Almost.
I had made a loop at the end of my rope. As he stepped through, I charged him, and thrust the rope over his head and pulled it tight. He smelled of sweat and smoke.
Without air he panicked. His hands went to his throat; then he tried to pummel me, but I had slipped behind him. I pulled the rope tighter still, and he went to his knees. I was shifting my grip to finish the job when a small hand touched mine. “Jubilee! Please don’t kill him! Please don’t!”
I looked up, stunned to find Jolly beside me. “You found your way here.” My grip eased, and Kaphiri drew in a whistling breath.
Jolly nodded. The ha glittered brightly around his hands, his face, and in his hair. “I learned how to do it. Now please, let him live.”
My anger flooded back. “Why should I? Hasn’t he killed Liam too? And Udondi?”
“No! They’re alive. Kaphiri didn’t find us. It was me. Liam wanted me to stay at the Temple of the Sisters, but I couldn’t. I went into the silver, looking for him. Liam is alive. He’s coming south to find you. Jubilee, please. Let him live.”
I could not deny my brother. My grip eased, and Kaphiri coughed and fell forward onto the tiles. “Yaphet is dead,” I said.
Jolly blinked hard, and coughed himself.
I nudged Kaphiri with the toe of my boot. “And this one swears that Temple Huacho is gone from Kavasphir.”
“I’m sorry,” Jolly whispered.
“I am sorry too. But I am going to end it, Jolly. I am going to make sure I never face this choice again.”
He looked at me in confusion, and dread. “What do you mean? You were going to kill him… Jubilee, you aren’t going to let the flood come, are you?”
I felt incredulous at his question. “You ask me that? I am not him. And anyway, Kaphiri is only partly to blame for this.”
I crouched beside him. Guilt touched me as I listened to his wheezing as he struggled to draw air through his damaged throat, but I pretended I did not feel it. “You said you would call down the destruction of the silver if I asked. So, I am asking.”
“No!” Jolly cried. “She doesn’t mean it.”
Kaphiri raised his head, enough that I could see his eyes. “She means it,” he said in a rasping whisper.
“So do it. Destroy the silver.” I tightened my grip on his leash. “Or I will do it myself.”
“Why?” Jolly said. “Why do you want this?”
“Because he will not accompany me into the Cenotaph, and I cannot fend off the silver that boils from that pit. Not by myself. So let him tear away the veils and I will make my own way into the pit, and I will destroy whatever I find there.”
“How?” Kaphiri whispered.
I stared at him, offering no answer.
“But you… have… a means?”
I nodded.
“Then I’ll help you.”
“You will go into the pit? Tonight? And you will fend off the silver?”
He nodded. “If it will mean the end of a god, I will do anything.”
I tried to convince Jolly to stay behind at the temple, but he would not. “If you leave me, I will only follow you through the silver. You are so easy to see, now that yourha is awake.”
Kaphiri soon recovered enough that he could walk. I kept the leash on him. We crossed the courtyard, and climbed the stairs to the top of the wall.
Jolly had hurried ahead to the flying machine, but he came back. “Look down, Jubilee. There is a fire in the temple.”
I looked, to see red flames flickering behind the window nearest the well room. The fire spread with astounding speed, invading the kitchen, and then the great room. The doors flew open, and Mari stumbled out, embers smoking on her skirt. She turned back to look at the building. Then she looked up at us. “Your library will soon be gone!” she shouted. “I won’t keep your refuge anymore.”
But with the well destroyed, there would be no refuge for her either. “Come with us!” I called after her as she strode off across the courtyard. “We will fend off the silver as long as we can! Mari!”
She did not hear me over the roar of the flames, or she would not.
“Mari, we will take you to Nuanez when this is done!”
She rounded the temple and disappeared. I wanted to go after her, but I had Kaphiri under the rope.
Jolly had no such hindrance. He darted back down the stairs, then sprinted across the courtyard, following Mari’s route around the building.
I saw her again on the other side of the temple, hurrying toward the gate. “She has lived too long,” Kaphiri said.
I knew he was right. “Jolly!” I screamed. “Come back! Come back now!”
Mari reached the gate. She was an old woman, but she still had her strength. When she pulled on the latch, the tall gate swung open and a tongue of silver reached through. For a moment, Mari stood silhouetted against its luminous glow. Then it swept over her, just as fire roared up through the temple roof.
“Call your brother back,” Kaphiri croaked. “The night is growing old.”
The flying machine was ready, but neither Jolly nor I could fly it. Only Kaphiri had learned the techniques from Yaphet. He claimed the pilot’s platform. I squeezed in beside him, so I could continue to hold his leash. “Aren’t you afraid…,” he rasped, “of what you might feel…?”
I did not think I would feel anything, but I was wrong. His warmth stirred in me a corrupt desire, but it was not so strong as my hate. “I will strive to bear your proximity,” I whispered.
He chuckled. “And I will do the same.”
Jolly took Moki with him in one basket. I had already balanced the other with food and water, so Kaphiri brought the engine humming to life.
It should have been Yaphet beside me.
Kaphiri touched the controls and the wings flexed; the engine’s hum climbed in pitch.
Yaphet was gone.
I did not look back. Neither did Kaphiri. The banks of tiny propellers whined, and we lurched forward, lifted hesitantly, and then swooped down into the canyon. I cried out, for I thought we were falling. The silver rushed up toward us, and I reached out to ward it away, but before I could form the thought it parted beneath us as if an invisible plow had carved a furrow in its luminous surface. The wing tips skimmed the silver, and gleamed a moment with its light, and then the light fell away, and the river of silver sank below us as it flowed down the canyon to the plain. We soared on at the same altitude, and the wind was loud in my ears, but even so I imagined Yaphet calling, crying my name into the night.
Chapter 35
The mists over the Cenotaph had quieted in the night, and I could not tell with any certainty where it lay, for the silver had risen in a uniform fog, obscuring all the plain. I was studying its misty surface, searching for some sign of the pit, when we chanced to pass close to a small circle of open ground. I had only a glimpse before the clearing fell behind us, but that was enough to make out stones and sand, looming gray in the silver’s glow, and against them darker shapes that I could not identify with any certainty. I clutched Kaphiri’s shoulder and pointed back. “What was that? Was that a kobold well?”
He arched his neck to look, but we had already gone too far. So he put the flying machine into a steep bank, and we turned back, descending at the same time.
On this pass we flew directly over the open ground. It was a kobold well—the largest I had ever seen. The black circle of its mouth was twice the wingspan of our flying machine, and around it was a ring of soil at least twenty feet high. Three players stood on the inside slope of the soil ring, their faces turned up toward us. Their bikes waited a few steps away, and there were sleeping bags on the ground.