Memory

Chapter 18

I turned and brought the rifle to bear on a hooded, sticklike figure in dull-colored clothes, angling down the boulder-strewn slope above us. My first thought was that one of the bikers had survived, but my quick offense collapsed when I sighted Moki trotting proudly in front of this desert apparition, as if intent on doing the introductions himself.

“Moki!”

He came bounding at my call, and I greeted him with a joyous hug, almost dropping the rifle in my enthusiasm. Fortunately Udondi acted with more thought, neither raising her weapon nor lowering her guard. Instead she called a cautious greeting. “If you are not one of those who pursued us on the plain, then well met.”

“If I were one of them,” the stranger answered in a throaty voice that identified her as an older woman, “I do not think I would be in fit condition to speak.”

Udondi stiffened at this jibe. Her grip on the rifle tightened just a little. “We did not ask to be pursued, nor to be accosted.”

The stranger stopped, still many yards away. She regarded us, her brown, time-weathered face looking out from the hood of a tunic that might once have been white but was now stained to the reddish-brown color of the Iraliad. She wore loose trousers and cloth boots of the same color, and an unused veil that draped her shoulder, but beneath her soft clothes I sensed she was as thin and hard as the pinnacles that towered over our heads—and in her height she echoed them too. My head did not reach her shoulder, while Udondi looked like a petite child before her. She said, “Your objection was strongly stated. Is it your way to summon the silver to your defense?”

Udondi’s posture softened. “No. That was a desperate act. One I hope we never repeat.”

“Still… it can be hard to forget such a weapon.” Her gaze turned to me, where I knelt, cradling Moki. “Such knowledge can haunt us, following us even from one life to the next.”

Her words stung. I wondered: was it possible I’d done such a thing before? I didn’t want to believe it. “I saw another savant taken by the silver only a few days past. And the air was heavy with the silver’s scent all this afternoon. That’s why the idea came to me.” But wasn’t that how languages came to me as well? In the right circumstances, memories were stirred.

The desert woman nodded, as if she approved this new turn of my thoughts. “I am Maya Anyapah,” she said. “Temple keeper here at the Sisters—” She gestured at the pinnacles. “Night is not far off and it’s my duty to offer sanctuary…” Her lips pursed in a cool smile. “At least to the survivors. Will you trust me?”

Udondi glanced at Liam, who answered with an ironic smile: a rather frightening expression given the blood on his face. “I would like the chance to prove we are not brigands.”

Udondi nodded. “Then, Keeper, we gratefully accept your offer of sanctuary this night.”

Liam and Udondi went with Maya Anyapah, but after receiving instructions on how to find the temple, I took Liam’s rifle and walked back down to the plain to retrieve my fallen bike. Moki went with me.

We skirted the pool of silver I had made. There was nothing left to mar its smooth surface, for the truck had been entirely consumed. I thought of it being returned by the silver in some far-off time, perhaps transformed to wood or quartz or jade. Few things leave the world forever; even players are returned when they are born again, but like the follies of the silver, they never return unchanged.

I walked out onto the plain. It was a folly too, as I had guessed, made of white, interlocking tiles the same color as the powdery dust. The walking was easy, and I had only a quarter mile or so to reach my bike, but it seemed much longer. Now that my blood had cooled, my body was remembering its traumas. My back ached where the soft shot had knocked me from my bike. My palms were skinned, and my shoulders and wrists felt as if they’d been sprained in my fall. The bike seemed very heavy, but when I finally got it back up on its tires it started easily. Moki scrambled into his bin, and after that it was a quick ride through the rocks to the temple door.

The Temple of the Sisters was built within the living rock of one of the pinnacles. From the front step, I gazed up at huge double doors of shining black onyx, carved in an intricate geometric relief. I could see no place to leave my bike, so I nudged one of the doors open and walked it inside, feeling truly like a brigand. I found myself in a large room lit with warm yellow ceiling panels. Hangings softened the stone walls, and across the carpeted floor pillows and low couches invited conversation… if only someone would linger long enough to speak.

The room was empty, but the other bikes were there, parked on a strip of stone floor, so I left mine beside them. Then I crossed to an arched hallway. The sound of voices encouraged me to push on to a kitchen where Maya Anyapah was recounting the temple’s history as she tended Liam’s wound at a massive slate table. In this way I learned the Temple of the Sisters was astoundingly old, 617 years, while its kobold well still showed no sign of the decrepitude that usually comes over a well of that age. Such was the power of silver in the Iraliad.

Udondi sat on the floor, cleaning her rifle beside a large fireplace where a bank of glowing coals yielded only an occasional yellow flame. When she saw me she sent me immediately out again to fetch the other rifles. I brought them, and my savant as well. My shoulders burned to carry even that little weight, my back ached, and I felt colder than I should have. That was the nearness of death, I think. I was not used to players dying. Especially, I was not used to causing their deaths, but I could not think what else I should have done.

The keeper offered me tea, but I was sad, and I wanted nothing to eat or drink. “Is there a high place where I can try to link?” I asked. “An upper room, maybe?”

“There’s a stair to the very top if you want to climb that far. Sometimes the Tibbett antenna can be reached from there.”

“You don’t keep an antenna of your own?” Liam asked her. He sat hunched over a steaming teacup, a plastic patch over his injured eye.

“There was one. But antennas bring company. It’s more peaceful, since a windstorm took it down.”

“Do you live alone?” Udondi asked.

“No, no. We are a colony of old cessants, though my companions went off to Tibbett a few days past. Only the old man is here, in his room upstairs. He’s almost two hundred twenty now, and he’s gone very frail.”

“Where is the stair?” I asked with some impatience.

Maya nodded at the door. “At the end of the hall, but it’s a long climb.”

“Don’t try to reason with her,” Liam warned. “She’s set her mind to it. You won’t persuade her to rest.”

Udondi set her rifle aside. “I’ll go with you.”

“No,” I said—too quickly. A faint blush touched my cold cheeks, but I was in no mood for company, even Udondi’s. “Really. Stay here. I’ll be down soon.” I started for the door.

“Jubilee,” Udondi called. I hesitated, glancing back. “Death is not an easy thing to face.”

“I’ll be okay.” And I hurried from the kitchen before she could persuade me to stay. Moki chose to remain behind by the fire’s warmth, so I got my wish to climb the stair alone.

The stairway spiraled up through the natural rock, opening on three more floors, each with a wide sitting room, and tall windows to the right and left set into the rock, admitting a wan gleam of late afternoon light. Hallways like the one below led away to private rooms.

Past the fourth floor the stairway narrowed, becoming as tight as a chimney and almost as steep as a ladder. If I had gone back for my bike (as I’d considered doing) I would have had to leave it in the last sitting room, for it would not have fit past those tight turns.

So I climbed on foot, and climbed and climbed, following a spiral of optical tubes set into the stairwell, and as my body warmed my back hurt less but it never stopped hurting altogether.

At last I saw gray daylight above me, and in a few more steps I emerged on a walled platform at the very top of the pinnacle. The wall was chest-high and damp, and as I looked over it I could see nothing of the surrounding plain, for I had climbed literally into the clouds. Fog wrapped the platform and I could just glimpse the boulder-strewn ground far, far below at the pinnacle’s base.

I instructed the savant to seek a link to my mother, but there was no link, and I was so high already I didn’t dare float it on a line. I felt close to despair. If only I could know my mother was well; if only I could tell her I was well too… though I didn’t want to tell her what I had done that day.

I sat down on the wet stone, my back against the enclosing wall and the savant cradled in my lap. I tried to imagine myself back at Temple Huacho, and my mother, busy in the kitchen, or taking my littlest brothers and sisters on a walk through the orchard, but those scenes kept getting messed up with the memory of the bikers behind me on the plain, and of Kaphiri’s shadowed face on that night he had come asking for Jolly, until in desperation I pressed my palms against my eyes to drive all visions away.

That’s when my savant spoke in its soft old man’s voice. “There is a call for you.”

I looked up, wide-eyed. “I thought there was no link.”

“There is none to the west. This call is from Yaphet.”

Yaphet.

Suddenly I wanted to see him almost as much as I wanted my mother. “Open the link. Now. Please.”

And as easily as that Yaphet was on the screen, looking at me with a stunned half smile. “Jubilee? I’ve tried to call you, every few hours, for days.”

“We weren’t in range of any antennas.”

“I thought something had happened to you.”

“We’re okay. But you…” His cheek wore a dark bruise, and he had a cut over one eye. “You’re hurt.”

“No. It’s nothing.”

“You left home, didn’t you?”

He nodded, his eyes charged with excitement. “I’m on my way to meet you.”

“It’s dangerous.”

This won another rare smile from him. As if he cared! “I talked to your mother.”

“You did? When? Is she all right?”

“The night I left home. That was the night after we talked. Two nights ago, now. I was worried when I didn’t hear from you. She told me more about your brother Jolly—”

“Was she all right?”

“She was worried for you—”

“Did she say if anyone had come to the temple?”

He shook his head. “No. We didn’t talk about anything like that… why? Something’s happened to you, hasn’t it?”

“Yaphet, there’s no time to explain—”

“Yes there is. Look—” He gestured at his screen. “There’s no limit on this call. Probably because there aren’t any links beyond the Iraliad, so no one bothers to call. We’re probably the only players on this channel. We can talk all night if we want to.”

“I should call Jolly.” I opened a second link, to the address Jolly had given me at Rose Island Station. A savant answered, and I asked for my brother, but the savant said he’d gone out. I left a message for him to call me.

It was getting really cold on the pinnacle now, so I sealed my field jacket and huddled close to the stone, cradling the savant in my lap, and we talked, Yaphet and I, while night descended on the desert. Night still reached him first, but it hurried on to me much faster than it had that first time we’d spoken. I learned how it had been for him, when he left home. At first he’d thought to just slip quietly away, but his conscience wouldn’t allow it. So he did the proper thing and went to his father to speak his intentions and say good-bye.

It is an unnatural thing for a parent to have only one child, and perhaps that is some explanation for the row that followed. It was the worst that had ever fallen out between them. In his rage Yaphet’s father beat him, but afterward he was so shocked by what he’d done that he relented and Yaphet was given his freedom. He seemed bitter over it, and sad, and angry, but also proud and pleased too. So many feelings, all at once, but then, that was Yaphet.

In turn I told him all that had happened to me, and it was both pleasing and disturbing to see him fret over the dangers I had visited. To be the object of his concern—that was a heady feeling, though at the same time I sensed in him the same strong protectiveness he despised in his own father. Not that I mentioned it. He was still too far away to bring his will to bear and I wanted only to bask in his affection.

So we talked.

At one point I heard footsteps on the stair, and I guessed Udondi had come to check on me, but after listening a moment she must have assured herself I was in good company because she retreated. I smiled, feeling content in that moment despite the cold and all the questions we still faced. I asked Yaphet if he would go back with me to Temple Huacho after we found Jolly and he said he would do that. It was a pleasant dream for us to share.

Darkness came, the clouds rolled back, and silver bloomed across the desert floor just as it had the night before. I stood beside the wall to watch the spectacle, while Yaphet watched it through my savant.

That’s when I saw Kaphiri for the second time.

The silver had risen almost to the foot of the pinnacle when a slender, dark figure slipped out of it, glowing tendrils trailing from his body as if the silver was reluctant to give him up, this living folly. My eyes widened, and I stifled the cry that tried to rise from my throat.

Yaphet saw him too. “Jubilee—!” but I slapped the link off so Kaphiri would not hear and know that we were aware of him, for our best hope was to take him in ambush.

I darted for the stairway. My muscles had grown stiff in the cold, and the first downward jolt reawakened the angry bruises in my back. Each step was an agony. Still I hurried as I could, turn and turn, until the world itself coiled about me in a dizzy spiral.

At last I reached the wider stairway between the floors, and there I slowed, to keep my footsteps quiet. Udondi was in the kitchen. She had the rifles there. This was my thought as I stumbled onto the lowest floor. Liam must have heard me gasp, for he appeared at once from the kitchen.

“He is outside,”I whispered.

And immediately there came the sound of a fierce pounding on the door.