Memory

Chapter 20

I should have died within twelve hours. Instead my blood fever stretched on through three days of delirium, or so the old man told me when I finally awoke. I opened my eyes to find him sitting at my bedside, his beautiful pale hands resting atop the afghan in his lap. The sun was just rising, its rays striking past a translucent window shade to illuminate his kindly smile.

“At first we were all frightened by the imminence of your death,” he mused, his voice raspy as desert sand. “Then we were frightened you might live, it was so unnatural. I think now most of us have grown used to the idea.”

“Will I live?” I whispered. I did not feel at all confident in that conclusion.

He smiled. “You’ll live through this, at least. The fever has broken. All the savants agree that is a sign of imminent recovery.”

“I thought there was no recovery… from a blood poisoning.”

“Ah.” He seemed embarrassed. “There is an exception. A rare exception. Very rare. That it should be you here, now, well, it would not be unreasonable to conclude this game you’re playing is not entirely random.”

“Game?” I croaked, struggling to follow his conversation.

“A figure of speech. I meant this contest you are engaged in with the traveler.”

“The traveler? That is the name Nuanez Li used.”

“That is the name he is known by in the Iraliad. I am told you call him Kaphiri, though where he came by that name I cannot say. He is old, older even than I am—far older!—though he does not look it. How I would love to know what he knows of the silver!” The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Though I don’t think I would survive that interview.

“But I am forgetting my duty. Maya put me to watch over you. Watching is what I do best these days. I don’t sleep much.”

His beautiful hands had lain so still in his lap I’d begun to wonder if he was somehow damaged and could not move them, but now he stirred, opening a compartment in the arm of his chair and removing a small device that proved to be a voice phone. “Hello, Maya,” he said, with droll amusement in his voice. “Yes, she has wakened. Soup would be in order, I think, and the company of anxious friends. Nay, of course I am not talking too much. What a preposterous suggestion!”

His name was Emil, and in the short time I spent in his company I grew to love him. He was the oldest in a household of scholars who had come to live in the remote Temple of the Sisters so that they might study the silver without risking harm to anyone else. His companions had been gone to Tibbett, just as Maya had said, but they’d returned the previous evening, bringing life to the silent household. Emil reported that they were very interested in all of us, and Liam and Udondi had been made to tell their stories many times, and had been closely questioned. “You can be sure the eager young vultures want to question you too! But for today at least, I guard the door.”

He did allow Liam and Udondi inside. Liam still wore the patch over his injured eye. He held my hand for a long time, looking pleased, but troubled too. Udondi remarked again and again on my luck, speaking a little too loudly. As Emil had said, my survival was unnatural. So what explained it? Looking on their worried faces, I guessed they knew something I did not.

“Why am I alive?” I asked at last. “You all know, don’t you?”

The far corners of the room suddenly commanded their complete attention.

“Emil,” I insisted, “you said there was an exception to the blood poisoning. What exception? You must tell me. Please.”

His eyebrows did a zigzag dance. “Ah. Well. Your case is fascinating, you see, because you suffered harm from the traveler’s blood, though you did not die.”

“That’s right,” Udondi said. “You should have suffered no effect at all, if—” She caught herself. Her gaze met Liam’s.

“If what?” I demanded.

She sighed. “If your blood crossed with the blood of your lover.”

I must have misheard! But Liam confirmed it. “It’s the only exception,” he said gruffly. “A player cannot be poisoned by the blood of her lover.”

I stared at him, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. “Kaphiri is not my lover.”

“I know it.”

“Yaphet is my lover!”

“Jubilee, I know it.”

“Still, that is the only known exception,” Udondi said.

I closed my eyes, hearing again his harsh voice: I could almost think you were her, come again. He had said those words to me. And he had looked like Yaphet. He had looked so very much like him…

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Liam said. “If… if there was something between you, you’d have sensed it…” He hesitated, waiting for me to deny I’d felt anything, but I could not. “Anyway, you should have suffered no harm, if it had been that way. As it was, you nearly died.”

“But she had two lovers, didn’t she?” I whispered.

“Don’t think about that,” Udondi commanded, though she might as well have ordered me not to breathe.

Still, there was good news to be shared. Jolly had called while I was feverish. As it turned out, he’d never received my message. It seemed his rescuer, this Ficer Elmi, had heard a report of strangers in the town where Jolly first appeared—strangers with a lively interest in the odd incident of the boy who stepped out of the silver. Ficer Elmi had decided that an expedition into the desert was long overdue, so he and Jolly had spent the past few days exploring the ruins of lost, unmapped stations.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked. “If the stations are in ruins, surely it’s because their kobold wells have failed?”

Liam shrugged. “This Ficer Elmi has apparently survived the Iraliad for a hundred twenty years. I’ve no doubt Jolly is safer with him than he’ll be with us… uh, I’m not sure I said that right.”

“Such confidence!” Udondi chided, but her smile didn’t last. “Still it’s true. We’ll need to think hard on our next move.”

To that end they planned to set out within the hour, to scout the land to the north looking for any sign of a new assault against us. “But you can’t go on without me,” I protested.

Udondi took my hand. “We’re not. We’re going north, not east, and we’ll be back by tomorrow evening. That’s how long you have to regain your strength. It’s not much time.”

I shrugged. “If you come back so late, we won’t be able to leave until the morning anyway.”

Liam scowled, the way he did when he was uneasy. “The scholars here think that maybe the silver will come late, both tonight and tomorrow night. We’re thinking of leaving tomorrow in the evening, to throw off pursuit.”

Travel the Iraliad at dusk? “Liam, that’s crazy. If you’re trusting to my luck—”

“Oh, no. Your luck’s too harsh to trust, Jubilee. But these scholars—they’ve studied the flow of silver here for over a century. They’re sure enough of their predictions that they came back last night after full dark had fallen.”

We talked some more about it. I didn’t like the idea of traveling at night, but they badgered me into a promise that I would at least consider it, and soon after that they took their leave.

I wanted to watch them ride away, but Maya came into the room and told me I must not raise the shade or show myself at any window. “Kaphiri may be watching, or he may have sent someone, to learn if you lived or not. Don’t give away the truth. It’s better for you if he thinks you’re dead.”

I should have been dead, but there was something monstrous inside me that had let me live.

“Do you believe us now?” I asked Maya as she turned to leave the room. “Do you understand why we did as we did?”

She stopped at the door and looked back at me. Wariness, or maybe regret, lurked in her eyes. Her tall, stern frame seemed a little stooped. “All the time you were outside,” she said, so softly I had to strain to hear, “I was standing just within the front doors. I heard everything he said to you.”

I couldn’t think what to answer. She had been there, but she had not helped me. Maybe there had been no way she could help, and still…

I looked at the shade, at the sunlight streaming in, until I heard the door close.

Emil returned soon after that, shuffling in his time-weighted gait, a white shawl held about his shoulders. He sat beside my bed and asked after my health and we talked. I could feel his curiosity, but he was too polite to guide the conversation toward Kaphiri. So I did it for him: “If he was my lover, we should have known each other right away, but we didn’t. Still, he suspected. The blood poisoning was a test.”

“One you did not truly pass.”

“Would he see it that way?”

Emil’s thin shoulders rose in the slightest of shrugs. “He is far older than any player should be. Who can say what he thinks, or what pains his heart might still feel?”

“He hates her.”

Emil nodded. “I’m afraid it’s so. I met him once.”

“You met him? Are you from Lish? I thought he was known only in Lish.”

“In Lish they believe he is known only in Lish, but we have known him longer in the Iraliad. I grew up in the desert, and I returned here when my wandering was done. When I was a boy, it wasn’t uncommon to see the traveler. My own encounter occurred when I was twelve. He came at dusk, to the gate of the enclave my father tended in Bakran. It was my duty that evening to seal the gate, so I saw him first. He told me he wanted to buy food, but he would not enter the enclave. I ran to report this strange incident, and some among the cessants were very excited. They went out to speak with him and I…” Emil smiled. “I listened at the gate.

“Ah, the traveler! He was not a man you could easily forget. Frighteningly intelligent. A natural scholar. He did not look it, but he was ancient even then, and it was apparent he had not spent his days in idleness. The cessants questioned him on many subjects, and the range, the depth of his knowledge, it astounded me, even then when I was twelve. But his bitterness was as obvious as his brilliance. He had examined life without embracing it, and for all I could tell, he loved nothing.

“At last one of the cessants asked the question that is always first in the minds of all of us who have been defeated by the great search: why are so many players condemned to a life of loneliness?

“The traveler answered with these words: ‘Because this world was broken, along with the goddess who made it. We are all condemned to a cycle of death and birth and terrible loneliness, that can be stopped only by a final great flood of silver.’

“In this flood the world will either be lost forever, or remade as new,” Emil explained. “The traveler did not seem at all sure which it would be and he did not seem to especially care, so long as the cycle that had trapped him here was finally stopped.”

After he finished recounting this story, we were silent for a while. I considered what I’d heard, but I was confused. “I like it here, in the world. Don’t you, Emil? Why would anyone want it to end?”

“Ah, I like it here too,” Emil said softly. “But it is hard sometimes. Very hard.”

“Do you believe the world is broken?”

“Ah, well. Perhaps it was intended to work differently.”

“Intended? Then do you think the stories of the goddess are true? That she was wounded in her war with the dark god?”

“It’s hard to know. Still, the world was made somehow.”

“I wonder why the dark god would wish to destroy it?”

“I cannot say.”

“But if it’s true, if the world is broken and the goddess cannot heal it, then it’s up to us to try, isn’t it? Isn’t that better than hoping for its end?”

Emil accepted my words with a formal nod. “That is my belief. It’s a good belief, and if it’s any comfort, I don’t feel we are entirely on our own.”

“Do you mean… the goddess?”

He raised his eyebrows, but I was not at all amused.

“What good is a dreaming goddess, when her dreams are so wicked?” I demanded. “She should be dreaming of life! But in just these past days my father has been murdered. I have abandoned my mother to a dangerous position. I have caused the deaths of many men, and I have survived the blood poisoning of a monster. If we are not on our own, Emil, we might as well be.”

Many players would have been offended at such an outburst, but Emil nodded, as if my words were worthy of careful consideration. “When you put it like that, it does seem a wonder you’re alive at all.”

“I’m a lucky player, or so others like to say.”

“I’ve heard. And what is luck? Why do things happen as they do?”

I did not like the flavor of this question. “Things must happen one way or another.”

Emil smiled, amused I think, at my resistance. “The scar on your hand,” he said. “It saved you, didn’t it?”

I raised my hand, to look at the scar I’d received in the kobold well. Emil was right. In another few seconds Kaphiri would have killed me… but he’d seen the scar, and hesitated.

“He recognized it,” Emil said. “These scars are so very distinctive. So many fine lines and ridges, like the compressed writing in lettered stone.”

Like writing? I examined the etches and loops of my scar. “I cannot see it as writing.”

“Did the traveler ask how you got it?”

“No. He seemed to know.”

Emil nodded; his eyes were sad. “I also know, for such things have happened many times before. Players are impetuous, and still it’s a cause for wonder. History tells us not one in ten thousand will survive the kobold poison.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Perhaps the traveler once knew a player with a similar scar.”

“Emil—”

“Itis a wonder you are still alive.”

“So what are you saying? That I climbed down the kobold well seven years ago, so that Kaphiri would not kill me here, this year, at the Temple of the Sisters? That’s ridiculous! Our roles cannot be that closely written.”

He smiled. “Perhaps not. But the scar would be lucky no matter where, or when you met him, don’t you think?”

“It was only chance that I met him at all. He did not come looking for me.”

“And still he found you. Twice.”

“He wants my brother.”

Emil nodded slowly, and his thoughts seemed far away. “Mostly the silver seems to act without purpose, but sometimes it is otherwise.”

“Nuanez Li believed that too.” I told him of Nuanez, and the book he had given me, Known Kobold Circles. “It came out of the silver, and he and his wife believed it came to them for some purpose, though in the end the only purpose was to give it to me.”

“That seems cruel to you?”

I nodded. It was eerie too, given the book’s subject, and the language in which it was written—the same language used by the bogy in the ancient city. More than chance, as Emil might say. “The author hints his ‘kobold circles’ might be used to recall memories from the silver itself.”

Emil’s pale old eyes widened in a flicker of surprise. “I have heard of such things, but only in fantastic stories. This book claims it for the truth?”

“I have not had time to study it, but yes, I think so. It has lists and lists of code. Almost all of it is code. I’ll show it to you if you like. Where is my field jacket? It should be in one of the pockets.”

Emil took a great interest in my book. He could not read it. Neither could anyone else in that house of scholars, but they were eager to hear my translation. Once again, I puzzled over the words of the introduction:

“But what are kobold circles?” I wondered, looking around at the half-dozen scholars Emil had allowed to gather in my room. “That’s what the author, Ki-Faun, never bothers to say.”

“I can tell you what they are.”

It was Maya who spoke. She stood on the edge of our little group, lurking near the door. Everyone turned to her in surprise.

“I saw a kobold circle once, in a road show, when I was a girl. At least, that’s what the hucksters called it. They asked for very specific kobolds from the audience. When these were presented, they adjusted the configuration codes, claiming they must be set to the correct sequence of zeroes. When this was done, the kobolds linked together in a ball.”

Maya cupped her hands, the fingers interlaced, leaving a hollow space between her palms. “Like this. No one had ever seen anything like it. At the end of the show—an hour or so, I’d guess, though I don’t really remember anymore—the kobolds separated, but as they did they released a new kobold, one they had made together. This new kobold inflated into a balloon and blew away.”

She shrugged. “Well, it was a comedy show. Probably there was some trick to it, some way of secretly introducing the ‘new’ kobold, though I never figured out what it was.” A self-conscious smile flitted over her lips. “I tried for years to get kobolds to form circles, but I never succeeded.”

How odd to think of this stern keeper trying to reenact a road show she’d seen as a little girl. “The coding sounds very specific,” I mused, frowning at the next sentences in the introduction. “So really it’s no wonder you had no luck with it. Here it says something like, ‘All the listed circles are based on the—’ There’s a word here I don’t know… Pythagorean? Has anyone heard of it? I meant to ask my savant.”

“That is a very old word,” Emil said. “It describes a sequence of numbers obtained by adding the next greatest number to an accumulating sum… zero plus one to give one, one plus two to give three, three plus three to give six, et cetera.”

I laughed in amazement. “Why would you know such a thing?”

“Well, to impress wild young wayfarers, of course.”

“Oh. Well… is there any meaning to these… Pythagorean numbers?”

He shrugged. “They’re interesting.”

Someone asked, “What does the text say of them?”

I frowned at the page. “Just that all the listed circles are based on these numbers, then,‘No doubt other combinations of zero exist, but at the time of this writing they are unknown.’”

“There, Maya,” Emil said. “Did you set your zeroes in the pythagorean sequence?”

She shrugged. “It was all long ago.”

It went that way for an hour or more as we read and discussed the little book. Before long I came to understand that a kobold circle was a means of procuring rare kobolds that could seldom, if ever, be found naturally in wells. If the book was correct, then a kobold created within a circle might be completely unlike any of those that had given rise to it.

In the road show Maya had described, the new kobold had been nothing more than a toy, but Known Kobold Circles implied wider possibilities. Its pages listed hundreds of formulas for producing kobolds, most with catalog numbers that would fit among the mysterious, empty pages of my mother’s kobold libraries. Unknown kobolds—though Ki-Faun had included brief sketches describing what they might be used for. Most produced elixirs that were claimed to prolong life and health and even to cool the blood fever. (“We could have made use of that!” Emil chuckled.) But a very few seemed to have something to do directly with silver… Recalling its memories? That had been my impression on first reading, but now I felt less sure. Certainly the silver must have some means of memory. How else could it bring follies forward in time? Still… “I think these formulas are more about calling certain follies from the silver, than about calling out the silver’s memory.”

Even that was unheard of, as the general murmur confirmed.

It was a wonder to me, to think I might hold in my hands the instructions for a method of kobold culture unknown to even dedicated keepers like my mother. If the formulas proved true then I would know something of kobolds that my mother did not—and how astonishing that would be!