Memory

Chapter 25

That night when we put out the light, I did not expect to sleep, for my mind was full with the day’s events, each memory jostling for recognition and reflection. But sleep came anyway, quieting my troubled thoughts one by one, until all that remained in my awareness was a soft whispering, a murmur of voices with no apparent source unless it was my own ears, stunned by the profound silence of that cavern. Adrift between sleep and wakefulness, I listened, and gradually the whispering resolved into words, faint and garbled at first, and in a language I did not immediately know, but as it had so many times before, the knowledge of another language wakened in me.

Or I wakened into that knowledge.

I have dreamed often, and what happened then was no dream, though it was a kind of vision, for I wakened into more than just the knowledge of another language. I wakened into another life. My life, though it was not the one I had lived.

The whispering grew closer, surrounding me, faint ghost voices imploring me to do what only I could do. Save us. That was their plea. Their ghost fingers brushed my arms, my face, light touches like puffs of warm air. They whispered blessings. They touched my tears as if this effusion was a sacred liquid.

The fear in my belly was so hot I thought I would puke. I had already run away once. Now they begged me to go back.

I raised my head, looking up to meet the gaze of an old man, small and crooked as a crab that has spent most of its life living in borrowed shells. His complexion was dark, but his skin had a translucence to it, a smooth purity, as if he had never seen the sun. His hair was gone, but tendrils of beard remained, reaching past his knees like lichen that hangs from the limbs of trees. He sat in an ornate chair, a small throne really, for we were in an audience chamber of grand design such as I had seen only in market dramas, with high ceilings and immense windows of colored glass and all of its span filled with whispering ghosts begging me to do what I dreaded to do.

The old man was Ki-Faun. In my vision I knew this. He was the player who had authored a book of kobold lore. I had never seen him before, yet I felt as if I had always known his name. At the same time, I was not entirely that other me, for I felt surprise too. Ki-Faun, the author of my book? Yes.

I had not seen him before, but as I looked on him I was surprised by a sense of familiarity, and I began to realize that I had known him, but in another guise, or more likely another life altogether.

Surprise filled his eyes, and he leaned forward to look at me more closely, as if he was troubled by remembrances too. His old crab hands pinched at the armrests of his chair, and his eyes closed briefly. “Not by chance,” he whispered. When his gaze met mine again there was the faintest of smiles on his faded lips. “The knot is tied around you, milady, did you know it? All our fates circle around you.”

I had no idea what he meant, but I knew what he wanted. “You want to blame me, but it’s not because of me! He was something strange and wicked before I ever knew him!”

“We do not blame you,” Ki-Faun said softly. “But we need you, just as we have needed you in other lives before this.” He set a kobold in my hand. “We have reached the end of this age. We will either master the silver, or we will drown in it—”

“You think you can master it?”

“With the time that you buy us, yes. We are that close. Our fates circle around you.”

“He will not want to see me again!”

An expression of such pain crossed the old man’s face I thought he would cry. “Oh, no, milady, he will want to see you.”

An anguished cry pierced my dream, and I awoke with a start, to find myself once again in the room at Azure Mesa that we had chosen for sleep. Faint light fell from my drifting savant, and in that illumination I could see Jolly sleeping peacefully beside me, but beyond him Ficer was calling out in a troubled sleep. Sweat shone on his face. My own clothes were damp and my skin was clammy. The scent of kobolds was strong in the air, and sweeter than the kobold scent of Temple Huacho.

I sat up, feeling my muscles limp, and trembling. I leaned against the hardness of the stone wall, thinking on my vision, and trying not to think on it, as if I were still two people: one that was me, and one that was me, in another life.

A life I had lived.

How to describe the horror this conviction brought? To know who I had been, what I had done…

He was something strange and wicked before I ever knew him!

Not for a moment did I doubt who “he” might be, and it was Ki-Faun’s plan that I should return to him.

Most of the time we live an illusion. We put the worst possibilities out of our thoughts, and live as if evil is a neutered beast, incapable of the horrors described in stories of old. We see ourselves as strong, and lucky; the weakened beast is no more than a shiver in our spines on a blustery evening—and this is a good way for us to live. For to be fully conscious of the potential horrors of existence would quickly destroy existence, as a raging stream will level the mud castle a child has made upon its bank.

That night though, I saw with the clarity of a condemned prisoner. The world was broken, and had been, almost from the day it was made. The silver that should have served us was drowning us instead. The floods grew deeper with each passing night and enclave after enclave was falling to them.

No player had made this disaster. It was a flaw in the world itself. But one player there was who would hurry the world toward its conclusion.

Our fates circle around you. Ki-Faun thought he could master the silver, if only he had time, so I promised to do what I could to get him that time.

I flinched as Ficer again cried out in his sleep. But Jolly slept quietly, as if no unpleasant thought had ever brought a shadow to his beautiful boy’s face.

My eyes started to close, but I forced them open again. I had no idea of the time, but I swore I would not sleep again that night. I would stay awake until dawn and then we would leave this ancient stronghold and my dream would fade and all would be as it had been… so I told myself. But the cloying scent of kobolds was in my nostrils, sweeter, and more intense than their scent at Temple Huacho, and my mind drifted. Though I clutched at my sleeping bag I could not keep myself from slipping away.

The stone walls of that room became the stone walls of a barren canyon that tumbled down to a desert plain, and the faint gleam of my savant became the gleam of a twilight sky. A cold wind moaned among the rocks, bringing with it the scent of silver, to mix with the scent of temple kobolds that arose from the wild well where I had made my camp. My sleeping bag was laid out and I had put a pot of water to heat on my little stove, but these were only gestures, done out of habit.

All around me, skeins of silver gleamed beneath the overhanging rocks, and there was a pearly opacity to the air that I knew too well. The kobold Ki-Faun had given me weeks before scrabbled within the prison of my clutching hand. You must not crush it! Ki-Faun had warned. Not until the moment when he will breathe its vapors. There will be no second chance. That I might breathe the same vapors was a possibility Ki-Faun admitted with real grief. You are his guardian. It is not an easy task, but it is yours. The goddess herself made it so.

The kobold could not escape its fate, any more than I could.

The evening’s last light faded from the sky, but it did not grow dark, for silver gleamed into existence, seeping from the air. It sank to the ground all around the sheltering ring of my wild well. Once on the ground it gathered together at the lowest point of the defile and slid away downhill, like a phantom stream. I watched it pool in a vast lake on the plain below.

Some time passed. An hour. Maybe two and then I saw him, a dark figure, climbing up from the plain with a spritely step, the silver flowing harmlessly past his knees. He spoke to me, the memory of a memory, his warm breath tickling my ear as he whispered his dark philosophy like words of love: We can be like them. The goddess who made this world and the god who pursued her… they were once as we are now, mortal, on another world in a far place. There they were tested, and some few among them climbed beyond their world and became more than human… We can do the same, you and I. We don’t have to remain simple players. We can master the silver, and own this world…

I hated him. Even then as I lay in his arms. And I hated the goddess and the god, who were swallowed by their own darkness, leaving the world broken. Why should I wish to be like them?

I was content to be human. To be human was to know the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, to live without a darkness in the soul. I understood enough of gods and goddesses to know that they were terrible, as the silver is terrible, and not human. Not at all.

Now he was back.

I watched him climb toward me up the canyon and the silver did not harm him because he had become a minor god.

He must not die, Ki-Faun had warned,or the silver will be poisoned. And he must not live, or he will bring the silver into this enclave. It is a wicked thing we ask you to do, to erase the very memory of him from the world, but it’s the only thing we can do. He must be removed forever from the cycle of birth and rebirth.

Evidently his climb up the canyon was taxing him. His pace slowed, and as he drew near I could hear the harsh wash of his breath, though I could not hear the tread of his feet against the stone for his feet were hidden beneath the silver. I wondered if the ground he walked on was somewhere else altogether.

He looked ahead and he saw me, but neither of us spoke, not even when he reached the edge of the safe ground around the kobold well and stepped free of the streaming silver.

His shoulders heaved with exertion and in his dark eyes was an expression of mistrust and anger and pathetic hope that sickened me. Could he really believe I would love him again?

I saw that he could.

The kobold struggled in my hand, reminding me of why I had come. I stepped toward him. I tried to smile.

A rock skipped down the cliff behind me. He heard it too, and looked up. His enemies were uncountable, and any one of them would be grateful to murder him, but I could not allow him to die that way, not while there was still a chance Ki-Faun’s plan might work.

“Get down!” I cried, but he was already moving, dropping behind the shelter of a boulder. I fell on my pack and dragged it with me behind the cover of another rock, as rifle shots bit at the sand all around us. I pulled my own rifle free of the pack. Then I leaned out just far enough to see the cliff face.

He had called the silver to his defense. An arm of it was flowing—impossibly!—up the gully wall, nosing behind boulders and sweeping into every cleft and cut. Someone shouted, in a language strange to me. Then six players appeared as if from nowhere. They charged down the slope, their guns firing wildly. I ducked back behind the boulder, clenching my rifle, listening.

It would not take long.

There was a scream, and then another. The chorus of shots was cut in half, and then it was cut again until only one weapon spoke. A man’s voice shouted what must have been a curse. Then silence fell, save for my ragged breathing.

I turned to look at him.

He was standing, smiling faintly, with the silver behind him and all around. “You didn’t know they were there, did you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I was careful not to be followed! I don’t know how—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

We were both still alive. That’s all that mattered.

His gaze fixed on something between us, lying in the sand. He frowned, stooping to collect a large kobold, the very one I had dropped when the shooting started. “What is it for?” he asked, looking at me.

I could not lie. “It’s for you.”

He regarded it thoughtfully. “And what will it do for me?”

I whispered the only answer I had: “It will end your pain.”

“No, I think only you could do that.” Then he cocked his arm back. I saw what he was doing and shouted at him, “No!” but he did not heed me. He cast the kobold in a powerful throw down the gully where it plunged into the streaming silver. Gone.

Then he looked at me with wounded eyes, this man who had brought the silver into a thousand enclaves. “They sent you, didn’t they? Ki-Faun and his cohort, always so taken with their own cleverness, but they will not live long past this night.”

He had never been one to lie. So I made my choice. Bringing my rifle to my shoulder, I fired.

Blood fountained from his chest. He collapsed first to his knees and then he started to pitch forward, but he stopped his fall with one hand against the ground. He looked up at me. There was confusion in his eyes, and cold horror. Do you know what you’ve done? he seemed to ask. Do you know?

I did. I was his guardian after all. I always had been.

Then he could no longer hold his head up. He sagged to the ground, his eyes reflecting the gleam of silver but with no life of their own. Silver seeped from his lips and nostrils, the silver that leaves the body at death—more and more of it. I was amazed at how much. I watched in fascination as it flowed across the ground, to meet with the ordinary silver of the night. Ki-Faun had warned against just this.It must not happen! But surely it was better for the silver to die than for the world to drown in a silver flood?

The two fogs met, and where they touched the silver collapsed, its light going out as it was transformed to a gray powder that sifted to the ground. The destruction spread outward, sweeping down the canyon, leaving the rocks covered with a fine, powdery ash and every gleam of silver extinguished.

The transformation reached the plain. Darkness rolled across that lake of silver faster than a bird could fly so that within seconds the only light left was that of the stars overhead and the pale gleam of Heaven’s arch.

A warm hand touched my shoulder. “Jubilee, what’s the matter? Why do you cry?”

I shoved that comforting hand away. “You ask me that? The world is murdered! Again. And you ask me that?”

Then I was back in the cavern of Azure Mesa, on my knees but still entangled in my sleeping bag, with Jolly all in a heap before me, looking up at me with frightened eyes. “Jubilee?” he whispered, as if testing if it was really me.

I closed my eyes. I could hear Ficer muttering, still trapped in visions of his own. “I have seen it,” I whispered. “I have seen what happens when one such as Kaphiri is made to die. He did not lie, Jolly. He did not lie.”