“What else should I have done? I am not the goddess. I cannot create a world. I’ve never been confused on that point.”
“So will you choose it now?”
“I don’t know! Maybe it will come to that.”
“If you do, you will send us all around this same circle again, and this choice will face you in another life… and what reason is there to believe you will ever choose differently? So that again and again and again you make us relive this nightmare.”
“It is not my fault!”
“But you could end it so easily, by doing nothing at all. Stay here and wait for the last night. Let the silver drown the whole world, and there will be no survivors to give birth to us ever again. The gods will be defeated then, and their great project will be only an empty folly, lost among the stars.”
My eyes stung, and suddenly I wanted my mother desperately. Should I let the silver drown her world? Should I murder her? I blinked back my tears, and asked him what I had not dared to ask before. “Have you already murdered my mother?”
He shrugged. “I went back to that place you lived, but it was gone. The hills were empty.”
A fierce ache filled my throat, so that all I could do was whisper. “There was only one temple in Kavasphir. Did you go to the right hill?”
“The road was there, and the raspberry bushes, but on the hilltop there was only a ring of golden standing stones.”
Kaphiri had murdered thousands, but never had he lied to me. I laid my head down on the table, but I did not weep. Once—it seemed so long ago—I had crawled to the edge of the Kalang, and peered over a sheer precipice, where waterfalls vanished into mist long before they reached the ground, and the world had seemed grand and wild. Now it had become a cold, hollow thing.
“I need you,” I whispered.
He leaned closer. “What did you say?”
There was a note of desperate hope in his voice, but it did not move me. I was done with compassion, and I was done with waiting. Why wait? I knew what to do.
Ki-Faun’s kobold had been made to erase the very memory of a player from the silver, removing him forever from the world. Might it do the same thing to a god?
Selma had believed that within the silver was a memory of the minds of the goddess and the god who made the world. If I could remove all remembrance of the dark god, would he be gone forever? And would his flood of silver cease?
I lifted my head, and turned to meet Kaphiri’s gaze. “I need you to go into the Cenotaph with me.”
The hope in his eyes died. Anger took over, announcing itself with a short and bitter laugh. “I have already gone there.”
“But you did not find the god.”
His fist slammed against the table. “You cannot fight a god!I cannot.You cannot. Not unless we are gods ourselves, but you won’t help me there. I know you won’t, no matter the promises you make.”
I felt no fear of him. I should have taken warning from that, but my mood was as fierce as his. “These are the last days! You said so yourself. There isn’t time left for all the studies you would have me make, but it doesn’t matter. I know what to do. I just need you to come with me. You have a power over the silver—”
“Enough!” Such an anger filled his eyes! A murderous rage. He stood, slamming back his chair so that it went tumbling across the room, while Moki darted into the darkest corner. “If you choose to go, then your decision is made. It will be the flood.”
He strode toward the door.
“What do you mean?” I rose to my feet. “Wait! Where are you going?”
“Into the silver.”
“No!” I charged after him, and grabbed his arm. “If you will not come with me then at least stay here! The end will come soon enough.”
He was no taller than me, but he was stronger, and better skilled in mayhem. He caught my hand in the lightest of grips and twisted—
—and I went to my knees, crying out in pain.
“I won’t go again into the Cenotaph,” he called over his shoulder. “Not until you have shown me how to become a god.”
“I don’t know how!”
He paused at the great bronze doors. “Then learn. There is still tonight. And for you, at least, there will be a tomorrow.”
He stepped out into the courtyard. I ran after him, but now he was running too, sprinting to the pool of silver that seeped from Jolly’s monument. I screamed my pleas that he should come back, but he reached the silver, and it rolled over him, and even now I do not know how many enclaves fell to him that night.
I was sobbing when I reached Yaphet in the library. I choked my story out to him. “I provoked him. I didn’t intend it, but I provoked him, and now he has gone into the silver to do murder. I could not stop him.”
“Hush, my love. How could you stop him? If you tried, he would only call the silver over you.”
“I should not have made him angry. I should have lied to him, told him what he wanted to hear.” My gaze fell upon the long table. Last night it had been almost empty, but now it was covered in neat stacks of lettered stone. “What are you studying?”
He smiled apologetically. “Anything. Everything. It’s fascinating. I could live here for a hundred years.”
“You did live here for at least that long. This was your house, Yaphet, in another life. Can’t you sense it?”
He looked around at the tall stacks, then back at the table. “I know my way around, but I have no memory of this place. None.” He looked at me. “Do you?”
“Yes. Fragments come to me.”
“I wish I could say the same. It’s what I want most: to recall the memories of my past lives.”
“That talent has not made Kaphiri happy.”
“He doesn’t have you.”
I could not answer him. I was cold inside, and hollow. “I told you of my vision at Azure Mesa.”
“I remember. You saw your past then too. When you ended Kaphiri’s life, it caused the silver to be destroyed.”
“I had planned to end his life in another way.”
I watched Yaphet closely, looking for any spark of remembrance, but all he recalled was our conversation. “That’s right. You were going to use the kobold the old sage had made. It was supposed to erase the memory of him from the silver, but that part sounded like a magic spell to me.”
“That old sage was you, Yaphet. And I want you to re-create that kobold for me. I want you to do it tonight.”
He told me it was impossible, and then he set to the task, moving between the shelves with a certainty that must have come from Ki-Faun himself. Near dawn, he stopped beside me with a puzzled look. “I choose manuscripts without knowing why, and they are the right manuscripts. Some part of me remembers this place, and the things I must have done here… but I can’t remember being here. It’s eerie.” And then, as an afterthought, “I found the recipe for the kobold you wanted.”
“You did? Where is it?”
He tapped his forehead. “Here. It was too dangerous to write down, so I memorized the formula for the kobold circle. The memory came to me, as I was scanning other texts on the subject. I hope we can find the right kobolds. Have you been to the well?”
“No.”
“Neither have I. Not in this life anyway, but I know where it is. Come on, I’ll show you the way.”
The well room lay beyond the kitchen. The well itself was a wide hole, maybe twelve feet across, and deep. I dropped a bit of stone down its dark throat and listened, but I did not hear it hit bottom. Yaphet said, “This well must be a thousand years old, or more.”