If we tried to climb over it, we would surely be consumed.
The bogies were a stone’s throw behind us, and the walls were too sheer to climb.
“Mari!” I screamed, desperately hoping she would hear me. “Release the mechanics! Release them now!” But there was no response from the temple. Not even a light.
I did not see a way out for us. But Yaphet still harbored a hope. “Call the silver,” he said.
“I do not know how.”
“Call it.”
I looked again at the onrushing shapes of the bogies. One of them paused, to raise a tube to its mouth. I lifted my hand, and the ha sparkled brightly between my fingers. The silver in the canyon brightened. I felt its proximity, and the lines of influence reaching from it to my beckoning hand, seeking a connection…
A tendril of silver shot up from the canyon, hurtling straight toward us. I cried out, stumbling backward, but Yaphet stayed rooted in place. He raised his own glittering hand, and he warded the tendril away. It went swirling around us, and as it passed, it slowed and it expanded, billowing into a wall of luminous fog that divided us from the bogies, hiding them from our sight.
We were left standing in a ring of silver. Its diameter was wider than the wall, so we could see down into the courtyard, and the canyon, and to my relief there were no bogies on either side. I turned to Yaphet, throwing my arms around him and kissing him—“You did it! You did it!”—while Moki danced at our feet.
Then a bogy scuttled out of the silver. I saw it from the corner of my eye and fell back. It raised a tube to its lips. Phwat! A wasp buzzed, and Yaphet’s whole body snapped backward. His hands rose spasmodically, to tear at a black dart dangling from his throat. Then he plunged over the wall, into the courtyard.
“Yaphet!” I dropped to my belly, in time to hear the sickening thunk of his impact against the tiles. Clinging to the edge, I looked down, to see him forty feet below me, his crumpled form illuminated by the glow of the silver that pooled at the foot of Jolly’s monument. I wanted to go to him, but the wall was too sheer to climb, and I could not bring myself to jump. A mob of bogies appeared out of the shadows by the temple. They swarmed over Yaphet, ignoring my screams of rage. They were like ants, swarming over a choice morsel. I could not even see his body. Then, as if they had become one creature, of one mind, they moved toward the pool of silver. One of them touched it, and the silver flowed over all of them, billowing madly up the wall so that I had to ward it off to keep from being consumed.
Some part of me died with Yaphet. We’d shared lifetimes together, and I knew I must have lost him before, but not like this. He had been taken away by phantoms from out of the silver, and only the god or the goddess could have sent them.
In my heart I was sure it had been the god. He was a brooding remnant within the Cenotaph, still at war with the goddess who had brought life to the world. He must have taken Yaphet, believing him to be Kaphiri—for only Kaphiri could turn back the flood of silver that would soon drown all the world. When the final flood came, life would be erased from the world, and the dark god would finally have his victory.
Except the god had been mistaken. Kaphiri still existed.
A coldness settled in my heart, and I whispered a vow of vengeance against the builder of the world.
Moki whined and waggled. The silver that surrounded us could not stand against the vapors of the temple kobolds. It was swiftly steaming into nothingness, so it was no trick for me to push the remnants away.
No bogies remained on the wall, or in the courtyard, or anywhere in sight. With Moki at my heels I walked past the flying machine. It was still poised, ready for its journey to the Cenotaph. I made sure it was anchored, so no stray wind could blow it away. Then I made my way down the dark stairway to the temple, where I found Mari, standing in the doorway, her hands kneading at the fabric of her skirt. “I heard your cries,” she said.
“Yaphet is dead.”
“I know.”
“Where are the mechanics?”
She would not meet my gaze. “I thought he would come back this night,” she whispered.
Her words stirred a terrible suspicion. “What are you saying?”
“I thought he would come back this night,” she repeated, her voice faint, and hollow.
“Didyou remove the mechanics?”
A violent shaking seized her hands. She turned away, withdrawing into the shadows of the great room.
“You arranged it so he would die,” I whispered.
“He told me Nuanez was dead! Long dead.”
“But it’s Yaphet who’s been murdered!”
“I thought he would come back this night!”
“He will,” I said softly as a scheme took shape in my mind, a structure for my vengeance. “I will force him back.”
In the pocket of my field jacket I still carried the book Known Kobold Circles. I took it with me to the well room. Consulting its pages, I collected the same kinds of kobolds Jolly and I had gathered at Azure Mesa, and within an hour I had a kobold sphere. I put it into the pocket of my field jacket. Then I went to the kitchen, and took a knife from a drawer. In a closet I found a spool of thin rope, and I cut a section of that and took it with me to the courtyard. I set the sphere down on the tiles, at a point equally spaced between the temple and the wall. Then I sat back to wait, with Moki nestled at my side.
The night was quiet. No wind blew, nor did I hear any night birds. Overhead the Bow of Heaven gleamed faintly, while the silver cast up its luminous glow from beyond the walls. I remembered the statues we had seen in the sandy desert washes at the eastern foot of the Kalang, stony warriors waiting in silent ambush, and I felt a kinship with them, for a great patience had come over me.
Near midnight the sphere began to steam with a mist of silver, faint at first, but swiftly growing. I picked up Moki and stepped back a pace, but I did not try to flee.
I had translated the name of this kobold circle as ‘The mirror of the other self,’ but it was more a portal than a mirror, and it had almost brought Kaphiri to me once before.
I watched the silver rise in trembling threads that fused into a panel. Its texture teased my eyes, suggesting an endless depth, as if I looked across time as well as space; but if there was structure there, I could not see it. To my eyes it was only a vastness of possibility.
I should have been afraid, but my anger would not let any such benign emotion surface.
“My love,” I whispered, searching the silver panel for some shadow, some trembling of his presence. Even if he had withdrawn himself from the silver, the silver still existed inside him, just as it existed inside all of us. He could not escape my whispering voice. “My love, come home.”
In only a few minutes I found him. He appeared first as a distant smudge that grew quickly larger, until I could distinguish his dark garb, and his confused gaze as he turned to look over his shoulder.
He was not alone.
He had his hand in a raptor-grip on the shoulder of a smaller figure beside him, a wriggling figure that slipped free even as I watched, eluding Kaphiri’s clutching hand, to vanish into mist. “Jolly!”
I screamed his name, but he did not hear me. He was already gone. Safe into the silver, I hoped, but at the same time I reeled under another dark blow of despair, for Jolly had been with Liam and Udondi—and what hope could remain for them, if Kaphiri had come upon them in the desert?
Kaphiri heard me cry out. If he had been unsure of my identity, he knew it now. He turned toward me, and taking one long stride, he stepped through the panel and into the courtyard, almost before I was ready to meet him.