world.

Irregular ridges like spokes whirled around the gleaming hole now, giving the pool the appearance of a rapidly turning black glass wheel. Again the big voice rang the air: "Is this...the son?"

Ishmael croaked, "You tell me, O Djinn."

With another crash the water exploded as if something big had plummeted into it, and when it had fallen back like glittering coal it smoothed out into the crude amphibian-like head again, veiled with hissing bursts of steam. In the silt-streaked swell the two gleaming black domes stared straight into Hale's eyes, with nothing but fixed attention. While the thing was focusing on him in this way, Hale's thoughts were a fluttering scatter of speculation and alarm and excitement, like a radio receiver picking up too many bands at once.

The two lip-like ridges separated with a splash, and from the yard-wide gap between them the basso profundo voice sang to Hale, "O man, I believe you are the son." White clouds of steam blasted away into the blue sky with each syllable.

Hale couldn't think of anything to say-but he was able to recall the old rule, Never startle them, never reason with them-and so he simply echoed Ishmael. "You tell me, O Djinn."

Ishmael was speaking again, desperately: "We think he is. He will tonight be flying west over the sands, to the western sea. Your brothers and sisters are awake, but they will not approach him-"

The black globes collapsed and then bulged up from the convex surface again, and when they had cleared of silt they were palpably focused on the old man, and Hale was once more able to think. Whose son did they believe he was? Did they mean it literally? Could the Rabkrin, and this elemental creature, know something of Hale's actual father?-but a moment later he was distracted by the flat crack of a rifle shot behind him; and as he turned to look back he heard two more shots.

The five mounted Bedu were looking away from the spring, toward the southeast, and Hale saw that bin Jalawi had the BAR rifle in his hands. Looking beyond them, Hale was able to see on that horizon a cluster of moving dots that were mounted men, not mirage.

If the strangers were friendly, they would soon be waving their head-cloths in the air and then dismounting to toss up handfuls of sand.

So far they were not doing it.

"'Al-Murra?" asked Hale nervously, unable to keep himself from glancing back at the pool. The bulbous approximations of eyes and lips had broken up into churning random shapes below the curls of vapor. "Manasir?"

"As much as our party is Mutair, probably," Ishmael said in a flat voice. "But they're KGB-or conceivably Mossad, or the French SDECE. We have no time." He tugged back the fluttering flap of his kaffiyeh, and his exposed face was gray. "Bin Jalawi!" the old man shouted.

Hale's friend looked away from the unknown riders, toward the pool, and goaded his camel into a fast walk this way when Ishmael beckoned.

Ishmael's raised arm swept down with surprising weight onto Hale's shoulder, turning him back around to face the djinn in the pool.

"Say 'I break it now,'" the old man hissed in Hale's ear.

Hale crouched, clawing the sand and digging in with his toes-for an instant he thought he was about to fall into the pool-and then he realized that the nearest ten-foot quadrant of it had tilted up more than forty-five degrees, like a slanted glass bunker wall. Steaming black spray was fringing away along the rounded top and sides of the raised section of water, and as he watched, the smoothly convex surface began churning in a dozen concave vortices.

Hale straightened up dizzily, but Ishmael's hand was bearing down on his shoulder.

"Kneel," said Ishmael's voice urgently.

The vortices deepened into holes like clarinet bells, and as steam puffed out of the deep chambers, a dozen deep voices in unison said, "My name is Legion. Worship us." Two, then three of the holes combined into a bigger one.

Break it now, Hale thought as his heart thudded like a hammer in his chest. You've been coat-trailing for the opposition, and it's worked, they've been fooled so far, they've picked you up. They've at least provisionally bought into your role as a renegade ex-Declare agent. Live your role, "Know, not think it." And...

And it would be membership, initiation, a way to get leagues farther in! What on earth-or above it or under it!-might you not learn, and become able to do, if you obey this creature or cluster of creatures and kneel to it, prostrate yourself before it? What kingdoms in the clouds...