I felt Jolly’s hand squeeze gently against my shoulder. “She is wounded,” he said. “She does not understand.”
“Neither do I.”
“It is not the dark god who festers in the Cenotaph, Jubilee. It never was him. He is gone. Long gone. It is the goddess who is left here.”
I looked up, to the towering shell of her temple. Torrents of silver poured from its shattered rim, rushing forth to flood the world. “Is that her, then?” I whispered, nodding at the shell. “Is that the seat of her mind?” For she was a goddess, and I understood that the blackened corpse huddled before me could not contain the mind of a goddess, that it had to be only a manifestation, an avatar, a concentration of her dreams.
“I think she is some kind of a mechanic,” Jolly said. “And this great structure is the last fragment of her mind.”
She was listening to our words. Laying Yaphet gently on the ground, she stood, and looked with us at the great arch, and the vast layers of blocky mold that it sheltered. Her anger had passed, and when she spoke her voice was soft once again. “I am wounded. I know it. This war consumes me, and my memories slip away.”
She had murdered Yaphet because he was made to look like the dark god. Her mind was so far gone she could not tell the difference. She was broken… by the war, or by her fall to the world, I did not know, but clearly there was so little left of her that she could not repair herself, or even comprehend how far she had fallen—and still enough of her mind remained that she must try. The Cenotaph boiled with her efforts, churning out vast clouds of silver: the fever dreams of a goddess flooding the world.
“He is gone,” she whispered. “But it won’t end. Why won’t the war end?”
“Would you have it end?”
She had sent me to the Cenotaph for that purpose, after all. She had commanded me to be her hands, to find the wound in the world, and to remove the fragment of deity that would not let it heal.
I reached into the pocket of my field jacket and felt the hard shape of the kobold case Yaphet had given me, with the deletion kobold inside.
Did the goddess know, on some level, what I had come here to do? Had she planned it? Had some splinter of her crumbling self given me the book Known Kobold Circles? Had she deliberately left the memory of this kobold on the surface of Yaphet’s mind? I hoped it was so.
“Jolly, I think you should go now.”
“No. Not until it’s over.”
“That could be too late.”
“I’ll chance it. I’m not running away again, Jubilee. Now go. Do it while you have the chance.”
So I turned my back on the burnt avatar, for it was only an interface to the goddess. Her mind was my target, and that existed within the maze of moldering blocks and towers that filled the broken sphere. I opened the kobold case and removed the solitary specimen. Its silver body gleamed, and its strong legs moved against my palm just as they had in my vision. If I were to crush it, its vapors would erase me forever. That was the promise Ki-Faun had made, but I had no intention of erasing myself. The goddess was the target, and only the goddess. I still hoped to be born again into a world that would never suffer the threat of silver flood.
My hand closed over the kobold. Would it be enough to hurl it into the depths of the sphere? Surely the impact would crush it, and then its vapors could do their work… but if its shell failed to break, how would I ever find it, to crush it myself?
In the midst of my hesitation, Kaphiri came.
Moki gave first warning with a sharp, frantic bark. Then Jolly shouted, “Jubilee! He is here. He is here. Hurry and release it!”
I turned, to see Kaphiri newly emerged from the silver. Jolly tried to stop him, but he threw my brother to the ground.
I should have hurled the kobold then, but hatred is stronger than reason. It is stronger than good intentions. In that moment I discovered that what I truly wanted was revenge against this man who had been made by a broken goddess, and who had brought so much misery on the world.
So I held on to the kobold and waited for him to come.
He stopped five feet from me. He smelled of smoke, and his fine clothes were stained and torn. His hair had fallen loose and it was gray with ash, but there was wonder in his eyes. “You have found the god.” His gaze wandered up, to the high rim of the shell and the torrents of silver that gushed down its sides. “You have walked right to his dark heart. My love, I never thought it was possible…”
“The goddess commands that I end the war.”
His gaze fixed on me again, and it was hard. “Do you still serve her?”
“Only in this last thing… and she has done all she can to aid me.”
He looked at the great shell. He looked at me. Doubt showed in his eyes. “To aid you? How? She has not made you a goddess?”
“No, and she never will. We are only players, my love. Accept it.”
“Then what aid has she given to you?”
I opened my fist to show him the kobold. I wanted him to know.
He recognized it, and the shock made him stumble back a step. “No, my love!Throw it away! You must throw it away now—”
“Oh, I will.” I turned, intending to hurl the kobold into the heart of the goddess, but he was faster than I.
He caught my wrist. He unbalanced me, and we both went down. “You will not destroy yourself.” He clawed at my fingers, his nails tore gouges of flesh from my hands. “I will not live forever without you! I will not! I will not!”
I tried to throw him off, but he was stronger—or more desperate—than I. Oh, how I regretted my hesitation! Why had I not thrown the kobold while I had the chance?
His knife appeared out of nowhere. It flashed with the speed of a worm mechanic, plunging straight through my wrist. I screamed, and my hand spasmed. The kobold spilled upon the ground. He yanked the knife out of my flesh, and swept up the kobold. Then he was on his feet, glaring down at me. “You will not leave me this way!”
He turned, and aiming at the bank of silver that surrounded us, he cocked his arm, ready to throw the kobold away, just as he’d done in that other life.
But in this life Moki reached him first. Jolly’s little hound had a long grudge against Kaphiri. He leaped on him, sinking his strong teeth into the back of Kaphiri’s knee, and Kaphiri went down. The kobold burst within his palm. I saw the silver vapors leach out between his fingers. He saw them too, and his eyes went wide. He stood up and hurled the remains of the kobold as far away as he could, but he had been turned around, and the fragments flew into the great shell. The burnt avatar of the goddess wailed. She leaped upon his back, driving him to his knees, but it was far too late to stop the kobold in its work. A brilliant silver fire spilled across Kaphiri’s hand. I did not wait to see more. I grabbed Moki and scrambled away, while a horrible scream erupted behind me, and a wailing that I knew must be the avatar.
I did not look back again until I collapsed beside Jolly on the edge of the open ground. Blood was pumping from my wrist, and I could not feel the silver at all. Only Jolly’s will kept it from collapsing around us. He put his arms around me, unmindful of the blood—“Come on, Jubilee. Come on”—and we retreated together. A few steps only, and then he had to stop and lean against the silver. I used that chance to look back.
They had become a pillar of incandescent fire. Within the shell of the temple many other white fires blazed. They drew the silver to them, as true fire will pull in oxygen. Fat streams of luminous mist raced past us, swirling into the conflagration, and causing it to burn brighter and brighter so I thought I would go blind with its brilliance.
I turned away, and I did not look back again.
The silver streamed past us for only a few minutes. After that all became quiet and calm again. So at least we knew we had not set off the destruction of the silver, though what we had accomplished was less clear. I did not doubt Kaphiri was gone forever, but the goddess was vast, and I wondered if our white fire had consumed only some small part of her?