Memory

Chapter 34

Night had come to the mountains, though it was not full darkness yet. The sky still had some blue in it, and only the brightest stars showed. From the direction of the forest we heard the plaintive call of a night bird, but within the courtyard all was still. Not a breath of wind stirred, and I did not see even a single mechanic as we crossed the tiles. Moki trotted ahead of us, his ears pricked and alert, but he did not seem worried. We climbed the stairs to the top of the wall, and every breath that we drew was laden with the sweet scent of temple kobolds.

We paused to look down into the canyon. A river of silver ran through it. It was still far below the wall, but I could feel it, streaming past the lines of my awareness. I closed my eyes. The silver was in me. It was in all of us, but in me it was awake. The ha was a new sense, one that reached beyond taste and touch, beyond sight and scent and hearing. This new sense reached out into the night, riding on thin lines of detection, and almost immediately I felt him. It was just as Kaphiri had said, that night when he came to us. The ha of one’s lover makes an unmistakable signal. I clutched Yaphet’s hands. “He is far away.”

“Call him.”

He was not truly my lover, but I called him anyway. My desire made a tremor in the silver, a wordless wanting. I felt him startle. I felt his anger run back to me, following on the same lines of connection, his cold resistance.

“Look,” Yaphet said.

Our joined hands sparkled with the ha. It ran up his arms, and mine.

“I can feel you,” he whispered. “I can feel the flowing of the silver.”

“Is it awake in you?”

“I don’t know… but I can feel him too.”

“And he feels you… but he’s not coming. Yaphet, he’s not coming… is he?” The connection I felt with Kaphiri was so strong it hardly seemed possible that he could refuse… and then he was gone, vanished from my awareness.

“He has gone into the daylight,” Yaphet said.

“He won’t come back.”

I felt stunned, and frightened, and for a long time I stood there, just holding his hands. When we finally let go I thought I would see the ha dissolve from his hands, but it stayed with him. It sparkled in his hair. He held his hands up, gazing at them in wonder.

“Maybe we don’t need him?” I asked.

Yaphet shook his head. “I think we do… but we can’t wait.”

So we prepared the flying machine, first unfolding the wings and stretching the canvas tight across the frame, then dividing our supplies between the flying machine’s two cargo baskets. In the canyon, the silver was rising, climbing swiftly nearer the temple wall. I could feel the lines of its structure, vibrating with information, but the structure I saw with my eyes and the structure I felt were not the same thing. The second was vaster, reaching far beyond my sight. I searched for Kaphiri within those lines, but he had hidden himself away.

I turned my back on the canyon. Yaphet was busy checking the wings. I still did not see any mechanics, either in the courtyard or on the walls, and that seemed strange to me. I was about to say something about it when Moki growled.

I looked up. Moki stood at the tail of the flying machine, gazing back along the length of the wall, toward the stairway we had ascended, and the hair on his back was raised, and his teeth were bared.

Silver lit up the canyon, but in the courtyard the temple walls cast black shadows. I stepped forward, straining to see what Moki saw. It could not be Kaphiri. He was still far away. “Is it a mechanic, boy?”

A black shadow slipped from the blackness on the stairway. Another followed close behind it, and another, and another still. They were humanlike, but hunched over, like awkward animals scampering on all-fours. At the same time, they weren’t human at all. They were too tiny by half, with hairless heads and huge eyes that gleamed and flashed in the starlight. They whispered to one another:

La-zur-i. La-zur-i. La-zur-i. La-zur-i.

Like the hissing of snakes.

There had been no mechanics in the courtyard or on the walls. I understood then that there would be no mechanics in the meadow either. Kaphiri must have somehow ordered them in, opening the way for the bogy army to carry out their vendetta—against Yaphet. “Yaphet,run! ”

More stooped figures joined the first four. One raised a thing like a stick to its lips. I turned to flee, and a dart smacked my shoulder. Its tip stuck in the fabric of my field jacket, but did not pierce it. Another dart whistled past my ear. “Yaphet!”

He dropped to the ground, and the tiny missile passed over his shoulder. In an instant, he was on his feet again. “The flying machine!”

“Leave it! They want to kill you. Run. Run!”

He grabbed the dart that had stuck in my jacket, and he hurled it back at them. “Go back!” he shouted. “Back into the silver!” But they did not heed him. Already they were swarming past the tail of the flying machine.

Moki had given up his defense. He darted past us. “Come on,” I yelled, and this time Yaphet gave in. He grabbed my hand and we ran together along the wall.

Where was the next stairway? I knew there was one by the temple gate, but that was on the other side of the complex. Had there been another in between? We had to get off the wall. We had to get back into the temple. The mechanics would surely be there, hidden away in some chamber. If we released them, the bogies would be driven back.

“Jubilee, wait!” Yaphet grabbed my hand and we stopped together, staring ahead at Jolly’s monument. It blocked our escape: a tentacle of blue glass reaching from the top of the wall, down into the courtyard. In the canyon, the silver had not yet risen high enough to touch the base of the temple wall, but the folly had made its own silver. Fine veins of it flowed over the monument, a nerve plexus of tiny streams, joining, parting, glistening, collecting in a slowly growing pool of silver on the courtyard’s tiled floor.

If we tried to climb over it, we would surely be consumed.

The bogies were a stone’s throw behind us, and the walls were too sheer to climb.

“Mari!” I screamed, desperately hoping she would hear me. “Release the mechanics! Release them now!” But there was no response from the temple. Not even a light.

I did not see a way out for us. But Yaphet still harbored a hope. “Call the silver,” he said.

“I do not know how.”

“Call it.”

I looked again at the onrushing shapes of the bogies. One of them paused, to raise a tube to its mouth. I lifted my hand, and the ha sparkled brightly between my fingers. The silver in the canyon brightened. I felt its proximity, and the lines of influence reaching from it to my beckoning hand, seeking a connection…

A tendril of silver shot up from the canyon, hurtling straight toward us. I cried out, stumbling backward, but Yaphet stayed rooted in place. He raised his own glittering hand, and he warded the tendril away. It went swirling around us, and as it passed, it slowed and it expanded, billowing into a wall of luminous fog that divided us from the bogies, hiding them from our sight.

We were left standing in a ring of silver. Its diameter was wider than the wall, so we could see down into the courtyard, and the canyon, and to my relief there were no bogies on either side. I turned to Yaphet, throwing my arms around him and kissing him—“You did it! You did it!”—while Moki danced at our feet.

Then a bogy scuttled out of the silver. I saw it from the corner of my eye and fell back. It raised a tube to its lips. Phwat! A wasp buzzed, and Yaphet’s whole body snapped backward. His hands rose spasmodically, to tear at a black dart dangling from his throat. Then he plunged over the wall, into the courtyard.

“Yaphet!” I dropped to my belly, in time to hear the sickening thunk of his impact against the tiles. Clinging to the edge, I looked down, to see him forty feet below me, his crumpled form illuminated by the glow of the silver that pooled at the foot of Jolly’s monument. I wanted to go to him, but the wall was too sheer to climb, and I could not bring myself to jump. A mob of bogies appeared out of the shadows by the temple. They swarmed over Yaphet, ignoring my screams of rage. They were like ants, swarming over a choice morsel. I could not even see his body. Then, as if they had become one creature, of one mind, they moved toward the pool of silver. One of them touched it, and the silver flowed over all of them, billowing madly up the wall so that I had to ward it off to keep from being consumed.

Some part of me died with Yaphet. We’d shared lifetimes together, and I knew I must have lost him before, but not like this. He had been taken away by phantoms from out of the silver, and only the god or the goddess could have sent them.

In my heart I was sure it had been the god. He was a brooding remnant within the Cenotaph, still at war with the goddess who had brought life to the world. He must have taken Yaphet, believing him to be Kaphiri—for only Kaphiri could turn back the flood of silver that would soon drown all the world. When the final flood came, life would be erased from the world, and the dark god would finally have his victory.

Except the god had been mistaken. Kaphiri still existed.

A coldness settled in my heart, and I whispered a vow of vengeance against the builder of the world.

Moki whined and waggled. The silver that surrounded us could not stand against the vapors of the temple kobolds. It was swiftly steaming into nothingness, so it was no trick for me to push the remnants away.

No bogies remained on the wall, or in the courtyard, or anywhere in sight. With Moki at my heels I walked past the flying machine. It was still poised, ready for its journey to the Cenotaph. I made sure it was anchored, so no stray wind could blow it away. Then I made my way down the dark stairway to the temple, where I found Mari, standing in the doorway, her hands kneading at the fabric of her skirt. “I heard your cries,” she said.

“Yaphet is dead.”

“I know.”

“Where are the mechanics?”

She would not meet my gaze. “I thought he would come back this night,” she whispered.

Her words stirred a terrible suspicion. “What are you saying?”

“I thought he would come back this night,” she repeated, her voice faint, and hollow.

“Didyou remove the mechanics?”

A violent shaking seized her hands. She turned away, withdrawing into the shadows of the great room.

“You arranged it so he would die,” I whispered.

“He told me Nuanez was dead! Long dead.”

“But it’s Yaphet who’s been murdered!”

“I thought he would come back this night!”

“He will,” I said softly as a scheme took shape in my mind, a structure for my vengeance. “I will force him back.”

In the pocket of my field jacket I still carried the book Known Kobold Circles. I took it with me to the well room. Consulting its pages, I collected the same kinds of kobolds Jolly and I had gathered at Azure Mesa, and within an hour I had a kobold sphere. I put it into the pocket of my field jacket. Then I went to the kitchen, and took a knife from a drawer. In a closet I found a spool of thin rope, and I cut a section of that and took it with me to the courtyard. I set the sphere down on the tiles, at a point equally spaced between the temple and the wall. Then I sat back to wait, with Moki nestled at my side.

The night was quiet. No wind blew, nor did I hear any night birds. Overhead the Bow of Heaven gleamed faintly, while the silver cast up its luminous glow from beyond the walls. I remembered the statues we had seen in the sandy desert washes at the eastern foot of the Kalang, stony warriors waiting in silent ambush, and I felt a kinship with them, for a great patience had come over me.

Near midnight the sphere began to steam with a mist of silver, faint at first, but swiftly growing. I picked up Moki and stepped back a pace, but I did not try to flee.

I had translated the name of this kobold circle as ‘The mirror of the other self,’ but it was more a portal than a mirror, and it had almost brought Kaphiri to me once before.

I watched the silver rise in trembling threads that fused into a panel. Its texture teased my eyes, suggesting an endless depth, as if I looked across time as well as space; but if there was structure there, I could not see it. To my eyes it was only a vastness of possibility.

I should have been afraid, but my anger would not let any such benign emotion surface.

“My love,” I whispered, searching the silver panel for some shadow, some trembling of his presence. Even if he had withdrawn himself from the silver, the silver still existed inside him, just as it existed inside all of us. He could not escape my whispering voice. “My love, come home.”

In only a few minutes I found him. He appeared first as a distant smudge that grew quickly larger, until I could distinguish his dark garb, and his confused gaze as he turned to look over his shoulder.

He was not alone.

He had his hand in a raptor-grip on the shoulder of a smaller figure beside him, a wriggling figure that slipped free even as I watched, eluding Kaphiri’s clutching hand, to vanish into mist. “Jolly!”

I screamed his name, but he did not hear me. He was already gone. Safe into the silver, I hoped, but at the same time I reeled under another dark blow of despair, for Jolly had been with Liam and Udondi—and what hope could remain for them, if Kaphiri had come upon them in the desert?

Kaphiri heard me cry out. If he had been unsure of my identity, he knew it now. He turned toward me, and taking one long stride, he stepped through the panel and into the courtyard, almost before I was ready to meet him.

Almost.

I had made a loop at the end of my rope. As he stepped through, I charged him, and thrust the rope over his head and pulled it tight. He smelled of sweat and smoke.

Without air he panicked. His hands went to his throat; then he tried to pummel me, but I had slipped behind him. I pulled the rope tighter still, and he went to his knees. I was shifting my grip to finish the job when a small hand touched mine. “Jubilee! Please don’t kill him! Please don’t!”

I looked up, stunned to find Jolly beside me. “You found your way here.” My grip eased, and Kaphiri drew in a whistling breath.

Jolly nodded. The ha glittered brightly around his hands, his face, and in his hair. “I learned how to do it. Now please, let him live.”

My anger flooded back. “Why should I? Hasn’t he killed Liam too? And Udondi?”

“No! They’re alive. Kaphiri didn’t find us. It was me. Liam wanted me to stay at the Temple of the Sisters, but I couldn’t. I went into the silver, looking for him. Liam is alive. He’s coming south to find you. Jubilee, please. Let him live.”

I could not deny my brother. My grip eased, and Kaphiri coughed and fell forward onto the tiles. “Yaphet is dead,” I said.

Jolly blinked hard, and coughed himself.

I nudged Kaphiri with the toe of my boot. “And this one swears that Temple Huacho is gone from Kavasphir.”

“I’m sorry,” Jolly whispered.

“I am sorry too. But I am going to end it, Jolly. I am going to make sure I never face this choice again.”

He looked at me in confusion, and dread. “What do you mean? You were going to kill him… Jubilee, you aren’t going to let the flood come, are you?”

I felt incredulous at his question. “You ask me that? I am not him. And anyway, Kaphiri is only partly to blame for this.”

I crouched beside him. Guilt touched me as I listened to his wheezing as he struggled to draw air through his damaged throat, but I pretended I did not feel it. “You said you would call down the destruction of the silver if I asked. So, I am asking.”

“No!” Jolly cried. “She doesn’t mean it.”

Kaphiri raised his head, enough that I could see his eyes. “She means it,” he said in a rasping whisper.

“So do it. Destroy the silver.” I tightened my grip on his leash. “Or I will do it myself.”

“Why?” Jolly said. “Why do you want this?”

“Because he will not accompany me into the Cenotaph, and I cannot fend off the silver that boils from that pit. Not by myself. So let him tear away the veils and I will make my own way into the pit, and I will destroy whatever I find there.”

“How?” Kaphiri whispered.

I stared at him, offering no answer.

“But you… have… a means?”

I nodded.

“Then I’ll help you.”

“You will go into the pit? Tonight? And you will fend off the silver?”

He nodded. “If it will mean the end of a god, I will do anything.”

I tried to convince Jolly to stay behind at the temple, but he would not. “If you leave me, I will only follow you through the silver. You are so easy to see, now that yourha is awake.”

Kaphiri soon recovered enough that he could walk. I kept the leash on him. We crossed the courtyard, and climbed the stairs to the top of the wall.

Jolly had hurried ahead to the flying machine, but he came back. “Look down, Jubilee. There is a fire in the temple.”

I looked, to see red flames flickering behind the window nearest the well room. The fire spread with astounding speed, invading the kitchen, and then the great room. The doors flew open, and Mari stumbled out, embers smoking on her skirt. She turned back to look at the building. Then she looked up at us. “Your library will soon be gone!” she shouted. “I won’t keep your refuge anymore.”

But with the well destroyed, there would be no refuge for her either. “Come with us!” I called after her as she strode off across the courtyard. “We will fend off the silver as long as we can! Mari!”

She did not hear me over the roar of the flames, or she would not.

“Mari, we will take you to Nuanez when this is done!”

She rounded the temple and disappeared. I wanted to go after her, but I had Kaphiri under the rope.

Jolly had no such hindrance. He darted back down the stairs, then sprinted across the courtyard, following Mari’s route around the building.

I saw her again on the other side of the temple, hurrying toward the gate. “She has lived too long,” Kaphiri said.

I knew he was right. “Jolly!” I screamed. “Come back! Come back now!”

Mari reached the gate. She was an old woman, but she still had her strength. When she pulled on the latch, the tall gate swung open and a tongue of silver reached through. For a moment, Mari stood silhouetted against its luminous glow. Then it swept over her, just as fire roared up through the temple roof.

“Call your brother back,” Kaphiri croaked. “The night is growing old.”

The flying machine was ready, but neither Jolly nor I could fly it. Only Kaphiri had learned the techniques from Yaphet. He claimed the pilot’s platform. I squeezed in beside him, so I could continue to hold his leash. “Aren’t you afraid…,” he rasped, “of what you might feel…?”

I did not think I would feel anything, but I was wrong. His warmth stirred in me a corrupt desire, but it was not so strong as my hate. “I will strive to bear your proximity,” I whispered.

He chuckled. “And I will do the same.”

Jolly took Moki with him in one basket. I had already balanced the other with food and water, so Kaphiri brought the engine humming to life.

It should have been Yaphet beside me.

Kaphiri touched the controls and the wings flexed; the engine’s hum climbed in pitch.

Yaphet was gone.

I did not look back. Neither did Kaphiri. The banks of tiny propellers whined, and we lurched forward, lifted hesitantly, and then swooped down into the canyon. I cried out, for I thought we were falling. The silver rushed up toward us, and I reached out to ward it away, but before I could form the thought it parted beneath us as if an invisible plow had carved a furrow in its luminous surface. The wing tips skimmed the silver, and gleamed a moment with its light, and then the light fell away, and the river of silver sank below us as it flowed down the canyon to the plain. We soared on at the same altitude, and the wind was loud in my ears, but even so I imagined Yaphet calling, crying my name into the night.