“Jubilee’s right,” Liam said. “Come with us. Let the matchmakers help you find your Mari.”
Nuanez shook his head. “I thank you for your kind offer, but I can’t go. Mari and I, we made promises. She said she’d come back here, and I know she will.”
We argued with him some more, but he had his faith and he would not come. So we left him some of our food packets as a parting gift, and we said good-bye. Afterward I thought of him as a kind of ghost, for although he was not dead he did not seem truly alive either. The past owned him, and he had not the heart to ask it to let him go.
We left Temple Li heading east, but after several miles we turned in a more southerly direction. This spur of the Kalang Crescent reached deep into the desert, and it was our plan to follow it for as long as we could, but first we wanted to find our way to the remote southern side.
The Iraliad was really two deserts. The northern expanse was renowned as a harsh land, with few settlements and no permanent highways, where the silver was said to rise almost every night of the year. But the southern basin was worse. The silver storms there were so bad that few players had ever survived it, and what little was known was mostly rumor. We reasoned that if we kept to the southern escarpment, there would be no highways, and no settlements below us, and the worm would have no way to make radio contact with its masters, and give us away.
We set out in the gray light of dawn, but it wasn’t long before the sun joined us, glittering among the leaves and casting spangled shadows on the moss. With no mist among the trees it was not so easy for the worm to hide, and Liam and I glimpsed it shortly after we set out, sliding through a patch of sunlight. We both pulled our rifles, but it slipped away. Then at midmorning it was Udondi’s turn to spot it.
She was riding ahead of me when she brought her bike skidding to a stop, so that I had to pull hard to the side to avoid hitting her. She yanked her rifle from its sheath, snapped it up to her shoulder, and fired.
Hiss. Pop!
The worm was caught on the moss, less than fifty feet away. It bucked, its back rising a hand span into the air. Then it writhed, coiling into a tight knot, turning over and over until it vanished behind a tree.
Udondi slung her rifle over her shoulder and sped off after it. I followed. It took us only seconds to reach the site, but the worm was gone.
At least it had not gone away unscathed. Liam found a six-inch segment of its body, where one of the kobolds had attached. I found another, smaller segment a few feet away, and then a third. Udondi crouched over each, counting the kobolds. “Five,” she announced. “There were seven in the slug. Damn. The other two will be lost in the moss somewhere.”
“They might be with the worm,” I said. “We don’t know.”
“No. It would have dropped more segments.”
“Not if one reached the head.”
She smiled—“Then we’ll hope for that”—but I could tell she was only humoring me. She let the kobolds feed for a few minutes. Then she gathered them up and we went on.
We reached the southern escarpment just before noon. We knew we were close by the gleam of brilliant daylight growing steadily brighter beyond the massive trunks of the trees, until suddenly the trees were gone, and there was only sky.
Leaving our bikes, we walked the last few feet to the edge of the escarpment. A wind sailing up from the south poured over the cliff’s edge, whipping my hair and chilling my face. I crept up to an outcropping of rocks that stood like a guardrail at the very edge of the abyss. Gingerly, I leaned over them—and found myself facing a sheer drop of at least two thousand feet.
Bile rose in my throat. I was looking down on the world, as a bird looks, as a bat looks. As if I were flying…
But players did not fly.
Beneath the cold touch of the wind my cheeks flushed with an unwholesome heat. Players did not fly… and yet there was something familiar in this height, in the feel of the streaming wind, as if I had known such a thing before, in some dream I dared not remember. I felt suddenly guilty, as if I’d violated some essential law… but I did not retreat from the edge. Instead I leaned even farther, gazing in wonder at the cliff’s sheer face.
It looked unnatural, as if it had been chiseled by some giant hand. Here and there a few silver-barked trees clung to the rock, in defiance of the need for soil. Between the trees, moss and lichen grew in green streaks and silvery patches, but they did not soften the slope. Looking east and west I counted three waterfalls plunging in long spires of mist that turned to rain before they reached the land below. At the base of the cliff trees grew in a dense forest, but farther from the wall their ranks thinned, and soon they yielded altogether to grassy foothills that fell steeply away into a barren land of stone and brown dust. A brown haze veiled the basin, while storm clouds gathered on the horizon. Lightning flickered among them, and the streaming wind carried with it a faint growl of thunder. I was glad we would not be going down into those lands.
Liam and Udondi had retreated to the trees. I joined them, to find Udondi with her savant unpacked and balanced in her lap. “You see here,” she was saying to Liam as she tapped at the screen. “The map shows rolling foothills, blending with the plateau. There’s no hint of an escarpment like this. None at all.”
Liam frowned at the display. “Well look over here, at the elevation measures on the western side. We came up that way, and it was a lot higher than it shows. Your map is wrong.”
“You mean the Kalang Crescent isn’t supposed to be this high?” I asked.
“Not according to the cartographers who pretended to map it,” Udondi said in disgust. “Three different expeditions, according to the records, but they must have been copying each other’s work because not one of them shows a cliff like this—” and she waved her hand at the escarpment. “Which means we can’t rely on these maps to show us a way down.”
“The northern edge of the Kalang is better known,” Liam said. “And probably more accurately mapped. We’ll find a way down.”
“But finding takes time.”
I crouched beside Udondi. “How old are these maps, anyway? Maybe it’s just that the land has changed.”
She frowned at me. “Enough that the entire plateau has risen two thousand feet?”
Well, it was true I’d never heard of land changing on such a scale. Still…
“May I see the other maps?”
She shrugged, and passed the savant to me.
I studied each display, not sure what I was hoping to find. On each one the southern escarpment was shown as a steep slope, but it was not vertical, and it rose no more than a thousand feet above the surrounding land. A thousand feet, at most. On one of the maps the height was only 740 feet, while on the other it was 870. I looked at the dates and my brows rose. “Udondi!” I called. She had returned to the cliff edge, where she stood, gazing east with her field glasses. “Udondi!”
This time she heard me over the streaming wind. I beckoned her over. Liam came too. “Time to pack up,” he said. “If the terrain stays smooth, we might be able to put two hundred miles behind us by sunset, enough to bring us to the eastern tip of the Crescent.”
“First look at this.” I had the three maps displayed so they overlapped one another, with the southern cliff showing at the bottom of each. “The oldest map shows the lowest elevation… thirty two hundred years ago. The newest map shows the highest. That one’s nineteen hundred years old. The land is changing, but not so much as it seems. If it’s been rising only six inches a year, that would account for the error in the most recent map.”
Udondi and Liam traded a bemused look. “That’s a clever idea,” Udondi said diplomatically, “although I have never heard of such a thing in all the histories I’ve explored.”