Memories are elusive. We might struggle to recall a song or the name of a player, but come up with nothing until someone sings a teasing note, or utters the first syllable of the forgotten name. Then recognition floods in. When Jolly named the goddess, I knew it was so: the presence I sensed was her.
“Has she come to help us?” I whispered.
“How can she? She is wounded.”
“Where is the god?”
“I don’t know.”
“He should be here.”
“I can’t sense him. Can you?”
I shook my head. “But he must be here. She said he would be here.” The goddess had sent us into the Cenotaph to find him. She was our ally. I took Jolly’s hand. “Perhaps she has come to show us the way. We will find her first. Then we’ll find him.”
So we gave up trying to guess at the direction of the center, and we followed her presence instead.
Sometimes I could hardly sense her. Other times she seemed to be all around us, existing at once in every direction. “Are you there?” I cried out in frustration. “Are you here? Where are you?” Her gravity pulled me in circles, and only when Jolly grabbed my hand and steered me in a straight path would I remember to walk on.
We walked and walked, and I began to think we would walk forever through that flat, featureless terrain. At the same time I worried the goddess was a being of mist only, so that even as we sought her, we pushed her away when we pushed at the silver.
Then at last we came upon the edge of a folly.
The silver rolled back, revealing a complex landscape, like a miniature city, though the tallest towers were only knee-high. There were no windows or doors in the “buildings,” at least none that I could see, for each of them was encrusted in a sheath of some colorful growth, lumpy and uneven like the mold that will grow on bread, but in strident colors of bright green and pink, red, yellow and electric blue. I decided they were more like blocks, or oddly shaped boxes, than buildings.
They stood in clusters, some arranged in perfect squares, but most of them irregularly shaped, with narrow aisles of smooth white ground wedged between each group.
We stopped on the folly’s edge. “My lady,” Jolly called, “are you here?”
There was no answer.
I stepped forward, and tentatively, I touched a nodule on one of the mold-encrusted blocks. It looked like a solid thing, some kind of organic mineral, but that was illusion. At the first pressure of my finger the nodule burst with a tiny pop! I had heard that sound before. I yanked my hand away as a spurt of glowing silver slurry shot straight up into the air. Only a tiny droplet touched my finger, but that burned with a fury, and I turned away, my hand pressed against my belly and tears starting in my eyes.
Kaphiri felt it too. All this time he had been a distant presence in my awareness, gnawing on my consciousness like the pain of some deep wound that I could not reach, or comfort.
Suddenly he was aware of me. I felt his sharp surprise, his panic, as he turned away from whatever wicked deed had occupied him.
Jolly threw his arms around me, crying out in a high, frightened voice, “Jubilee, are you all right? Are you all right?”
“I will be.” The pain was easing. I looked at my fingertip, and it was livid red. “Do you remember when we climbed down the kobold well, and I broke into the vein of liquid silver?”
“This is the same thing?”
I nodded. “We must walk very carefully now. Do not touch the blocks, for they will burst at the lightest pressure.”
He nodded nervously.
“And, Jolly, Kaphiri is coming back. He knows we are close to the goddess now.”
I went first through the aisles, and Jolly followed behind me. The goddess was everywhere in my awareness and I could not tell which way would bring me closer to her center, so I just followed the easiest path. A sense of haste was upon me. Kaphiri was drawing swiftly nearer, and I wanted to find the goddess before he could come. So our cautious walk soon gave way to a hurried jog, and then to a scuttling run, but that was the limit of our speed. We could not push the silver away any faster than that.
The blocks grew higher as we advanced, until their average was waist-high, with the tallest towers reaching to my chin.
Then suddenly the pressure of the silver vanished. Some will far greater than mine seized the luminous curtain that hung so close around us and flung it back so that we could see for a quarter mile in any direction, even straight up, though silver still made a ceiling far above our heads.
We stood on the edge of an open space, like a white courtyard fronting a great temple… or anyway, I wanted to think of the structure that stood there as a temple, though it was like none I had ever seen. Imagine a great sphere that has been half-crushed and split in two, so that only a small remnant of its shell is still intact. That remnant rose in an arch a quarter mile above my head. Within the amphitheater-shell of the arch, layer upon layer of the mold-covered blocks were suspended on laminate shelves curved in the same arc as the shell. Clouds of silver steamed and billowed from the rim, rushing down the back of the shell in a great, glittering flood. We should have drowned in it, but the will that had made this bubble of open space somehow held it off.
A small, blackened figure huddled on the threshold of the temple, its head bowed as it wept over a moldering burden cradled in its lap.
It did not seem possible that such a creature could be alive, for it looked like a burnt corpse, its hair and clothes seared away and its flesh like charcoal, withered and cracked. But itwas alive, and as we approached, it looked up at us with eyes that were lenses of luminous silver. Its mouth opened, showing a blackened tongue, and the blackened stumps of teeth. “I cannot fix him,” it whispered. “I don’t remember how.”
I looked more closely at the burden it cradled in its lap and I realized that beneath the encrustations of colorful mold it was the body of a man. I fell to my knees as dread blossomed inside me. “Who is he?” I whispered, for the burnt creature held the corpse close and I could not see the dead man’s face.
“It is my lover.” As if to prove this, the tiny arms eased their desperate hold and the body shifted, rolling slightly, so I could see the face.
Colorful molds blossomed across his cheeks and eyes and within his mouth and nose, but I knew him anyway. I had always known him. “Yaphet.”
My chest heaved, and suddenly there did not seem to be enough air left in the world for me to breathe. I could not bear to look upon his face being consumed by the dreadful growths that thrived in that place, so I looked up at the burnt creature instead. “What have you done to him? And why?”
“I have killed him. He is dead now, and the war is over.”
I knew her then. This burnt creature was the goddess, or some manifestation of her. When she had come to me at Azure Mesa she had seemed beautiful… until she reached through the mirror, and then her lovely arm had been transformed into the blackened arm of a burnt corpse.
“Where is the dark god?” I demanded.
“This is him,” she insisted, cradling Yaphet’s body. “The last fragment. I have murdered him at last—my own lover—and our war is over… but why is nothing changed?” She looked at me with her luminous silver eyes, and I felt as if I looked into empty windows.
“Explain it to me!” she demanded. “He is dead, but nothing is changed! I am still wounded. I tear out the flawed parts of myself and rebuild, and rebuild, but I cannot heal! Is there some fragment of him remaining still? Is there an avatar I have not found yet? Is there an avatar that you have not found? Why are you here? Why have you come? I sent you to find him! I sent you to remove him from the world!”