As Yaphet brought the flying machine around in a broad circle I looked again at the forest edge. Silver lingered there, in patches sheltered by the shadows of the trees, and between the silver I thought I saw players wandering in slow groups as if searching for something. But I wasn’t sure. Maybe they were some kind of strange, upright animal, for they seemed small and hunched, with heads too large for their bodies, but before I could decide, they disappeared, shying away from the wind-rush of the flying machine.
Then we were over the canyon again, and a moment later the temple’s massive wall was rushing up below us. Yaphet had chosen to land on the wall that faced the canyon. I glimpsed staircases rising up to it from the courtyard, and saw that only a shallow curbing offered protection from the precipitous drop. Then the wings flared, rolling back to embrace the air just as the wings of a bird will, and we floated gently down the last few feet, landing with only a slight bump.
Immediately, I rolled out of the cargo basket and staggered to my feet. It was as if I had been half-asleep all night, enthrall to some bizarre dream, but in that moment I wakened fully to my situation, and horror filled me. I was standing on the wall of Kaphiri’s temple, his stronghold, where he had returned again and again over many lifetimes in his long and bitter struggle with the will of our flawed goddess. Why had I come? What had moved me to abandon Jolly, and Liam, and Udondi to flee south with my father’s murderer? I wanted to discover that I had been swept up in a dream, another vision, but that dawn had too much of reality about it. I was stiff with cold, and exhausted, and hungry, and in desperate need to answer a particular call of nature.
Moki whined and I picked him up, the warmth of his small body so tender against my cheek that I knew it was no dream.
I stepped to the edge of the wall. Silver still filled the canyon. It flowed downhill in a great, silent river, roiling and tumbling past the foot of the temple wall without ever quite touching the stone. I breathed in the sweet perfume of temple kobolds, mixed with the sharp scent of silver, and it seemed to me that temple was strong and well defended. But then I stepped around the wing and I saw that the wall had been breached by the silver at least once, for a strange folly of blue glass had replaced some of the stone. The folly started at the top of the wall and plunged down into the courtyard, looking like the spillway of a steep mountain stream. I was tired, and it was hard to focus on the translucent mass, but it seemed to be filled with swooping shapes and swirls as if some edgeless, unstable geometry was trapped within it.
Kaphiri came round the flying machine. He saw where I looked. “That is Jolly’s monument,” he said. “Seven players were taken when he called that flood over the wall. And every night since the silver follows that path into the temple grounds.”
I turned away, for I could not bear to think of Jolly, so far away, and lost to me again.
Within the walls, the courtyard lay like a dark skirt around the central temple building. That building stood three stories high, each story smaller than the one below so that it had the look of a stacked cake. Its dark windows cast a brooding gaze toward the vistas beyond the walls.
Memory stirred in me. I felt the tremor of an old fear rising in my consciousness, a terrible dread, and suddenly I knew with absolute certainty I had been in that place before. “Yaphet—” My mouth had gone dry, so that I could hardly speak. I turned to look for him—but what I saw made my voice leave me entirely.
He had called Kaphiri to him, and they worked together to furl the wings, while Yaphet explained the mechanism of the flying machine and its steering system, speaking gently, as if the two of them were brothers.But they were not! I could feel the difference between them… though it did not seem as profound as last night.
The night’s cold had settled in my bones and I shuddered, but to the east the sky above the mountains blazed with the light of a hidden sun. As Yaphet finished furling the wings, the sun finally showed itself, rising over the eastern slopes to spill its warmth across the temple walls and the flowing silver in the canyon—which sank away into the shadows—and against my jacket, and like the silver, my fear receded, though it did not go away.
The sound of our footsteps made a forlorn tapping as we crossed the empty courtyard to the tall temple building. The wide grounds were tiled in a herringbone pattern of gray and blue brick, and nowhere did I see a stray leaf or any gathering of dirt or dust, or sprouting weed between the tiles, so that it seemed we walked inside an electronic market, and not in the true world. An explanation of this perfection was not long in coming.
The temple was made of the same gray stone as the walls. Wide, arched windows looked out into the courtyard, and between them were tall doors of shining platinum. They opened at our approach, and their motion stirred to life a creature that had been crouching on the step: a mechanic, mantislike and the height of my hand. It scuttled aside on four legs, while holding two front limbs close to its body—one pincered, one armed with scissored blades. Its machine eyes looked at us from a triangular head mounted on the end of a snakelike neck.
I stared back at it, mouth agape, for it was exactly like the mechanics on the Kalang Crescent, whose endless task it was to protect the forest. The traveler had visited that forest often, and Nuanez Li had seen his little daughter killed by these things.
“You’re Kalang, aren’t you?” I asked Kaphiri. “You are the player who left the mechanics in the forest.”
He glanced at the mechanic, a look of melancholy in his eyes. “That was another life. My name was Zha Leng, but it changed with time, as all things do.”
“You left the mechanics to guard the wells, didn’t you? Not the trees!”
He shrugged. “If the trees cannot be cut, then no one should have reason to settle near the wells.”
“Nuanez Li lived there. He lives there still!” But I bit my lip, regretting the words as soon as they were spoken. Perhaps Kaphiri didn’t know Nuanez was still alive, or that he had found his own unending youth in the wells of the Kalang.
But Kaphiri’s interest proved to be only philosophical. “If he still lives on the Kalang Crescent, then he’ll likely be the last player alive in the world, for the silver may never conquer that plateau. Not that Nuanez would ever notice the difference!”
He laughed, but it was a laugh full of bitterness, delighting in the harsh ironies of the world.
We mounted the front steps, and passed through the open doors into a great room, neatly furnished with couches and tables and chairs, all meticulously clean. Across the room, a grand stairway led up to the next floor, while on either side gloomy passages gave access to other ground-level rooms.
A woman appeared from one of these hallways. She was white-haired and stooped, and she clung to the shadows, as if reluctant to show herself. I guessed her to be Mari, the woman who had cared for my brother when he was a prisoner in this temple. Mari, the lost wife of Nuanez Li.
Jolly had described her as a kindly player, but she did not extend us any welcome. When she spoke, it was in a soft, furtive whisper, as if she feared drawing the attention of a wicked fate. “How long will these last?” she asked Kaphiri, gesturing at me and Yaphet with her chin.
“No longer than the rest of us,” he answered. “For all things must end, Mari. All things. Even you.”