Kaphiri said, “It is the pressure of sunlight that makes it bubble. At night it is still.”
“I did not know it was so close.”
For several minutes I could not look away, but finally I raised my gaze, to see the dark, blocky mass of a distant plateau beyond the pit. “The Kalang,” I whispered, but my memory of that place felt borrowed, as if it was the memory of someone else… someone I used to be.
“What would happen if you hurled a stone into the mud?” Kaphiri asked.
I gave him a puzzled look. “What kind of question is that?”
“A straightforward one, so think on it. What would happen if you hurled a stone into the mud?”
I scowled, annoyed that he would toy with me. “I would not do it, for it would dirty my clothes, with the mud spattering everywhere.”
He nodded. Then he looked again over the plain, to the distant clouds of silver steaming from the great pit of the Cenotaph. “A god was cast down to the world like a stone, and we are all dirty still. How are you going to fix it, my love? When even the goddess will not dare to try? And why is it you?”
Chapter 32
I could not answer Kaphiri’s questions. I was too tired to do anything but wander aimlessly and worry. “You are no good to me like this,” he said, and he led me to a bedroom Mari had made up.
When I awoke it was deep in the night. Through the window I could see stars, but they were pale in the sky, their light faded by the gleam of silver from beyond the temple walls. Moki stirred beside me, and I gave him a quick hug. “Yaphet?” I whispered, hoping he had come to the room while I slept. I listened for his breathing, but all was silent.
Fear drove away the last of my sleepiness. I was supposed to protect Yaphet, but I had hardly seen him since we arrived. All that day and night I had left him to Kaphiri’s mercies. Quickly I rose, and found that I had slept in my clothes.
I did not know where the light might be, and I didn’t want to spend time looking for it, so I groped my way to the door. It was not locked.
In the hallway the light tubes were dim amber, emitting hardly enough illumination to reach the floor. The hallway looked the same in both directions, but I knew to turn left. I had been asleep on my feet when Kaphiri brought me to my room, and I should not have known my way around his temple, but I did. I knew that wide hallway, and the turnings I would have to take to reach the great room. Even the echo of my footsteps I had heard before.
I passed the kitchen and went on, until I came to the great central hall with its tall doors to the courtyard. Moki whined to go out, but I did not dare let him, fearing the mechanics that patrolled there. So I called him with me as I approached the grand staircase.
Ever since I’d arrived, a strange, remembered fear had lived within me. It grew suddenly stronger as I set foot on that stair. The steps were made of massive blocks of the same gray stone used in the walls. I had climbed them before. I knew their number. When I reached the top, I paused to gaze warily across a wide landing at a closed door. I knew that door. I knew its bronze gleam, and the raised scene worked into its surface, of a sun rising beyond the horizon of a ring-shaped world. The door must have weighed several hundred pounds, but it was perfectly balanced. At a touch it swung soundlessly open… and my memory failed.
There should have been a wide audience chamber on the other side of that door. There should have been a raised dais at the far end, and a chair of rank, and whispering ghosts with fingers like leaves brushing my arms and begging my help…
For I had walked through this temple in that vision I endured at Azure Mesa.
But instead of an audience chamber, I found the library. I stood with the door propped open, staring at a bookcase that stretched from floor to ceiling, every shelf on it crammed with paper and parchment manuscripts, and leaves of lettered stone, and relics.
I wandered the length of the bookcase, trailing my fingers on the spines of the manuscripts to assure myself they were real.
An aisle opened at the end of the row, with scattered tables pushed up against the wall. Many more bookshelves lay beyond the first.
I walked past them, and as I made my way around the last one, I knew where I was. The raised dais was gone, and the chair of rank. In their place stood a long table holding a scattering of manuscripts. Three chairs were placed around it. Two had stacks of lettered stone piled in their seats. The other held Yaphet, sprawled in sleep upon the table. I wanted to wake him, to tell him what I knew: that we were in the house of Ki-Faun—in my mind’s eye I could see him sitting exactly where Yaphet sat: his old, crab body hunched in his chair as he watched me with a pained gleam in his ancient eyes that I could not understand—but I knew Yaphet must be exhausted and I did not want to interrupt his slumber.
Moki had disappeared somewhere among the stacks, so I had no warning. I turned my head and Kaphiri was there in the shadows.
So forlorn was his expression that I thought our time was over. All hope seemed gone from his eyes, and with it his fiery ambition to become a god, so that nothing was left to him but to call the silver into that room to consume us all—except that it would not consume him. I think that was all that held him back—the knowledge that he would be left behind.
He said to me, “You have been here before. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
He nodded at Yaphet. “And do you remember him? No?”
I was unsure what he was asking.
“It’s just that he returns so naturally to the habits of his past, I thought you would know him.”
I studied Yaphet and, slowly, I began to see that room again with the eyes of my past self. I saw age fall upon Yaphet, so that his body withered and his lush black hair vanished and tendrils of beard trailed like strands of gray moss from his chin. “It was him,” I said, astounded at my sudden knowledge. “He was Ki-Faun.” I turned to look again at Kaphiri. “Or was it you?”
“It was him.”
Of course, for I had been sent to murder Kaphiri.
“Will you come?” he asked me, and when I hesitated he added, “There is nothing to fear. It’s only your memories that I desire now.”
We walked into a room of ghosts. From outside the closed door I could already hear their whispering, and when the door opened their chatter was like the streaming of wind in treetops.
They were savants. Hundreds of them, some floating near the ceiling, some hovering just above the floor, or at every level in between. Some were wing-shaped, others spherical, while many more were flatscreens. Some of these were fixed to the walls, or sitting like decorations on the shelves. They spoke to one another in languages I had never heard before, carrying on conversations that never slowed for the drawing of a breath.
“Are they sane?”
Kaphiri shrugged. “Speak to them and find out.”
Where should I start? There were so many, it would require years to know them all, but the silver was rising, and I feared we had only days left, at best. Just a few days to learn the ways of goddesses and gods. But if any players had ever known such things, surely they would be the most ancient, those who had lived when the world was first made?
“Which is the oldest?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“That one never speaks.”
“I would see it anyway.”
He shrugged and slipped into the chaos of drifting savants. I expected him to select one of the decrepit ones hovering near the floor, but instead he reached for a translucent wing that hung in perfect stillness and stability near the ceiling. It looked to be made of some substance like glass, but with a greater purity, and clarity, than I had ever seen. The wing was as long as my arm, and two inches in thickness at its widest point. Colors burst to life within it when Kaphiri took it in his hands. He gazed at them, and his face grew more stern, and colder even than it had been before. Then he gave it a shove. The colors disappeared as it left his hands. It glided across the room, angling toward me as if it understood its destination, and it did not wobble, though it bumped against several other savants along the way.