So I would guess.
“Anyway, I stayed there many days. I didn’t keep count. But I never saw another player. It was lonely, and I wanted to go home. So when the silver rose again, I walked into it.”
That became the pattern of his life, for weeks at least. Perhaps for months. He would look for a place like Kavasphir, or any place that seemed familiar, or just a place where there was some sign that players might be nearby. But the world is vast, and he never found his way home.
“Then he came,” Jolly said. “I saw him, far away in the silver. At first I thought I was only looking through another window, but there was something different about him… as if he was solid and everything else was mist. The other windows would fade in and out of existence, but he was solid. Not a window at all, but a player within the silver itself.
“A player… but he wasn’t a ghost like me. He was real. Solid. Fixed in place… like the sea snails I’d pried off the rocks. That’s what he was like. I went to him, but he couldn’t see me. He was in the silver, but he couldn’t see. You understand? I was the silver. He was still a player.”
“You were transformed? And he was still untouched?”
Jolly nodded. “The silver would not take him, or touch him. That was his power, but it was a curse too. It made him angry, though I didn’t know it then.” His eyes had a distant look. “He couldn’t see me, but I could see him. He was walking, and there was solid ground under his feet, but it was not solid for me. I followed him anyway, through a window and out of the silver.” Jolly’s smile was bitter. “He saw me then. I scared him. He looked so scared. But only for a few seconds.” His face grew sad as he remembered. “He took care of me, and for a time I was happy that I’d found him.”
They learned much from each other, Kaphiri and my brother. Though they both could survive the silver, their talents were not the same. When Kaphiri entered the silver, he remained a physical being. He could go only where he could walk within the fog. It was different for Jolly. His fate was like that of the metal pole Ficer had directed me to touch. The silver would dissolve his body, but he would not lose coherence. He would remain whole in the memory of the silver. He would remain aware. It was as if the silver’s awareness became his, as if he shared the mind of the goddess. He could see through the silver, to places all around the ring of the world. He could reach through it: a ghost that might appear anywhere the fog touches.
Never before had Kaphiri imagined it possible to ride the silver. It was a talent he wanted for himself.
“I asked him to help me find my home,” Jolly said, “but he had never heard of Kavasphir. So we went to a temple in high mountains where he kept his home.
“He told me that silver once was rare, and in those days people were less afraid of the mountains. Many temples had been built in the high places then, and people would come deliberately to see the silver. All those temples are gone now, except the one where Kaphiri lives, and almost no one comes there because they’re afraid of the silver. But there was another player who lived there, a woman who kept the temple for him.”
“And was she his wife?” I wanted to hear that she was, for then I would not have to suspect myself.
“He has no wife,” Jolly said. “He told me he was a cessant, and Mari—she who keeps the house for him—she is a cessant too.”
“Mari?” I asked, startled.
“Yes. Why? Have you heard of her?”
“I think I have.” The wife of Nuanez Li had been named Mari, and she had gone off with the traveler, seeking to restore her youth. How long ago? I could not guess.
“Tell me more,” I said, “and I’ll tell you my story later.”
Jolly nodded. “Mari was an old woman. Very old. She wouldn’t tell me how she’d come to be so high in the mountains, but she was afraid of the silver. She would never step outside the temple walls, even when the sun was bright. So she was trapped there, a prisoner.
“She was always good to me though, and she never became angry. Still she must have been lonely when Kaphiri was away. I felt sorry for her. I wanted to find some way for her to escape. It wasn’t Kaphiri that held her prisoner, you understand? It was the silver. So I hunted around the temple, wandering for miles, and made a map of all the wild kobold wells I could find.”
He frowned, and his voice grew even softer. “I was afraid of the silver too. Kaphiri could find his way through it, but I could not. Not when he wasn’t there. I needed him. I needed something solid to follow. I knew if I went back into the silver alone I would get lost again… and we were so high in the mountains there was no way I could walk out in the few hours the silver was away. Maybe, if I could move from wild well to wild well…”
He shook his head. “Mari didn’t want to go. Kaphiri had been away for many days, but as soon as he returned she told him what I was planning. It made him angry. Whenever he was angry I would stay in my room, or if the sun was bright I’d go walking in the forest. But when Mari told him I’d been looking for a way out of the mountains he went crazy.”
Jolly’s voice dropped again until it was no more than a whisper. “He hit me.” His hand rose, to touch the side of his head. “It made me dizzy and sick. It was night, and he took me outside, up onto the temple wall.
“That temple was on a cliff above a steep canyon. On afternoons when the sun was bright you could see to the canyon bottom where a thread of white water ran through forest, but most of the time there was only silver below us. That night the silver filled the canyon, flowing downhill like a wide, slow river just beneath our feet. Kaphiri said he would throw me into it.”
My brother’s eyes were haunted. He gazed at his hands, but he saw other things. “I didn’t want to be lost again!”
“Jolly, it’s all right.”
“I was afraid.”
“It’s all right,” I said again, but neither of us believed it.
“After that he brought other players to the temple.” His voice took on a note of bitter triumph. “He guided them between wild wells! I learned that after—that he stole the idea from me. He had threatened to throw me into the silver, but after that night he was afraid I would jump, so he brought some of his cessants to watch over me.”
Kaphiri had found a treasure in Jolly and he was not about to give it up. “All of us, we are like the kobolds,” Jolly said. “We all have configuration codes. That’s what I learned from Kaphiri.” He looked me hard in the eye as he said this, as if daring me to argue. I did.
“Jolly, players don’t have configuration codes. He was lying to you. We’re not mechanics.”
Jolly laughed—a cold laugh that frightened me because it reminded me of another. “You think you know.” He jumped up then, and paced the room. Ficer watched him, propped up on one elbow. Jolly said, “Kaphiri knows more about how we are made than anyone else alive. Our configuration codes are hidden deep in our blood, in our cells, but they exist. Kaphiri studied the codes in my blood, the codes that made me. Then he copied the pattern as best he could, adjusting the codes in his own blood.”
In his blood? I was aware suddenly of my heart beating. Kaphiri’s blood had crossed with mine and now I was changed, as if some part of me had been rewritten…
Jolly said, “He learned to move through the silver as I do. He went to many far places, while I stayed in the temple with the cessants he’d brought to watch me. They were afraid of him, but they loved him. They wanted to be like him. Sometimes… I wanted to be like him too.”
I nodded. There is an attraction in power. It’s why a son wants to be like his father, or a daughter like her mother who she sees as being in control of life. How much more powerful Kaphiri must have seemed than any father!