Memory

Chapter 33

I slept through much of that next day. Sometimes I sleep just to avoid being awake. A waking mind must face facts and make decisions. I wanted none of that. I wanted to sleep forever, but in the afternoon my conscience stirred, and I wakened.

Instantly I felt cold, for Yaphet was gone.

I knew where he was. In my imagination I could see him in the library, poring over ancient slices of lettered stone, or electronic documents that might have been written by himself, lifetimes ago.

I called Moki and he appeared from under the bed and I petted him for a few minutes, but it did little to calm me. In the vision I had suffered at Azure Mesa I had spoken with Ki-Faun, who was Yaphet. His words reechoed in my mind and I felt their weight like a curse: The knot is tied around you, milady, did you know it? All our fates circle around you.

He had been so old I had not recognized him as my lover, but he knew me.

He had put the kobold in my hand. I wondered if that memory lay somewhere beneath the surface of Yaphet’s mind… and if so, how far beneath the surface?

There was a knock at the door, and I stood and dressed, though I did not hurry, knowing he would wait.

He had been made in the image of Yaphet, and Yaphet had been made to resemble the god, and I was an avatar of the goddess, a container for her to play in, when she was in a playful mood.

We were not them. We were only players, made to look like them. But perhaps we had also been made to share some aspects of their personalities? The god had designed the mechanical structure of the world—which went far in explaining Yaphet’s passion to know, to analyze, to understand, and to defy… and also why he frightened me even when I loved him.

But where was the explanation for me? The goddess had given life to the world, but death was my role. Maybe I was that part of the goddess that had made war against her mate.

The knock sounded again at the door, louder, and this time I answered it.

Kaphiri waited in the hall, his eyes shadowed by a sullen anger. I had not seen him when Yaphet retrieved me from the room of the savants, but he was back now, and wanting to know what I knew. I could see it in his eyes.

I told him, “Terrible things can be done in the heat of anger.”

“And also when it is cold.”

So true. Cold anger had eaten at him for thousands of years. It had led him to murder my father and countless others, and it had planted in him his ambition to become a god. I said, “I know why the bogies are trying to kill you. It’s because you were made to look like the dark god.”

“Do not toy with me.”

“It is what the ancient savant told me. I have already warned Yaphet.”

I told him everything then, for I saw no advantage in hoarding the information. He and Yaphet were both brilliant, and I desperately hoped one of them would find a better solution than the one that had come to me.

Evening had fallen by the time Kaphiri left me. I thought of going to the library, but I dreaded that place, so I wandered into the courtyard with Moki for company. I could smell the silver beyond the walls, though I could not see it yet.

In the corner of the courtyard, the glass folly glowed and flickered as if illuminated shapes moved within it. I thought of Jolly in this courtyard, calling the silver to him over these towering walls. “Come, Moki,” I said, and we wandered closer to the glass spillway. The shapes within it looked like ghosts. They turned to gaze at me, with faces that were not quite faces, their eyes like hollow sockets. Moki whined. I reached down to comfort him, but he was gone, fleeing back to the open temple door.

My own retreat was more dignified, but it was a retreat, just the same. When I reached the temple I turned back, to see a wraith of silver flowing down the glass spillway to settle on the courtyard floor.

A luscious scent of cooking had infiltrated the temple. I followed it to the kitchen, and found Kaphiri again, sitting at a table of rose-colored jade. Mari was at the stove, fussing over a pot of stew. “You’ll be hungry,” she announced. “Sit down.” And she set a bowl before me.

Kaphiri did not eat, or maybe he had eaten before I came in. As Mari put my bowl down, he gave her a hard look. No word passed between them, but she turned sullenly away, and after taking a moment to check the stove, she left us alone.

“Look at me,” he said.

I did, and saw a version of Yaphet, older in the ways of the world and bitter. Terribly bitter.

“You want me to believe that players were no more than toys in their eyes, but the god and the goddess must have been players once, on another world. Did the savant say nothing of this?”

“She did not. And I do not understand you. How can you still want to become a god, knowing what they did?”

“Tens of thousands of players in this world think I am a god now.”

“And you know they are wrong. You have learned to command the silver to destruction, but not to creation. You have never learned to command it to bring forth what you choose. If you want to be a god, learn that! It is said Fiaccomo created the kobolds. Your talent is similar to his, but what have you ever done except wipe away the world?”

For a long time he said nothing. He seemed to be looking inside himself, but if he found an answer there, I never learned what it was.

I had finished eating and was feeding the leftovers to Moki when he spoke again. “You are right. Destruction is always easier than creation. It’s what you’ve always chosen. Will you choose it this time too? To destroy the silver is an easy thing. Ask me, and I will do it. Now. This night. And in the next few years most of the world will starve to death or die in warfare. That, my love, is the choice you’ve made over and over again.”

“What else should I have done? I am not the goddess. I cannot create a world. I’ve never been confused on that point.”

“So will you choose it now?”

“I don’t know! Maybe it will come to that.”

“If you do, you will send us all around this same circle again, and this choice will face you in another life… and what reason is there to believe you will ever choose differently? So that again and again and again you make us relive this nightmare.”

“It is not my fault!”

“But you could end it so easily, by doing nothing at all. Stay here and wait for the last night. Let the silver drown the whole world, and there will be no survivors to give birth to us ever again. The gods will be defeated then, and their great project will be only an empty folly, lost among the stars.”

My eyes stung, and suddenly I wanted my mother desperately. Should I let the silver drown her world? Should I murder her? I blinked back my tears, and asked him what I had not dared to ask before. “Have you already murdered my mother?”

He shrugged. “I went back to that place you lived, but it was gone. The hills were empty.”

A fierce ache filled my throat, so that all I could do was whisper. “There was only one temple in Kavasphir. Did you go to the right hill?”

“The road was there, and the raspberry bushes, but on the hilltop there was only a ring of golden standing stones.”

Kaphiri had murdered thousands, but never had he lied to me. I laid my head down on the table, but I did not weep. Once—it seemed so long ago—I had crawled to the edge of the Kalang, and peered over a sheer precipice, where waterfalls vanished into mist long before they reached the ground, and the world had seemed grand and wild. Now it had become a cold, hollow thing.

“I need you,” I whispered.

He leaned closer. “What did you say?”

There was a note of desperate hope in his voice, but it did not move me. I was done with compassion, and I was done with waiting. Why wait? I knew what to do.

Ki-Faun’s kobold had been made to erase the very memory of a player from the silver, removing him forever from the world. Might it do the same thing to a god?

Selma had believed that within the silver was a memory of the minds of the goddess and the god who made the world. If I could remove all remembrance of the dark god, would he be gone forever? And would his flood of silver cease?

I lifted my head, and turned to meet Kaphiri’s gaze. “I need you to go into the Cenotaph with me.”

The hope in his eyes died. Anger took over, announcing itself with a short and bitter laugh. “I have already gone there.”

“But you did not find the god.”

His fist slammed against the table. “You cannot fight a god!I cannot.You cannot. Not unless we are gods ourselves, but you won’t help me there. I know you won’t, no matter the promises you make.”

I felt no fear of him. I should have taken warning from that, but my mood was as fierce as his. “These are the last days! You said so yourself. There isn’t time left for all the studies you would have me make, but it doesn’t matter. I know what to do. I just need you to come with me. You have a power over the silver—”

“Enough!” Such an anger filled his eyes! A murderous rage. He stood, slamming back his chair so that it went tumbling across the room, while Moki darted into the darkest corner. “If you choose to go, then your decision is made. It will be the flood.”

He strode toward the door.

“What do you mean?” I rose to my feet. “Wait! Where are you going?”

“Into the silver.”

“No!” I charged after him, and grabbed his arm. “If you will not come with me then at least stay here! The end will come soon enough.”

He was no taller than me, but he was stronger, and better skilled in mayhem. He caught my hand in the lightest of grips and twisted—

—and I went to my knees, crying out in pain.

“I won’t go again into the Cenotaph,” he called over his shoulder. “Not until you have shown me how to become a god.”

“I don’t know how!”

He paused at the great bronze doors. “Then learn. There is still tonight. And for you, at least, there will be a tomorrow.”

He stepped out into the courtyard. I ran after him, but now he was running too, sprinting to the pool of silver that seeped from Jolly’s monument. I screamed my pleas that he should come back, but he reached the silver, and it rolled over him, and even now I do not know how many enclaves fell to him that night.

I was sobbing when I reached Yaphet in the library. I choked my story out to him. “I provoked him. I didn’t intend it, but I provoked him, and now he has gone into the silver to do murder. I could not stop him.”

“Hush, my love. How could you stop him? If you tried, he would only call the silver over you.”

“I should not have made him angry. I should have lied to him, told him what he wanted to hear.” My gaze fell upon the long table. Last night it had been almost empty, but now it was covered in neat stacks of lettered stone. “What are you studying?”

He smiled apologetically. “Anything. Everything. It’s fascinating. I could live here for a hundred years.”

“You did live here for at least that long. This was your house, Yaphet, in another life. Can’t you sense it?”

He looked around at the tall stacks, then back at the table. “I know my way around, but I have no memory of this place. None.” He looked at me. “Do you?”

“Yes. Fragments come to me.”

“I wish I could say the same. It’s what I want most: to recall the memories of my past lives.”

“That talent has not made Kaphiri happy.”

“He doesn’t have you.”

I could not answer him. I was cold inside, and hollow. “I told you of my vision at Azure Mesa.”

“I remember. You saw your past then too. When you ended Kaphiri’s life, it caused the silver to be destroyed.”

“I had planned to end his life in another way.”

I watched Yaphet closely, looking for any spark of remembrance, but all he recalled was our conversation. “That’s right. You were going to use the kobold the old sage had made. It was supposed to erase the memory of him from the silver, but that part sounded like a magic spell to me.”

“That old sage was you, Yaphet. And I want you to re-create that kobold for me. I want you to do it tonight.”

He told me it was impossible, and then he set to the task, moving between the shelves with a certainty that must have come from Ki-Faun himself. Near dawn, he stopped beside me with a puzzled look. “I choose manuscripts without knowing why, and they are the right manuscripts. Some part of me remembers this place, and the things I must have done here… but I can’t remember being here. It’s eerie.” And then, as an afterthought, “I found the recipe for the kobold you wanted.”

“You did? Where is it?”

He tapped his forehead. “Here. It was too dangerous to write down, so I memorized the formula for the kobold circle. The memory came to me, as I was scanning other texts on the subject. I hope we can find the right kobolds. Have you been to the well?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. Not in this life anyway, but I know where it is. Come on, I’ll show you the way.”

The well room lay beyond the kitchen. The well itself was a wide hole, maybe twelve feet across, and deep. I dropped a bit of stone down its dark throat and listened, but I did not hear it hit bottom. Yaphet said, “This well must be a thousand years old, or more.”

“That would make it even older than the well at the Temple of the Sisters.”

“Both are close to the Cenotaph. I wonder if it feeds their longevity?”

“I think it does. I think it’s the engine beneath the Kalang as well.”

There were interesting kobolds alive in the mound, but the four we needed all came from the drawers of a vast kobold cabinet. We wakened them and reset their codes. Then we put them together and immediately they formed a smooth, interlocked sphere.

Yaphet studied it, turning it over and over in his hands. “This is awkward.” He frowned at the kobold circle “Doesn’t this seem like a cumbersome procedure to you?”

“So long as it works.”

“But what are kobolds, really?”

“Yaphet, please,” I said, in no mood for his musings.

“But they’re mechanics, seeded by the silver. Tools.”

“Yes, of course they are. They are a knowledge stolen by Fiaccomo from the mind of the goddess.”

Yaphet smiled. “They are tools we use to create the things we need—but why do we need tools? Why can’t we create these things directly from the silver? It should be possible, if only we knew how.”

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck, for wasn’t that the definition I had given to Kaphiri for a god? “Do you know how?”

“No, of course not. Not yet. But it’s something I wanted to talk to you about. You use the ha to manipulate the silver, or anyway to push it away.”

“Even if I could call it, that is not the same as creation. Even Kaphiri cannot do that, and he’s had centuries to experiment.”

“But before the ha was awake in you, you could not push the silver. It wouldn’t matter how many experiments you ran, or how much you tried, it couldn’t be done. It would be like trying to speak when you had no voice. So what if there is another level of the ha? What if this level you’ve found is only the level of an apprentice or an adolescent? What if there is another level that can be awakened too?”

It frightened me to think of it. I did not want to know more. I knew too much already. “Would you want it?” I asked him. “If such a door opened, would you step through it? Even if it took you to another world?”

He looked away. He looked guilty. “I would still want to be with you.”

“You would go.” The comforting scent of kobolds was heavy in the air, and I was remembering how sweet life had been when I was a child, in the years before Jolly was taken. “I’m afraid all the time… but you’re not. You’re like Fiaccomo, in that. If the silver swept over you, you’d embrace it. You’d make love with the goddess, and bring some great gift back to the world. I never used to believe the old stories, but I do now. I wonder if you were Fiaccomo, in another life?”

Yaphet blushed. Even past his dark skin, I saw his color rise. “No. I know that’s not true. It wasn’t me.”

“It could be true,” I insisted.

“I don’t want to guess at things like that.”

“Kaphiri doesn’t guess. He remembers his past. Yaphet, if we could do that… We are older than he is. Our memories would go back farther. Maybe, back to the beginning of the world, to the days when we knew how to use the silver.”

Yaphet looked suddenly guilty. “He told me how to do it. He was happy to share all the details of it… how to make the kobold circle, and what it felt like to have the past fall open.”

I was stunned. “And you have not tried it? Why not?”

“It nearly killed him, to remember that much. His mind was overwhelmed. Months passed, and he couldn’t think straight, and finally he stumbled into the silver and that helped him sort it out. He keeps his memories there now. Only some of it stays with him when he’s outside.”

“And we cannot go into the silver.”

Yaphet nodded agreement. “And still I might take the chance… except you’re right. We are older than Kaphiri. Far older. You talked to that ancient savant. Her one life was so very long. If you remembered what she remembers, would you have room for anything else? And among all that knowledge, would you be able to find the one fact you’re looking for?”

I smiled a fuzzy smile. “You make it sound like it would be easier to just ask her how to reach the next level of the ha.”

“Ask her?” A fierce scowl darkened his brow. “Actually, I hadn’t thought of that.”

So we ran to the room of savants, taking the kobold circle with us, for we had no way of knowing how much time might pass before the new kobold emerged. But the ancient savant would not waken. Yaphet examined it, but all he could say was that its power system must have failed. “The shock of powering-up after so many millennia. It’s amazing it worked at all.”

I held the lifeless glass shell, furious at the thought of the knowledge it contained, locked away forever.

“Okay,” Yaphet said. “So we’ll have to remember it some other way.”

But a sense of urgency had come over me. “What time is it? Has the dawn come yet?”

“Long since.”

“Then where is Kaphiri?”

We went to the kitchen. Mari was there, but she said he had not come back.

“I thought he would return at dawn.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes he is gone for days.”

“It is always night somewhere in the world,” Yaphet said, and his face was grim.

It made me shudder, to think of Kaphiri following the night around the ring of the world. I had thought his rampage would end at dawn… but what was there to stop him now except exhaustion?

I looked at Yaphet. “We need his talents. We must make him come back.”

“How can we?”

“I’ll call him. When the silver rises tonight… I’ll seek him. I’ve felt him through the silver before.”

So we waited out the day. I slept for part of it. Yaphet did not sleep; he said he could not. There was an energy burning in him, and he spent all that day at study in the library, but he did not learn how to awaken his ha. Near dusk we ate a quiet meal in the kitchen, with the kobold circle on the table before us. “Do you still plan to call him?” Mari asked, standing in what I had come to think of as her place, beside the stove.

“Yes, as soon as the silver has risen. We’re going to leave after that. So I want to thank you for your kindness…”

She shrugged. “If you come back, I’ll be here.”

“We won’t be coming back.”

“So sure, are you?”

“Yes.”

I felt the weight of the book, Known Kobold Circles, in my pocket. Almost as heavy as the weight of my conscience. I reached for the book. Yaphet caught my hand, and we traded a look. “She should know,” I said softly. He could not meet my gaze. So I pulled out the book and showed it to her. “Nuanez gave this to me because I could read it.”

Her face went slack. With a trembling hand, she pulled out a chair. Then she collapsed into it, steadying herself with a palm against the table. “Nuanez?” she whispered. “How is it you know that name?”

“I stayed in his house. I spoke with him. He’s still waiting for you, Mari, in the forest of the Kalang. He’s still there, waiting for you to come back.”

I went on to tell her all I could remember. She listened, asking no questions, her face locked in frozen grief. When I was done, she sat in silence for several minutes. Then she excused herself, saying she had chores to do.

“I wonder if that was a mistake?” Yaphet asked when she was gone.

I wondered too, but Nuanez had been waiting so very long. “Maybe she’ll return now?”

I hoped she would.

I reached for the kobold circle, picking it up yet again to examine it. Many hours had passed since it was formed. I had looked at it a hundred times without discovering any hint of change, but now dark lines appeared between the joined kobolds. I cried out in excitement, and over the next hour Yaphet and I watched as the kobolds were pushed apart by some force within the sphere. Lifelessly they fell aside, and at last a new kobold crawled with slow determination from the ruins of the sphere. I stared at it and felt cold, for it was the same kobold I had seen in my vision: a large, glossy, silver specimen, with a carapace like a lozenge, and six strong legs, but no head, no eyes.

Yaphet picked it up.

“Don’t crush it!” I warned.

“I won’t.”

“Its vapors are the harmful thing.”

“I know.”

He had a case for it in his pocket, and he put it in that. Then he handed it to me. “We should go tonight,” he said, “whether Kaphiri returns or not.”

I slipped the case into the pocket of my field jacket. It was our plan to use the flying machine, to get as close to the Cenotaph as we could. We hoped to land near its rim. Then we would walk down into the pit, and perhaps it would take us only a day or two to reach the bottom… but Yaphet had not found his ha. “We need him,” I whispered. “I cannot fend off the silver by myself.”

“Every night, thousands more die.”

“I know.”

“Last night—”

“I know! I know it. Please don’t say it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’ll go. But let me call him first. Let me try.”

We found a cloth bag in one of the cabinets, and I filled it with bread and cheese and rations. Yaphet took several plastic bottles from another shelf and filled them with water from the tap. Then we went outside.