“Death is my role,” I whispered.
“What are you saying?”
I was speaking to myself as much as to her. “It’s what Kaphiri told me. Death is my role.”
“Jubilee, do you know how to murder a god?”
I shook my head. But then a new thought came to me, and though it repulsed me, I could not let it go. “Tell me, did the goddess make the kobolds? Do you know?”
“What is a kobold?”
“They are beetlelike mechanics that grow in the ground wherever a plume of nutrients awakens the kobold motes that are everywhere in the world.”
“I have not heard of mechanics like these.”
I nodded. “I am not surprised, for it is said they did not exist at the beginning of the world. They were made later, in a time when the world was on the verge of starving to death… by a player who could survive the silver.”
“Like this Kaphiri you have described?”
“Maybe it was him. But I think it was someone more clever.”
Fiaccomo had defied death in the silver, seducing the goddess and stealing her creative powers to bring the first kobolds into the world. So it was said. Ki-Faun twisted this gift, making a kobold that could erase not just a player, but the very memory of that player from the silver so he never would be born again…
Was the goddess aware that players had stolen this knowledge from her mind? Did she guess what might be done with it?
Death is my role.
My heart was beating hard, and it took some time to understand that the voice calling my name was a real voice, and not the whispering of some ancient version of myself. “Jubilee,” Yaphet crooned, his mouth beside my ear. “Come back to me. Come back, please.”
I shoved the savant away, and I turned to him, crying against his shoulder and whispering, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid.” Over and over again. I did not want to know what I knew, or what I had to do. I did not want anything but to hide in Yaphet’s arms.
We spent the remaining hours of that night together. All those who have lovers will know how it was between us. There is no choice in love. Though we were in the house of Kaphiri, and though my heart was sick with fear, we had comfort between us, and I still treasure those hours above all others in my memory, which has grown very full indeed.
Chapter 33
I slept through much of that next day. Sometimes I sleep just to avoid being awake. A waking mind must face facts and make decisions. I wanted none of that. I wanted to sleep forever, but in the afternoon my conscience stirred, and I wakened.
Instantly I felt cold, for Yaphet was gone.
I knew where he was. In my imagination I could see him in the library, poring over ancient slices of lettered stone, or electronic documents that might have been written by himself, lifetimes ago.
I called Moki and he appeared from under the bed and I petted him for a few minutes, but it did little to calm me. In the vision I had suffered at Azure Mesa I had spoken with Ki-Faun, who was Yaphet. His words reechoed in my mind and I felt their weight like a curse: The knot is tied around you, milady, did you know it? All our fates circle around you.
He had been so old I had not recognized him as my lover, but he knew me.
He had put the kobold in my hand. I wondered if that memory lay somewhere beneath the surface of Yaphet’s mind… and if so, how far beneath the surface?
There was a knock at the door, and I stood and dressed, though I did not hurry, knowing he would wait.
He had been made in the image of Yaphet, and Yaphet had been made to resemble the god, and I was an avatar of the goddess, a container for her to play in, when she was in a playful mood.
We were not them. We were only players, made to look like them. But perhaps we had also been made to share some aspects of their personalities? The god had designed the mechanical structure of the world—which went far in explaining Yaphet’s passion to know, to analyze, to understand, and to defy… and also why he frightened me even when I loved him.
But where was the explanation for me? The goddess had given life to the world, but death was my role. Maybe I was that part of the goddess that had made war against her mate.
The knock sounded again at the door, louder, and this time I answered it.
Kaphiri waited in the hall, his eyes shadowed by a sullen anger. I had not seen him when Yaphet retrieved me from the room of the savants, but he was back now, and wanting to know what I knew. I could see it in his eyes.
I told him, “Terrible things can be done in the heat of anger.”
“And also when it is cold.”
So true. Cold anger had eaten at him for thousands of years. It had led him to murder my father and countless others, and it had planted in him his ambition to become a god. I said, “I know why the bogies are trying to kill you. It’s because you were made to look like the dark god.”
“Do not toy with me.”
“It is what the ancient savant told me. I have already warned Yaphet.”
I told him everything then, for I saw no advantage in hoarding the information. He and Yaphet were both brilliant, and I desperately hoped one of them would find a better solution than the one that had come to me.
Evening had fallen by the time Kaphiri left me. I thought of going to the library, but I dreaded that place, so I wandered into the courtyard with Moki for company. I could smell the silver beyond the walls, though I could not see it yet.
In the corner of the courtyard, the glass folly glowed and flickered as if illuminated shapes moved within it. I thought of Jolly in this courtyard, calling the silver to him over these towering walls. “Come, Moki,” I said, and we wandered closer to the glass spillway. The shapes within it looked like ghosts. They turned to gaze at me, with faces that were not quite faces, their eyes like hollow sockets. Moki whined. I reached down to comfort him, but he was gone, fleeing back to the open temple door.
My own retreat was more dignified, but it was a retreat, just the same. When I reached the temple I turned back, to see a wraith of silver flowing down the glass spillway to settle on the courtyard floor.
A luscious scent of cooking had infiltrated the temple. I followed it to the kitchen, and found Kaphiri again, sitting at a table of rose-colored jade. Mari was at the stove, fussing over a pot of stew. “You’ll be hungry,” she announced. “Sit down.” And she set a bowl before me.
Kaphiri did not eat, or maybe he had eaten before I came in. As Mari put my bowl down, he gave her a hard look. No word passed between them, but she turned sullenly away, and after taking a moment to check the stove, she left us alone.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did, and saw a version of Yaphet, older in the ways of the world and bitter. Terribly bitter.
“You want me to believe that players were no more than toys in their eyes, but the god and the goddess must have been players once, on another world. Did the savant say nothing of this?”
“She did not. And I do not understand you. How can you still want to become a god, knowing what they did?”
“Tens of thousands of players in this world think I am a god now.”
“And you know they are wrong. You have learned to command the silver to destruction, but not to creation. You have never learned to command it to bring forth what you choose. If you want to be a god, learn that! It is said Fiaccomo created the kobolds. Your talent is similar to his, but what have you ever done except wipe away the world?”
For a long time he said nothing. He seemed to be looking inside himself, but if he found an answer there, I never learned what it was.
I had finished eating and was feeding the leftovers to Moki when he spoke again. “You are right. Destruction is always easier than creation. It’s what you’ve always chosen. Will you choose it this time too? To destroy the silver is an easy thing. Ask me, and I will do it. Now. This night. And in the next few years most of the world will starve to death or die in warfare. That, my love, is the choice you’ve made over and over again.”