Memory

Chapter 16

Liam had the last watch that night. He woke me with a gentle shake of my shoulder. “Jubilee.”

“Is it morning?”

“Soon.”

It was still dark, but I could hear a constant lowing of cattle all around me, and now and then the sound of a hoof striking rock. Udondi stirred sleepily. “Has something frightened the cattle?” she asked. “Why are they moving?”

“They make their way to the trailhead,” Liam said. “Most of them probably go down to graze in the day.” He was crouched beside me. I could just make out his rifle, cradled in his lap. “Are you both awake now?”

He spoke softly, but something in his voice gave me warning. I sat up, and Udondi did the same. “What’s happened?” I asked.

“I’ve seen him.”

“Seen who?” I searched my mind for possibilities. “Mica Indevar?”

“No. It was Kaphiri.”

Liam told us then how he’d taken his rifle and walked out to the cliffs to look about. “The land below was flooded with silver, and I could see the tiny shapes of cattle, crowded onto the high ground. After a time one of the trapped herds began to churn in a sudden panic that drove some of the smaller calves into the silver. I thought a coyote might have been on their hilltop island, but no. The shape that came around from the back of the hill was no coyote. It stood tall, and it walked on two feet. A player.”

“He was alone?” Udondi asked.

“Yes. Dressed in dark clothing. No more than a silhouette, despite the glow of silver. He walked around the side of the hill, and the silver lapped at his feet. He walked into it, as if it were only fog.”

Shock was still fresh in his voice; it echoed my own. “Kaphiri,” I whispered, while fear shivered across my scalp. To think he had been here… “How long ago?” I asked.

“A few minutes. I lay on the edge of the cliff and watched to see if he would reappear. In only seconds he did. This time, right against the base of the cliff.” In the darkness I could not see Liam’s face, but I heard his harsh sigh. “Jubilee, I owe you an apology. I only half believed your story of Kaphiri. When I saw him reappear, across a gulf of silver from where he had been before, it seemed impossible, as if I saw a ghost. My mind froze, and it was many seconds before I remembered I had my rifle with me. When I did I moved swiftly, bringing it to my shoulder to aim. That’s when he looked up at me.”

Liam shifted, and a faint gray light from the east glinted in his eyes. “It all seemed unreal, like a dream. It made no sense. How could he know I was there? He couldn’t have heard me, and so far above the silver, the darkness should have kept me hidden—”

“The worm,” Udondi said. “Perhaps it watched you. Perhaps it warned him.”

“Maybe.” He stroked the barrel of his rifle. “Anyway, I hesitated. For a second or two seconds. Maybe longer, I don’t know, but it was all the time he needed. He raised his hand and a tongue of silver rushed over him. I have never seen silver move so fast. I fired then, at the place he had been, but too late.”

I remembered the confusion I’d felt the first time I saw Kaphiri. I could not blame Liam, and yet how I wished… what? That I had been the one on the cliff? Would I have done better?

“You did what you could,” Udondi said gently. “To see him for the first time, and to know such a creature is real—”

“I knew he was real!” Liam hugged his rifle, his voice so low I could barely make out his words. “It was my brother’s life he took. If I’d been faster, I could have put an end to him.”

“It’s something to remember,” Udondi said. “Next time.”

Liam rose to his feet. “He will come again. Maybe tonight. He’ll look for us whenever the silver rises… and it rises almost every night in the Iraliad. We shouldn’t sleep in the open again.”

We had made our camp beside a low bluff, and this protected us from the passing herds, though we could hear them on every side. The bulls snorted and bellowed at one another and once I heard the thunder of running hooves followed by the crash of heavy bodies.

“It’s said animals can sense the coming of the silver,” Udondi mused as we ate a quick breakfast standing beside our bikes. “These cattle must have learned to retreat to the plateau whenever they sense a flood rising.”

“It’s too bad Moki doesn’t have that talent,” I said as I knelt, to feed some bread and bits of meat to him. He caught mice in the night, so I didn’t have to feed him much.

“Are you sure he doesn’t?” Udondi asked. “He’s survived what? Almost twenty years in Kavasphir?”

“At a temple,” Liam reminded.

“But it’s true he never was caught out,” I said, stroking the smooth fur of his back. “I never thought about it before, but he always does seem to know which nights are safe to hunt, and which better to stay at home.” And after all, it was Moki who had warned of the silver that night Jolly disappeared.

Udondi knelt to feed him another snack. “He’s been a handy companion.”

Liam grunted agreement. “He keeps a good watch, but it’s too bad he hasn’t found the worm.”

We rode our bikes out to the cliff edge, but there were so many cattle about we could not approach the trailhead. So we went a little to the west, to wait and watch as the giant bulls fought for the right to take their herds first down the narrow trail. We lay on our bellies at the edge of the escarpment while the eastern sky brightened, until finally the furnace of the rising sun climbed over the flat horizon, its rays painting long lanes of light and shadow across the land below.

In daylight the northern Iraliad looked even more austere than it had at twilight. Grass grew against the canyon walls and here and there I could see the deeper green of a tree, but I suspected the cattle would have a long trek to find enough forage. Where they would get water I could not guess.

Clearly though, we were about to enter a playground of the silver—for its mad creations were everywhere to be seen. False colonnades of gold decked the walls of many of the small ravines just below us. Farther away, a giant arch framed the mouth of a canyon. On a low slope of stone a mural had been laid, depicting a fantastic landscape so real it seemed as if one could step through it into another world—except the calves that skipped across its face remained in this one.

Elsewhere the exposed rock was shot through with veins of red and yellow minerals like lightning bolts, while the dry streambed spilling from one ravine was a stepped watercourse, architecturally precise but filled with drifted sand. Strangest of all, statues of gigantic god-men crouched in the shelter of every overhanging rock, or lay behind the ridges, their bows drawn as if they were hunting one another.

A gentle wind stirred, carrying a veil of dust to us from the cliff trail. I thought to look for other plumes of telltale dust that might be a truck moving at speed, or a posse of motorcycles, but I saw nothing. “It still looks blissfully empty,” Udondi agreed as she studied the land through her field glasses. “No doubt Kaphiri has summoned his people, but they’re not here yet.”

“Maybe we’ll have some hours to ourselves,” I said. “This is a rough country, and if we can ride on hard soil, or stone, we might hide our tracks.”

Liam lowered his own field glasses. “We’ll never get free while the worm follows us.”

Udondi nodded. “And even from a distance, we’ll be easy marks the whole time we’re on the cliff trail. It’s too bad there aren’t any clouds today to hide us.”

I remembered the light I’d seen last night. Someone with a powerful telescope might want to sit far out on the plain, to get a good look at the entire wall of the plateau.

Liam boosted himself on his elbow, to look down at the progress of the cattle. “The last herds are starting now. When they’re halfway down, we follow.”

“Right,” Udondi said. “Make a race of it. The less time we spend on the cliff, the happier I’ll be.”

Udondi went first, I followed her, and Liam came behind. The cattle trail plunged in steep switchbacks across the cliff face, so that a wall of rock rose always on one side while an abyss fell away on the other. The trail’s surface was a mix of loose shale enlivened with buzzing flies and stinking dung, and our bikes slipped and skidded as we descended, sometimes bearing us perilously close to the edge. At first I made it a habit to pause at each hard turn and look around, especially to look back, searching the cliff face for the telltale glitter of the worm. We had not seen it since Udondi shot it with the kobolds, but none of us doubted it was around. Soon though, my attention was drawn by other things.

In the two days we’d spent on the Kalang Crescent, we’d seen no evidence of silver and as we began the descent it was the same: the trail wound down past iron-red, unchanged stone. But that ended some two hundred feet down. The natural stone proved to be a cap rock only, sitting primly atop an immense stack of transformed minerals. The first layer we passed was of glistening onyx studded with white seashells; below that, a stratum dense with veins of eroded opal; and then many layers of colorful sandstones pressed with the polished skulls of beasts I had never seen even in the playgrounds of the market.

All of it looked freshly formed—perhaps even forming still—each layer thrusting outward in lumps and bumps and crumbling knobs. It was as if the layers of transformed stone were being squeezed out of the plateau, forced out under tremendous pressure. The trail was littered with broken pieces of jade and onyx and sandstone and bone that had fallen away. Over the side of the trail, wherever the cliff lay back from the vertical, the loose stones clung in precarious balance, so that the whole slope seemed on the verge of giving way.

Of all the layers we passed, the most enthralling were the long veins of lettered stone. The trail was rough and commanded my full attention, yet I could not resist stealing a glance, and then another, at that treasure. Whole words, clearly legible, leaped out at me. I could have spent a lifetime there, happily decrypting the secrets of the past. I was so distracted that for many minutes I forgot to look behind. We were hardly a hundred feet from the bottom when I thought to pause and glance back—only to discover that Liam was nowhere to be seen.

“Udondi!” I called. “Hold up.”

I searched the slope where the trail passed, but the light was all harsh sun and deep shadows, and at first I could not see him.

Udondi turned her bike around. She rode up beside me. Dust covered her face and her sunglasses. “He’s there,” she said, “where the trail crosses the top of that ravine.”

Most of the ravine was so steep it was almost a dry waterfall, but near its top there was a ledge where the trail wound past. Liam was there, lying on his belly in the shadow of a large, flat stone of some rusting metal, gazing up the cliff face. “Where’s his bike?” I wondered.

Udondi shook her head. “I don’t—”

We both saw it at the same time: the worm, sliding down the sheer wall of the cliff. It moved with the swiftness of water. It glittered like water too as the brilliant sunlight reflected off its scales. I watched it enter the ravine where Liam lay hidden. I expected it to slow or circle away as it drew near him, but it slipped past, unaware of him behind the rusting stone.

“Let’s go,” Udondi said, a sudden urgency in her voice. “Now!”

“But why doesn’t he pull his rifle?”

“Rifles don’t work.”

Liam rose from behind the stone that sheltered him. He put his foot against a knee-high boulder, sending it bounding into the steep ravine. It exploded past the brush and knocked loose more boulders, along with a trickle of tumbled stone.

“Sweet silver,”I whispered.

Liam kicked more rocks, generating more tiny rock falls that went whooshing into the ravine, adding mass on top of the first bouncing stones so that within seconds the whole floor of the ravine was in motion. Small gray birds rose up from the slope as if they’d been shaken loose. Moki started to climb from his bin, but I put my hand on his neck as a sign that he should be still.

“Get back!” Udondi shouted over the rumble of stone. “This whole cliff face could go.”

The thundering avalanche was shaking loose stones ahead of the flow and I thought she might be right. I started to retreat, but I stopped when I saw the glitter of the worm below us, in the lower reach of the ravine.

It was still well ahead of the tumbling rocks, but it was no longer fleeing downhill. Instead, it had turned. It was attempting to escape the avalanche by climbing the ravine’s steep wall.

Moki saw it too and jumped from his bin just as I pulled my rifle. I shot from the hip, aiming not at the worm, but at the rocks just above it. The loose stone fountained, startling both Moki and the worm. They both hesitated. “Moki!” I shouted. “Come here!”

Udondi was firing now too. Her first shot missed, but her second kicked close to the worm’s head. It reared back—and then the slide was on it. Its tail vanished under the tumbling rocks. Momentum spun its forward half around even as it dropped segments, and then it vanished inside a cloud of roiling dust.

Udondi whooped. “Got it!”

“Moki!”I called again, but he couldn’t hear me. The rock slide was thundering past and I could feel the ground shaking under my bike. I slammed my palm against my thigh. “Moki!” Fear got the better of him at last. He gave up on the worm and came bounding back to me. I helped him scramble into his bin, at the same time glancing at the cliff directly above us, where a dozen tiny rock falls were skipping merrily downhill. “Udondi…”

“I see it. Come on!”

We raced our bikes then, starting a small rockfall of our own as we cut straight down to the next switchback. Moki hunkered low in his bin to keep from being bounced out.

The cow trail left the cliff through a steep tangle of stone and boulders left by past slides. Hooves had shaped the path into densely packed gravel—good traction for our bikes. The wheels became round and we sped toward the washes, the avalanche deafening behind us, spitting dust at our backs. Dust everywhere, and grit in our eyes so I could hardly see.

Then it was over. The rocks had spent their momentum. Birds whirled through the billowing dust, and for a moment I wondered if I’d gone deaf, the silence was so astonishing. Then a stray rock rattled, the wind whispered past my ears, and time began again.

I turned to look back at the cliff. Even through the dust it was easy to see that at least a third of the trail had fallen away, and there at the top of the slide…

“Liam!”I shouted. I grinned to see him, a tiny figure, gingerly working his bike around the unstable slope that remained.

Udondi laughed. “That’ll do for the worm. I don’t think even a mechanic can get out from under that much stone.” Moki shook the dust from his head and sneezed, drawing a smile from Udondi. “This dust. If anyone is watching, they won’t overlook it.”

I had one more worry. “The trail’s gone. How are the cows going to get back to the top? They’ll be trapped down here.”

Udondi considered this carefully. Then, “Hmm. We could stay to rebuild the trail.”

I gave her a sour look, and she smiled. “Don’t worry over it too much, Jubilee. I’m sure the herds have faced landslides before.”

We waited in the shadow of one of the stone god-men for Liam to come down. As the dust settled, the transformed strata of the Kalang Crescent were revealed, glistening and glittering, scoured smooth by the avalanche. Wisps of silver curled ominously from the torn cliff face, evaporating in the sunlight. All was quiet now, and still I had the impression of a terrible pressure in the land, as if some great engine of silver lay trapped there, set to a task of endless creation deep beneath the Kalang.