“Get down!” I cried, but he was already moving, dropping behind the shelter of a boulder. I fell on my pack and dragged it with me behind the cover of another rock, as rifle shots bit at the sand all around us. I pulled my own rifle free of the pack. Then I leaned out just far enough to see the cliff face.
He had called the silver to his defense. An arm of it was flowing—impossibly!—up the gully wall, nosing behind boulders and sweeping into every cleft and cut. Someone shouted, in a language strange to me. Then six players appeared as if from nowhere. They charged down the slope, their guns firing wildly. I ducked back behind the boulder, clenching my rifle, listening.
It would not take long.
There was a scream, and then another. The chorus of shots was cut in half, and then it was cut again until only one weapon spoke. A man’s voice shouted what must have been a curse. Then silence fell, save for my ragged breathing.
I turned to look at him.
He was standing, smiling faintly, with the silver behind him and all around. “You didn’t know they were there, did you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I was careful not to be followed! I don’t know how—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
We were both still alive. That’s all that mattered.
His gaze fixed on something between us, lying in the sand. He frowned, stooping to collect a large kobold, the very one I had dropped when the shooting started. “What is it for?” he asked, looking at me.
I could not lie. “It’s for you.”
He regarded it thoughtfully. “And what will it do for me?”
I whispered the only answer I had: “It will end your pain.”
“No, I think only you could do that.” Then he cocked his arm back. I saw what he was doing and shouted at him, “No!” but he did not heed me. He cast the kobold in a powerful throw down the gully where it plunged into the streaming silver. Gone.
Then he looked at me with wounded eyes, this man who had brought the silver into a thousand enclaves. “They sent you, didn’t they? Ki-Faun and his cohort, always so taken with their own cleverness, but they will not live long past this night.”
He had never been one to lie. So I made my choice. Bringing my rifle to my shoulder, I fired.
Blood fountained from his chest. He collapsed first to his knees and then he started to pitch forward, but he stopped his fall with one hand against the ground. He looked up at me. There was confusion in his eyes, and cold horror. Do you know what you’ve done? he seemed to ask. Do you know?
I did. I was his guardian after all. I always had been.
Then he could no longer hold his head up. He sagged to the ground, his eyes reflecting the gleam of silver but with no life of their own. Silver seeped from his lips and nostrils, the silver that leaves the body at death—more and more of it. I was amazed at how much. I watched in fascination as it flowed across the ground, to meet with the ordinary silver of the night. Ki-Faun had warned against just this.It must not happen! But surely it was better for the silver to die than for the world to drown in a silver flood?
The two fogs met, and where they touched the silver collapsed, its light going out as it was transformed to a gray powder that sifted to the ground. The destruction spread outward, sweeping down the canyon, leaving the rocks covered with a fine, powdery ash and every gleam of silver extinguished.
The transformation reached the plain. Darkness rolled across that lake of silver faster than a bird could fly so that within seconds the only light left was that of the stars overhead and the pale gleam of Heaven’s arch.
A warm hand touched my shoulder. “Jubilee, what’s the matter? Why do you cry?”
I shoved that comforting hand away. “You ask me that? The world is murdered! Again. And you ask me that?”
Then I was back in the cavern of Azure Mesa, on my knees but still entangled in my sleeping bag, with Jolly all in a heap before me, looking up at me with frightened eyes. “Jubilee?” he whispered, as if testing if it was really me.
I closed my eyes. I could hear Ficer muttering, still trapped in visions of his own. “I have seen it,” I whispered. “I have seen what happens when one such as Kaphiri is made to die. He did not lie, Jolly. He did not lie.”
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 Jolly went with me, to the distant room with its steel pole. I pressed my palm against the cold metal, but I could feel no vibration. Had the silver receded? Moki was sniffing at the door that was set into the wall. I laid my palms against it. It too was still.
Jolly watched me with wary eyes. “This should lead to the surface,” I said. “I don’t think there is silver on the other side, but I cannot be sure.”
“Will you tell me what you dreamed?”
“When we’re outside. I need to see the silver first.”
The mechanism to open the door was a large, polished wheel. I took it in both hands and glanced at Moki. He seemed eager to go out. So I turned the wheel.
It proved to be well oiled. I felt a heavy bolt slide back and then the door swung open an inch, admitting a breath of cold, clean night air. No silver came sweeping into the room, so I pushed the door wider, and Moki slipped outside. The beam of my flashlight followed him as he disappeared up a rising stone stairway.
Jolly and I were more cautious. We stayed long enough to gather some of the kobold shells that everywhere littered the floor, making a mound of them in the doorway so the door could not close completely and lock us outside. Then we went to find Moki.
The stairway was steep. After only a half-dozen steps I could see stars in a rectangle of sky above us. There was no glow of silver.
I knew there had been silver on the plateau earlier in the night: I had felt it bite against the steel pole. What had caused it to retreat? Fear hurried my steps until I burst from the top of the stairs, to find myself only a dozen feet from the southern escarpment.
That prospect was not as lofty as standing on the edge of the Kalang, but it was impressive enough. An ocean of silver lay upon the desert below us, an expanse that reached all the way to the faintly gleaming horizon. I went to my knees in relief. “It’s still here.” My vision had been of the past, yet I feared it spoke of the future too.
“You dreamed his death?” Jolly asked. He stood beside me, gazing out across that luminous sea, its glow reflected against his smooth skin.
“It was another life. An earlier life. Did Kaphiri… did he speak to you of his death?”
“Always, when he was angry. If he was killed, the world would regret it. That’s what he would say. That he was a poison in the world, and the silver would not outlive him.”