“No, Jubilee, don’t!” Jolly shouted.
I had let myself forget about Jolly. I saw him now, crouched beneath the folded wing of the flying machine.
“He’ll trick you, Jubilee. Don’t do what he wants. Please don’t.”
Kaphiri crossed his arms over his chest, mocking the posture of a weary parent. “I have said only the truth.”
Through every turn we had played, through every lifetime, I had always refused to help him… and the world had never healed. Always, we had been caught in the cycle of silver flood and silver drought. “Where is it you would have us go?”
“Jubilee, please.”
“South,” Kaphiri said. He turned to Yaphet. “You will come too. We need you. Or anyway we need your flying machine, for my temple is far to the south, among the peaks of the Sea Comb.”
Jolly crept out from under the wing. “Jubilee, say you won’t go. You can’t go with him.”
I wanted to refuse. I wanted to send Kaphiri away, and take Jolly home, and have my father back, and see my mother, but all those were impossible things.
Yaphet watched me, a hungry gleam in his eyes. “Think about it, Jubilee. We can’t let him go, and we can’t let him die, and you can’t watch him forever. This is the only answer.”
All was quiet. No wind blew, and no bird called. The world lay still beneath a heavy blanket of silver and still I felt as if I was hurtling forward. “We’ll go.”
Yaphet’s fist clenched in triumph, but Jolly cried out in fear.
“Jolly!” I knew how afraid he was of Kaphiri. “We will take you to our uncle first—”
“No,” Kaphiri said. “We leave tonight, and Jolly comes with us.”
Yaphet looked scornful. “We can’t fly at night.”
“With me, you can.”
I did not doubt it. Sprawled on the ground outside the Temple of the Sisters, I had looked up at an auditorium of silver arching over my head. It was no great stretch to think the architect of that magic could keep even a flying machine safe.
“We will go tonight,” I said. “But we will take Jolly to my uncle first. Hurry now, before I change my mind.”
We set about getting the flying machine ready, while the goats shied from us, frantic to avoid both our presence and the wall of silver that lay all around. Into the cargo baskets went our few possessions. Then Kaphiri drove back the silver, far enough that we could spread the wings.
Was it real? So I asked myself over and over again, for the night was weighted with the strangeness and inevitability of a dream.
Jolly came out of hiding, but he would not let Kaphiri come near him, nor answer him in any way.
At Yaphet’s direction, we carried the flying machine to the edge of the precipice, and the silver fell back before our advance. The air was calm, and the stars were bright despite the luminous glow of the flood.
I huddled with Jolly in one of the cargo baskets, and we cradled Moki between us. “Please don’t do it,” Jolly whispered. “He’ll hurt you. You know he will.”
“Not tonight.”
I watched Kaphiri as he made a nest for himself in the other basket. Then Yaphet crawled into the pilot’s sling. He yelled at Kaphiri to make a path through the silver that lay beyond the cliff, and the silver rolled back as if some god’s breath had blown upon a cloud of cold smoke. The engine started. Then the plane rocked forward, and with a sickening lurch, dropped from its perch on the cliff’s edge. I cried out, sure we were all falling to our deaths. Then the wings crackled as air filled their hollows. The nose of the flying machine nodded upward, and slowly, slowly we began to climb.
The canyon was filled with silver: a great gleaming river flowing between islets of sharp stone. We followed its current to the plain. I had wondered once what it was like to be a bird, forced to fly all night above a world drowned in luminous silver. That night I learned. It was cold! Bitterly cold in the high air above the world, and dreamlike: the dream of some ancient god bent on defying all the rules of the world.
It was a brilliant night. The Bow of Heaven glowed, without dimming the stars around it, and the world was ablaze with silver. The only real darkness was cast by the plateaus of two distant mesas, one to the east, and one north: Azure.
We could see it easily; the night was that clear. Yaphet brought the flying machine round in a smooth arc, and a wisp of silver danced along the wing’s edge. I pushed it away and Kaphiri laughed, as if at a child’s clever trick. He made no move to fend off the silver, leaving it all to me.
It took only a little while to reach Azure, but we did not go all the way to my uncle’s encampment. How could I explain to Liam what I was doing? I was fairly sure there were not words in any language to convince him that a bargain with his brother’s murderer was the right thing to do.
So we studied the mesa from afar, until we sighted the camp, and then we set Jolly down a quarter mile away from it along the mesa rim. Yaphet did not even touch down. He slowed the flying machine, bringing it almost to a stall a few feet above the ground. Jolly and I shared a long look. I did not believe I would see him again. “Take Moki,” he whispered. Then he dropped from the cargo basket and fell into the brush. An explosion of birds took flight, and then we were away from the mesa and over the plain again. I heard a shout from the plateau. It sounded like my name. Moki turned to look, but I did not.
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 crowded one against the next, but where there was space between them, the ground sparkled in broken glass. As we passed over I saw why. Every few seconds a great windowpane would pop loose from one of the towers and drop, turning and flashing in the muted light, until it struck the ground, bursting apart in a high-pitched, crashing explosion of sound. It seemed to me that if the wind blew hard, the towers themselves would be toppled.
The glass city did not belong in our world. I was sure of it. The architecture was wrong. The towers were too tall, too thin, too fragile for our gravity… but the gods had come from another world.
I wondered: How does a player become a god? What is a god? What qualities might define one? If we could learn to command the power of the silver, would that make us gods? Or was that only a first step?
The city fell behind us, and soon after that the desert began to yield to an upland of shrubs and small trees, that grew greener and more lush with the increasing elevation. The ground no longer seemed far away, for the land rose steeply, while we only slowly climbed toward the middle peaks. Then Kaphiri guided us into a canyon, and suddenly the mountains surrounded us.
We flew between the canyon’s narrow walls for perhaps five miles, and then at Kaphiri’s direction we climbed above the canyon rim. A temple compound was perched there on the very edge of the precipice, and at once I recognized it as the temple Jolly had described. The defensive walls were massive, at least forty feet high and twenty wide, surrounding a courtyard and a central temple building, all of it built of a melancholy gray stone. Beyond the temple was a lovely green meadow edged in forest, with high peaks in the distance that glistened white with ice.