There was no way to know, and neither one of us had the courage to suggest going back. So we continued our retreat, creeping for hours across the spongy ground, with Moki in between us.
The silver was never more than a few inches away. Jolly struggled to push it off, to hold it back. It yielded to him only with great reluctance, but it did give way.
At one point we stopped, and Jolly made a bandage for my arm, using the fabric of his shirt. I looked in his eyes, and saw his exhaustion, and I knew his thirst must be the equal of mine. But we had no water. We had no food. “Maybe you should sleep,” Jolly suggested. “And when you wake up you’ll be stronger. You’ll be able to help me hold off the silver.”
But I was afraid to sleep. I was afraid Jolly would give in to exhaustion too, and then the silver would roll in. Or that I would bleed to death. If I was going to die, I wanted to know it. So we pushed on.
I do not know how much time passed like that. It might have been only an hour, or many hours, I cannot say. Consciousness was slippery, and time did not seem to matter.
But sometime later Jolly spoke again. “Jubilee? Is something happening? Look around. Is the silver changing?”
I looked up, surprised to discover that we had left the flat floor of the Cenotaph. We were clambering up a slope of tumbled stone. “How long have we been climbing?” I whispered.
“I don’t know. Not long, I think. But look at the silver. Is it my eyes? Or is it changing?”
I looked. The silver was still wrapped close around us, but its light seemed different. Warmer. No longer was it a featureless fog, for I could see swirls and currents running through it. “Is it thinning?”
“I don’t know.” He sat down on the loose slope. “I’m so tired.”
“I know.” I raised my good hand. The ha still sparkled between my fingers. “If you want to sleep, I think maybe I can hold the silver off.”
“Okay.”
But he didn’t sleep. Neither did I. We sat together, and after a while the silver started brightening again, but now its light seemed tinted warm yellow. It was a familiar hue, though at first I couldn’t think where I had seen it before, until finally the memory came to me: it was sunlight.
As the silver cleared, the slope around us came into view: a wasteland of crumbled minerals, and flows of transformed stone. There was not a weed, or a blade of grass, or a trickle of water anywhere to be seen.
Then the last of the silver above us gave way, and suddenly sunlight fell upon us and we could see all the way to the top of the Cenotaph, and to a brilliant blue sky beyond.
“Oh,”Jolly said.
I could not manage even that much. All I could do was to stare up at a towering wall that was certainly equal in height to the southern escarpment of the Kalang. “We can’t climb that,” Jolly whispered. “Not without food and water.”
Water. Already my throat was dry and horribly swollen. “Maybe we’ll find water.”
“Okay. Maybe.”
But neither of us made a move to start. We waited, while the sun chased away the silver that still lay below us. In only a few minutes we could see all the way across the vast crater of the Cenotaph, to the far wall, blurred by distance. I studied the white floor of the crater, but I could not see the ruins of the goddess’s temple.
“Maybe she really is gone from the world,” Jolly said. He lay back, and after a few minutes he pointed at the sky. “Look there,” he said. “A hawk flying.”
We watched it until it passed out of sight over the rim of the Cenotaph.
“We should go,” Jolly said.
So far we had climbed only a hundred feet or so above the crater floor, but I felt a little stronger for our rest, or maybe it was the comfort of sunlight. Anyway, I made it to my feet and we pushed on, not because there was a hope of getting out, but because there was nothing else to do.
We had been going only a few minutes when I started to hallucinate. I thought I heard voices calling down the cliff walls, familiar syllables echoing against the rock: Jol-ly-ly-ly! Jub-blee! Jub-blee! Jub-blee! Sounds that rippled over the stone.
Moki pricked his ears and stared upward. Even Jolly stopped to look, scowling at the terrible walls. “Did you hear that?” he asked me.
“You mean Liam calling?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I imagined it.”
“Well then, I imagined it too.”
Even in my fevered state of mind that didn’t seem likely. “So call out to him.”
Jolly drew a great breath. Then he bellowed at the top of his lungs, “Uncle!!! We’re here. We’re here!” and it made such a cacophony of echoes that a flight of doves took off from the crater rim, and I feared a landslide would start among the loose scree.
But when the last of the echoes died away, Liam called out again. “Stay where you are! We’ll come get you!”
Then I heard Udondi whoop and Ficer bellow.
“They’re all here!” Jolly shouted, and I returned his smile.
Epilogue
We made our way back to the Temple of the Sisters. I rode behind Liam, my arms around his waist and my cheek pressed against his broad shoulders. It took us three days to reach the Sisters, and we camped twice on high ground and only once by a kobold well. The silver still appeared each night, but only as a low mist in the ravines and along the lower slopes of each desert rise.
We stayed seven nights at the Sisters, and I spent most of my time there writing down my remembrances. It was Emil who suggested it, for I could not speak of all that had happened. It hurt too much even to try, but he said I should not keep it inside.
So I started writing. I started in the middle, with all that had happened since I’d left the Temple of the Sisters, and by the time we were ready to leave, I had a draft for Emil to read.
After that we continued north, skirting the foot of the Kalang. I thought of Nuanez in his forest, and I told myself that someday I would visit him, but I did not have the heart for it just yet.
After two days we reached the desert highway. Or at least Ficer said we had reached it. I could not make out a road unless it was that the ratio of rocks had fallen off somewhat.
Ficer left us there, heading east back into the desert, while we turned west. By the afternoon, the invisible highway finally became a true road, and we followed its switchbacks up a long, steep slope, until by evening we had left the Iraliad behind.
Udondi said there had once been a temple where the road met the edge of the great desert basin, but it was not there when we passed through, so we camped another night.
Evidence of silver storms was everywhere. The road to Xahiclan had mostly been erased. Now and then there were follies marking where it had once run: arches and huts, and once, a wilderness of blocks hauntingly similar to the miniature cityscape we had found in the Cenotaph. We met no other travelers.
On the third day we found a long section of intact road. The miles fell behind us, and by late afternoon we reached the broad river valley where Xahiclan once stood.
The enclave was gone.
I had been there only once, but I remembered fondly walking the long, tall wall that skirted the river, and the merry streets with their crowded buildings, bright with lights at night and the heady scent of kobolds. I wondered if Kaphiri had murdered the city, or if the rising silver had simply overwhelmed it, but it seemed likely I would never know.