Kaphiri started to take the flying machine down. “No,” I said. “We will fly on.”
“Players do not come this far south! I will know who they are!”
“I know already.”
Those upturned faces had belonged to Liam and Udondi and Ficer, but I would not risk a reunion. I trusted neither Liam’s temper, nor Kaphiri’s tolerance. “Fly on,” I insisted. “Whatever they have come for, it cannot matter now.”
Kaphiri relented. He guided the flying machine up, and away to the north.
Liam’s voice called after us, carrying eerily in the still night. “Jubilee, we will follow when we can.”
Kaphiri glanced at me, a grim smile on his face. He knew now who these wayfarers were. “His chance will come only if we succeed.” This seemed to please him, though whether by the anticipation of our success, or our failure, I could not say.
The sameness of the silver confused my mind, but Kaphiri seemed to see through it. He pointed out the pit to me, and laughed when I could not see it. Then he turned the plane and began a tight spiral that took us quickly closer to the mist. When the silver lay just beneath the belly of the plane he warded it off. We continued to descend, turning round and round, while the silver rose above us, and then closed over our heads.
We still flew in a tight spiral. I knew this because the wind of our passage roared past my face, and the wings flexed and dipped. But with the sameness of the silver all around it felt as if we had been caught and suspended in a place of endless luminosity.
Then a wall of darkness emerged from out of the homogeneous glow: a steep, crumbled slope of transformed stone.
Kaphiri hissed. He leaned on the guidance stick and the plane rocked to one side. I looked down the length of the wing to see Jolly’s terrified face below me. Then the other wing clipped the wall. The canvas tore, and the struts collapsed.
The plane dropped. I closed my eyes. I could not help it, but at the same time I pushed at the silver beneath us. There was an impact. The air was knocked from my lungs, my teeth snapped together, and every part of my body felt as if it had been torn from its proper placement. There was a terrible scraping sound and a sense of motion. I heard Jolly cry out, but all I could do was hold on andpush as hard as I could against the silver that crowded my awareness.
I did not lose consciousness, for I was always conscious of the close press of the silver. I was aware too of Moki’s menacing growls, but only when his growling turned into a high-pitched yelping attack did I open my eyes.
Kaphiri stood over me. He had removed the leash from his own neck and was attempting to place it over mine, but little Moki had already savaged his hand.
I reared back, kicking out at him at the same time, but my reflexes were slow, and he dodged easily. I seized stone from the jumbled slope and flung it after him. It was a keen throw, but too late, for Kaphiri stepped into the silver, and was gone.
“Jolly?”
I turned to look for him, and was stunned to see the remnants of the plane. It lay all around me like a smashed skeleton. The pilot’s platform had broken in half, separating from the engine, which lay downslope, only inches from the wall of silver. The crumpled wings were draped across a chaotic slope of stones and dust and layered ground that reminded me of the eastern slope of the Kalang. “Jolly!” I called again. Moki had been with him, and Moki had survived the crash, so Jolly had to be somewhere close by. “Jolly!”
This time I heard a muffled answer. “I’m here! Over here! Help me get out.”
I followed his voice and found a narrow crevice splitting the slope. A slow-running flow of silver seeped through it, shimmering two meters down. Jolly straddled the flow, his feet and hands propped against the crumbling wall.
“Help me,” he said when he saw me peering down.
I gave him my hand. That was all the help he needed to scramble out and onto the slope beside me. We collapsed together, spending a minute just looking at each other. His face was bruised, but I saw no blood, and he would admit to no broken bones. Moki crawled between us.
“We’ve done well, don’t you think?” Jolly said, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
We were in a chamber of silver, on an unstable slope that fell away to the abode of a wicked god, and my head hurt, and I was thirsty. “At least it’s not dark.”
“Are you holding the silver off?”
I nodded. “It’s certainly not him. But I can feel him out there. I can feel his ha. He’s not far away.”
Jolly raised his dusty hands. The ha sparkled brightly between his fingers. “I think I can hold off the silver too. We should be all right, so long as one of us is awake.”
“Do you know how far it is to the bottom?”
He shook his head. “A long way, I think.” Then he added, in a frightened whisper, “I’m scared.”
I glanced upslope, but after a few feet, the only thing to be seen was silver. “We could try going back.”
“Back to what? The silver is rising. There’s no way out.”
“There is for you—”
“No.”
“Jolly, you could make your way back to Liam—”
“No! I’m scared, but I’m not leaving you. I’m not. We came for a reason, and there’s no going back. Not even for me. Jubilee, if the final flood comes, it will only be me and him alive in the whole world. That’s what I’m scared of, more than anything. So we have to go on. There’s no choice, and no other way out.”
So we scavenged the wreckage, and after a few minutes we found some water bottles and the bag of food I had packed. Sharing the weight of these things we set off downslope, trading off between us the task of pushing the silver away.
At first the air was very cold. My breath condensed in little gray clouds. I had never seen that before. Neither had Jolly. We played with it for a while.
It was hard walking. The slope was steep and covered with loose stones that rolled away under the pressure of a foot. We both fell down several times. I was afraid one of us would twist an ankle or break a leg, and then what would we do?
I didn’t want to think about it.
So we pushed the silver away ahead of us, and let it close in behind, and after a while we came to a precipice. It was a cliff of hard white stone, full of tiny air bubbles. I’d never seen anything like it. It felt as slippery as soap, and when I scuffed at it with my heel, it crumbled.
I stood on its edge, pushing with all my will against the silver, for I wanted to know if the drop was ten feet or two hundred. The silver rolled back, and I saw that it was more than ten feet down. It was at least twenty, and maybe a lot farther. Remembering the southern escarpment of the Kalang, I felt a little queasy. I stepped back from the edge.
“Let’s follow the cliff,” Jolly said. “Sooner or later we’ll find a way down.”
On the cliff’s edge, the walking was easy. Maybe the escarpment had pushed its way into existence only recently. It seemed that way, for its lip was bare of the loose stones that covered the slope above. We followed it for a long time. As we walked, I kept glancing over my shoulder, partly because I knew Kaphiri was somewhere close by. His presence burned within the net of awareness that is part of the ha. I knew he could sense me in the same way, and I feared he would emerge from the silver while our attention was turned away—though exactly what his intentions might be, I didn’t know. He wanted the death of the dark god, but I suspected he wanted my death too.
Another part of my edginess was due to the voices that began to whisper to me. For a long time I wasn’t sure they were real. They sounded distant, like someone calling, who is almost too far away to hear. I couldn’t make out any of their words, but I heard them speaking in the turning of a stone under my foot, or in the wash of my breath, or the ticking of Moki’s nails.