Declare

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