Memory

Chapter 31

It was my task to guard Yaphet, but my vigil failed during that long flight south. I fell asleep, waking only when Yaphet shouted some question and Kaphiri answered that we should bear west. My face and hands were numb with cold and I pulled Moki’s small body close to warm them.

We were very high. The silver-flooded plain lay far below us, unbroken by any peak or pinnacle, but ahead there were mountains.

I had seen the Sea Comb from afar, but only as we drew close did I understand the expanse of that range. The part standing above the flood was twice as tall as the Kalang: a wall of sharp, ice-coated peaks raised against a dawn sky of liquid blue-gray.

As the dawn brightened, the silver rolled back, uncovering a land as strange as any I have seen. A city of glass towers sparkled in the foothills, carpeting the dry slopes and filling the valley floors for mile after mile. The glass towers were black, or gray, or blue, standing impossibly high and thin. Some of the buildings crowded one against the next, but where there was space between them, the ground sparkled in broken glass. As we passed over I saw why. Every few seconds a great windowpane would pop loose from one of the towers and drop, turning and flashing in the muted light, until it struck the ground, bursting apart in a high-pitched, crashing explosion of sound. It seemed to me that if the wind blew hard, the towers themselves would be toppled.

The glass city did not belong in our world. I was sure of it. The architecture was wrong. The towers were too tall, too thin, too fragile for our gravity… but the gods had come from another world.

I wondered: How does a player become a god? What is a god? What qualities might define one? If we could learn to command the power of the silver, would that make us gods? Or was that only a first step?

The city fell behind us, and soon after that the desert began to yield to an upland of shrubs and small trees, that grew greener and more lush with the increasing elevation. The ground no longer seemed far away, for the land rose steeply, while we only slowly climbed toward the middle peaks. Then Kaphiri guided us into a canyon, and suddenly the mountains surrounded us.

We flew between the canyon’s narrow walls for perhaps five miles, and then at Kaphiri’s direction we climbed above the canyon rim. A temple compound was perched there on the very edge of the precipice, and at once I recognized it as the temple Jolly had described. The defensive walls were massive, at least forty feet high and twenty wide, surrounding a courtyard and a central temple building, all of it built of a melancholy gray stone. Beyond the temple was a lovely green meadow edged in forest, with high peaks in the distance that glistened white with ice.

As Yaphet brought the flying machine around in a broad circle I looked again at the forest edge. Silver lingered there, in patches sheltered by the shadows of the trees, and between the silver I thought I saw players wandering in slow groups as if searching for something. But I wasn’t sure. Maybe they were some kind of strange, upright animal, for they seemed small and hunched, with heads too large for their bodies, but before I could decide, they disappeared, shying away from the wind-rush of the flying machine.

Then we were over the canyon again, and a moment later the temple’s massive wall was rushing up below us. Yaphet had chosen to land on the wall that faced the canyon. I glimpsed staircases rising up to it from the courtyard, and saw that only a shallow curbing offered protection from the precipitous drop. Then the wings flared, rolling back to embrace the air just as the wings of a bird will, and we floated gently down the last few feet, landing with only a slight bump.

Immediately, I rolled out of the cargo basket and staggered to my feet. It was as if I had been half-asleep all night, enthrall to some bizarre dream, but in that moment I wakened fully to my situation, and horror filled me. I was standing on the wall of Kaphiri’s temple, his stronghold, where he had returned again and again over many lifetimes in his long and bitter struggle with the will of our flawed goddess. Why had I come? What had moved me to abandon Jolly, and Liam, and Udondi to flee south with my father’s murderer? I wanted to discover that I had been swept up in a dream, another vision, but that dawn had too much of reality about it. I was stiff with cold, and exhausted, and hungry, and in desperate need to answer a particular call of nature.

Moki whined and I picked him up, the warmth of his small body so tender against my cheek that I knew it was no dream.

I stepped to the edge of the wall. Silver still filled the canyon. It flowed downhill in a great, silent river, roiling and tumbling past the foot of the temple wall without ever quite touching the stone. I breathed in the sweet perfume of temple kobolds, mixed with the sharp scent of silver, and it seemed to me that temple was strong and well defended. But then I stepped around the wing and I saw that the wall had been breached by the silver at least once, for a strange folly of blue glass had replaced some of the stone. The folly started at the top of the wall and plunged down into the courtyard, looking like the spillway of a steep mountain stream. I was tired, and it was hard to focus on the translucent mass, but it seemed to be filled with swooping shapes and swirls as if some edgeless, unstable geometry was trapped within it.

Kaphiri came round the flying machine. He saw where I looked. “That is Jolly’s monument,” he said. “Seven players were taken when he called that flood over the wall. And every night since the silver follows that path into the temple grounds.”

I turned away, for I could not bear to think of Jolly, so far away, and lost to me again.

Within the walls, the courtyard lay like a dark skirt around the central temple building. That building stood three stories high, each story smaller than the one below so that it had the look of a stacked cake. Its dark windows cast a brooding gaze toward the vistas beyond the walls.

Memory stirred in me. I felt the tremor of an old fear rising in my consciousness, a terrible dread, and suddenly I knew with absolute certainty I had been in that place before. “Yaphet—” My mouth had gone dry, so that I could hardly speak. I turned to look for him—but what I saw made my voice leave me entirely.

He had called Kaphiri to him, and they worked together to furl the wings, while Yaphet explained the mechanism of the flying machine and its steering system, speaking gently, as if the two of them were brothers.But they were not! I could feel the difference between them… though it did not seem as profound as last night.

The night’s cold had settled in my bones and I shuddered, but to the east the sky above the mountains blazed with the light of a hidden sun. As Yaphet finished furling the wings, the sun finally showed itself, rising over the eastern slopes to spill its warmth across the temple walls and the flowing silver in the canyon—which sank away into the shadows—and against my jacket, and like the silver, my fear receded, though it did not go away.

The sound of our footsteps made a forlorn tapping as we crossed the empty courtyard to the tall temple building. The wide grounds were tiled in a herringbone pattern of gray and blue brick, and nowhere did I see a stray leaf or any gathering of dirt or dust, or sprouting weed between the tiles, so that it seemed we walked inside an electronic market, and not in the true world. An explanation of this perfection was not long in coming.

The temple was made of the same gray stone as the walls. Wide, arched windows looked out into the courtyard, and between them were tall doors of shining platinum. They opened at our approach, and their motion stirred to life a creature that had been crouching on the step: a mechanic, mantislike and the height of my hand. It scuttled aside on four legs, while holding two front limbs close to its body—one pincered, one armed with scissored blades. Its machine eyes looked at us from a triangular head mounted on the end of a snakelike neck.

I stared back at it, mouth agape, for it was exactly like the mechanics on the Kalang Crescent, whose endless task it was to protect the forest. The traveler had visited that forest often, and Nuanez Li had seen his little daughter killed by these things.

“You’re Kalang, aren’t you?” I asked Kaphiri. “You are the player who left the mechanics in the forest.”

He glanced at the mechanic, a look of melancholy in his eyes. “That was another life. My name was Zha Leng, but it changed with time, as all things do.”

“You left the mechanics to guard the wells, didn’t you? Not the trees!”

He shrugged. “If the trees cannot be cut, then no one should have reason to settle near the wells.”

“Nuanez Li lived there. He lives there still!” But I bit my lip, regretting the words as soon as they were spoken. Perhaps Kaphiri didn’t know Nuanez was still alive, or that he had found his own unending youth in the wells of the Kalang.

But Kaphiri’s interest proved to be only philosophical. “If he still lives on the Kalang Crescent, then he’ll likely be the last player alive in the world, for the silver may never conquer that plateau. Not that Nuanez would ever notice the difference!”

He laughed, but it was a laugh full of bitterness, delighting in the harsh ironies of the world.

We mounted the front steps, and passed through the open doors into a great room, neatly furnished with couches and tables and chairs, all meticulously clean. Across the room, a grand stairway led up to the next floor, while on either side gloomy passages gave access to other ground-level rooms.

A woman appeared from one of these hallways. She was white-haired and stooped, and she clung to the shadows, as if reluctant to show herself. I guessed her to be Mari, the woman who had cared for my brother when he was a prisoner in this temple. Mari, the lost wife of Nuanez Li.

Jolly had described her as a kindly player, but she did not extend us any welcome. When she spoke, it was in a soft, furtive whisper, as if she feared drawing the attention of a wicked fate. “How long will these last?” she asked Kaphiri, gesturing at me and Yaphet with her chin.

“No longer than the rest of us,” he answered. “For all things must end, Mari. All things. Even you.”

We were in the household of my father’s murderer.

I had come to help him learn more about our shared past, and about the lost science of becoming a god. I brooded over these ironies as we sat down to a formal breakfast, in a room hung with paintings and projections of ages long past.

Mari served us. She would allow neither myself nor Yaphet to help, and while we were at the table she refused all attempts at conversation. But when I was returning from a visit to the scupper I encountered her in the hall. In her whispering voice she asked about Jolly, and I assured her my brother was well, but this news did not bring her any particular pleasure.

“Seven players died when Jolly left this temple.” She glanced over her shoulder, as if to assure herself Kaphiri was still at table. “Did you see the folly that has broken the courtyard wall? Jolly left that to us, to remember him by. A knife thrust, that’s what it is. A wound that draws the silver into the yard night after night, like bacteria seeking flesh. This temple won’t stand much longer.”

This last was pronounced with vindictive satisfaction.

“Do you want to see it fall?”

She bent closer to me, and her voice grew even softer. “I came here long ago, because he told me I would not die—not if I stayed within these walls—and he did not lie. I have lived and lived and lived! I have been old longer than anyone else has been alive. Even him!”

“You are older than him?” I asked incredulously, thinking of Nuanez, living alone on the plateau of the Kalang.

“So you know about him?”

I nodded.

“He kept himself youthful, but I have always been old.”

“Not always, surely.”

She looked away, and there was a tremor in her lip. “Whatever existed before… that is lost to time. I wonder how many lives he has lived, since I lived with him? I wonder how many lives he has spent searching for me? But there will be no more lives after this one.”

I did not tell her that Nuanez too was still living the same life. I didn’t think she would believe me. How could she let herself believe? If she had stayed with Nuanez she might have regained her youth… or Kaphiri might have murdered them both for nosing into his secrets.

Yaphet and Kaphiri had been deeply involved in a discussion of flight when I left the table. That discussion was still ongoing when I returned. I listened at the door, but their conversation was hard for me to follow. They spoke as if they knew, or guessed, what was in the other’s mind and perhaps they did, for Kaphiri had been made as a copy of Yaphet, and it came to me that they likely shared a vast measure of memory kept within the silver.

Their similarity frightened me, but their growing sympathy troubled me even more. As I listened, I could not say with any certainty which was Yaphet’s voice, and which belonged to Kaphiri. I told myself this confusion was only a result of my exhaustion, for I had not slept well since leaving the Temple of the Sisters, but I decided against rejoining them. Instead I resolved to explore the temple on my own.

I set out with that purpose in mind, but the dread of that place that had stirred in me upon our arrival was still strong. Fear seized me as I started to climb the grand staircase to the second floor, so I went outside instead, with Moki following at my heel.

The sun was warm and the air cool. I did not see any mechanics about.

I circled the courtyard, and in that way came to the temple gates. They were three times my height, fitted beneath a horizontal span of stone. I knew Jolly used to walk in the meadow beyond the wall, and climb the ridges around the temple, but in his stories he had never mentioned the strange creatures I had seen lurking on the forest’s edge. Instinct warned me against them, and I did not dare to open the gates. Instead I climbed the nearest stairs, thinking to look for the creatures from the safety of the wall.

I spied them almost immediately: a band of five just at the edge of the trees, and this time there was no doubt in my mind. Though they walked on two legs and in every general way resembled men and women, they were not players. They were too tiny and too lithe, and gravity did not seem to chain them, for they would bounce and float at every step, sometimes drifting several inches into the air. They were ephemeral too. They began to disappear, one by one. I would look away, and when I looked back one more would be gone, reappearing sometimes a little farther along the forest’s edge.

Moki growled, and I turned, to see Kaphiri coming up the stair. “Where is Yaphet?” I demanded.

“In the paradise of my library. He will not miss us for a little while.”

“I feel as if I have been in this temple before.”

He came to stand beside me. “You have been here before.”

Across the wide meadow, the creatures paused in their random wandering. They looked toward the temple, and one cried out in a high, strange voice something that sounded like La-zur-i, with the syllables all drawn out. Another took up the cry, and another, and there was nothing of friendliness in the sound.

“It sounds like a malediction,” I said, feeling shaken.

“I think it’s a name.” He watched the forest creatures with an expression that was part amusement, part contempt.

“Are they bogies?”

He nodded. “Though they don’t seem to be attached to any ruin. They came out of the silver only a few days ago, but they have already demonstrated some skill with poison darts. They seem to have assumed the task of murdering me.”

Startled, I stepped back from the edge of the wall. “You alone?”

“It’s a hard assumption to test. There is only me and the woman here, but she does not come out on the walls.” His brow wrinkled. “Still, I think it is only me. Some kind of vendetta, I suspect. They believe I am this Lazuri—”

“We should not be standing on the wall.”

“There are mechanics in the meadow. We are safe enough.”

“Are you Lazuri?”

“It’s not a name I remember using. But come. There are more interesting sights than this.”

We walked around the wall until we came to the side that looked down over the canyon.

On our flight south, silver had covered all the desert, but the sun had been at work since dawn and the silver had burned away. I looked down into the canyon and saw a thread of water sparkling within a forest far below, but my gaze did not rest there long, for the vast Iraliad lay before us. There was no wind, so no dust had risen to haze the view. We were high in the mountains, and through the crystalline air I could see farther—I could see more—than I ever had before. The desert glowed in the morning light, warm yellows and tans and rust red colors, with bright sparks of reflected light hinting at the presence of follies and precious veins of silver-spawned minerals. Far to the north—a hundred miles? two hundred?—the plain dissolved into a haze of blue distance.

All this came to me in a glance, before my attention was seized by the great pit of the Cenotaph. I had glimpsed its storm-wracked edge once before, from the southern escarpment of the Kalang, but now I saw it clearly, and I shuddered.

The goddess had called it a wound in the world, and that was what it looked like: if the golden desert was the world’s flesh, then the Cenotaph was a great bullet wound.

It was a crater, fifty miles or more across, its rim a chaos of colored sand and slag—pink and putrid green and black and a poisonous, electric blue—with thin mists of silver steaming here and there from vents and fissures, sparkling brightly before dissolving in the sunlight.

Lying within the pit was a lake of silver, and it was boiling. Even at such a distance I could see great bubbles rising up from its surface and bursting, throwing drops of silver in all directions. How large must those “drops” be, if I could see them?

Kaphiri said, “It is the pressure of sunlight that makes it bubble. At night it is still.”

“I did not know it was so close.”

For several minutes I could not look away, but finally I raised my gaze, to see the dark, blocky mass of a distant plateau beyond the pit. “The Kalang,” I whispered, but my memory of that place felt borrowed, as if it was the memory of someone else… someone I used to be.

“What would happen if you hurled a stone into the mud?” Kaphiri asked.

I gave him a puzzled look. “What kind of question is that?”

“A straightforward one, so think on it. What would happen if you hurled a stone into the mud?”

I scowled, annoyed that he would toy with me. “I would not do it, for it would dirty my clothes, with the mud spattering everywhere.”

He nodded. Then he looked again over the plain, to the distant clouds of silver steaming from the great pit of the Cenotaph. “A god was cast down to the world like a stone, and we are all dirty still. How are you going to fix it, my love? When even the goddess will not dare to try? And why is it you?”