Memory

Chapter 14

We left our bikes alongside the path and walked up the moss-covered stairs that led to the temple’s open doors. I was surprised at the dull thump of our footsteps on the stair, as if it was made of hollow plastic. An angled roof covered the small stoop, sheltering it from the rain and shading the double doors so that instead of moss, their plain panels were covered with a slimy black algae that came away on my fingers when I made the mistake of touching it. The doors were pinned against the wall with blackened hooks.

Twilight was falling over the forest, but within the temple night had already come. Liam used a flashlight to chase back the shadows, revealing a modest hall bare of any furnishing. The massive trunks of two trees grew up through the floor, disappearing past neat collars set into the ceiling. Water—presumably from the rain—trickled down their rough bark and out of sight. The floor was a slick of black algae, except where that one resolute path made its way straight across the room, vanishing into a hallway beyond. Moki sniffed at the floor, his tail wagging furiously.

“Nobody home?” Liam wondered.

Udondi addressed the question to the house. “Hello? Anyone here?” Her voice reverberated from hard surfaces. There was no response.

I shrugged, too tired to feel much fear. “If there’s any comfort to be found here, it’ll be at the end of this path. Come on.”

The floor was slick. I almost went down before I figured out how to walk flat-footed. “Hold on, Jubilee,” Liam said. “Let me go first, I’ve got the light.”

The path took us through a hallway, then into a round chamber crowded with four massive tree trunks. Rain was drumming on the roof now, and little freshets of water raced down the trunks, trickling into drains in the floor. Everything was damp, and the chamber smelled the way chronically damp things do: of mildew and moldering. Still, it was warmer in here than it had been in the hall and when we stepped past the first great tree trunk it was clear why: four huge gold coils spiraled up from battery pots set into the floor. They gave off a cheerful heat so that in the center of the room the air seemed light to breathe, though its smell reminded me of burnt mulch.

This, apparently, was where the resident had chosen to live, for between the heating coils was a bed with a sagging mattress, a bench, a battered table, a tiny stove, and an ill-designed sink served by a pipe laid right across the floor.

I collapsed onto the bench. Udondi leaned past me to touch a quartz-paned lamp that sat on the table. It blushed to life, reducing Liam’s flashlight to an inconsequential role.

I looked about at the pathetic furnishings, and at last a healthy doubt began to assert itself. If this truly was a temple, why was it on no map? Why was it so empty of everything except an abject poverty? “Maybe Liam was right,” I said softly. “Maybe this is only the ruin of a failed temple.”

Liam answered from the darkness beyond the heaters. “A nice theory, but there’s a thriving kobold well here that disputes it.”

“You found a well?” I was on my feet in a moment, despite my fatigue, hobbling into the shadows where Liam was crouched beside a waist-high ring of sour-smelling soil as coarse as worm castings. The mound shivered and trembled as kobolds by the hundreds crawled aimlessly through the surface layers. Inside the ring the well was a dark, unfathomable circle. The air above it was cold.

“Listen,” Udondi said softly. She stood at the doorway, Moki beside her, his ears pricked as he stared down the hall.

After a second I heard it too: a sound of low, mournful singing, just at the threshold of hearing.

Udondi said, “I think the keeper returns.”

We put the light out, and returned to the front door to wait.

The mist-shrouded twilight had given way to true darkness in the few minutes we had been inside. Neither the light of any star nor the gleam of Heaven could reach down through the clouds that shrouded the Kalang Crescent that night. Neither was there any stir of wind, nor whisper of leaf against leaf, but everywhere the endless soft pattering of rain on yielding moss.

I crouched on the stoop, too tired to stand, holding Moki gently by the scruff so he would not charge. The singer’s voice drifted through the trees. It was a man’s voice, and the song he sang was soft and sad, and full of loneliness, though the words were of a language I did not know, and that did not move any memory in me. A light appeared through the mist, a blurred golden spot jostling along the mud path, revealing nothing of the one who held it.

We waited in silence while the light advanced to the gate, where it stopped. Had the singer seen the tracks our bikes had left on the mud path? Or had he sensed our presence some other way? A scent, or a strange warmth in the air of bodies passing…

How long had he been alone? How long, with his world never changing?

Udondi stepped forward then, deliberately scuffing her boots against the slick stair. “Greetings, Keeper,” she called in a voice that was clear but soft.

The light rose higher in the air, as if the keeper had lifted it to extend its reach, and for the first time I could see a large, looming shadow behind it.

Udondi said, “We are three strangers on your doorstep at twilight, seeking shelter from the silver.”

Those are the traditional words used in stories of old to gain entrance to a temple. I couldn’t remember any visitor to Temple Huacho ever being so formal, but of course our hospitality was never in question.

“Mari?” the singer asked, his voice oddly hoarse as with some wretched hope. Then, speaking in the language we all knew, “Mari, is it you? Did you find your youth? Have you come home at last?”

Udondi answered him, “Alas, Keeper, none of us are your Mari.” Then she turned to Liam and murmured, “Hand me the flashlight.” He passed it to her. She turned it on, and held it high so its light shone down on us. “I am Udondi Halal, this is Liam Panandi, and this, Jubilee Huacho.”

“Are you wayfarers?”

“It’s only that we have business in the desert to the east.”

He came forward then, into the gleam of the light, and I could see he was a player big enough to fill the boots whose tracks we had seen—taller than me and Liam by a head and shoulders, and almost wider than the three of us put together. He wore a hat with a great, flat brim, and a long green raincoat that whispered as he moved.

But despite his size, and despite a neatly trimmed black beard that furred the lower half of his face, he looked a boy, his features youthful and rounded and smooth. If not for that beard, I would have guessed him even younger than me, a husky adolescent just reaching his full growth. The beard looked like stage costuming.

He examined us in turn, and his confusion was that of a child. “She said she would come back.” His worried eyes looked first at Udondi, and then Liam. Next he turned to me, and hope touched him. “I never saw her when she was young. Are you sure…?”

“She is not Mari,” Udondi said quickly. “She is Jubilee Huacho.”

“And she is no wayfarer,” Liam added. “She is mated.”

“I am not,” I snapped. “Not yet.”

The boy-man chuckled at this, showing an elusive maturity, though he still did not seem convinced. He studied me, as if hoping I would reveal some habit or gesture to prove I was his lost Mari after all. This annoyed me. I was exhausted and still sick, and I didn’t want to defend myself against the ghost of a woman long gone.

So I let Moki go, and rising to my feet, I said, “You don’t look old enough to have ever known a lover.”

“Oh, but I am.” He rubbed at his damp forehead with the tips of pale white fingers, as if trying to rouse some memory. “I’m older than I look. My name, it’s… Nuanez Li. And… and…” He frowned. “I am the temple keeper. I have been, since she went away. A long time, now. There are words I’m supposed to say when players come. I know there are, but… what were they? What?” He shook his head in utter mystification. “Anyway, all of you are welcome here. Not that there’s any silver to hide from. I’ve never seen it here. Not once. But you’re welcome…” He snapped his fingers, looking at us in sudden triumph. “All travelers are welcome! Those are the words. ‘All travelers are welcome at Temple Li!’ Well. It has been a very long time since any have come.”

We brought the bikes inside to get them out of the rain. Then we returned to the well room, which was the only room Nuanez Li used anymore. He had gone in ahead of us, and we found him waiting there with the light turned on, looking forlorn as he stood before the open door of a small cabinet. “There’s only kibble,” he said softly. “It’s not fresh.”

Kibble is a wayfarer’s food, made of a strain of kobold that can eat almost anything organic. The kobold’s body swells into a marble-sized pellet of protein. Then the head and legs die and fall off, leaving a protein pellet encased in a sweetened carbohydrate shell. Kibble can last for months, and apparently that was how Nuanez cultivated it: in large batches in a back room of the temple whenever he could get the carcass of a wild calf, or gather enough fallen leaves to make a compost heap.

“We have other food,” Liam said. “If you’ll permit it, we’d be honored to provide dinner tonight.”

Nuanez looked close to tears at this suggestion, and I could not tell if it was because he felt ashamed, or because he was moved to be with other players again. Liam nodded, pretending Nuanez had assented. Then he went to fetch our road packets from the bikes and Nuanez went with him.

When they came back Nuanez carried all the packets himself, looking as pleased as a child on his birthday. He sat beside me at the table and sorted through them again and again, admiring the labels, and the listed contents. Liam encouraged him to choose whichever he wanted and that took another ten minutes until finally I said I should cover his eyes and let him pick blindly. He agreed that would be best and afterward he ate with his eyes closed, and a look of bliss upon his face. None of us had the heart to disturb him, so it was a silent dinner, requiring only a few minutes to finish.

Afterward I forced myself up. Leaning past Liam, I put my hand on his flashlight. “I’m going to get our things off the bikes.”

He looked up at me, and the look in his eyes made me remember that we had not finished our business of the afternoon. Udondi saw it too. She leaned across the table, distracting Nuanez with questions about the structure of the temple. “Oh, aye,” Nuanez said. “It’s all plastic, compiled of carbon harvested from the air…”

I took the flashlight and left. I did not look back. Shadows retreated ahead of me in the hallway and I heard Nuanez ask, “Where are they going?” Udondi answered something I could not understand and Moki’s claws scrabbled at the floor as he hurried to catch up.

I listened for Liam following me, but he moved like a cat, silent. Saying nothing. When I could stand it no longer I turned about in the hall sending the shadows jumping up the mildewed walls. “I had to do something!”

He was six paces behind me, looking as angry as he’d been that afternoon, as if he’d packed the emotion away, only to pull it out again, still fresh. “You didn’t thinkI’d do something?”

“I’m not the kind of player to wait for someone else.”

“If you don’t learn to think first, Jubilee, to think ahead, you’re not going to last out here. It’s as simple as that.”

I nodded. “I made a mistake, Liam. I know that.”

He watched me, as if waiting for something more. “What? No promise it won’t happen again?”

“I can’t promise that.”

“So you’re honest.” He held out his hand. “Give me the flashlight.”

It was his, so I handed it to him. He went past me, into the front hall where we had left the bikes. “Liam, I am sorry.”

He was already throwing open the saddle boxes, pulling out the sleeping bags, and our savants. “I don’t want to die out here. I don’t want you to die.”

“We aren’t going to die.”

“Spend a few months on the road, and you won’t sound so confident when you say that.”

He was in no mood to make peace. So I took my savant and went out on the stoop to call my mother, but I could not get a signal, not even when I floated the savant high on a wire line. Liam came out to watch. “No luck?”

I shook my head. “Either the district antennas are down or there are no district antennas.”

“That last, I’d guess.”

Moki was running about in the rain. I whistled for him, trying hard to hold on to an artificial calm. At Temple Huacho we had often lost our market connection, but never before had I been prevented from calling home if I was away. What was going on there? Did they need me? Would I ever know?

It came to me that I might find Jolly, and that I might take him back to Kavasphir only to find that our home, Temple Huacho, had been lost: fallen to ruins at the hands of some cessant cult, or washed away by the silver, and all that we loved in this world gone.

“She’ll be all right,” Liam said as if he had heard my heart. “Your mother is good at taking care of things.”

“She is. I know it.”

But Kaphiri was a hazard altogether different from any she had faced before.

Back in the well room, Udondi saw things in a more positive light. “If you can’t get a link out of here, neither can the worm.”

That was true. So it was possible nothing was known of our activities since we’d left the Kalang’s western rim. If we could get rid of the worm before we left the Crescent’s eastern spur, we might still stand a chance of slipping away undiscovered.

I laid out my sleeping bag beside one of the heating coils. Then I checked that my rifle was loaded. “How can we stop the worm?” I wondered aloud. “Would a shot to the head do it?”

Nuanez had heard the story of the worm from Udondi. “Depends on the design,” he said. “Some mechanics have intelligence in every segment. Do you want to sleep in my bed?”

I glanced at his sagging mattress—“No thank you; this is fine”—and crawled inside my bag before he could insist.

Liam said, “The metallophores could still work. Or maybe we could take it in a noose.”

“No,” I said. “If you noose it, the worm would only split into segments and escape.” I pulled the bag over my shoulders, grateful for the nearby heating coil.

“Maybe it could be noosed about the head,” Nuanez said.

“It has only one set of eyes,” Liam mused. “That probably means the intelligence is local to the head.”

“So a head shotmight work,” I mumbled as a lethargy crept over me. The room grew distant, and yet I didn’t fall asleep. Or if I did, it was only a half sleep in which the voices of the others continued to play inside my mind, their soft words wrapped around a whiskey smell. I guessed it was Udondi who’d produced the liquor, because I never knew Liam to carry it. I listened to their low voices, and after a while it was mostly Nuanez who spoke, his words building the shape of his life in my half-waking mind.

Long ago he had come to the Kalang Crescent with his lover, and together they had made this temple around a kobold well they discovered freshly born from the ground. A lifetime spent in that horrible forest! I could not imagine it, yet Nuanez spoke fondly of his past. He had been happy, and I can only think his lover Mari had been happy too. There had been twenty-six children, though one daughter was lost to the forest mechanics when she was five. Nuanez still was bitter: “Kalang—whoever he was—was a fool to leave them here. Now it’ll take a silver flood to be rid of them.”

In time the children grew up and one by one they went away. “I hope some of them found lives out there,” Nuanez said, a faraway note in his voice. “Anyway, none came back.”

But Nuanez did not look old enough to have even one child. I wondered if he might be the youngest son after all, left on his own after some terrible accident, his loneliness driving him to re-create a life history of love and family bonds. “How is it you look so young?” I asked.

They all turned to me with startled faces. Then Liam chuckled. “Jubilee, I thought you were asleep.”

“Not really.”

Nuanez eyed me with that disturbing, speculative glint he had. “Do I look young?”

Udondi answered that. “Hardly a teen.”

This pleased him. “That’ll be a relief for Mari! She wouldn’t want to come back to an old man. Ah, I miss her so much. She endured a lot to win the traveler’s favor. He was a cruel one, with never a kind word for her, but she would always gift him the best room and the best food when he came to stay.” Nuanez smiled sheepishly. “It’s hard to believe, I guess, but we kept a fine house when Mari was here. Not like now…”

“Your house is warm,” Udondi said, “and your hospitality unquestioned… but who is this traveler you speak of?” Was there an edge of excitement in her voice?

Nuanez frowned, struggling with the memory. “Did he ever have a name? If he did I don’t remember it. We called him the traveler. Or we called him nothing at all. He’s here. That’s all Mari would say when I returned in the evening from tending the wells, but I knew who she meant. He had no need of a name.

“He came the first time not long after we moved here, but even then he knew his way in the forest. He showed me kobold wells I had not found before, and he ordered me to care for them. It made my circuit very long, but I kept them well. Mari wanted me to. The traveler knew many things, and Mari loved to learn new things. Our wells must be very special, she’d say. To bring him back again and again.

“Years passed between his visits, and when he came back he always looked just the same. Mari noticed it first. He doesn’t age, she’d say.”

This startled me, and my gaze shifted to Udondi, who answered my look with a slight nod.

Nuanez went on with his story. “Mari felt her own age growing heavy on her. She had spent ninety-one years as a wayfarer. She was past one hundred when she found me. She’d been through a lot and… it made her afraid. If she died and was born again, would she have to spend another ninety years in fruitless searching? She didn’t want to die and lose what she had. So finally she gathered her courage and asked the traveler about his secret, how he had held on to his youth.

“He had always been a cruel man, but he showed her some kindness then. He told her he would help her, that she did not have to die. So she went away with him. He was going to make her young again, that’s what she told me, and then she’d come back, and we’d be together always…”

Again Udondi and I exchanged a look, and I could see she thought this traveler was Kaphiri.

Nuanez did not notice. “She’ll be surprised when she does finally come home, because I have found a way to get my own youth back, and I found it right here, in our own kobold wells. After Mari left, I had a lot of time, so I read her books, and I experimented with the kobolds and changed their configuration codes and finally I got what Mari wanted: an elixir to return youth.”

I pushed myself up on one elbow, peering at his boy-face. “So you made yourself young again.” But his youth was not the same as Kaphiri’s. The player I’d met at Temple Huacho had none of the childish look or mannerisms of Nuanez. Kaphiri had seemed not so much young, as timeless, immune to age.

“She should have come back by now,” Nuanez said, and his voice broke. His face scrunched up, so that I was afraid he would cry. “Why does it take so long?”

“Has the traveler never come back?” Udondi asked gently.

“Never. The road is dangerous, I know, and if something happened to him in some far land, then Mari might have become lost. That could be why she takes so long. But the goddess will finally guide my Mari home. I know it. The silver’s aware of all of us. Mari told me it was so, and she grew up in the mountains, so she would know.”

He snapped his fingers. “But I’m forgetting again! It’s gotten bad lately. The traveler must have known something I did not, for he never forgot anything…” Nuanez tapped his forehead. “But me… I feel stuffed with memories. Too many memories. They make me fuzzy-headed. Sometimes I feel I don’t have room in my head to think at all, but—” He stopped in midsentence, a distant look in his eyes as if he were off chasing some stray thought. Then he smiled. “Mari doesn’t like me forgetting.”

His bed creaked as he stood. He shuffled over to one of the cabinets behind the heating coil at the foot of his bed. Opening the plastic door, he bent over, and rummaged around inside. “Oh. Miracle. I’ve found it.”

When he turned around, I glimpsed a flat, greenish object half-hidden in his great hand. “This was Mari’s. When she was a girl in the mountains, it was the custom to make shrines to the goddess. If you left something valuable for the silver, sometimes something even more valuable was returned, so it was said. Well, Mari had a brother who was good at everything, while she was not so good. It sat hard with her, and one day she made a shrine and left her cat there. That cat was more precious to her than anything… except, I guess, beating her brother. She wanted the goddess to send her something powerful in trade for that cat. Well, she lost the cat, and all she got in return was this book.” He handed a little palm-sized book to Udondi, who thumbed through it curiously. “Can you read it?” Nuanez asked hopefully.

“Not a word.”

He sighed. “Neither could Mari. She never showed it to the traveler, or told him she had it, because she didn’t trust him to let her know what it was about. But before we came here she used to show it to everyone she met, hoping someone could read it.”

“Jubilee is good with these things,” Udondi said, and she passed the book to me. I accepted it eagerly. The cover was green plastic, but each inner page was a wafer of green lettered stone, the black writing tiny, compressed. I bent over it, squinting in the poor light. I knew these letters! My lips moved as I sounded out the words. “Sweet silver,” I whispered.

“Do you have it?” Liam asked.

I nodded, feeling a sudden chill. “It’s the same language used by the bogy in the ruined city.”

“You can read it?” Nuanez asked in hoarse amazement. “What does it say?”

I turned a few pages, reading words where I could. “It looks like an index of configuration codes.”

“For regrowing youth?”

“I don’t think so. It’ll take me some time to work the whole thing out, but here… and here. These seem to do with recalling memories.”

His face fell in clear disappointment. “Oh, I have too many memories already. An old man’s mind in a young man’s body and no room left for thinking.”

I frowned over the book. Had I misspoken? The codes had to do with recalling memories, yes, but not the memories of individual players. Rather, the memory of silver…

Could that be?

I glanced at Nuanez, knowing I should explain the difference, but I’d begun to covet the book. I held it against my chest. “May I read it?”

“You can have it! Didn’t I say that? Mari intended to give it to the one who could read it. She got to thinking maybe that was the reason she’d been given the book in the first place—to hold on to for another. She traded her cat for it. She wanted it to mean something. Oh, Mari. You’d be disappointed to know it was only configuration codes.”

After that the light was put out and the others slept, but I lay awake, thinking, still holding the book in my hands. Mari had traded her cat for it—the same as if I’d traded Moki. A powerful gift.

Wasthe silver aware? I riffled the book’s crisp stone pages and a light fluttered from them. A greenish light.

My eyes went wide in surprise. I huddled deeper in my sleeping bag. Then I opened the book again.

The pages made their own light, a lovely, light green glow that left the letters standing out in crisp silhouette. I turned to the first page and read the title: Known Kobold Circles. There was an introduction before the listings of configuration codes. I rubbed at my eyes and told myself to close the book and go to sleep. But the introduction was short; only a few sentences. I decided I would read that, no more. Eagerly, I started puzzling out the unfamiliar words. The meaning I gleaned was close to this:

If Ki-Faun had counted years according to the same calendar we used, then this writing was more than eight thousand years old.

Forgetting my resolve to read only the introduction, I turned the page, puzzling over the lists of configuration codes. It was too bad Ki-Faun had not bothered to explain what a kobold circle was, or for that matter a Pythagorean series. Maybe my savant would know?

I stuck my head out of my sleeping bag to whisper a quiet summons. That’s when I saw Moki standing over me, stiffly alert, his ears pricked toward the top of the tree trunk beside the heater where I had made my bed. I followed his gaze. Between the trunk and the collar that ringed the hole in the ceiling, I could just see the tiny head of the worm, glittering in the faint light of the drifting savants. Moki growled, and the worm’s head emerged a little farther. It looked at us with its empty white eyes.

I reached for my rifle. Without sitting up I raised it slowly, slowly to my shoulder. Then I lifted my head, just far enough to peer along the sight. The worm didn’t shy at my movement. It hung motionless against the tree trunk, its white eyes fixed on me… as if it was daring me to take the shot.

That first night Liam had shot it in the body, and it had immediately repaired itself, but I knew I could hit it in the head… and maybe that would finish it.

I held my breath; my finger tightened over the trigger—

Then, as if some ghost had whispered a warning in my mind, I realized what I was about to do. I would hit the worm, yes, and maybe destroy it, but the bullet would carry on into the trunk of the tree and then the forest mechanics would surely come.

I collapsed back to the floor, holding the rifle against me, my eyes closed and a cold sweat beading my skin. Sweet silver. I had nearly repeated my mistake of this afternoon. I could hear Liam again, his disappointment, Learn to think first, Jubilee.

He didn’t trust me. I wasn’t sure anymore I trusted myself.

I laid the rifle on the ground. Then I looked again for the worm, but it had withdrawn. I watched for it to return. Only after a long time, did I fall asleep.