I reached for the kobold circle, picking it up yet again to examine it. Many hours had passed since it was formed. I had looked at it a hundred times without discovering any hint of change, but now dark lines appeared between the joined kobolds. I cried out in excitement, and over the next hour Yaphet and I watched as the kobolds were pushed apart by some force within the sphere. Lifelessly they fell aside, and at last a new kobold crawled with slow determination from the ruins of the sphere. I stared at it and felt cold, for it was the same kobold I had seen in my vision: a large, glossy, silver specimen, with a carapace like a lozenge, and six strong legs, but no head, no eyes.
Yaphet picked it up.
“Don’t crush it!” I warned.
“I won’t.”
“Its vapors are the harmful thing.”
“I know.”
He had a case for it in his pocket, and he put it in that. Then he handed it to me. “We should go tonight,” he said, “whether Kaphiri returns or not.”
I slipped the case into the pocket of my field jacket. It was our plan to use the flying machine, to get as close to the Cenotaph as we could. We hoped to land near its rim. Then we would walk down into the pit, and perhaps it would take us only a day or two to reach the bottom… but Yaphet had not found his ha. “We need him,” I whispered. “I cannot fend off the silver by myself.”
“Every night, thousands more die.”
“I know.”
“Last night—”
“I know! I know it. Please don’t say it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’ll go. But let me call him first. Let me try.”
We found a cloth bag in one of the cabinets, and I filled it with bread and cheese and rations. Yaphet took several plastic bottles from another shelf and filled them with water from the tap. Then we went outside.
Chapter 34
Night had come to the mountains, though it was not full darkness yet. The sky still had some blue in it, and only the brightest stars showed. From the direction of the forest we heard the plaintive call of a night bird, but within the courtyard all was still. Not a breath of wind stirred, and I did not see even a single mechanic as we crossed the tiles. Moki trotted ahead of us, his ears pricked and alert, but he did not seem worried. We climbed the stairs to the top of the wall, and every breath that we drew was laden with the sweet scent of temple kobolds.
We paused to look down into the canyon. A river of silver ran through it. It was still far below the wall, but I could feel it, streaming past the lines of my awareness. I closed my eyes. The silver was in me. It was in all of us, but in me it was awake. The ha was a new sense, one that reached beyond taste and touch, beyond sight and scent and hearing. This new sense reached out into the night, riding on thin lines of detection, and almost immediately I felt him. It was just as Kaphiri had said, that night when he came to us. The ha of one’s lover makes an unmistakable signal. I clutched Yaphet’s hands. “He is far away.”
“Call him.”
He was not truly my lover, but I called him anyway. My desire made a tremor in the silver, a wordless wanting. I felt him startle. I felt his anger run back to me, following on the same lines of connection, his cold resistance.
“Look,” Yaphet said.
Our joined hands sparkled with the ha. It ran up his arms, and mine.
“I can feel you,” he whispered. “I can feel the flowing of the silver.”
“Is it awake in you?”
“I don’t know… but I can feel him too.”
“And he feels you… but he’s not coming. Yaphet, he’s not coming… is he?” The connection I felt with Kaphiri was so strong it hardly seemed possible that he could refuse… and then he was gone, vanished from my awareness.
“He has gone into the daylight,” Yaphet said.
“He won’t come back.”
I felt stunned, and frightened, and for a long time I stood there, just holding his hands. When we finally let go I thought I would see the ha dissolve from his hands, but it stayed with him. It sparkled in his hair. He held his hands up, gazing at them in wonder.
“Maybe we don’t need him?” I asked.
Yaphet shook his head. “I think we do… but we can’t wait.”
So we prepared the flying machine, first unfolding the wings and stretching the canvas tight across the frame, then dividing our supplies between the flying machine’s two cargo baskets. In the canyon, the silver was rising, climbing swiftly nearer the temple wall. I could feel the lines of its structure, vibrating with information, but the structure I saw with my eyes and the structure I felt were not the same thing. The second was vaster, reaching far beyond my sight. I searched for Kaphiri within those lines, but he had hidden himself away.
I turned my back on the canyon. Yaphet was busy checking the wings. I still did not see any mechanics, either in the courtyard or on the walls, and that seemed strange to me. I was about to say something about it when Moki growled.
I looked up. Moki stood at the tail of the flying machine, gazing back along the length of the wall, toward the stairway we had ascended, and the hair on his back was raised, and his teeth were bared.
Silver lit up the canyon, but in the courtyard the temple walls cast black shadows. I stepped forward, straining to see what Moki saw. It could not be Kaphiri. He was still far away. “Is it a mechanic, boy?”
A black shadow slipped from the blackness on the stairway. Another followed close behind it, and another, and another still. They were humanlike, but hunched over, like awkward animals scampering on all-fours. At the same time, they weren’t human at all. They were too tiny by half, with hairless heads and huge eyes that gleamed and flashed in the starlight. They whispered to one another:
La-zur-i. La-zur-i. La-zur-i. La-zur-i.
Like the hissing of snakes.
There had been no mechanics in the courtyard or on the walls. I understood then that there would be no mechanics in the meadow either. Kaphiri must have somehow ordered them in, opening the way for the bogy army to carry out their vendetta—against Yaphet. “Yaphet,run! ”
More stooped figures joined the first four. One raised a thing like a stick to its lips. I turned to flee, and a dart smacked my shoulder. Its tip stuck in the fabric of my field jacket, but did not pierce it. Another dart whistled past my ear. “Yaphet!”
He dropped to the ground, and the tiny missile passed over his shoulder. In an instant, he was on his feet again. “The flying machine!”
“Leave it! They want to kill you. Run. Run!”
He grabbed the dart that had stuck in my jacket, and he hurled it back at them. “Go back!” he shouted. “Back into the silver!” But they did not heed him. Already they were swarming past the tail of the flying machine.
Moki had given up his defense. He darted past us. “Come on,” I yelled, and this time Yaphet gave in. He grabbed my hand and we ran together along the wall.
Where was the next stairway? I knew there was one by the temple gate, but that was on the other side of the complex. Had there been another in between? We had to get off the wall. We had to get back into the temple. The mechanics would surely be there, hidden away in some chamber. If we released them, the bogies would be driven back.
“Jubilee, wait!” Yaphet grabbed my hand and we stopped together, staring ahead at Jolly’s monument. It blocked our escape: a tentacle of blue glass reaching from the top of the wall, down into the courtyard. In the canyon, the silver had not yet risen high enough to touch the base of the temple wall, but the folly had made its own silver. Fine veins of it flowed over the monument, a nerve plexus of tiny streams, joining, parting, glistening, collecting in a slowly growing pool of silver on the courtyard’s tiled floor.