“What will we do?” Kaphiri asked. “I cannot call the silver, and you are not ready yet to spill my blood.” His mocking gaze returned to me. “Is it a stalemate?”
He was confident—and why not? I could not keep watch forever—I must sleep sometime—and then it would be easy for him to bring the silver.
“Jolly,” he called in a mocking, singsong voice, “come home with me—”
“Leave him alone!” I cried, but he ignored me.
“Come home, Jolly… and maybe I’ll let your sister live… at least until the final flood. The game finishes then for everyone.”
“It won’t finish,” I told him. “It’ll just start over again, when your death triggers the destruction of the silver!”
A sudden fey mood rose in him when I said these words. There was a sheen on his skin, and his eyes were wild. “Is that what you want? Shall I call the end of the silver now? Do you wish it yet again?”
“No,”I breathed, and I backed a step away.
“Did you think the end of the silver was tied only to my death? It’s not. I could summon it anytime. Cold murder isn’t necessary, love, and I am not as stubborn as I used to be. Ask me, and I will destroy all the silver this night.”
I could not doubt his claim, for at his words some connection closed in my mind and the world felt different. Harder, clearer. The uncertainty that had dogged me since leaving the Temple of the Sisters was gone, dissolved like the silver in my vision, leaving all the hard edges of the world exposed. “The goddess made you, didn’t she?” I asked him. “She made you for this purpose, to call down the destruction of the silver at need. She must have trusted you so deeply.”
I saw through his chilly smile. It was a false front, a painted animosity to disguise the fragile architecture that lay beneath. “She made me only when she could not find him.” He thrust his chin at Yaphet. “It seems that in that age he had been swallowed by the silver, so she devised me instead, adding in some skills he lacked.” There was such a gleam of hatred in his eyes as he said this, that I thought he would not be able to contain it. I felt the pressure of it in my own head. Then Kaphiri sucked in a sharp breath, like a swimmer returning from a deep dive, and his shoulders relaxed. “Sometimes I wonder if I remember it rightly,” he added. “Was she the one who made me? Or was it the other?”
“The dark god?” I asked.
“No matter. I serve neither of them now.” And he sat on the ground, arranging the folds of his garments around him. “Come. Sit with me.”
I would not sit, but I crouched nearby. Yaphet remained standing.
Kaphiri looked at me. “These are the last days. You sense it, don’t you? There is only a little time left before the world drowns… unless you choose to stop it again.”
“That should beyour choice! It’s what the goddess made you for.”
His smile was bitter. “And I obeyed her, that first time.” He looked down at the dusty ground. “I was naive. Do you know what follows the destruction of the silver?”
I nodded, for I had seen the city.
“You don’t know!” Kaphiri barked. “Not until you’ve seen a hundred thousand players starve to death.”
Nothing was the same. I faced a murderer, but I could see the horror of death in his eyes.
“Barely a thousand survivors left in the world,” he said, his voice so soft I had to strain to hear him.
“How can you remember it?” Yaphet asked.
“I have learned to remember.”
“Tell us how.” He could not disguise his eagerness. Yaphet loved knowledge best. He always had. I knew it, though I could not remember how I knew or why.
Kaphiri knew it too. “Would you learn how?”
Yaphet nodded.
Kaphiri’s expression turned to disdain. “Even if you remembered every word ever spoken, you would have no victory. The goddess is using you… using us. She always has.”
I knew it was true. “I am going to the Cenotaph.”
Shock overtook his features. He looked at me with haunted eyes. “Where have you learned of that place? Why would you go? My love, there is nothing in the Cenotaph. Nothing you can touch.”
“There is a god there. Or some fragment of a god.”
“He will not help you.”
“I am not sent there to seek help. He is the cause of the floods. The goddess has said that the world will not heal until he is removed.”
“The goddess? Has she visited you?”
I nodded. “She said that I am her hands, and this fragment of the god must be removed.”
“By you?”
I shrugged.
He started to laugh, but his humor turned suddenly to anger. “You cannot defeat a god! Even a fallen one. Think on it! If the goddess herself cannot eject him, what hope is there for you?”
“I don’t know. None, maybe, for me alone.”
“You won’t be alone,” Yaphet said.
Kaphiri threw him a dark look. “You are always so eager to play their game.”
“And what alternative should I take? Should I refuse to play? Should I be like you and wish for the night when we all drown? Let us all die! Why not? If it will spite the goddess.”
“You mock me, but I will answer you anyway. There is an alternative.” He nodded toward me. “She has never dared it, but it’s real all the same. The only way to bring our malice to bear against the gods who made this world is to become as gods ourselves.”
I caught my breath, for these were the same words he had whispered to me in my vision—and that I had rejected. I rejected them again. “If you knew how to do that, you would have done it already.”
“But I don’t know how… though I might still learn, with your help. Will you help me? This time?”
My heart was beating hard. What he asked repulsed me. To become a goddess, to hold the power of life and death, and to wield that power with none stronger to say if I am right, or if I am wrong. It horrified me. “We don’t need more gods and goddesses. They have done badly enough by this world already.”
Yaphet touched my arm. “Jubilee, think. Will you always make this same answer?”
“What do you want me to do? Do you want me to help him?”
“If you have never helped him before, then yes. Do it differently this time! Do anything! Because there may never be another chance.”
But this turn was already different. Yaphet had never spoken to me like this before. Never.
He turned to Kaphiri. “What is it you want from her anyway?”
“A small thing. The smallest thing. I want her to translate our past. My love—” He reached toward me. I thought he would touch me, and I shied away.
He laughed at my childishness, but his laughter could not hide his pain. “You did not always find me so repulsive! You loved me in other lives. But the bond between us has faded, for I have changed, and you have not. I have remade myself! But in doing so, I’ve left you behind. We can never be true lovers again.”
“We never were,” I whispered.
“You say that, because you don’t remember. But you haven’t forgotten everything, have you? You still remember the language spoken when the world was made. I know you do.”
“And what use is that?” Yaphet asked.
Kaphiri mocked him. “We are always so hungry, aren’t we? Insatiable!”
“And impatient!”
“I know it.” He turned again to me. “If you would dare to face our past, to understand it, then help me. For lifetimes I have gathered documents and written manuscripts, in languages left over from the ancient world. Thousands of pages, my love, and I cannot read more than a few words of any of them! But you can. These languages live now only in your ancient mind. Come back with me.Teach me.”