We were in the household of my father’s murderer.
I had come to help him learn more about our shared past, and about the lost science of becoming a god. I brooded over these ironies as we sat down to a formal breakfast, in a room hung with paintings and projections of ages long past.
Mari served us. She would allow neither myself nor Yaphet to help, and while we were at the table she refused all attempts at conversation. But when I was returning from a visit to the scupper I encountered her in the hall. In her whispering voice she asked about Jolly, and I assured her my brother was well, but this news did not bring her any particular pleasure.
“Seven players died when Jolly left this temple.” She glanced over her shoulder, as if to assure herself Kaphiri was still at table. “Did you see the folly that has broken the courtyard wall? Jolly left that to us, to remember him by. A knife thrust, that’s what it is. A wound that draws the silver into the yard night after night, like bacteria seeking flesh. This temple won’t stand much longer.”
This last was pronounced with vindictive satisfaction.
“Do you want to see it fall?”
She bent closer to me, and her voice grew even softer. “I came here long ago, because he told me I would not die—not if I stayed within these walls—and he did not lie. I have lived and lived and lived! I have been old longer than anyone else has been alive. Even him!”
“You are older than him?” I asked incredulously, thinking of Nuanez, living alone on the plateau of the Kalang.
“So you know about him?”
I nodded.
“He kept himself youthful, but I have always been old.”
“Not always, surely.”
She looked away, and there was a tremor in her lip. “Whatever existed before… that is lost to time. I wonder how many lives he has lived, since I lived with him? I wonder how many lives he has spent searching for me? But there will be no more lives after this one.”
I did not tell her that Nuanez too was still living the same life. I didn’t think she would believe me. How could she let herself believe? If she had stayed with Nuanez she might have regained her youth… or Kaphiri might have murdered them both for nosing into his secrets.
Yaphet and Kaphiri had been deeply involved in a discussion of flight when I left the table. That discussion was still ongoing when I returned. I listened at the door, but their conversation was hard for me to follow. They spoke as if they knew, or guessed, what was in the other’s mind and perhaps they did, for Kaphiri had been made as a copy of Yaphet, and it came to me that they likely shared a vast measure of memory kept within the silver.
Their similarity frightened me, but their growing sympathy troubled me even more. As I listened, I could not say with any certainty which was Yaphet’s voice, and which belonged to Kaphiri. I told myself this confusion was only a result of my exhaustion, for I had not slept well since leaving the Temple of the Sisters, but I decided against rejoining them. Instead I resolved to explore the temple on my own.
I set out with that purpose in mind, but the dread of that place that had stirred in me upon our arrival was still strong. Fear seized me as I started to climb the grand staircase to the second floor, so I went outside instead, with Moki following at my heel.
The sun was warm and the air cool. I did not see any mechanics about.
I circled the courtyard, and in that way came to the temple gates. They were three times my height, fitted beneath a horizontal span of stone. I knew Jolly used to walk in the meadow beyond the wall, and climb the ridges around the temple, but in his stories he had never mentioned the strange creatures I had seen lurking on the forest’s edge. Instinct warned me against them, and I did not dare to open the gates. Instead I climbed the nearest stairs, thinking to look for the creatures from the safety of the wall.
I spied them almost immediately: a band of five just at the edge of the trees, and this time there was no doubt in my mind. Though they walked on two legs and in every general way resembled men and women, they were not players. They were too tiny and too lithe, and gravity did not seem to chain them, for they would bounce and float at every step, sometimes drifting several inches into the air. They were ephemeral too. They began to disappear, one by one. I would look away, and when I looked back one more would be gone, reappearing sometimes a little farther along the forest’s edge.
Moki growled, and I turned, to see Kaphiri coming up the stair. “Where is Yaphet?” I demanded.
“In the paradise of my library. He will not miss us for a little while.”
“I feel as if I have been in this temple before.”
He came to stand beside me. “You have been here before.”
Across the wide meadow, the creatures paused in their random wandering. They looked toward the temple, and one cried out in a high, strange voice something that sounded like La-zur-i, with the syllables all drawn out. Another took up the cry, and another, and there was nothing of friendliness in the sound.
“It sounds like a malediction,” I said, feeling shaken.
“I think it’s a name.” He watched the forest creatures with an expression that was part amusement, part contempt.
“Are they bogies?”
He nodded. “Though they don’t seem to be attached to any ruin. They came out of the silver only a few days ago, but they have already demonstrated some skill with poison darts. They seem to have assumed the task of murdering me.”
Startled, I stepped back from the edge of the wall. “You alone?”
“It’s a hard assumption to test. There is only me and the woman here, but she does not come out on the walls.” His brow wrinkled. “Still, I think it is only me. Some kind of vendetta, I suspect. They believe I am this Lazuri—”
“We should not be standing on the wall.”
“There are mechanics in the meadow. We are safe enough.”
“Are you Lazuri?”
“It’s not a name I remember using. But come. There are more interesting sights than this.”
We walked around the wall until we came to the side that looked down over the canyon.
On our flight south, silver had covered all the desert, but the sun had been at work since dawn and the silver had burned away. I looked down into the canyon and saw a thread of water sparkling within a forest far below, but my gaze did not rest there long, for the vast Iraliad lay before us. There was no wind, so no dust had risen to haze the view. We were high in the mountains, and through the crystalline air I could see farther—I could see more—than I ever had before. The desert glowed in the morning light, warm yellows and tans and rust red colors, with bright sparks of reflected light hinting at the presence of follies and precious veins of silver-spawned minerals. Far to the north—a hundred miles? two hundred?—the plain dissolved into a haze of blue distance.
All this came to me in a glance, before my attention was seized by the great pit of the Cenotaph. I had glimpsed its storm-wracked edge once before, from the southern escarpment of the Kalang, but now I saw it clearly, and I shuddered.
The goddess had called it a wound in the world, and that was what it looked like: if the golden desert was the world’s flesh, then the Cenotaph was a great bullet wound.
It was a crater, fifty miles or more across, its rim a chaos of colored sand and slag—pink and putrid green and black and a poisonous, electric blue—with thin mists of silver steaming here and there from vents and fissures, sparkling brightly before dissolving in the sunlight.
Lying within the pit was a lake of silver, and it was boiling. Even at such a distance I could see great bubbles rising up from its surface and bursting, throwing drops of silver in all directions. How large must those “drops” be, if I could see them?