Memory

Chapter 35

The mists over the Cenotaph had quieted in the night, and I could not tell with any certainty where it lay, for the silver had risen in a uniform fog, obscuring all the plain. I was studying its misty surface, searching for some sign of the pit, when we chanced to pass close to a small circle of open ground. I had only a glimpse before the clearing fell behind us, but that was enough to make out stones and sand, looming gray in the silver’s glow, and against them darker shapes that I could not identify with any certainty. I clutched Kaphiri’s shoulder and pointed back. “What was that? Was that a kobold well?”

He arched his neck to look, but we had already gone too far. So he put the flying machine into a steep bank, and we turned back, descending at the same time.

On this pass we flew directly over the open ground. It was a kobold well—the largest I had ever seen. The black circle of its mouth was twice the wingspan of our flying machine, and around it was a ring of soil at least twenty feet high. Three players stood on the inside slope of the soil ring, their faces turned up toward us. Their bikes waited a few steps away, and there were sleeping bags on the ground.

Kaphiri started to take the flying machine down. “No,” I said. “We will fly on.”

“Players do not come this far south! I will know who they are!”

“I know already.”

Those upturned faces had belonged to Liam and Udondi and Ficer, but I would not risk a reunion. I trusted neither Liam’s temper, nor Kaphiri’s tolerance. “Fly on,” I insisted. “Whatever they have come for, it cannot matter now.”

Kaphiri relented. He guided the flying machine up, and away to the north.

Liam’s voice called after us, carrying eerily in the still night. “Jubilee, we will follow when we can.”

Kaphiri glanced at me, a grim smile on his face. He knew now who these wayfarers were. “His chance will come only if we succeed.” This seemed to please him, though whether by the anticipation of our success, or our failure, I could not say.

The sameness of the silver confused my mind, but Kaphiri seemed to see through it. He pointed out the pit to me, and laughed when I could not see it. Then he turned the plane and began a tight spiral that took us quickly closer to the mist. When the silver lay just beneath the belly of the plane he warded it off. We continued to descend, turning round and round, while the silver rose above us, and then closed over our heads.

We still flew in a tight spiral. I knew this because the wind of our passage roared past my face, and the wings flexed and dipped. But with the sameness of the silver all around it felt as if we had been caught and suspended in a place of endless luminosity.

Then a wall of darkness emerged from out of the homogeneous glow: a steep, crumbled slope of transformed stone.

Kaphiri hissed. He leaned on the guidance stick and the plane rocked to one side. I looked down the length of the wing to see Jolly’s terrified face below me. Then the other wing clipped the wall. The canvas tore, and the struts collapsed.

The plane dropped. I closed my eyes. I could not help it, but at the same time I pushed at the silver beneath us. There was an impact. The air was knocked from my lungs, my teeth snapped together, and every part of my body felt as if it had been torn from its proper placement. There was a terrible scraping sound and a sense of motion. I heard Jolly cry out, but all I could do was hold on andpush as hard as I could against the silver that crowded my awareness.

I did not lose consciousness, for I was always conscious of the close press of the silver. I was aware too of Moki’s menacing growls, but only when his growling turned into a high-pitched yelping attack did I open my eyes.

Kaphiri stood over me. He had removed the leash from his own neck and was attempting to place it over mine, but little Moki had already savaged his hand.

I reared back, kicking out at him at the same time, but my reflexes were slow, and he dodged easily. I seized stone from the jumbled slope and flung it after him. It was a keen throw, but too late, for Kaphiri stepped into the silver, and was gone.

“Jolly?”

I turned to look for him, and was stunned to see the remnants of the plane. It lay all around me like a smashed skeleton. The pilot’s platform had broken in half, separating from the engine, which lay downslope, only inches from the wall of silver. The crumpled wings were draped across a chaotic slope of stones and dust and layered ground that reminded me of the eastern slope of the Kalang. “Jolly!” I called again. Moki had been with him, and Moki had survived the crash, so Jolly had to be somewhere close by. “Jolly!”

This time I heard a muffled answer. “I’m here! Over here! Help me get out.”

I followed his voice and found a narrow crevice splitting the slope. A slow-running flow of silver seeped through it, shimmering two meters down. Jolly straddled the flow, his feet and hands propped against the crumbling wall.

“Help me,” he said when he saw me peering down.

I gave him my hand. That was all the help he needed to scramble out and onto the slope beside me. We collapsed together, spending a minute just looking at each other. His face was bruised, but I saw no blood, and he would admit to no broken bones. Moki crawled between us.

“We’ve done well, don’t you think?” Jolly said, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

We were in a chamber of silver, on an unstable slope that fell away to the abode of a wicked god, and my head hurt, and I was thirsty. “At least it’s not dark.”

“Are you holding the silver off?”

I nodded. “It’s certainly not him. But I can feel him out there. I can feel his ha. He’s not far away.”

Jolly raised his dusty hands. The ha sparkled brightly between his fingers. “I think I can hold off the silver too. We should be all right, so long as one of us is awake.”

“Do you know how far it is to the bottom?”

He shook his head. “A long way, I think.” Then he added, in a frightened whisper, “I’m scared.”

I glanced upslope, but after a few feet, the only thing to be seen was silver. “We could try going back.”

“Back to what? The silver is rising. There’s no way out.”

“There is for you—”

“No.”

“Jolly, you could make your way back to Liam—”

“No! I’m scared, but I’m not leaving you. I’m not. We came for a reason, and there’s no going back. Not even for me. Jubilee, if the final flood comes, it will only be me and him alive in the whole world. That’s what I’m scared of, more than anything. So we have to go on. There’s no choice, and no other way out.”

So we scavenged the wreckage, and after a few minutes we found some water bottles and the bag of food I had packed. Sharing the weight of these things we set off downslope, trading off between us the task of pushing the silver away.

At first the air was very cold. My breath condensed in little gray clouds. I had never seen that before. Neither had Jolly. We played with it for a while.

It was hard walking. The slope was steep and covered with loose stones that rolled away under the pressure of a foot. We both fell down several times. I was afraid one of us would twist an ankle or break a leg, and then what would we do?

I didn’t want to think about it.

So we pushed the silver away ahead of us, and let it close in behind, and after a while we came to a precipice. It was a cliff of hard white stone, full of tiny air bubbles. I’d never seen anything like it. It felt as slippery as soap, and when I scuffed at it with my heel, it crumbled.

I stood on its edge, pushing with all my will against the silver, for I wanted to know if the drop was ten feet or two hundred. The silver rolled back, and I saw that it was more than ten feet down. It was at least twenty, and maybe a lot farther. Remembering the southern escarpment of the Kalang, I felt a little queasy. I stepped back from the edge.

“Let’s follow the cliff,” Jolly said. “Sooner or later we’ll find a way down.”

On the cliff’s edge, the walking was easy. Maybe the escarpment had pushed its way into existence only recently. It seemed that way, for its lip was bare of the loose stones that covered the slope above. We followed it for a long time. As we walked, I kept glancing over my shoulder, partly because I knew Kaphiri was somewhere close by. His presence burned within the net of awareness that is part of the ha. I knew he could sense me in the same way, and I feared he would emerge from the silver while our attention was turned away—though exactly what his intentions might be, I didn’t know. He wanted the death of the dark god, but I suspected he wanted my death too.

Another part of my edginess was due to the voices that began to whisper to me. For a long time I wasn’t sure they were real. They sounded distant, like someone calling, who is almost too far away to hear. I couldn’t make out any of their words, but I heard them speaking in the turning of a stone under my foot, or in the wash of my breath, or the ticking of Moki’s nails.

I started remembering things too. Flashes would come to me, perfectly clear recollections. I was feeling bored, watching a baby play. I was driving a truck. I was reading a manuscript, or tending a kobold well. Perfectly ordinary recollections, except they weren’t mine. They did not even belong to some version of me in another life. I was seeing into the lives of other players, and that seemed wrong somehow, though I could not stop it.

I wished they would all shut up and leave me alone.

I described the effect to Jolly, and he looked at me in evident relief. “It’s happening to you too? Thank goodness! I thought I was losing my mind.”

“It’s like we’re breathing in memories.” I stopped and shrugged out of my jacket. “I was cold when we started, but it’s gotten hot.”

It got hotter still. Heat soaked through the soles of my boots. I started to get scared about it. Then it was cold again. Just like that. Like stepping through a door. But when I walked back a few paces, it was still cold. The heat was gone, and it was cold that stung my hand when I touched the rocks.

“Have you noticed there are no follies here?” Jolly asked.

I looked around, and realized it was true. There were no follies like those we were accustomed to seeing. “I wonder if the voices are follies, and the memories?” Flashes of substance from out of the chaos, unmade as soon as they were formed, except where we passed. In our bubble of stillness we held them for a while in our senses.

It was hot again when Jolly finally found a break in the cliff face. It looked like part of the white rock had dropped away in an avalanche, leaving a cleft at the top. I guessed there would be a skirt of debris below, but we couldn’t see it.

“It looks rough,” I said.

“So maybe if we keep going, we’ll find a paved road to take us down?”

“Well it’s not impossible.”

He grinned. “You realize, if we were stronger, we could will a road into existence.”

“Or another flying machine.”

“Or our father.”

Or Mama. Or Yaphet. “We’d be gods, if we could do that.”

We made our way down the cleft. The stone walls played strangely with my vision. From the corner of my eye I would see the outline of a window, or the shape of a watching player, but when I turned to look, there would be only white stone. I might have passed it off as an illusion, but Moki was nervous. He would stop and growl at nothing. Then dart ahead and growl again.

We had been walking several minutes when I slipped on a rock. I caught my balance with a hand against the white stone. In the moment I touched the rock, a burnt black hand reached out of it to grab my arm. I yelped, and flailed wildly, while Moki launched into a storm of barking. The arm dissolved like a soap bubble.

“What was that?” Jolly demanded, and his eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them.

“A bogy, I think.”

They were hideous and they haunted the walls. As we descended they appeared every few minutes: a fire-blackened hand reaching for us, or a burnt face pressing out of the rock. The faces spoke, asking always the same questions: Will you stop him? Will you? Can you? They were the fevered whisperings of our wounded goddess, but they were not her, so we made no answer, but hurried on, and when the cleft ended and we found ourselves on the apron of debris left by the avalanche, we felt relief, for the bogy-haunted walls were behind us.

We had no way to measure time. We were deep within the Cenotaph and neither the sun’s light nor the light of the stars could reach us. In the pit the illumination was always the same: a beautiful silver glow that turned Jolly’s face gray and made Moki’s coat look whitened with age.

All I knew was that we had been walking for many hours. We both started to stumble, but neither of us called for a rest until Jolly almost slipped over another precipice. Even then he did not want to stop, but I insisted he lie down for a time and close his eyes. Moki curled up beside him, and they both fell quickly asleep. I walked circles around them to keep myself awake.

When that grew dull I opened my senses, deliberately seeking Kaphiri’s presence. He seemed far away. My heart went cold as I imagined the wickedness he was doing: summoning the silver into enclaves, or trapping wayfarers on the road. I tried to summon him back. He heard my desire, and for a while he seemed to heed me. His presence grew stronger. But he did not come to me, and soon exhaustion led me to give up the duel.

Jolly woke, and we walked on for several hours more. Then it was my turn to lie down and sleep. I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come. I longed for sunlight, the more because I did not believe I would ever see it again. I consoled myself with memories of sunlit days, and blue skies, and green meadows.

When I stood up again, I was suddenly conscious of every bruise and trauma I had received since the fall of the flying machine. “Remind me not to seek my ease again,” I said to Jolly through gritted teeth. We shared out most of our food, and drank half the remaining water. Then we set out again.

Eventually, we found the bottom of the Cenotaph. We knew it immediately. All the tumbled stones and dust of the slopes stopped at a hard boundary, and the ground became level and smooth. Its color was white, even in the sheen of the surrounding silver. Even so, it did not seem to be entirely present. At least, I could not quite focus my eyes on it. It was as if the surface was constantly shifting up and down by tiny fractions of an inch… or as if it was saturated with silver slowly boiling on a microscopic scale, forever bubbling in mindless acts of minute creation. When I stepped out on it, I half expected a column of silver to erupt around me.

That didn’t happen, but the ground felt springy, bubbly, and sometimes we would sink in it to our ankles, and sometimes we would seem to be walking just above any visible surface.

After a few steps the silver closed in behind us, and we could no longer see the slope we had just descended. There was only the silver, and the uncertain ground. We walked, but with nothing to measure our progress, we did not seem to be going anywhere. Or more accurately, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, that all places were one place, and the world was empty, save for us.

After we had been walking for some time, Jolly came to a stop, and I beside him. The silence in that place was extraordinary. It rang in my ears. “How can we know what direction to go?” Jolly asked softly.

“I don’t know.” I kept my voice low too; it seemed necessary in that place. “We could be walking round in circles and not know it… but I had thought to find the center. Kaphiri said this pit was made when the dark god was hurled from the sky and struck the world…”

“And that would put him at the center…?”

“It’s only a guess. But we know he is here somewhere, for the world has never been able to repair itself. The dark god has kept it from healing.”

So we walked on some more, but after a few minutes Jolly stopped again. “I can sense a presence.” This time his voice was no more than a whisper.

I answered in kind. “Kaphiri?”

“No.” He stared off into the silver.

I followed his gaze, and not just with my sight. Kaphiri burned in my awareness as a dread beacon, but as I looked, I too discerned the essence of another within the silver, faint, elusive, yet somehow familiar, a memory, perhaps, of another life. “Is it the god?”

Jolly shook his head. “No. It’s not him. It’s her. The goddess. She’s here, Jubilee.”

Memories are elusive. We might struggle to recall a song or the name of a player, but come up with nothing until someone sings a teasing note, or utters the first syllable of the forgotten name. Then recognition floods in. When Jolly named the goddess, I knew it was so: the presence I sensed was her.

“Has she come to help us?” I whispered.

“How can she? She is wounded.”

“Where is the god?”

“I don’t know.”

“He should be here.”

“I can’t sense him. Can you?”

I shook my head. “But he must be here. She said he would be here.” The goddess had sent us into the Cenotaph to find him. She was our ally. I took Jolly’s hand. “Perhaps she has come to show us the way. We will find her first. Then we’ll find him.”

So we gave up trying to guess at the direction of the center, and we followed her presence instead.

Sometimes I could hardly sense her. Other times she seemed to be all around us, existing at once in every direction. “Are you there?” I cried out in frustration. “Are you here? Where are you?” Her gravity pulled me in circles, and only when Jolly grabbed my hand and steered me in a straight path would I remember to walk on.

We walked and walked, and I began to think we would walk forever through that flat, featureless terrain. At the same time I worried the goddess was a being of mist only, so that even as we sought her, we pushed her away when we pushed at the silver.

Then at last we came upon the edge of a folly.

The silver rolled back, revealing a complex landscape, like a miniature city, though the tallest towers were only knee-high. There were no windows or doors in the “buildings,” at least none that I could see, for each of them was encrusted in a sheath of some colorful growth, lumpy and uneven like the mold that will grow on bread, but in strident colors of bright green and pink, red, yellow and electric blue. I decided they were more like blocks, or oddly shaped boxes, than buildings.

They stood in clusters, some arranged in perfect squares, but most of them irregularly shaped, with narrow aisles of smooth white ground wedged between each group.

We stopped on the folly’s edge. “My lady,” Jolly called, “are you here?”

There was no answer.

I stepped forward, and tentatively, I touched a nodule on one of the mold-encrusted blocks. It looked like a solid thing, some kind of organic mineral, but that was illusion. At the first pressure of my finger the nodule burst with a tiny pop! I had heard that sound before. I yanked my hand away as a spurt of glowing silver slurry shot straight up into the air. Only a tiny droplet touched my finger, but that burned with a fury, and I turned away, my hand pressed against my belly and tears starting in my eyes.

Kaphiri felt it too. All this time he had been a distant presence in my awareness, gnawing on my consciousness like the pain of some deep wound that I could not reach, or comfort.

Suddenly he was aware of me. I felt his sharp surprise, his panic, as he turned away from whatever wicked deed had occupied him.

Jolly threw his arms around me, crying out in a high, frightened voice, “Jubilee, are you all right? Are you all right?”

“I will be.” The pain was easing. I looked at my fingertip, and it was livid red. “Do you remember when we climbed down the kobold well, and I broke into the vein of liquid silver?”

“This is the same thing?”

I nodded. “We must walk very carefully now. Do not touch the blocks, for they will burst at the lightest pressure.”

He nodded nervously.

“And, Jolly, Kaphiri is coming back. He knows we are close to the goddess now.”

I went first through the aisles, and Jolly followed behind me. The goddess was everywhere in my awareness and I could not tell which way would bring me closer to her center, so I just followed the easiest path. A sense of haste was upon me. Kaphiri was drawing swiftly nearer, and I wanted to find the goddess before he could come. So our cautious walk soon gave way to a hurried jog, and then to a scuttling run, but that was the limit of our speed. We could not push the silver away any faster than that.

The blocks grew higher as we advanced, until their average was waist-high, with the tallest towers reaching to my chin.

Then suddenly the pressure of the silver vanished. Some will far greater than mine seized the luminous curtain that hung so close around us and flung it back so that we could see for a quarter mile in any direction, even straight up, though silver still made a ceiling far above our heads.

We stood on the edge of an open space, like a white courtyard fronting a great temple… or anyway, I wanted to think of the structure that stood there as a temple, though it was like none I had ever seen. Imagine a great sphere that has been half-crushed and split in two, so that only a small remnant of its shell is still intact. That remnant rose in an arch a quarter mile above my head. Within the amphitheater-shell of the arch, layer upon layer of the mold-covered blocks were suspended on laminate shelves curved in the same arc as the shell. Clouds of silver steamed and billowed from the rim, rushing down the back of the shell in a great, glittering flood. We should have drowned in it, but the will that had made this bubble of open space somehow held it off.

A small, blackened figure huddled on the threshold of the temple, its head bowed as it wept over a moldering burden cradled in its lap.

It did not seem possible that such a creature could be alive, for it looked like a burnt corpse, its hair and clothes seared away and its flesh like charcoal, withered and cracked. But itwas alive, and as we approached, it looked up at us with eyes that were lenses of luminous silver. Its mouth opened, showing a blackened tongue, and the blackened stumps of teeth. “I cannot fix him,” it whispered. “I don’t remember how.”

I looked more closely at the burden it cradled in its lap and I realized that beneath the encrustations of colorful mold it was the body of a man. I fell to my knees as dread blossomed inside me. “Who is he?” I whispered, for the burnt creature held the corpse close and I could not see the dead man’s face.

“It is my lover.” As if to prove this, the tiny arms eased their desperate hold and the body shifted, rolling slightly, so I could see the face.

Colorful molds blossomed across his cheeks and eyes and within his mouth and nose, but I knew him anyway. I had always known him. “Yaphet.”

My chest heaved, and suddenly there did not seem to be enough air left in the world for me to breathe. I could not bear to look upon his face being consumed by the dreadful growths that thrived in that place, so I looked up at the burnt creature instead. “What have you done to him? And why?”

“I have killed him. He is dead now, and the war is over.”

I knew her then. This burnt creature was the goddess, or some manifestation of her. When she had come to me at Azure Mesa she had seemed beautiful… until she reached through the mirror, and then her lovely arm had been transformed into the blackened arm of a burnt corpse.

“Where is the dark god?” I demanded.

“This is him,” she insisted, cradling Yaphet’s body. “The last fragment. I have murdered him at last—my own lover—and our war is over… but why is nothing changed?” She looked at me with her luminous silver eyes, and I felt as if I looked into empty windows.

“Explain it to me!” she demanded. “He is dead, but nothing is changed! I am still wounded. I tear out the flawed parts of myself and rebuild, and rebuild, but I cannot heal! Is there some fragment of him remaining still? Is there an avatar I have not found yet? Is there an avatar that you have not found? Why are you here? Why have you come? I sent you to find him! I sent you to remove him from the world!”

I felt Jolly’s hand squeeze gently against my shoulder. “She is wounded,” he said. “She does not understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“It is not the dark god who festers in the Cenotaph, Jubilee. It never was him. He is gone. Long gone. It is the goddess who is left here.”

I looked up, to the towering shell of her temple. Torrents of silver poured from its shattered rim, rushing forth to flood the world. “Is that her, then?” I whispered, nodding at the shell. “Is that the seat of her mind?” For she was a goddess, and I understood that the blackened corpse huddled before me could not contain the mind of a goddess, that it had to be only a manifestation, an avatar, a concentration of her dreams.

“I think she is some kind of a mechanic,” Jolly said. “And this great structure is the last fragment of her mind.”

She was listening to our words. Laying Yaphet gently on the ground, she stood, and looked with us at the great arch, and the vast layers of blocky mold that it sheltered. Her anger had passed, and when she spoke her voice was soft once again. “I am wounded. I know it. This war consumes me, and my memories slip away.”

She had murdered Yaphet because he was made to look like the dark god. Her mind was so far gone she could not tell the difference. She was broken… by the war, or by her fall to the world, I did not know, but clearly there was so little left of her that she could not repair herself, or even comprehend how far she had fallen—and still enough of her mind remained that she must try. The Cenotaph boiled with her efforts, churning out vast clouds of silver: the fever dreams of a goddess flooding the world.

“He is gone,” she whispered. “But it won’t end. Why won’t the war end?”

“Would you have it end?”

She had sent me to the Cenotaph for that purpose, after all. She had commanded me to be her hands, to find the wound in the world, and to remove the fragment of deity that would not let it heal.

I reached into the pocket of my field jacket and felt the hard shape of the kobold case Yaphet had given me, with the deletion kobold inside.

Did the goddess know, on some level, what I had come here to do? Had she planned it? Had some splinter of her crumbling self given me the book Known Kobold Circles? Had she deliberately left the memory of this kobold on the surface of Yaphet’s mind? I hoped it was so.

“Jolly, I think you should go now.”

“No. Not until it’s over.”

“That could be too late.”

“I’ll chance it. I’m not running away again, Jubilee. Now go. Do it while you have the chance.”

So I turned my back on the burnt avatar, for it was only an interface to the goddess. Her mind was my target, and that existed within the maze of moldering blocks and towers that filled the broken sphere. I opened the kobold case and removed the solitary specimen. Its silver body gleamed, and its strong legs moved against my palm just as they had in my vision. If I were to crush it, its vapors would erase me forever. That was the promise Ki-Faun had made, but I had no intention of erasing myself. The goddess was the target, and only the goddess. I still hoped to be born again into a world that would never suffer the threat of silver flood.

My hand closed over the kobold. Would it be enough to hurl it into the depths of the sphere? Surely the impact would crush it, and then its vapors could do their work… but if its shell failed to break, how would I ever find it, to crush it myself?

In the midst of my hesitation, Kaphiri came.

Moki gave first warning with a sharp, frantic bark. Then Jolly shouted, “Jubilee! He is here. He is here. Hurry and release it!”

I turned, to see Kaphiri newly emerged from the silver. Jolly tried to stop him, but he threw my brother to the ground.

I should have hurled the kobold then, but hatred is stronger than reason. It is stronger than good intentions. In that moment I discovered that what I truly wanted was revenge against this man who had been made by a broken goddess, and who had brought so much misery on the world.

So I held on to the kobold and waited for him to come.

He stopped five feet from me. He smelled of smoke, and his fine clothes were stained and torn. His hair had fallen loose and it was gray with ash, but there was wonder in his eyes. “You have found the god.” His gaze wandered up, to the high rim of the shell and the torrents of silver that gushed down its sides. “You have walked right to his dark heart. My love, I never thought it was possible…”

“The goddess commands that I end the war.”

His gaze fixed on me again, and it was hard. “Do you still serve her?”

“Only in this last thing… and she has done all she can to aid me.”

He looked at the great shell. He looked at me. Doubt showed in his eyes. “To aid you? How? She has not made you a goddess?”

“No, and she never will. We are only players, my love. Accept it.”

“Then what aid has she given to you?”

I opened my fist to show him the kobold. I wanted him to know.

He recognized it, and the shock made him stumble back a step. “No, my love!Throw it away! You must throw it away now—”

“Oh, I will.” I turned, intending to hurl the kobold into the heart of the goddess, but he was faster than I.

He caught my wrist. He unbalanced me, and we both went down. “You will not destroy yourself.” He clawed at my fingers, his nails tore gouges of flesh from my hands. “I will not live forever without you! I will not! I will not!”

I tried to throw him off, but he was stronger—or more desperate—than I. Oh, how I regretted my hesitation! Why had I not thrown the kobold while I had the chance?

His knife appeared out of nowhere. It flashed with the speed of a worm mechanic, plunging straight through my wrist. I screamed, and my hand spasmed. The kobold spilled upon the ground. He yanked the knife out of my flesh, and swept up the kobold. Then he was on his feet, glaring down at me. “You will not leave me this way!”

He turned, and aiming at the bank of silver that surrounded us, he cocked his arm, ready to throw the kobold away, just as he’d done in that other life.

But in this life Moki reached him first. Jolly’s little hound had a long grudge against Kaphiri. He leaped on him, sinking his strong teeth into the back of Kaphiri’s knee, and Kaphiri went down. The kobold burst within his palm. I saw the silver vapors leach out between his fingers. He saw them too, and his eyes went wide. He stood up and hurled the remains of the kobold as far away as he could, but he had been turned around, and the fragments flew into the great shell. The burnt avatar of the goddess wailed. She leaped upon his back, driving him to his knees, but it was far too late to stop the kobold in its work. A brilliant silver fire spilled across Kaphiri’s hand. I did not wait to see more. I grabbed Moki and scrambled away, while a horrible scream erupted behind me, and a wailing that I knew must be the avatar.

I did not look back again until I collapsed beside Jolly on the edge of the open ground. Blood was pumping from my wrist, and I could not feel the silver at all. Only Jolly’s will kept it from collapsing around us. He put his arms around me, unmindful of the blood—“Come on, Jubilee. Come on”—and we retreated together. A few steps only, and then he had to stop and lean against the silver. I used that chance to look back.

They had become a pillar of incandescent fire. Within the shell of the temple many other white fires blazed. They drew the silver to them, as true fire will pull in oxygen. Fat streams of luminous mist raced past us, swirling into the conflagration, and causing it to burn brighter and brighter so I thought I would go blind with its brilliance.

I turned away, and I did not look back again.

The silver streamed past us for only a few minutes. After that all became quiet and calm again. So at least we knew we had not set off the destruction of the silver, though what we had accomplished was less clear. I did not doubt Kaphiri was gone forever, but the goddess was vast, and I wondered if our white fire had consumed only some small part of her?

There was no way to know, and neither one of us had the courage to suggest going back. So we continued our retreat, creeping for hours across the spongy ground, with Moki in between us.

The silver was never more than a few inches away. Jolly struggled to push it off, to hold it back. It yielded to him only with great reluctance, but it did give way.

At one point we stopped, and Jolly made a bandage for my arm, using the fabric of his shirt. I looked in his eyes, and saw his exhaustion, and I knew his thirst must be the equal of mine. But we had no water. We had no food. “Maybe you should sleep,” Jolly suggested. “And when you wake up you’ll be stronger. You’ll be able to help me hold off the silver.”

But I was afraid to sleep. I was afraid Jolly would give in to exhaustion too, and then the silver would roll in. Or that I would bleed to death. If I was going to die, I wanted to know it. So we pushed on.

I do not know how much time passed like that. It might have been only an hour, or many hours, I cannot say. Consciousness was slippery, and time did not seem to matter.

But sometime later Jolly spoke again. “Jubilee? Is something happening? Look around. Is the silver changing?”

I looked up, surprised to discover that we had left the flat floor of the Cenotaph. We were clambering up a slope of tumbled stone. “How long have we been climbing?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. Not long, I think. But look at the silver. Is it my eyes? Or is it changing?”

I looked. The silver was still wrapped close around us, but its light seemed different. Warmer. No longer was it a featureless fog, for I could see swirls and currents running through it. “Is it thinning?”

“I don’t know.” He sat down on the loose slope. “I’m so tired.”

“I know.” I raised my good hand. The ha still sparkled between my fingers. “If you want to sleep, I think maybe I can hold the silver off.”

“Okay.”

But he didn’t sleep. Neither did I. We sat together, and after a while the silver started brightening again, but now its light seemed tinted warm yellow. It was a familiar hue, though at first I couldn’t think where I had seen it before, until finally the memory came to me: it was sunlight.

As the silver cleared, the slope around us came into view: a wasteland of crumbled minerals, and flows of transformed stone. There was not a weed, or a blade of grass, or a trickle of water anywhere to be seen.

Then the last of the silver above us gave way, and suddenly sunlight fell upon us and we could see all the way to the top of the Cenotaph, and to a brilliant blue sky beyond.

“Oh,”Jolly said.

I could not manage even that much. All I could do was to stare up at a towering wall that was certainly equal in height to the southern escarpment of the Kalang. “We can’t climb that,” Jolly whispered. “Not without food and water.”

Water. Already my throat was dry and horribly swollen. “Maybe we’ll find water.”

“Okay. Maybe.”

But neither of us made a move to start. We waited, while the sun chased away the silver that still lay below us. In only a few minutes we could see all the way across the vast crater of the Cenotaph, to the far wall, blurred by distance. I studied the white floor of the crater, but I could not see the ruins of the goddess’s temple.

“Maybe she really is gone from the world,” Jolly said. He lay back, and after a few minutes he pointed at the sky. “Look there,” he said. “A hawk flying.”

We watched it until it passed out of sight over the rim of the Cenotaph.

“We should go,” Jolly said.

So far we had climbed only a hundred feet or so above the crater floor, but I felt a little stronger for our rest, or maybe it was the comfort of sunlight. Anyway, I made it to my feet and we pushed on, not because there was a hope of getting out, but because there was nothing else to do.

We had been going only a few minutes when I started to hallucinate. I thought I heard voices calling down the cliff walls, familiar syllables echoing against the rock: Jol-ly-ly-ly! Jub-blee! Jub-blee! Jub-blee! Sounds that rippled over the stone.

Moki pricked his ears and stared upward. Even Jolly stopped to look, scowling at the terrible walls. “Did you hear that?” he asked me.

“You mean Liam calling?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I imagined it.”

“Well then, I imagined it too.”

Even in my fevered state of mind that didn’t seem likely. “So call out to him.”

Jolly drew a great breath. Then he bellowed at the top of his lungs, “Uncle!!! We’re here. We’re here!” and it made such a cacophony of echoes that a flight of doves took off from the crater rim, and I feared a landslide would start among the loose scree.

But when the last of the echoes died away, Liam called out again. “Stay where you are! We’ll come get you!”

Then I heard Udondi whoop and Ficer bellow.

“They’re all here!” Jolly shouted, and I returned his smile.