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Chapter 1 When I was ten I had a blanket that was smooth and dark, with no light of its own until I moved and then its folds would glitter with thousands of tiny stars in all the colors of the stars in the night sky. But the pale arch that appears at the zenith on clear nights and that we call the Bow of Heaven never would appear on my blanket—and for that I was glad. For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life. This was always a great concern for me, for my mother was the wisest person I knew and I feared for her. More than once I schemed to make her look foolish, just to be sure she would not get into Heaven when her time came. When my antics grew too much she would turn to my father. With a dark frown and her strong arms crossed over her chest she would say, “We have been so very fortunate to have such a wild and reckless daughter as Jubilee. Obviously, she was sent to teach us wi
Chapter 2 If a child should ask,What is the world? a parent might answer, “It is a ring-shaped island of life made by the goddess in defiance of the frozen dark between the stars. On the outer rim of this ring there is mostly land, and that is where we live. On the inner rim there is only ocean. We have day and night because the world-ring spins around its own imaginary axis. At the same time it follows another, greater circle around the sun so that we see different stars in different seasons.” These are the simple facts everyone accepts. But if a child should ask,What is the silver? the answer might take many forms. “It is a fog of glowing particles that arises at night to rebuild the world.” “It is a remnant of the world’s creation.” “It is the memory of the world.” “It is the dreaming mind of the wounded goddess and you must never go near her! Her dreams will swallow any player they touch. Do you want to be swallowed up by the silver? No? Then stay inside at night. Never wander.” Wh
Chapter 3 “Liam, are you angry?” He was astride his bike, his sunglasses on so I couldn’t see his eyes. He shrugged. “So. Maybe a little.” We had talked of wayfaring together when he was ready to return to the road. Now he would have to go on alone. The afternoon was hot and still. There were no clouds, and the sky had been baked to a pale, pale blue. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” I said. “I don’t think I’m ready.” “Don’t you dare complain, Jubilee. You’ve won the prize.” So I had. I looked out across the rolling plain of grass to the distant city shimmering in the heat. “I’ve never been anywhere, Liam. I’ve never done anything.” “So go visit him. Go to live with him! That journey should give you all the adventure you’ll ever want.” “I wish the matchmaker had found a lover for you instead.” He sighed. “So maybe I’ll go with you when the time comes. Maybe there’ll even be someone there for me, and you and I, we’ll live close together. Kedato’s right, Jubilee. You have a lot
Chapter 4 We were not quite at the top of the tower. There was one more floor above us, but the door to it was closed and sealed, and we did not have the proper tools or kobolds to take it down. So we returned to our room, where a cool breeze soughed through arched windows. We shared a chilled water cell. Liam splashed some of the water on his face, leaving dark streaks of dust. “Do you want to go out again?” he asked. We had at least two hours before sunset, but I was afraid to face the heat of the streets, so I shook my head. “It’s too hot. I’m going to rest.” “Good. I feel the same.” I looked out the window, at the sheets of rainbow light shimmering over the rooftops. “Anyway, it’s not like we’ve found anything.” “Finding the square was something.” He pulled a sleeping bag from his saddle bin. “I wonder how old this city is? Ten thousand years? More?” Who could say? History is deeper than anyone can measure, and as chaotic as the silver. The past is carried forward into the present,
Chapter 5 “Wake up, Yaphet. Yaphet?” I could see him asleep on his bed beneath the dim glow of a hanging lamp, its globe worked in tiles of colored glass to make flowers purple and yellow in color. The variegated light fell over him, illuminating the high points of his face, accenting the shadows. Sleep gives to some people a look of peace so profound it is almost inhuman. Yaphet had that look. In the shadows he seemed more a memory of an idealized past than a young man of this world. “Yaphet.” A week had passed since my adventure in the city and in that time I had been able to talk to Yaphet only twice. The market connection to Vesarevi was intermittent and rationed, and tonight the channels were especially bad. My father had called that morning to say he was leaving Xahiclan at last. He was to have called again from Temple Nathé where he would stay the night, but an antenna must have gone down along the highway because we’d had no word from him. So it was a wonder I’d reached Yaphet
Chapter 6 I had no time to visit the market that day, or the next, caught up in the preparations for my father’s memorial ceremony. But on the third day, when all the notices had gone out and the food had been ordered, I found myself with a free hour in the early afternoon. My mother was napping with the baby and all the other children were quiet, so I took my savant and a folding chair and went out to the orchard with Moki, finding a shady site in a hollow between three trees. I sat down with the savant in my lap and thought for a moment about strategy. What if Yaphet was in the market? His profile was linked to mine, but I didn’t want him to know I was about. I didn’t want anyone to know. So I stripped all identifiers from my market presence—name, face, notifiers, history. I reduced myself to a blank face within a portrait frame, and then I linked. I went first to the library and, using a synthesized voice, asked my question of the resident savant: “Has anyone ever survived the silve
Chapter 7 In the days that followed I lived in a state of nervous terror, jumping at any odd noise in the night, or the sweep of an unexpected shadow. I didn’t talk to Yaphet, though my mother must have notified his family because he sent me a formal letter of condolence. We waited seven days to hold the memorial ceremony, as custom advises for those taken by the silver. This is to allow time for friends to gather from neighboring enclaves. But travel is dangerous as my father’s fate showed, and I did not expect many guests—revealing how little I knew of Kedato Panandi. My father had traveled often and made many friends. In the end, forty-two players risked the journey to Temple Huacho, many from far away Xahiclan, and if they hadn’t thought to bring gifts of food and drink and their own bedding we would have been hard-pressed to provide for them all. Among them were merchants and truckers and hoteliers and librarians and even the matchmaker from Halibury who had changed his opinion of
Chapter 8 Kaphiri seemed to forget us. For twenty days there was no sign of him, though I remained vigilant, spending many nights on the wall. No one questioned me. They knew I had a lover, and it was only natural I would want to be alone with him; when the market link was down, it was just as natural for me to choose to be alone in my grief. I was of the age of restlessness and melancholia, and my behavior was easily explained. That was why I was on the wall one dreary evening, when clouds lay low and heavy over the land. Night was falling early. The vale had become a wide gray shadow and the horizon had taken on the color of old steel, when the headlight of a bike appeared in the distance, racing through the dusk for the shelter of Temple Huacho. There was no sign of silver that night; no hint that this rider might be a servant of Kaphiri, but I’d been on edge so long I started to my feet, expecting the worst. I wished furiously that I had my hunting rifle in hand, but it was locked
Chapter 9 Dread had stirred in me when Liam first mentioned the name of Temple Nathé. The feeling did not leave me all that afternoon, and still I was taken by surprise when the highway crested a ridge and suddenly we were looking down on a wide valley filled with golden knee-high grasses. There beside the highway were the grim remains of my father’s truck. Neither of us spoke as we approached the hulk. It was an eerie testament. The wheels and undercarriage, and the lower third of the truck’s body, were gone, dissolved by the fickle touch of silver. The remaining shell was engraved in a language long dead in this world, though it was one I knew. I walked around the ruin, reading as I went: community news from some forgotten era—a storm, a marriage, a new temple site, a silver flood. Each word a faint echo of lives lost to the past and now my father had joined them. Morning glories were already sending their vines over the hood of the truck and in through the windows. I checked the bac
Chapter 10 Elek had six other guests that night, five of them truckers from distant Ano who spoke in the formal style of that region, with many “ma’am’s” and “Should-it-please-you-my-lady’s” and courtly nods and smiles. We sat with them, and with Elek’s staff of twelve, at a large table in Temple Nathé’s dining hall. Throughout the meal—a feast centered on sage partridge, as fine as Elek had promised—the truckers entertained us with stories of the silver and of their lives on the road. These truckers had with them a player called Mica Indevar, who they introduced as a scholar from a land even beyond Ano. This Mica Indevar was a stoop-shouldered cessant whose round face and smooth, hairless head gave little hint of his age, though his husky voice led me to suspect he was pushing ninety years. He seemed familiar to me, though I could not place him. I wondered if he had visited Temple Huacho, but Elek dashed that theory when she explained that Mica Indevar had sworn himself to a quest, to
Chapter 11 Much later that night I was awakened by my savant, whispering my name. I opened my eyes to find it floating beside me, its wing emitting a soft, golden illumination that did not reach to the edges of the little room. “A call,” it said in its old man’s voice. “From Jolly.” A cold flush ran through me as I sat up on my pallet. I stared at the gleaming savant, afraid to speak, afraid that speech would shatter the dreamspell that surely held me. “It is a time-limited channel,” the savant added. “But how could it be Jolly?” The savant hesitated a second. Then it answered confidently: “It can be Jolly because the biometrics are correct.” “That can’t be.” “Rechecking. Done. Identical results. Reminder: this is a time-limited channel.” “Answer it!” It was not Jolly calling me. That’s what I told myself. But I wanted to know who it was, and why. A rectangular window appeared within the golden glow of the savant’s wing. At first the mimic screen was dark, but a second later light stir
Chapter 12 At first we followed the highway south, as if to return to Temple Huacho. But once we rounded the hills that guarded the valley’s end we left the road, striking east into a trackless land of low hills and scattered trees. By dawn we’d put seventy miles behind us. Udondi had her own field glasses. When the sun was well up we stopped, and she and Liam searched our trail, but they found no sign of pursuit. “Anyway, it’s too soon,” Liam said. Udondi returned her field glasses to a battered saddle box. “Only if Indevar is alone.” “Are you suspecting the Ano truckers too?” “Better to be cautious, that’s all.” Udondi had assured us that Indevar would sleep until noon, but what then? If he woke on a truck bound for Xahiclan, he might not get a ride back for many days. But if the truckers left him behind, it would be easy for him to find his way to Temple Huacho. So I sent a message of warning to my mother, giving detailed descriptions of Mica Indevar and all the Ano truckers, and I
Chapter 13 By dawn I had recovered enough volition to throw up when Liam tried to get some water down my throat. My thoughts fixed on Mica Indevar and they were wicked thoughts indeed. But soon after that I got my fingers to twitch and my eyes to blink on command. Then, instead of the pleasure of feeling nothing, I endured a horrible prickly return of sensation as when the leg has fallen asleep, but it was everywhere and lasted a solid hour at least. I’m ashamed to say the first sound I uttered (and the only sound for some long time) was an agonized moan. At last though, the torment faded. I gained some control of my muscles, especially of my tongue and throat—though I had no control at all of what I said. I began to babble, to confess. Anything and everything I had never told to Liam before poured forth: the story of how I had taken my father’s rifle when I was eleven and still forbidden to use it, and how I had killed a deer then left the carcass in the forest because I was too frigh
Chapter 14 We left our bikes alongside the path and walked up the moss-covered stairs that led to the temple’s open doors. I was surprised at the dull thump of our footsteps on the stair, as if it was made of hollow plastic. An angled roof covered the small stoop, sheltering it from the rain and shading the double doors so that instead of moss, their plain panels were covered with a slimy black algae that came away on my fingers when I made the mistake of touching it. The doors were pinned against the wall with blackened hooks. Twilight was falling over the forest, but within the temple night had already come. Liam used a flashlight to chase back the shadows, revealing a modest hall bare of any furnishing. The massive trunks of two trees grew up through the floor, disappearing past neat collars set into the ceiling. Water—presumably from the rain—trickled down their rough bark and out of sight. The floor was a slick of black algae, except where that one resolute path made its way strai
Chapter 15 The table lamp was on again when Udondi nudged me awake. “Time to rise, wayfarer, the road awaits us.” “You found a road?” I asked around a yawn. She grinned. “Where we step, that is our road.” I groaned and tried to wriggle deeper into my sleeping bag. “It’s too early to quote classics. Are you sure it’s even morning?” There was certainly no evidence of daylight in the temple’s well room. The lamp on the table burned just as it had last night, casting the same illumination. I squinted at the tree trunks, but could see no sign of the sun winking through the narrow gap in the ceiling. “It’s morning by the clock,” Udondi assured me. “And even better the rain has stopped. Do you feel all right today? Has the worm poison finished with you?” I considered the question. I felt tired, hungry, sore, but what else could be expected? “I feel all right.” “Good. Come have some breakfast. We want to be ready to leave at first light.” I gave in, and crawled out of my sleeping bag. A glance
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. Af
Chapter 17 It was late morning by the time Liam found a way down, and the news he brought was not good. “I saw a plume of dust to the west. Ten, fifteen miles, maybe, back along the base of the Kalang. It disappeared after a few minutes but I don’t doubt it was kicked up by a truck—one that was forced to slow when it hit rough terrain.” No one was surprised. Udondi frowned at the sky, where clouds had begun to gather, just as they had yesterday. “We ride fast,” she said at last. “There are refuge mesas in the northern Iraliad, way stations for travelers. If we can reach one, we might be able to defend it, and then the silver can take care of our pursuers.” “If Kaphiri doesn’t interfere,” I added gloomily, remembering the apparition Liam had seen last night. “He’s still a player, and he can die as easily as any other player from a bullet wound.” She looked at Liam. “This time we’ll be ready for him.” It was not a question, and Liam did not answer. We rode swiftly, following the line of
Chapter 18 I turned and brought the rifle to bear on a hooded, sticklike figure in dull-colored clothes, angling down the boulder-strewn slope above us. My first thought was that one of the bikers had survived, but my quick offense collapsed when I sighted Moki trotting proudly in front of this desert apparition, as if intent on doing the introductions himself. “Moki!” He came bounding at my call, and I greeted him with a joyous hug, almost dropping the rifle in my enthusiasm. Fortunately Udondi acted with more thought, neither raising her weapon nor lowering her guard. Instead she called a cautious greeting. “If you are not one of those who pursued us on the plain, then well met.” “If I were one of them,” the stranger answered in a throaty voice that identified her as an older woman, “I do not think I would be in fit condition to speak.” Udondi stiffened at this jibe. Her grip on the rifle tightened just a little. “We did not ask to be pursued, nor to be accosted.” The stranger stoppe
Chapter 19 The pounding at the door was echoed in my panicked heartbeat. “Liam! He will bring the silver through that door. Quickly. The rifles. There are windows on the upper floors.” “What talk is this of rifles in my house?” Maya Anyapah demanded as she followed Liam from the kitchen. “You claimed to be innocent victims on the plain, but now you would murder a player who comes openly to my door?” “It is the one we spoke of, Keeper,” Udondi said. “And he is not a player like any other.” “Because he knows more of the silver than any other?” Maya asked. “Do not let him in,” Udondi warned. “The cost of your curiosity will prove too much.” I guessed this debate had gone on for most of the time I had been at the top of the pinnacle. Keeper Maya was tempted by what she’d been told of Kaphiri…but I had no patience for the argument. “Where are the rifles?” Maya tried to keep me from the kitchen, but Udondi stepped between us, and I was able to slip past. The rifles were lying clean and reass
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.” “WillI 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. Arare exception. Very rare. That it should be you here, now, well, it
Chapter 21 Sleep did not come easily that night. I lay awake, listening, I don’t know for what. I could hear a distant guitar, and closer, the soft scratch of kobold feet on the stone windowsill. The rich, cloying scent of temple kobolds pervaded my every breath. A restlessness grew in me, so that after some time I left my bed, to stand watch at the window. From my room I could see the plain below the pinnacles. The silver was just taking form there, as a thin, bright sheen like liquid glass poured across the flat basin. I could feel its presence, as a strange new awareness in my mind. I could feel it, as if the silver had somehow become part of my mind. I felt it flowing past the rocks and swallowing them whole. I felt it rising. Fear took me, and I retreated from the window, but it made no difference. My preternatural awareness continued, as if some outpost of my mind existed down there on that plain, looking, listening, waiting on my instruction while my familiar self trembled in th
Chapter 22 By the time I reached Azure Mesa the sun was directly behind me. Its rays shot through rips in the clouds to fall in mottled patterns against the mesa’s blue stone cliffs—a lovely, bright blue like polished turquoise. Changed stone. Perhaps all of Azure Mesa was a folly. I wondered how long it had been there, and how long it would last. Its walls were badly undercut by the silver, and in places the overhanging rock had collapsed into hills of turquoise stone. Still, it looked solid enough to offer me shelter through the night…if I could find a way to scale its smooth walls. A skirt of brush surrounded the mesa. Perhaps it had rained recently, for the brush was covered in a haze of tiny yellow flowers. I breathed in their dry, honey-sweet fragrance: a pleasant scent, but not nearly strong enough to hide the lingering scent of silver. Darkness would not fall for the better part of an hour, but that smell had me nervous. Almost panicky. I did not want to be caught out in the op
Chapter 23 Even before Ficer sealed the door, Jolly turned to me and asked the question I dreaded most. “Why were you the one who came, Jubilee? Where is my father?” “He is gone, Jolly. Gone to the silver.” Not a flicker of surprise could I see on his face, only grief. He must have guessed the truth long before. Indeed, nothing else could have kept our father away. Now Jolly’s gaze fixed me in a way I remembered well. “Tell me how it happened.” And I would have, there on the doorstep, but Ficer intervened. “We’ll have time to tell our stories when we’ve settled in.” He mounted his bike. “Azure is not a true temple and the kobolds are poorly tended. We’ll be safer on the highest floor.” Jolly rode on the back of Ficer’s bike, with Moki cradled in his arms. They went first, while I followed them up the wide stairway, lit from above by optical tubes that glinted against the blue stone. Dead kobold shells crunched beneath our tires, and the taste of dust was in my mouth. It was easy to t
Chapter 24 When we returned, Jolly was huddled in a corner, with Moki in his lap. That sight affected me strangely, for it seemed as if I looked back in time at myself, alone in the corner of my room, holding on to a scream of despair until the silver was fully gone. I moved my sleeping bag next to his and sat down. He watched me with wary eyes as if I were the silver itself. I leaned against the wall, looking out across the room so that he did not have to feel my gaze. I was not, after all, the Jubilee he remembered. I said, “I’m sorry for this strangeness between us. You were my older brother. That’s how I remember you. My best friend. Now seven years have passed—” “It has not been that long.” “It has, for me. Seven years.” I tried to smile. “Ficer says I look on you as if you were a ghost. You must forgive me, Jolly, if it seems that way, but the dead do not come back to life every day, looking as bright as when they left. I think it will take some time to get my mind around it…thou
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 gh
Chapter 26 That vision left my body as weary as ever I can remember, but I would not lie down again despite Jolly’s urging. I would not risk a return to sleep and that nightmare world of vanishing silver. I felt trapped by my own history. Not for a moment did I doubt that what I’d dreamed was real. Somehow I had been allowed to recover a memory of my own past, to glimpse one of the lives I had lived.Why? So that I would not repeat the disaster of that night? Or so I would be prepared when I faced the same choice again? I remembered the feel of the kobold in my hand. A kobold that would erase the very memory of a player from the world.Any player. What a horrible weapon Ki-Faun had made, and I had been ready to use it. I started for the door. Jolly followed after me. “Where are you going?” He glanced anxiously at Ficer, whose sleep had quieted. “I cannot stay here. I need air.” “But there is silver this night.” “I need to see it.” He did not ask why. I took a flashlight from my bike and
Chapter 27 We stayed on the plateau until the eastern sky grew light enough to show the weather. It was not an encouraging sight. Heavy clouds were moving up again from the south, and though the silver faded as the dawn grew brighter, it seemed reluctant to be gone altogether. I wondered if we should risk leaving Azure Mesa, or if we should wait…for a better day, or to give Liam a chance to catch up with us. I wanted to try again to call him but I did not have my savant, so we returned to the cavern to fetch it. Ficer was awake, busily packing his gear onto his bike. He greeted me with a weary nod. “It was no pleasant night, was it?” he asked. “I dreamed,” I admitted. “Everyone does, and it’s never pleasant dreams either. It’s the kobolds—that’s what I think. They smell differently from your common temple kobolds, don’t they? A perfume to trouble the mind. It’s why no one lives here;why so few come to stay even one night—which made it the safest place for us to meet.” I hesitated, for
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 t
Chapter 29 We made our way at last into the highlands, succeeding in late afternoon when the winds began to die. We entered the mouth of a north-facing canyon where we had earlier seen goats along the walls. After half a mile, Jolly sighted a wild kobold well on the lip of a little pocket valley some three hundred feet above the canyon floor. None of us wanted to fly that high, but time was growing short. The sun had already dropped behind the crags and the canyon was in shadow. We could look for a more accessible kobold well, but chance did not favor the finding of one so late in the day. So we agreed to try for the little valley. Yaphet guided the flying machine in a tight spiral, keeping close to the cliff wall. He would glance anxiously at the valley, then back again, to the leading edge of the wing, alert for the first sign of a silver bloom. Jolly too kept a close eye on the wing, but I was distracted by a herd of brown goats that had stopped their browsing to eye us as we rose p
Chapter 30 It was cold that night, so high up among the rocks, and Yaphet had only one sleeping bag. When unfolded it would cover two. He said that Jolly and I should have it, and he would watch until at least midnight. I was exhausted, so I accepted gratefully. When I woke again, it was to the glow of silver. I sat up abruptly, my heart pounding with the certainty that someone was drawing near. But when I looked about, all was still. Jolly was still sleeping beside me, breathing softly beneath the folds of the sleeping bag. Yaphet was sitting with Moki on the folded structure of the flying machine, his hands clasped around his knees. He studied me curiously. “Are you truly awake?” “I don’t know.” I glanced over my shoulder. The silver stood in a waist-high ring around the well. I could smell the goats, but they were huddled on the other side of the flying machine, and I could not see them. The Bow of Heaven glimmered overhead. “Did you hear something?” “No. It’s been quiet. Eerily qui
Chapter 31 It was my task to guard Yaphet, but my vigil failed during that long flight south. I fell asleep, waking only when Yaphet shouted some question and Kaphiri answered that we should bear west. My face and hands were numb with cold and I pulled Moki’s small body close to warm them. We were very high. The silver-flooded plain lay far below us, unbroken by any peak or pinnacle, but ahead there were mountains. I had seen the Sea Comb from afar, but only as we drew close did I understand the expanse of that range. The part standing above the flood was twice as tall as the Kalang: a wall of sharp, ice-coated peaks raised against a dawn sky of liquid blue-gray. As the dawn brightened, the silver rolled back, uncovering a land as strange as any I have seen. A city of glass towers sparkled in the foothills, carpeting the dry slopes and filling the valley floors for mile after mile. The glass towers were black, or gray, or blue, standing impossibly high and thin. Some of the buildings c
Chapter 32 I could not answer Kaphiri’s questions. I was too tired to do anything but wander aimlessly and worry. “You are no good to me like this,” he said, and he led me to a bedroom Mari had made up. When I awoke it was deep in the night. Through the window I could see stars, but they were pale in the sky, their light faded by the gleam of silver from beyond the temple walls. Moki stirred beside me, and I gave him a quick hug. “Yaphet?” I whispered, hoping he had come to the room while I slept. I listened for his breathing, but all was silent. Fear drove away the last of my sleepiness. I was supposed to protect Yaphet, but I had hardly seen him since we arrived. All that day and night I had left him to Kaphiri’s mercies. Quickly I rose, and found that I had slept in my clothes. I did not know where the light might be, and I didn’t want to spend time looking for it, so I groped my way to the door. It was not locked. In the hallway the light tubes were dim amber, emitting hardly enoug
Chapter 33 I slept through much of that next day. Sometimes I sleep just to avoid being awake. A waking mind must face facts and make decisions. I wanted none of that. I wanted to sleep forever, but in the afternoon my conscience stirred, and I wakened. Instantly I felt cold, for Yaphet was gone. I knew where he was. In my imagination I could see him in the library, poring over ancient slices of lettered stone, or electronic documents that might have been written by himself, lifetimes ago. I called Moki and he appeared from under the bed and I petted him for a few minutes, but it did little to calm me. In the vision I had suffered at Azure Mesa I had spoken with Ki-Faun, who was Yaphet. His words reechoed in my mind and I felt their weight like a curse:The knot is tied around you, milady, did you know it? All our fates circle around you. He had been so old I had not recognized him as my lover, but he knew me. He had put the kobold in my hand. I wondered if that memory lay somewhere ben
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. Theha 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 de
Chapter 35 The mists over the Cenotaph had quieted in the night, and I could not tell with any certainty where it lay, for the silver had risen in a uniform fog, obscuring all the plain. I was studying its misty surface, searching for some sign of the pit, when we chanced to pass close to a small circle of open ground. I had only a glimpse before the clearing fell behind us, but that was enough to make out stones and sand, looming gray in the silver’s glow, and against them darker shapes that I could not identify with any certainty. I clutched Kaphiri’s shoulder and pointed back. “What was that? Was that a kobold well?” He arched his neck to look, but we had already gone too far. So he put the flying machine into a steep bank, and we turned back, descending at the same time. On this pass we flew directly over the open ground. It was a kobold well—the largest I had ever seen. The black circle of its mouth was twice the wingspan of our flying machine, and around it was a ring of soil at
Epilogue
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