Memory

Chapter 15

The table lamp was on again when Udondi nudged me awake. “Time to rise, wayfarer, the road awaits us.”

“You found a road?” I asked around a yawn.

She grinned. “Where we step, that is our road.”

I groaned and tried to wriggle deeper into my sleeping bag. “It’s too early to quote classics. Are you sure it’s even morning?” There was certainly no evidence of daylight in the temple’s well room. The lamp on the table burned just as it had last night, casting the same illumination. I squinted at the tree trunks, but could see no sign of the sun winking through the narrow gap in the ceiling.

“It’s morning by the clock,” Udondi assured me. “And even better the rain has stopped. Do you feel all right today? Has the worm poison finished with you?”

I considered the question. I felt tired, hungry, sore, but what else could be expected? “I feel all right.”

“Good. Come have some breakfast. We want to be ready to leave at first light.”

I gave in, and crawled out of my sleeping bag. A glance around the room showed the other bags were already gone, packed on the bikes I supposed, along with the savants. Of Liam and Nuanez and even Moki, there was no sign. “How long has everyone been up?” I asked, collapsing onto the bench beside the table.

Udondi set a bowl of kibble in front of me. “Not so long.”

They were babying me. She and Liam had probably been up for an hour, packing, and making plans. I scowled at the kibble. I didn’t want to be the cargo, the human baggage on this journey.

Udondi chided me: “The kibble will not be improved, no matter the stern looks we give it.” She put out a glass, and a pitcher of water. Then she sat down across from me. “You’ve been sick with the worm’s bite. It would have affected any of us in the same way.”

I nodded, though I couldn’t help but think she and Liam would have shown more fortitude.

I commenced my duty with the kibble, while Udondi spilled three snub-nosed bullets onto the table. Picking up the first, she opened it at the base, revealing a hollow chamber inside the ceramic jacket. Next she took out the vial of metal-eating kobolds. With ceramic tweezers she carefully transferred seven kobolds into each of the bullets, sealing them shut when she was done.

“Going worm-hunting?” I asked.

She smiled.

Liam had been out with Nuanez, scouting about for the worm. He had hoped to try a head shot. But though Moki found scent trails that excited him, he did not find the mechanic, and Liam returned with his rifle unused.

Then it was time to leave.

Nuanez stood with us on the stoop, his boy-face looking all the more forlorn for the brave smile he tried to put on. “Take care on your journey,” he told us. “It’s a long way to the end of the eastern spur. Be cautious all the way. Don’t make fires. Don’t harm the trees.” Then he turned to me, still with that questioning look in his eyes. “Keep that book close to you, Jubilee. And if you ever come back here, you must visit, and tell me if it was worth Mari’s cat.”

I thought my heart would break. “Why don’t you come with us?” I blurted. “I think you should. We’re not the perfect companions, I know. That worm’s not a pleasant shadow, but you’d probably be okay with us to the edge of the Crescent. You could use my bike. I could ride with Liam.”

“Jubilee’s right,” Liam said. “Come with us. Let the matchmakers help you find your Mari.”

Nuanez shook his head. “I thank you for your kind offer, but I can’t go. Mari and I, we made promises. She said she’d come back here, and I know she will.”

We argued with him some more, but he had his faith and he would not come. So we left him some of our food packets as a parting gift, and we said good-bye. Afterward I thought of him as a kind of ghost, for although he was not dead he did not seem truly alive either. The past owned him, and he had not the heart to ask it to let him go.

We left Temple Li heading east, but after several miles we turned in a more southerly direction. This spur of the Kalang Crescent reached deep into the desert, and it was our plan to follow it for as long as we could, but first we wanted to find our way to the remote southern side.

The Iraliad was really two deserts. The northern expanse was renowned as a harsh land, with few settlements and no permanent highways, where the silver was said to rise almost every night of the year. But the southern basin was worse. The silver storms there were so bad that few players had ever survived it, and what little was known was mostly rumor. We reasoned that if we kept to the southern escarpment, there would be no highways, and no settlements below us, and the worm would have no way to make radio contact with its masters, and give us away.

We set out in the gray light of dawn, but it wasn’t long before the sun joined us, glittering among the leaves and casting spangled shadows on the moss. With no mist among the trees it was not so easy for the worm to hide, and Liam and I glimpsed it shortly after we set out, sliding through a patch of sunlight. We both pulled our rifles, but it slipped away. Then at midmorning it was Udondi’s turn to spot it.

She was riding ahead of me when she brought her bike skidding to a stop, so that I had to pull hard to the side to avoid hitting her. She yanked her rifle from its sheath, snapped it up to her shoulder, and fired.

Hiss. Pop!

The worm was caught on the moss, less than fifty feet away. It bucked, its back rising a hand span into the air. Then it writhed, coiling into a tight knot, turning over and over until it vanished behind a tree.

Udondi slung her rifle over her shoulder and sped off after it. I followed. It took us only seconds to reach the site, but the worm was gone.

At least it had not gone away unscathed. Liam found a six-inch segment of its body, where one of the kobolds had attached. I found another, smaller segment a few feet away, and then a third. Udondi crouched over each, counting the kobolds. “Five,” she announced. “There were seven in the slug. Damn. The other two will be lost in the moss somewhere.”

“They might be with the worm,” I said. “We don’t know.”

“No. It would have dropped more segments.”

“Not if one reached the head.”

She smiled—“Then we’ll hope for that”—but I could tell she was only humoring me. She let the kobolds feed for a few minutes. Then she gathered them up and we went on.

We reached the southern escarpment just before noon. We knew we were close by the gleam of brilliant daylight growing steadily brighter beyond the massive trunks of the trees, until suddenly the trees were gone, and there was only sky.

Leaving our bikes, we walked the last few feet to the edge of the escarpment. A wind sailing up from the south poured over the cliff’s edge, whipping my hair and chilling my face. I crept up to an outcropping of rocks that stood like a guardrail at the very edge of the abyss. Gingerly, I leaned over them—and found myself facing a sheer drop of at least two thousand feet.

Bile rose in my throat. I was looking down on the world, as a bird looks, as a bat looks. As if I were flying…

But players did not fly.

Beneath the cold touch of the wind my cheeks flushed with an unwholesome heat. Players did not fly… and yet there was something familiar in this height, in the feel of the streaming wind, as if I had known such a thing before, in some dream I dared not remember. I felt suddenly guilty, as if I’d violated some essential law… but I did not retreat from the edge. Instead I leaned even farther, gazing in wonder at the cliff’s sheer face.

It looked unnatural, as if it had been chiseled by some giant hand. Here and there a few silver-barked trees clung to the rock, in defiance of the need for soil. Between the trees, moss and lichen grew in green streaks and silvery patches, but they did not soften the slope. Looking east and west I counted three waterfalls plunging in long spires of mist that turned to rain before they reached the land below. At the base of the cliff trees grew in a dense forest, but farther from the wall their ranks thinned, and soon they yielded altogether to grassy foothills that fell steeply away into a barren land of stone and brown dust. A brown haze veiled the basin, while storm clouds gathered on the horizon. Lightning flickered among them, and the streaming wind carried with it a faint growl of thunder. I was glad we would not be going down into those lands.

Liam and Udondi had retreated to the trees. I joined them, to find Udondi with her savant unpacked and balanced in her lap. “You see here,” she was saying to Liam as she tapped at the screen. “The map shows rolling foothills, blending with the plateau. There’s no hint of an escarpment like this. None at all.”

Liam frowned at the display. “Well look over here, at the elevation measures on the western side. We came up that way, and it was a lot higher than it shows. Your map is wrong.”

“You mean the Kalang Crescent isn’t supposed to be this high?” I asked.

“Not according to the cartographers who pretended to map it,” Udondi said in disgust. “Three different expeditions, according to the records, but they must have been copying each other’s work because not one of them shows a cliff like this—” and she waved her hand at the escarpment. “Which means we can’t rely on these maps to show us a way down.”

“The northern edge of the Kalang is better known,” Liam said. “And probably more accurately mapped. We’ll find a way down.”

“But finding takes time.”

I crouched beside Udondi. “How old are these maps, anyway? Maybe it’s just that the land has changed.”

She frowned at me. “Enough that the entire plateau has risen two thousand feet?”

Well, it was true I’d never heard of land changing on such a scale. Still…

“May I see the other maps?”

She shrugged, and passed the savant to me.

I studied each display, not sure what I was hoping to find. On each one the southern escarpment was shown as a steep slope, but it was not vertical, and it rose no more than a thousand feet above the surrounding land. A thousand feet, at most. On one of the maps the height was only 740 feet, while on the other it was 870. I looked at the dates and my brows rose. “Udondi!” I called. She had returned to the cliff edge, where she stood, gazing east with her field glasses. “Udondi!”

This time she heard me over the streaming wind. I beckoned her over. Liam came too. “Time to pack up,” he said. “If the terrain stays smooth, we might be able to put two hundred miles behind us by sunset, enough to bring us to the eastern tip of the Crescent.”

“First look at this.” I had the three maps displayed so they overlapped one another, with the southern cliff showing at the bottom of each. “The oldest map shows the lowest elevation… thirty two hundred years ago. The newest map shows the highest. That one’s nineteen hundred years old. The land is changing, but not so much as it seems. If it’s been rising only six inches a year, that would account for the error in the most recent map.”

Udondi and Liam traded a bemused look. “That’s a clever idea,” Udondi said diplomatically, “although I have never heard of such a thing in all the histories I’ve explored.”

“The absence of silver argues against it too,” Liam added.

That was true. Without silver, the Kalang should be unchanging.

“Anyway,” Udondi said, “it doesn’t matter why the map is wrong, just that it is. It will be a long way back if the cliffs prove to be this steep all around the eastern spur.”

Liam shrugged. “We’ll cross to the north side tomorrow, and then we’ll know. But let’s make what progress we can, while the light is with us.”

With the coming of the afternoon, the weather changed. The storm we had seen to the south sent an army of clouds north to cover the basin, but they remained below us, hiding the desert beneath a white blanket that stretched to the horizon. I had never looked down on clouds before and I was fascinated by the slow, boiling motion of the mist tendrils as they rose, then collapsed again into the cloud bank.

Later, peaks came into sight far away to the south and east, their summits glittering faintly through the distance, like gems of white quartz cast on a field of wool. “That’s called the Sea Comb,” Udondi said, nodding at the distant points of white stone as we paused at a stream crossing. “A gulf of the southern ocean lies less than a hundred miles beyond them, and it’s said those peaks comb the moisture from the clouds that come up on the southern wind, sending it back to the gulf in a thousand streams and rivers. The clouds that pass through those teeth are stingy with the moisture they have left. They cast a gloom over the Iraliad, but they seldom give rain.”

I thought about the ocean, trying to imagine all those clouds as water. The fantasy delighted me. Maybe I should have been afraid, standing on that cliff edge, looking out on a vista that reached to the edge of the world, but I was part of that world, I felt my connection to it keenly. I wanted to throw my arms around it, and gather it all up and know it, for it was beautiful, and full of life and mystery, and these were things that called to my soul.

We continued east, and in the late afternoon we finally reached the edge of Kalang’s forest. There was nothing gradual or natural about the transition. The trees simply ended in a last line of carefully tended giants, without a single sapling to mar the strict boundary between the forest and the wide grassland that stretched before us.

As we rode through that grassland we saw many herds of wild cattle, each shepherded by a bull that would snort and offer false charges if we passed too near. The land was badly overgrazed, and cut through with the colorful scars of exposed mineral deposits. I could not imagine how so many cattle survived there, but they looked in good condition. “So,” Liam said when I mentioned it, “maybe they’re tended by mechanics too.”

We laughed, for even mechanics could not easily produce feed out of the air. Still, I looked around a little more warily after that, for if these herds were descendants of animals kept by the mysterious Kalang then perhaps theyhad inherited some ancient protection of their own.

The sun was behind us, low in the west and just on the verge of disappearing behind the gloomy line of the forest when we came unexpectedly to the eastern tip of the Kalang. Udondi, who had ridden ahead, stopped and gave a somber call back to us, her voice like a bird’s cry on the wind. Liam and I hurried to join her, only to find that the sheer southern cliff had circled around in front of us. We were standing on a peninsula in the clouds, no more than a quarter mile wide, its apex marked by a rounded bluff that dropped straight down into the fog.

“The maps don’t show anything like this,” Udondi said, and her voice was soft with a restrained anger. If the map makers had been there, I fear they might have learned very quickly the exact height of that cliff. But they were long lost to history, and we could go no farther east.

So we rode around the bluff, and in that way came immediately to the northern wall. At first the cliff was as sheer as on the southern side, but after a mile the vertical wall gave way to great piers of eroded stone that stepped out into the cloud sea. Their slopes—the little we could see before they vanished in mist—were frighteningly steep and heavily eroded, covered with loose flakes and chips of stone so that the danger of landslide was very real. And still they seemed friendly after the stern impossibility of the southern escarpment. We could have tried to descend in a dozen different places, but all of them presented a considerable risk, so we kept going, hoping for something better.

At twilight we found it. The clouds pulled back, revealing a well-used cattle trail winding along the side of a great ridge. We watched a herd appear from out of the mist, lowing gently as they climbed the last half mile to the plateau.

“And if the native cattle choose to pass the night in the highlands,” Liam said, “then I think we should too.”

Udondi and I quickly agreed. In all that land we had seen no sign of silver: no follies, and no recent veins of beautiful ore. We felt safe camping there. Or we would have felt safe, if we didn’t have to contend with the lurking threat of the worm.

We made our camp well back from the trailhead in case the cattle chose to use it in the night. I floated my savant, but there was still no signal. “That’s the Iraliad,” Udondi said. “Antenna towers go down all the time.”

I couldn’t help but worry—about my mother, about Jolly, and even about Yaphet. I was restless, so as evening loomed I set out for the cliffs, Moki at my heels.

To my surprise the clouds were breaking up, the greater mass rolling back toward the Sea Comb, while the stragglers evaporated in the descending night. There was little light left. Still, I was able to glimpse the land below. It looked to be a dry, jagged country, with little more vegetation than the southern desert I had seen that morning. Ridge after ridge ran east into darkness, each one cut by steep ravines that emptied into broad washes so smooth I guessed they were lined with sand.

Far, far away, where night had already fallen, a tiny light winked to life. Whose light? Few players dared the Iraliad and it was easy to think I looked out on the encampment of our enemies… but if so, why did they wait for us so far from the Kalang?

Within seconds a new glow appeared—silvery, nebulous—it sparkled in the washes, at first only a half-seen, illusory light but it brightened rapidly as twilight gave way to full darkness, and soon the plain was flooded with luminous silver. It rose as quickly as any silver flood I have seen, filling the gullies and climbing the steep slopes of the ravines until only the highest ridges and a few lonely pinnacles stood above it. Cattle, made tiny by distance, gathered on these islands, lowing forlornly to the twilight. Somewhere a coyote howled, and others answered it, and soon a symphony was rising from the lowlands and it was as if the silver itself had found a voice.

That sound got inside me. Or maybe it only wakened my coyote heart, but I found myselfhoping the worm’s owner was out there. Kaphiri might not be troubled by such an evening, but surely the same could not be said for Mica Indevar and the other players who followed him. The Iraliad was a dangerous place and not just for us. Perhaps the silver would swallow our enemies before ever they could find us. Perhaps it already had.

When I looked again for the distant light, I could not find it, though whether it had been taken by the silver or only eclipsed, I could not say.