I started remembering things too. Flashes would come to me, perfectly clear recollections. I was feeling bored, watching a baby play. I was driving a truck. I was reading a manuscript, or tending a kobold well. Perfectly ordinary recollections, except they weren’t mine. They did not even belong to some version of me in another life. I was seeing into the lives of other players, and that seemed wrong somehow, though I could not stop it.
I wished they would all shut up and leave me alone.
I described the effect to Jolly, and he looked at me in evident relief. “It’s happening to you too? Thank goodness! I thought I was losing my mind.”
“It’s like we’re breathing in memories.” I stopped and shrugged out of my jacket. “I was cold when we started, but it’s gotten hot.”
It got hotter still. Heat soaked through the soles of my boots. I started to get scared about it. Then it was cold again. Just like that. Like stepping through a door. But when I walked back a few paces, it was still cold. The heat was gone, and it was cold that stung my hand when I touched the rocks.
“Have you noticed there are no follies here?” Jolly asked.
I looked around, and realized it was true. There were no follies like those we were accustomed to seeing. “I wonder if the voices are follies, and the memories?” Flashes of substance from out of the chaos, unmade as soon as they were formed, except where we passed. In our bubble of stillness we held them for a while in our senses.
It was hot again when Jolly finally found a break in the cliff face. It looked like part of the white rock had dropped away in an avalanche, leaving a cleft at the top. I guessed there would be a skirt of debris below, but we couldn’t see it.
“It looks rough,” I said.
“So maybe if we keep going, we’ll find a paved road to take us down?”
“Well it’s not impossible.”
He grinned. “You realize, if we were stronger, we could will a road into existence.”
“Or another flying machine.”
“Or our father.”
Or Mama. Or Yaphet. “We’d be gods, if we could do that.”
We made our way down the cleft. The stone walls played strangely with my vision. From the corner of my eye I would see the outline of a window, or the shape of a watching player, but when I turned to look, there would be only white stone. I might have passed it off as an illusion, but Moki was nervous. He would stop and growl at nothing. Then dart ahead and growl again.
We had been walking several minutes when I slipped on a rock. I caught my balance with a hand against the white stone. In the moment I touched the rock, a burnt black hand reached out of it to grab my arm. I yelped, and flailed wildly, while Moki launched into a storm of barking. The arm dissolved like a soap bubble.
“What was that?” Jolly demanded, and his eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them.
“A bogy, I think.”
They were hideous and they haunted the walls. As we descended they appeared every few minutes: a fire-blackened hand reaching for us, or a burnt face pressing out of the rock. The faces spoke, asking always the same questions: Will you stop him? Will you? Can you? They were the fevered whisperings of our wounded goddess, but they were not her, so we made no answer, but hurried on, and when the cleft ended and we found ourselves on the apron of debris left by the avalanche, we felt relief, for the bogy-haunted walls were behind us.
We had no way to measure time. We were deep within the Cenotaph and neither the sun’s light nor the light of the stars could reach us. In the pit the illumination was always the same: a beautiful silver glow that turned Jolly’s face gray and made Moki’s coat look whitened with age.
All I knew was that we had been walking for many hours. We both started to stumble, but neither of us called for a rest until Jolly almost slipped over another precipice. Even then he did not want to stop, but I insisted he lie down for a time and close his eyes. Moki curled up beside him, and they both fell quickly asleep. I walked circles around them to keep myself awake.
When that grew dull I opened my senses, deliberately seeking Kaphiri’s presence. He seemed far away. My heart went cold as I imagined the wickedness he was doing: summoning the silver into enclaves, or trapping wayfarers on the road. I tried to summon him back. He heard my desire, and for a while he seemed to heed me. His presence grew stronger. But he did not come to me, and soon exhaustion led me to give up the duel.
Jolly woke, and we walked on for several hours more. Then it was my turn to lie down and sleep. I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come. I longed for sunlight, the more because I did not believe I would ever see it again. I consoled myself with memories of sunlit days, and blue skies, and green meadows.
When I stood up again, I was suddenly conscious of every bruise and trauma I had received since the fall of the flying machine. “Remind me not to seek my ease again,” I said to Jolly through gritted teeth. We shared out most of our food, and drank half the remaining water. Then we set out again.
Eventually, we found the bottom of the Cenotaph. We knew it immediately. All the tumbled stones and dust of the slopes stopped at a hard boundary, and the ground became level and smooth. Its color was white, even in the sheen of the surrounding silver. Even so, it did not seem to be entirely present. At least, I could not quite focus my eyes on it. It was as if the surface was constantly shifting up and down by tiny fractions of an inch… or as if it was saturated with silver slowly boiling on a microscopic scale, forever bubbling in mindless acts of minute creation. When I stepped out on it, I half expected a column of silver to erupt around me.
That didn’t happen, but the ground felt springy, bubbly, and sometimes we would sink in it to our ankles, and sometimes we would seem to be walking just above any visible surface.
After a few steps the silver closed in behind us, and we could no longer see the slope we had just descended. There was only the silver, and the uncertain ground. We walked, but with nothing to measure our progress, we did not seem to be going anywhere. Or more accurately, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, that all places were one place, and the world was empty, save for us.
After we had been walking for some time, Jolly came to a stop, and I beside him. The silence in that place was extraordinary. It rang in my ears. “How can we know what direction to go?” Jolly asked softly.
“I don’t know.” I kept my voice low too; it seemed necessary in that place. “We could be walking round in circles and not know it… but I had thought to find the center. Kaphiri said this pit was made when the dark god was hurled from the sky and struck the world…”
“And that would put him at the center…?”
“It’s only a guess. But we know he is here somewhere, for the world has never been able to repair itself. The dark god has kept it from healing.”
So we walked on some more, but after a few minutes Jolly stopped again. “I can sense a presence.” This time his voice was no more than a whisper.
I answered in kind. “Kaphiri?”
“No.” He stared off into the silver.
I followed his gaze, and not just with my sight. Kaphiri burned in my awareness as a dread beacon, but as I looked, I too discerned the essence of another within the silver, faint, elusive, yet somehow familiar, a memory, perhaps, of another life. “Is it the god?”
Jolly shook his head. “No. It’s not him. It’s her. The goddess. She’s here, Jubilee.”