Memory

Chapter 27

We stayed on the plateau until the eastern sky grew light enough to show the weather. It was not an encouraging sight. Heavy clouds were moving up again from the south, and though the silver faded as the dawn grew brighter, it seemed reluctant to be gone altogether. I wondered if we should risk leaving Azure Mesa, or if we should wait… for a better day, or to give Liam a chance to catch up with us. I wanted to try again to call him but I did not have my savant, so we returned to the cavern to fetch it.

Ficer was awake, busily packing his gear onto his bike. He greeted me with a weary nod. “It was no pleasant night, was it?” he asked.

“I dreamed,” I admitted.

“Everyone does, and it’s never pleasant dreams either. It’s the kobolds—that’s what I think. They smell differently from your common temple kobolds, don’t they? A perfume to trouble the mind. It’s why no one lives here;why so few come to stay even one night—which made it the safest place for us to meet.”

I hesitated, for it was rude to ask, but I could not help myself. “What did you dream?”

My question confused him. “Nothing I can remember. The memory is gone when you awake—at least that’s how it is for most who visit here. Was it different for you?”

I looked away, knowing I had said too much. “I seem to… remember a little.”

“And not a comforting little by the look of you.”

I was groping for some polite way to deny the truth when he raised a hand. “Don’t speak of it. I have heard that some few come here on purpose to dream. They claim it’s the past that visits them.” He shook his head. “If that’s so, we all have wicked things to account for, I say, for I have never met one who slept peacefully here… that is, until now.” His gaze settled pointedly on Jolly—a look my brother answered with a sheepish smile.

“What’s this?” I asked curiously. “What do you speak of? Not just that Jolly slept well?”

“That underestimates it,” Ficer said. “I awoke several times in the night, and while you were troubled, Jolly’s sleep was always quiet. Like the sleep of an innocent? One who has never lived before would have no past lives to haunt him.”

“You think this is Jolly’s first life?” But how could that be? No one new had been born into the world since its making—or so I’d been taught.

“It’s what I think,” Jolly said. “It makes sense. I don’t have talents like you, like everyone else. I don’t know anything but what I’ve learned—”

“It hasn’t wakened in you yet,” I said. “That’s all—”

“And I don’t think I could be reborn into another life. How could I, if the silver always returns me as myself?”

“Jolly!”He was so young. How could he believe that he would live only this one life? That such thoughts could even enter his mind… it horrified me. That he could believe such things and still hold on to the sweetness that had always been in his character… it astonished me, so that tears started in my eyes.

“He is closer to Heaven than you or I could ever be,” Ficer said gently, and though Jolly tried to protest, Ficer would not hear it. “He plays a different game, that’s what I believe. He’s on his way to a different end, same as the traveler that hunts him. What end that is I don’t know, but I’ve heard enough stories of this traveler to know whose side I’d rather play.”

“Is that why you’ve protected Jolly? To hinder Kaphiri?”

“Ficer helped me because that’s who he is,” Jolly said.

But it was more than that. Jolly could live within the silver, the realm of souls that other players visited only in death. Did that make him a god? Kaphiri believed it, while I… I pretended I did not.

“I must try to reach Liam,” I said brusquely. And taking my savant I fled to the mesa top where birds had begun to sing to the new day. Liam’s savant was destroyed, so I directed my calls to Udondi. But neither she nor Liam answered and my fears did not leave me, while the weather grew worse. Clouds gathered overhead, and patches of silver could be seen gleaming among the sheltering vegetation that surrounded Azure Mesa. I studied the horizon all around, but nowhere could I see a sign of dust that might indicate someone traveling in the desert. I wished desperately that Liam would come. I wished desperately for guidance. I did not know what to do. If only I knew where Liam was, and what had delayed him, then my own path might be clearer, but I was at a loss.

Should I wait for him to reach Azure Mesa? Should I try to find him? Or should I take Jolly and flee deeper into the Iraliad?

Yaphet was out there—likely only a day or two away, by now. I wanted to run to him, to meet him, to know without doubt that he was the one… but the clouds were growing heavier, and I could smell silver gathering on the plain below. I had told Jolly I could control the silver, but I had no confidence in my talent. It seemed foolhardy to do anything—and in the end that was my decision. I convinced myself that no one would risk travel on such a day.

I left my savant on the mesa top with a prerecorded message for Liam, and another for Yaphet, if either should chance to call. Then I went back down into the cavern, to find that Ficer had reached a different conclusion.

“What do you mean you’re going?” I demanded when I found him astride his bike, on the verge of descending to the gate. “Where are you going? And have you looked at the weather? There is silver on the plain, and no sign of the sun—”

“Aye,” Ficer said. “It’s why I’m going now.”

“But why? Ficer, where do you have to go that you must be there today? If the silver rises, you could die. Jolly—” I turned to my brother for support. “You must convince him.”

“He won’t listen,” Jolly said softly. My brother looked as frightened as I felt.

“Ficer—”

“No,” he said gently. “Don’t argue more. I’ve lived my life in this desert, and I’ve traveled on worse days than this—”

“But you don’t have to go—”

“That’s not how I see it.” He started his bike, its soft purr resonate against the stone walls. “They could be in danger at the Temple of the Sisters. The traveler knows you were there. I must see to that… and too, I must speak with the old man. There is too much here I don’t understand.”

“But Emil doesn’t understand it either. None of us does. And—and—” I bowed my head. I didn’t know what to do, what I should do. “I am worried for them too,” I confessed. “And for you. None of you asked to be caught up in this.”

“Neither did you.”

That didn’t matter. “We’ll come with you.”

“No,” Ficer said. “You’ll stay here, at least until the weather clears. Your duty is to Jolly now.”

“But it may be I can keep you safe from the silver.”

“Jolly said as much. But believe that I am safe enough. Stay here with your brother. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s the best refuge you’ll find. I’ll come back if I can, but don’t wait for me once the weather clears. If your heart tells you to go, then you must go. Do you understand?”

So we went down to the gate. Jolly and I worked the winch, lowering his bike over the side while he climbed down the notch steps. Though it was day, the light was dim. There seemed to be no colors anywhere, and the scent of silver was very strong. Ficer called back to us once: “Set your savant to listen at dusk. I’ll call if I can.”

Then he was gone away.

The caverns seemed a haunted place after Ficer left, a grim prison of cold stone and memories, and the prospect of sleeping there another night had me in a quiet terror. It wasn’t long before Jolly and I decided to flee to the mesa top.

It was gloomy there with the sun lost behind a ceiling of low clouds, but it was still incomparably brighter than the caverns. We stood on the cliff’s edge and looked out across the plain. Silver glittered in every drainage and depression and for a long time we saw no sign of Ficer. Then Jolly spied a plume of dust far to the south, and we agreed it must be him, though it might have been a dust devil, or even a small landslide.

My savant had received no messages from Liam, Udondi, or Yaphet. I told Jolly not to be discouraged. We were not in the range of any working antenna, so any communications would be line-of-sight only, meaning the sender was no more than a few hours away. I tried not to show my own disappointment, tucking it away beside my terror of the coming night.

We spent the morning exploring a tangle of pocket canyons in the mesa top, while silver gathered ever more thickly on the plain below. There were dead kobold wells in almost every ravine, so that we soon learned to be wary of holes as we beat paths through the desert brush.

There were birds everywhere, and day-flying bats as well. A constant, mad twittering filled the brush, and each time we descended into a new ravine, Moki would charge ahead of us, sending a storm of winged creatures into the air. The flocks would circle just above the ravines, keeping low, as if they feared being seen, and indeed, after a while a hawk appeared overhead, and then Moki could not get the flocks to stir at all.

I wondered where the birds went on the nights when silver climbed higher than the mesa top. I imagined them spending the whole night on the wing, gliding in a luminous space between the bright silver and the ethereal gleam of the Bow of Heaven. With such thoughts in my mind I fell asleep in a nest of grass and I did not waken again until the evening.

We went to retrieve the savant, and to wait for a message from Ficer, but night gathered and no message came. The plain below us was a luminous sea, and overhead was only darkness. We stayed there until silver began to gleam among the ravines on the mesa top. Then we retreated into the cavern and sealed the door.

I made it my strategy to put off sleep as long as possible. To this end, I persuaded Jolly to explore with me the labyrinth of the cavern. He had not slept in the afternoon, and I could see fatigue on his face, but he set off gamely beside me. We took a flashlight, and picking one of the many dark tunnels that branched from our well-lit hallway, we set out to see what there might be.

Within a few steps the tunnel began to descend. That was no surprise, as we were encamped at the top of the caverns. Still, it made me anxious, for silver lay all around the plateau.

Shadows jumped away from the beam of our flashlight, while dead kobold shells crunched unpleasantly under our feet. Worse, the scent of their living relatives faded the farther along we went, and I soon began to fantasize that I could smell silver seeping into the cavern.

Then Moki hesitated, peering ahead into the darkness and growling.

Kaphiri. My heart thundered and my skin grew flush as I imagined him climbing up that tunnel from the sea of silver that surrounded our keep. But there was no sound of footsteps and I could not imagine how anyone could walk among the dead kobold shells without sound. So I edged forward and Jolly went with me, and in a few steps we came upon a chamber so broad our flashlight beam could not find the other side.

Cautiously, we entered that great space. The ceiling was high, maybe thirty feet, while the walls that stood within reach of our light curved as if part of a great circle. “Is it an audience chamber?” I wondered, remembering the audience chamber of Ki-Faun that I had seen within my dream.

Jolly said, “It’s big enough to be a marketplace.”

There was no evidence of either function. All we found within reach of the light was a broken bike, shrouded in dust and missing its wheels, lying forlornly beside a knee-high midden of bird bones. Moki growled over these things while we examined them. Then Jolly took the flashlight, and casting its light about, he searched the shadows. He did not have to say what he was looking for. I followed him, expecting to see the bones of the bike’s owner materialize in the gloom. Instead the light picked out a purple pigment on the walls.

“Look at that,” Jolly said. “Is it writing?” He edged forward, until the light revealed a scrawl of purple lettering covering the wall from the height of my head to the floor. “It is writing. Jubilee, can you read it? No, wait. I can read it.”

Indeed, the script and the language were the same as ours. It had been done in a chalk of purple tint that had since acquired some moisture from the air so that it shone like enameled paint. “Look how the letters have begun to drip,” I said. “This cannot be too old.”

Jolly was eagerly deciphering the rough lines. “It’s a journal. Look here. ‘Today the silver subsided beneath the gate. I try not to hope for tomorrow.’ That is dated ‘day twelve.’” Jolly scowled. “Does that mean a player was trapped here for twelve days?”

“For far longer than that, I would guess,” I said, gazing down the length of the wall. The writing continued at least as far as the light reached.

It came to both of us then, that we might be trapped at Azure for many days, and it was as if the room grew colder, the walls harder, the reverberations of our voices a little more loud. “The longer we are here,” Jolly said, “the better chance Kaphiri will have of finding us.”

I nodded, but what could we do?

Jolly shone his light again upon the words. “There is day fifteen.” He walked several steps along the wall. “And there is day twenty-five. ‘A good day! The mesa top was clear of silver. The net worked! I have songbird for dinner! I am a mad man, to be so excited at such a thing. But who would not be mad, enduring night after night of these dreams?’”

But by day thirty songbird had grown dull, and by day forty-five the flocks had thinned. Day fifty-one was the last entry. “This night is full of stars. It feels like a lifetime since I have seen stars, but they have returned this night, and the Bow of Heaven with them, brighter than I have ever seen it. The sun will be bright tomorrow. I know it. May I never dream again.”

I touched the blank stone beside the writing. “He must have gotten away.” Perhaps by saying it, I could make it so?

Jolly nodded.

Neither of us mentioned the mystery of the broken bike.

We returned up the tunnel to our encampment and made a small dinner. The food tasted odd, as if it were permeated with the heavy, sweet scent of the temple kobolds. “You can’t eat temple kobolds,” Jolly said thoughtfully, picking up a stray to examine the white petals on its back. “At least I’ve never heard of it.” He tapped the hard shell. “It would be like eating stones.”

“I think the petals might be poisonous.”

Temple kobolds produced no food, no machinery, no hard goods, no medicines. All they did was to create a chemical shield against the silver. Until I came to Azure Mesa, that had always been enough.

My eyelids grew heavy, so I forced myself to my feet, determined to fend off sleep, for all night if I could. Fifty-one nights of Azure dreams. I could not imagine it.

“Jubilee, where is your book?” Jolly asked. “May I see it?”

It was still in the pocket of my coat, where it had been almost since Nuanez Li had given it to me. I’d had it out at the Temple of the Sisters, only so that Emil and the scholars could make a copy of it, though they could not read it. “It’s here,” I said, and I drew it out. But I hesitated in giving it to him, held back by a reluctance I could not explain.

“Jubilee?”

“I’m nervous tonight.” I made myself hand him the book.

He sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag, studying the green plastic cover. Then he examined the pages of fine lettered stone. “I guess you’ll have to read it to me,” he conceded.

I sat beside him, accepting the book back though I did not open it. “I have a dread of this book I did not have yesterday. I suppose it’s an effect of the dream.”

I started to slide it back into my pocket, but Jolly stopped me. “Jubilee.” He took the book again, but this time he laid it open in my lap. “If he dies, the silver dies with him. If he does not die the world will drown in silver flood. In your vision Ki-Faun believed he had found a third choice—to control the silver. I would learn that.”

I swear Jolly opened the book at random, but there on the page that faced me was a formula for a kobold circle made up entirely of temple kobolds.

The wells at Azure Mesa produced only temple kobolds.

“Jubilee?” he pressed, when I’d been silent too long.

I looked at his anxious face, wondering what powers a god might have. Then I tapped the book’s open page. “Here is a recipe. It’s supposed to create a kind of… mirror, I think.‘Reflect the other self’…? I’m not sure, but we can try it, just to see if a circle might work.”

It was late, but neither of us wanted sleep, so we went down to the well room and hunted for the required kobolds. All of them were common, and it didn’t take long to gather the necessary kinds, returning with them to our little stone room.

It was a harder task to reset the kobold’s configuration codes. We did not have the tools of a temple keeper—no magnification lens, no pick, and no decent light. But these were large kobolds, each the size of my thumbnail, so we were able to use a fine wire to tweak the digits.

There were six kobolds in all, and when their configuration codes were set as the book instructed, we put them together.

Kobolds generally seem aware of very little except an instinctive need to crawl, but this group was different. They did not clamber away in six different directions. Instead they crawled deliberately toward one another. It was eerie to watch them gather together. At first they made a tangle of twitching legs and glossy shells, but in less than a minute they had fitted together into a perfect sphere. Their petals were on the inside, locked away from sight, while their legs were folded flat against their exposed bellies Several minutes passed and nothing else happened, so I picked up the sphere and turned it over in my hands. It looked like one of those balls that is a puzzle of blocks, each piece a different color, but linking perfectly to the next.

The book did not say how long this kobold circle might take to mature, though from Maya’s description of the road show, I hoped it would not be much more than an hour.

It was already past midnight, and the very air of the cavern was working against me, its cloying scent like a potion drawing me down, down into sleep. I rubbed at my eyes and paced to keep awake while Jolly sat beside the sphere, watching it constantly, as if it were an explosive that might go off at any minute.

I swear I was asleep on my feet, ghost voices whispering again in my ears when Jolly gave a shout of triumph. I stumbled in fright and went down hard on my knees, producing a pain that brought me fully awake.

“Jubilee, look.” Jolly had risen to his feet. He backed a step away from the kobold circle.

A faint mist of silver seeped from its seams.

Moki barked at it, dancing frantically backward to the door. “Jolly, get back!” I shouted. “Get out of the room!”

The silver gathered about the kobold circle, hiding it inside a cloud that shimmered and boiled as it spread across the floor toward our gear—and the bike.

“Jolly, wait!” I jumped for our sleeping bags, gathering them up with our other things. “Get the bike outside!”

He remembered the savant too.

We tumbled together into the hall, while the silver filled the room. It did not behave like ordinary silver. Instead of flowing outward, it rose up, trembling and shimmering as it progressed higher and higher, as if the particles that made it up were linking into threads—too small to be seen, but strong enough to weave a wall of light.

I watched its growth from the corner of my eye as I worked to get our gear stowed aboard the bike. The savant went in last. Then I mounted. “Jolly, get on.”

“No wait.” He pointed into the room. “Look.”

The silver had reached the ceiling; its trembling had ceased. It had formed a luminous panel, with a texture that teased the eye, suggesting somehow a vast depth within that smooth surface.

“Jolly, let’s go. We’ll be safe by the wells.”

But Jolly did not heed me. He crept closer to the door. “The kobold circle was supposed to make a kind of mirror.” He glanced back at me. “I don’t see anything reflected.”

“Maybe ‘mirror’ was the wrong translation. Now come.”

“But it’s not growing anymore.” He took half a step into the room.

“Jolly!”

“But what’s that?” he asked. “Jubilee, do you see it? That shadow, near the center.”

I saw it. A dark shape, like the silhouette of a player obscured by rain or fog, far away, but striding steadily closer, with a gait all too familiar.

“It’s him,”Jolly whispered. He backed into the hallway. “How can it be him? How can he see us?”

“Maybe he can’t.”

“But he’s looking at us!”

Indeed, the figure had drawn close enough that I could see his eyes. Their gaze was fixed on me. He gestured, as if commanding me to stand fast. “Remember the translation?” I said.

Jolly glanced at me, and nodded.

A reflection of the other self.

I reached for my rifle. “No,” Jolly said. “It’s too soon for that.”

I pulled it out anyway. In my vision I had been the only one of his enemies who could get close to him.

“Jubilee, it’s not time!”

“Then let him stay away!”

He might have heard me, for he hesitated. Confusion bloomed on his distant face. He looked about, but he no longer seemed to see us. His mouth opened as if with a shout, but no sound could be heard. Then he changed. It was not him anymore that we saw in the distance, but a woman. She walked on toward us, a woman of good height and strong build, dressed in a gown of gold and white. Her dark hair lay loose about her shoulders, and there was a glow on her face of some hidden vitality, a perfection of body and spirit that did not seem to be of this world.

As she drew near, Jolly grabbed my arm and whispered the most nonsensical thing: “Jubilee, it’s you.”

Meaningless words that I ignored.

“It is you,” he insisted.

“Hush. It is the goddess.”

The memory of her lay within me, a vague remembrance, but certain all the same. I dismounted from the bike and went to meet her, wondering if she would step from the panel of silver and into the world, but she did not. She stopped only a step away. We faced each other, and for a dizzying moment I could not tell which of us stood within the mirror of silver, and which stood without, for her world seemed far larger than my tiny cage of stone.

She did not speak, either in words or in visions. Instead she reached out, much as the bogy had reached out from the wall of the tower room in the abandoned city. But as her arm passed through the panel it changed: on her side she was lovely, but the hand that darted out to touch me was a tiny, wizened, blackened thing—the arm of a corpse subjected to a long, slow fire. I flinched back, but she was faster. Her palm brushed my forehead.

The contact lasted only a moment, but that was enough. I stumbled back. Vaguely, I was aware of Jolly, shouting at me to flee, but I could not. My body felt far away, a distant object that I watched from a place deep inside myself, while another presence looked out from my eyes, and spoke with my voice. “This is a chance I did not foresee.”

The silver panel dissolved. In a few seconds it melted into nothingness so that I stood in an empty room, listening to my voice speaking words that did not come from me. “Do I still live within your memory?” it asked. “It was so long ago, when you were my hands and my eyes… before the war began… So much was lost. So much broken. And still this last battle will not end! It drains me, and I cannot heal.”

My mind jumped with frantic questions. Was she in me? Was I in her? In those seconds I could not tell the difference.

“Don’t you remember…? Oh. Oh, no. I took that away. It was too horrible to remember. It’s enough to know he came to unmake this world we had built. I drove him into the darkness, but some shadow of him exists here still. You sense it, don’t you?I sense it.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “He has left a wound in the world, and the silver gushes from it, like blood to drown all the land and sea. Some fragment of himself festers within it, like a poison, and it cannot heal. I cannot heal, so that I too am become no more than a shadow.”

A shadow strong enough to take me over!That was my thought, and I guess she understood it.

“You are my hands,” she said gently. “From the first days it was so. You must be my hands again. Find this wound. A veil of stealth lies over it, but you must look past that, and remove this fragment of our enemy, and let us heal.”

Then she turned. It was a clumsy movement and partly mine, for her presence was fading within me, dissolving like silver in the dawn’s light. She felt herself slipping away, and fear—or maybe it was despair—caused my heart to quicken. Hurry now. “Where is the new one?” she demanded. “Where is he?”

He stood in the doorway, watching us with panicky eyes. “Jubilee?” Jolly whispered. “Is it you?”

The goddess frowned. “How is it you are still so young? Ah, but at least your ha has awakened. I see it all about you. You must waken it in the others. All of them. Teach them how. They have been children for far too long…”

Even as she spoke, I felt her slip loose, sliding past me, into that remote place where I had been, while I was pulled back into myself. She spoke once more, but in a soundless voice, rising up from memory. “Remember! When the ha awakens, any player may speak to the silver and guide its function. But that will not turn back its advance. Do not make that mistake again!”

Then she was gone.

I staggered, all my energy gone away with her. My lungs heaved, and flecks of silver glittered between my fingers and in the folds of my sleeves. I braced myself against the cold stone of the wall. “Jolly! Was she real? Or was she another vision?”

Jolly knew then that she was gone. He came to put an arm around my waist.

“She was real,” he said.

“What is this wound in the world that she spoke of? If a goddess cannot heal it—”

“I know what it is.”

Raw fear was in his eyes, and for many seconds the only sound in that room was my frantic breathing, for I knew too. I had seen the edge of it. It had been visible from the southern escarpment of the Kalang: a terrible region, hazed with dust, and lightning storms. “It is the southern desert.”

Jolly nodded. “Kaphiri called it the Cenotaph. I don’t know why. He tried to go there once. It’s a great pit, with steep sides that go down and down into endless clouds of silver. He never found the bottom, and climbing out again, he nearly died of thirst and hunger.”

“He tried to go down there?” It seemed an act of madness to me. “Why? Why would anyone?” I wanted a reason. I needed a reason. One I could believe in.

“Because he had learned there is a god there. Her enemy. Just as she said. A god from out of the darkness.”

“But that’s a reason to run away! It’s not a reason to go.”

“It was for him, but he failed.”

“Of course he failed! How can any player do what a goddess cannot?”

Jolly considered this, as if he saw real merit in the question. “She is wounded.”

That was true. I had felt her weakness.

She had called me her hands. I had been her hands in some other life. I had served her will. Was that why sparks of silver now danced between my fingers? “This is ha,” I realized, raising my right hand to examine the glitter. “Or anyway,ha is the ability to survive this, to use it. Kaphiri wakened it in me… but who wakened it in you?”

“No one. It just came.”

“I think Ficer was right. She made you for this—to waken on your own to the silver, and then to waken it in other players…”

“I don’t know how to do that!”

“Can you learn?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you could—”

“If I could, then any player could learn to survive the silver. Our father—he’d be alive now, he’d be here, if—”

“No. Don’t say that. Neither of us knew anything then—and even the goddess cannot turn back time.” For if she could, surely she would have restarted this broken world? “Jolly, there’s something else, something she told me after she could no longer speak aloud. She said that even though a player may come to control the silver, that will not turn back its advance. She said we must not make that mistake again. You understand?”

He thought a moment. Then his eyes grew wide. “Ki-Faun was wrong!”

I closed my eyes, trembling to think how perilous the chance had been. What if, in that other life, I had succeeded in his plot against Kaphiri? The world would be drowned. “Soon you’ll learn to awaken the ha. When you do, you must tell everyone of this danger. Don’t forget it.”

“And you?”

I shrugged, feeling a weight upon me, the same as in my vision. The goddess had lied to me. I was not her hands. Hands were used for building; for creating new things. But that had never been my task.

“Can you sleep?” I asked Jolly.

He said he could not.

“Then let’s go up to the mesa top, and see what the dawn will bring.”