Memory

Chapter 28

That dawn was cloudless. A flood of silver lay on the plain, but it dissolved at the sun’s touch, vanishing first in streaks and rays that lanced from the eastern horizon. Then the disc of the sun rose past a line of distant mesas, releasing a great wave of light to roll the remnants away.

Far to the south and west there were dark lines on the horizon that might have been storms in the southern desert where the Cenotaph lay, the wound in the world. Otherwise the day was perfect: clear skies and no wind to stir the dust, so that I felt we could see for a hundred miles in any direction.

In all that vastness, nothing moved. We waited for most of an hour, but no plume of dust marked the trail of a motorcycle. Where was Liam? It came to me that I might never know.

Finally, Jolly spoke: “I think we should go.”

“Where would you go?”

“Anywhere! Just not here. Kaphiri will find us if we stay here.”

Of course he was right. The Temple of the Sisters was only 120 miles away.

I sniffed the air, seeking the scent of silver, but all I could smell was the dusty odor of desert soil and the sweet perfume of blossoms from the brush in the ravines. I wanted to wait for Liam, but that did not seem wise.

It was easier to decide that we should leave than to know where to go. To the south lay the terrible lands of the Cenotaph, where the goddess had directed me, but I did not want to take Jolly there. North and east would bring us ever deeper into the wastes of the Iraliad, while west would return us to the margin of the desert. West was also the direction of home, though both of us knew it would be foolhardy to return to Temple Huacho. “He’ll be watching,” Jolly said, “waiting for me to find my way back.”

I nodded. “It could be he will leave them unharmed, so long as he believes there’s a chance you might go back.” We both took comfort from this thought.

So we would not go home, but we decided to go west anyway, for that was where Liam had disappeared, and I wanted to find him. We went down to the gate. I was operating the winch, using it to lower my bike over the low cliff when Jolly called out. “Look there! Jubilee! A column of dust.”

I made sure the bike was safely on the ground before I looked. To the south and west, perhaps thirty miles or more away, in a direction that pointed back to the Temple of the Sisters, a plume of dust stained the blue sky. I could not see its source, but it was more dust than the wheels of two motorcycles could raise, even if they raced flat-out. “Maybe it’s a large herd of cattle?” I said, without much hope.

Jolly was more honest: “It’s a convoy.”

“They would have stayed last night with Maya and Emil and the other scholars. I hope no harm has come to them.”

“Ficer went back there.”

But Ficer had not stopped the convoy. How could he? He was just one man.

We climbed down the cliff face. Moki went into his box, while Jolly rode behind me. If we went west, they would see us immediately. So we turned east instead, setting off on the trail that circled the mesa. We went slowly at first, so as not to stir up our own revealing plume of dust, but as soon as the mesa lay behind us, I pushed the bike to speed. Our direction was north and east, a bearing that would take us deeper into the desert. It was also in my mind that with every mile, we were growing closer to Yaphet.

At first our progress was easy. The miles fell behind us as we fled across a smooth plain. But as the day advanced, the land rose in a rugged slope cut with shallow gullies and studded with a few far-scattered bluffs. It was a region made strange by its emptiness: we saw no follies, or deposits of exotic ore to indicate the presence of silver… though we knew silver had flooded this part of the desert only the night before. It was as if the folly constructed here was one of an untouched land.

Our progress slowed. Twice we found ourselves in dead-end canyons, not of any spectacular depth, but still with walls too steep to scale, so we were forced to retrace our path and find another way. It was after the second such doubling back that we sighted our pursuers again. From the vantage of Azure Mesa they had been only a distant plume of dust. Now that plume had separated into three, and I could see the metal glimmer of a truck at the base of each. They were not trying to hide their approach. Two ran parallel to our track, one to the east of it, and one to the west. The third truck was farther behind, but it followed our trail exactly. Even as I watched, it dropped out of sight, descending into the same shallow gully we had followed.

“They didn’t bother to stop at Azure,” Jolly said.

“I don’t understand. How can they run so quickly and still follow our trail?”

“The middle truck, it follows our trail.”

“But it’s farthest behind.”

“So they already know where we are? Is that what you’re thinking?”

I glanced over my shoulder. There was a small bluff a mile or so to the east, and another, closer, to the northeast, but to the west there was no eminence for many miles. “Let’s change direction. West and south will take us from the sight of any watcher on high ground.”

So we descended again into the little canyon we had only recently escaped, and we followed a branch of it west for many miles, until it became a shallow drainage between two low hills. At last we were able to look back: only to discover the convoy had not followed our trail to its farthest point. Instead, they had cut across the land, as if they’d known of our change of direction almost as soon as it was made. Not even two miles separated us now, and that gap was closing swiftly as the three trucks sped toward us. “They are watching us! But how?”

Jolly’s voice was whispery with panic: “Look there.” He pointed to the north. “That glimmer.”

Almost lost in the shimmering heat was a metallic spark, but it was not a truck, for it floated high above the ground. I squinted. “Some kind of bird?” Then it caught the sunlight, reflecting it in a brilliant flare as only metal can. “Or a savant,” I said, reaching for my rifle.

Jolly pulled it from the sheath and handed it to me. “Hurry! They’ll be here in a minute.”

I refused to look back at the trucks. “Don’t breathe,” I whispered as I brought the rifle to my shoulder. Taking careful aim, I squeezed off one shot, then another, but to my consternation, neither found its target. A second later the glimmer descended from sight, disappearing into a low swale… and a cold confusion took me. I twisted around to look at Jolly. “Did you see that?”

He nodded, his cheeks pale beneath a frosting of dust. A savant is a small thing. When I’d taken aim with my rifle I’d judged it to be much less than a mile away. Farther, and we would not have seen it at all through the heat shimmers of that desert noon. But the swale where it had disappeared was two miles, maybe two and a half to the north—farther away than the pursuing trucks. “That was no savant,” I said softly. “It was something larger.” Much larger, though what, I could not imagine.

“Let’s go!” Jolly’s voice was breaking in panic. “Jubilee, now!”

I nodded, though I had no plan, no idea what to do except to run. I eased the bike forward. I was picking out a path on the crumbly slope when a muffled voice spoke my name from somewhere close behind us: Jubilee!

I jumped in fright and the bike slipped. Jolly cried out, throwing his arms around my waist. The voice called again: Jubilee! An old man’s voice, shouting as if from behind a pillow: Jubilee!

I recognized it then. “It’s the savant.”

“What?”

Again I stopped the bike. “Open the saddle box. Let it out.”

“There’s no time.”

“Just do it, Jolly.”

Furiously, he popped the hasp. The savant bobbed into the air, unfolding into its smooth wing shape. “A call,” it said in its calm and formal voice. “From Yaphet.”

Yaphet?His image coalesced on the savant’s mimic screen. Dust smudged his cheeks and lightened his hair, and his eyes were hidden behind black sunglasses, and still I caught my breath, so much did he resemble Kaphiri. Jolly’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Jubilee, he looks like—”

“I know.”

But Yaphet’s skin was bronze, and flushed with heat, while Kaphiri’s face was cold and pale—and Yaphet stirred in me a different kind of fear. I hoped he was still far away, but I did not believe it, and his first words confirmed my hope was in vain. “Jubilee, I’ve seen you. I think it’s you. Two players on one motorcycle? You’re running west.” He gestured with field glasses held in a black-gloved hand.

“Where are you?” I wasn’t ready to meet him. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to meet the trucks. It was all coming down too fast and I wanted to be anywhere but where I was.

He saw my panic and answered cautiously. “I’m here. A few miles north… or north and west of your position.”

I looked to the northwest, but I could not see him. I had no field glasses.

“There’s a second convoy, Jubilee, three miles or so west of me. It’s moving to meet the other trucks.”

I was aware suddenly of the dryness of my mouth in that desert air. “We’re trapped then.”

“Drop back to the south,” Yaphet advised in a voice so flat it did not sound truly human. “It’s not over yet.”

We turned south. There was no sign of the dark line of storms I had seen that morning. The sky was brassy with a dust that blurred the sun but did nothing to mute its heat. I sniffed at the air, but there was no scent of silver anywhere. The sun was too bright, and all I could smell was dust and my own sweat.

Jolly kept watch behind us, twisting around every few seconds to see if anything had changed. After a few minutes he said, “I see that savant again—or whatever it is. It’s moved farther east.”

“Can you see the second convoy?”

“No.”

A concussion struck my ears, a booming roar of thunder that I felt in my chest. There was a great rumbling of sliding stone, and when I glanced back, a cloud of cinnamon dust was climbing into the sky, from beyond a ridge to the northwest. “Yaphet,” I whispered, for he had been out there, only a few miles away.

Then I too saw the savant. It was much closer now, less than a mile away, and clearly, it was no savant.

It was a flying machine.

An impossible flying machine, soaring at least a hundred feet above the ground. I could see the dark shape of a player suspended beneath it, prone within a harness. I thought I could see a sparkle of silver along its wings. It passed behind an outcropping of rock.

My hands shook as I brought the bike to a stop. “Could Kaphiri order the silver away, even from a flying machine?”

“I don’t know! Maybe he can. Do you think it’s him beneath that wing?”

“Jolly, I tried to shoot him down! What if I had killed him?”

“We have to go. Now.”

I hesitated. Yaphet was out there somewhere. Had he caused the explosion we had just heard? That night at the Temple of the Sisters I had told him everything. I warned him Kaphiri must not die, but did he believe it?

“Jubilee!” Jolly shouted. “We have to—”

The thunder of a second explosion overwhelmed his voice. Then the flyer reappeared, speeding toward us down the canyon we had followed. Something else moved on the ground beneath it: a thread of glimmering water some six feet long. It flowed around boulders and down shallow slopes, retracing exactly the tracks left by my bike, and suddenly I knew how the convoy had followed us.

I thought my heart would stop, but Jolly’s reaction was the opposite. He had never seen a worm mechanic before, but I had described it well enough. “Go!” he shouted, and his fist hammered my shoulder. “Go now! Go now!”

But Yaphet was shouting too, and this time his voice did not come to us through my savant, which I had locked away again in my saddle box. Instead it reached us on the open air. “Get ready, Jubilee! Abandon the bike! There is no choice!”

Every word was clearly uttered, yet none of it made sense until I looked up at the flying machine.

It had overtaken the worm. It had run ahead of it, so close now I could easily see the face of the player suspended beneath it. It looked like Kaphiri, but it was not him.

Horror washed over me. We had only seconds before the worm mechanic caught us, but in that lost moment the threat of the worm meant nothing to me. All I could think was that this was my lover, in a flying machine. A forbidden flying machine. A wicked flying machine, with a glimmer of silver dancing along the leading edge of its long white wing. Yaphet lay prone in a harness beneath that wing, his legs splayed around the engine, with two white baskets on either side of him that held supplies. Only a psychotic would tempt the silver in a flying machine. A suicidal player or a murderous one. I knew the stories. There were many, and all were centered on a wicked player, his doomed machine sparkling with silver as it passed far above the influence of an enclave’s defending kobolds, to descend among the houses, and ignite a silver storm.

This was my lover.

I knew then that there was no forgiveness for the sins and failures of our past lives.

I rocked the bike forward, sending it coasting down the slope, engaging the engine again as we rolled. Yaphet soared over us, his engine silent, the only sound an artificial wind passing over the white wing. “Jubilee! Stop. Look at me. You have to abandon the bike. The mechanic will have you if you stay on the ground, but it can’t follow you in the air.”

“No! Go away. I don’t know you. I don’t need you—”

But Jolly’s desperation was different from mine. He reached around me and switched off the bike’s engine. The wheels locked. The bike skidded and went down. Jolly jumped free, but I did not. My leg was caught beneath the bike and I slid with it down the graveled slope. I heard Jolly shouting at me to“Get up! Get up!” A shadow passed over the sun, and then Yaphet was beside me, heaving the bike off my leg. I scrambled to my feet.

That was when I felt the pain. I gasped as my knee gave out. But Yaphet was beside me. He caught me as I dropped. He took my weight, passing my arm around his shoulder—and as soon as I had my balance I punched him: hard in the chest and we went down together. For one full second he stared at nothing, a look of stunned disbelief on his face. Then I pushed him away. “I hate you!” The words rushed from my throat, an honest assessment in a desperate situation. I would have left him to the worm then, if I could. I tried to. I scrambled backward on three limbs. “Stay away from me!” I warned.

But his anger was the equal of mine, and he at least could walk. “The silver take you, Jubilee.”

“Better the silver than you!”

He tackled me. I screamed as my knee was further twisted and then somehow he had my arms locked behind my back, his mouth beside my ear. I hated him for it, because it was the same way Kaphiri had held me. But Yaphet’s words were different. “You will live through this day, Jubilee, I swear it.” And then he half carried me, half dragged me down the slope.

He had left his flying machine in the dry water course at the bottom of the little canyon. Jolly was already there, with Moki under one arm, and my savant under the other, climbing into one of the cargo baskets. “Jolly, don’t!”

“Do you want to kill us?” he shouted. “Do you want to kill yourself? The worm can only follow us if we’re on the ground. So get in. Get in! Our only chance is to fly.”

Yaphet left me no choice. “Your brother’s a lot smarter than you,” he said, and he shoved me into the basket opposite Jolly. My head struck one of the struts. A different kind of pain. The sharp, fresh scent of silver tinged the air.

I had landed on a folded sleeping bag, but something brittle crunched beneath it as I shoved myself up on my elbows. What I had taken for a harness between the two baskets was really a solid platform suspended by fixed struts. Yaphet clambered over the engine and dropped onto it. The size of the flyer was such that his face was only inches from mine. “Look back,” he ordered as the engine started up. I felt its vibration. I felt the wing begin to lift and I grabbed at the rim of the basket. “Look back!”

I did, and saw the worm. It darted up the slope behind us, following the track of my bike. The flying machine began to climb, lofting slowly into the air.

The worm reached my fallen bike. It turned immediately, tracking our path down to the canyon floor. We were twenty feet in the air, and twice that far away down the canyon when the worm reached the place where the flying machine had been. It stopped, its six-foot length sparkling in the sun like a stream of water that does not flow. Then it circled that place, around and around, faster with each circuit, like a mad thing. I felt the hair on my neck stand up. It never once looked up for us, as any living thing would do.

Then we soared around a bend in the canyon, and I couldn’t see it anymore. I turned, to look ahead of us.

“You could unbalance us,” Yaphet suggested, past the streaming wind. “You could shift your weight too suddenly, or jump out, and send us crashing to our deaths. If you want to.”

Jolly worried I might consider this a good idea. “Jubilee, he doesn’t mean it! Don’t do it. Please.”

I could not answer. A new clarity had come over me. If not for Yaphet, we would have fallen to the worm. If not for this wicked flying machine. “Why does the silver leave us alone?” I asked, without looking at him.

“Because we’re flying low. Not even twenty feet above the ground.”

We were lower than the canyon walls.

“And the sun protects us,” Yaphet added. “If silver begins to bloom along the wings, the sun will burn it and stop it from growing.”

“And if you go higher?” I remembered a day as bright as this one, when Udondi’s savant had risen into the sky above the highway to Xahiclan, higher and higher, until a tiny silver storm burst into existence around it.

Yaphet said, “I won’t go higher.”

I did not want to look at him. I was afraid to look. So I kept my gaze fixed on the canyon wall, and still he was all I saw. Our bodies speak their own language, and mine was waking to one it had heard only faintly that night outside the Temple of the Sisters.

What if I hate him? I’d asked Liam that question on the day I’d first heard Yaphet’s name, and Liam had answered honestly. It won’t matter.

It was Jolly who broke a silence of several minutes. “Yaphet, was it you who set those explosives?”

I had forgotten the explosives. So distracted was I, I had even forgotten the two convoys.

“No, it wasn’t me.”

“It brought down a landslide, didn’t it?”

“I couldn’t see what happened… but it sounded like a landslide. Are you thinking it was your uncle?”

Liam?I had forgotten him too. I looked north, but all I could see was the canyon wall. “We have to go back.”

Yaphet didn’t answer. Neither did Jolly, for of course it would be foolish to go back. They both knew it… and so did I. Liam and Udondi would be furious if we did not use this chance to escape—and still I could not just leave them… “Jolly!” He lay in the other basket, his arm around Moki. “You have my savant, don’t you? So call them.”

Yaphet said, “We’ll have to climb out of this canyon first.”

“Then let’s do it.” We’d gone fifteen miles to the southeast, maybe more. “Both convoys are far away now. They won’t see us.” Not if we were lucky.

As we climbed to the canyon rim I found myself watching the wing for the glimmer of silver, but none appeared, and then we were over the plain. We stayed low, only ten feet above the ground, but the land was very flat, so that if anyone was looking, we would certainly be seen. I studied the land to the north and east, but there was no dust anywhere, no sign of a truck moving. Jolly put through a call to Udondi’s savant, but there was no answer. “They could be in a canyon,” Yaphet said.

He didn’t like to fly in the open, so when he found a shallow stretch of lowland between two ridges, he guided the flying machine down into it. We were still heading generally southeast. Ahead of us loomed a rugged highland of steep canyons and wind-smoothed pinnacles. Goats moved on the barren cliffs. I took their presence as a hopeful sign. “There must be someplace in there to shelter from the silver,” I said, pointing them out.

Yaphet nodded. “That’s where we’ll go.”

We tried to reach the cliffs, but the winds were confused, darting at us in powerful gusts that pushed us back out onto the plain. We were working our way back to the cliffs once again, flying lower than ever, only a few feet above the rocky soil, when we heard two faint concussions, one swiftly following the other. I would have thought it my imagination, if Yaphet had not turned to look.

Far to the northwest, a huge dust cloud boiled silently into the sky—far too much dust to be caused by any convoy.

In the ancient city, the bogy had taken Liam for one of her warlords. I wondered if she had been right after all.