Memory

Chapter 23

Even before Ficer sealed the door, Jolly turned to me and asked the question I dreaded most. “Why were you the one who came, Jubilee? Where is my father?”

“He is gone, Jolly. Gone to the silver.”

Not a flicker of surprise could I see on his face, only grief. He must have guessed the truth long before. Indeed, nothing else could have kept our father away. Now Jolly’s gaze fixed me in a way I remembered well. “Tell me how it happened.”

And I would have, there on the doorstep, but Ficer intervened. “We’ll have time to tell our stories when we’ve settled in.” He mounted his bike. “Azure is not a true temple and the kobolds are poorly tended. We’ll be safer on the highest floor.”

Jolly rode on the back of Ficer’s bike, with Moki cradled in his arms. They went first, while I followed them up the wide stairway, lit from above by optical tubes that glinted against the blue stone. Dead kobold shells crunched beneath our tires, and the taste of dust was in my mouth. It was easy to think we were the first players to enter that refuge in a hundred years. All looked abandoned, yet the sweet scent of temple kobolds permeated the air.

“There is no keeper here,” Ficer assured me when I questioned him on the matter. “Not in my memory, or the memory of anyone I have known.”

The stairs climbed in three long flights to a chamber of startling size, as wide as the auditorium at Halibury, though the ceiling was so low I could have jumped and touched it. The air was fresh and for good reason: nine bell-shaped chimneys perforated the rock. I supposed they were made to bring air into the cavern, but they also served as excellent conduits of sand, for mounds of it were piled beneath each vent.

Ficer sat astride his bike, watching me as I studied the chamber, as if waiting on my reaction. He was a tall man, thin and dark and sun-wrinkled so that pale dust was trapped in the deep fissures of his skin. Even so, and even though his hair was silvery white, he did not seem old. This puzzled me, until I decided he was an artifact of the desert, as much as the clean stone and the blowing sand, and I left it at that. “This is the well room,” he announced, when I refused to make any comment.

I smiled, sure he was having fun with me. Then I looked again at the mounds of sand on the floor. Was I supposed to believe each one was the mouth of a well? But I had never heard of a temple with more than one well. Even the oldest temple at Xahiclan was said to have only one, though it was vast in size.

Ficer smiled. “You don’t believe me? Take a look.”

I glanced at Jolly, but his face was turned away. My grief was older than his, and my curiosity was strong. So I dropped the kickstand on my bike and ventured across the chamber—to find it was just as Ficer had said. The mounds of sand were not made by the wind blowing grains into the ventilation shafts. Instead, the shafts appeared to have been carved over centuries by the traffic of stone-eating kobolds flying up from the mouths of nine wells that perforated the floor.

“It’s a natural wonder,” Ficer said. “More so, because the wells die out every few years, but always they come back to life. No one can explain it.”

I wondered how often Maya’s scholars came this way, and if their theory of silver tides could say anything about this strange concentration of wells. “But why is there no keeper?”

“Azure is a strange place. A place to pass through. No one I know has ever stayed more than three nights. Too much history.” He waved a sun-blackened hand, indicating the double stairway on the opposite side of the chamber, that rose without rails to the right and left. “There are chambers and passages all through the rock, enough room for a hundred people, or more than a hundred if they’re not desert folk. But the only way into the refuge is by those notches we climbed. What kind of people would wall themselves in like that? Not a happy people, I expect. Not at all.”

I looked around, and despite the large size of the chamber I felt a sense of entrapment.

Ficer nodded. “Some say the memory of those who made this place is still here, locked up in the rock. That’s how it seems to me.”

Though I had known Ficer only a few minutes, I could not imagine him being frightened by ghost stories. So perhaps there truly was something strange about this place. “There aren’t any bogies here, are there?” I asked suspiciously.

“You know of bogies?”

“I met one.”

He grunted. “Nasty things, spawned in greed. There have always been players who would try to protect the wealth of one life until they could find it in the next, and some, even worse, who could not endure the thought of others trespassing in the ruins of their estates, so they used bogies to guard them, even through the silver. But there are no bogies here. Just memories, and that’s enough.”

“We’ll be all right, though?” Jolly asked, his voice hoarse, little more than a whisper, though when he looked up at Ficer his eyes were dry. “This one night?”

Ficer gave him a reassuring smile. “Sure we will. And tomorrow we’ll do our part for the temple before we go.”

“For the next player,” Jolly said with a solemn nod, as if repeating a phrase he’d heard many times before.

“For the next player,” Ficer agreed.

We laid our sleeping bags in a small side chamber. I shared out some of my dwindling supply of packaged food, while Ficer brought out dried meat and fruit. I didn’t know how to ask the questions that were most important to me—what had happened to Jolly, where he had been, what he knew of Kaphiri. Also, I knew if I started asking questions, I would have to answer them too, and I was reluctant to say more about my father. There was a quality to Jolly’s face, a fragility, that frightened me. I couldn’t guess what he’d been through, or how much more he could bear. What if he blamed himself for my father’s death? Kaphiri had come seeking him after all.

Jolly ate mechanically, wrapped up in his own thoughts, so it was left to Ficer to carry the conversation. In a quiet way he told me about himself, how he roamed the Iraliad, repairing the antennas that grew here and there on the mesa tops. “The silver is less an enemy than the wind. Fierce storms out of the southern ocean blow down the antennas more often than the silver takes them away.”

When we were done eating I asked if there was a passage to the mesa top, for I wanted to call Liam, but Ficer shook his head. “This is not the night to be opening any door. But come with me awhile. There’s something here you should see.”

I started to my feet, surprised at the relief I felt at the prospect of leaving that room and my brother’s silence. Only a latent guilt made me hesitate. “Jolly,” I asked, without really meaning it, “will you come…?”

He looked at me with some faint amusement. It was a look that made me shiver, for it seemed mature beyond his years. “I think Ficer wants to speak with you alone.”

“There is no point in trying to be subtle around Jolly,” Ficer announced as he clambered to his feet. “He’ll see through it every time.”

That was true. Jolly had always had an eerie knack for guessing the thoughts and intentions of other players, while I was hardly aware of my own heart. Still, I worried about leaving him alone. “Will you be all right?” I asked.

“Fine,” Jolly insisted, his hand resting on Moki’s back.

“There’s nothing here to harm a player but his own conscience,” Ficer said, “and no other can be a shield against that.”

Jolly met my doubtful gaze. “That doesn’t reassure you, does it?”

My cheeks warmed, for he had seen through me again. “So. We’ll be back in a few minutes then.” And before I could diminish myself further, I followed Ficer into the hall.

The passage ran level for several hundred feet, lit by optical cables growing on the smooth walls. Beneath the strings of lights, dust and dead kobold shells were heaped in shallow banks, pushed there by passing feet. I glimpsed a few living kobolds among the debris. In such a strange place I expected to find strange kobolds, but there was no evidence of any variety beyond the familiar temple strains.

We passed many closed doors. Some were locked. Those few rooms that were open held only dust. It felt as if no one had ever lived there, or as if the abandoned kobolds had consumed everything except the rock itself.

Twice we passed other hallways, both running at odd angles to our own. Neither was lit, and I felt no urge to explore them when I saw the great cobwebs that hung like skeins of mist from their ceilings.

We’d been walking several minutes when the passage came to an end, widening into a round chamber with a single, massive door set in one wall. “That’s a stairway to the surface,” Ficer said. “If tomorrow the silver subsides, you can take your savant up and try your luck.”

I didn’t understand why I should wait. “We must be five hundred feet above the desert floor. The silver cannot have climbed this high.”

Ficer nodded at a pillar of black metal set to one side of the door. “It’s true the top of the mesa is only ten feet or so above us.” He laid his palm against the metal, which was damp with condensation. “This pole reaches up to it, through the rock and into the open air. Lay your hand on it.”

I did, and felt a faint but frantic vibration.

“That’s the teeth of the silver you’re feeling,” Ficer said, “chewing on the metal.”

My eyes grew wide. “Do you mean the whole mesa has drowned?” Never had I heard of silver so deep.

“The same as last night,” Ficer said. “Where did you stay?”

“At a wild well…” And hadn’t it been like standing at the bottom of a luminous ocean?

Then doubt set in. “This pole…” I frowned at it. “It must have been here for many years. How has it gone untouched so long, only to be consumed tonight?”

Ficer ran his fingers through the condensation. “It’s not so much that things go untouched by the silver. It’s more that sometimes they’re put back exactly as they were, and sometimes not. This pipe, it’s been touched by the silver many times, and always it’s been returned more or less as it began. Someday though, it’ll be given back changed… or not at all.”

I too ran my fingers down the column of metal and the cold of it seemed to reach all the way to my spine. “How is it the silver gave Jolly back?”

“That I don’t know.”

“I didn’t want to tell him of my father’s death.”

“You had no choice.”

“Still, he’s been very quiet.”

“He doesn’t say much,” Ficer agreed.

“You wanted to tell me something, didn’t you? It’s why we’re here.”

Ficer’s gaze took my measure. Then: “It’s the way you look at him, as if you’re looking at a ghost or a phantom.”

“I…?” I was shocked. “That’s not how I feel!”

“No?”

I had to look away. “But he is a ghost, isn’t he? In a way.”

“So I thought when I first saw him.”

“How did it happen? How did you find him?”

He smiled at the memory. “If you were lost in a silver fog, looking out for players to be with, what sort of players would you be most likely to see?”

I shook my head, not at all sure what he meant.

“What is the one and only reason most players ever approach a bank of silver?”

“Oh… you were at a funeral, or a memorial ceremony?”

He nodded. “I was attending a funeral at Sentinel Mesa. They have a fair-sized enclave there, almost at the center of the northern desert. The body of the deceased was hardly committed to the silver when this boy stumbled out, all silver himself at first, as if the soul of the deceased had returned. It scared everyone. It’s amusing now, to think on it, but it scared me too. Players don’t like being startled. Makes ’em feel foolish later. I could see how the talk was going, so I took Jolly away from Sentinel before anyone could notice.”

“I want to thank you for that.”

Ficer accepted this with a slow nod. “I wasn’t sure at first, but I think now it was the right thing to do. Jolly’s a good boy… and if the silver has given him back, it’s for a reason.”

“‘Mostly the silver seems to act without purpose,’” I recited, “‘but sometimes it is otherwise.’”

Ficer laughed. “And where did you here that?”

“From Emil.”

“The old man of the Pinnacles? That one is worth listening to.”

I didn’t disagree. “So what is Jolly’s purpose?”

Ficer’s eyes challenged me from their deep setting among sun-wrinkled skin. “Maybe that’s for Jolly to discover?”

I nodded, for it was true that each of us must find our own way. “I would still like to take him home.”

“And maybe you will. But come. He’s waiting, and he’ll be worried if we’re gone too long.”