Linda Nagata - Memory

Even in the darkness, I could see the surprise on her face. “Alive…? Has Kaphiri found him?”

“Not yet.”

“I would go with you.”

“We’re leaving now,” Liam said.

“I can leave now.”

“What about your sleeping scholar?” Liam nodded at the dark figure at the top of the stairs. I could hear Indevar’s soft, sonorous breathing, like the song of some night insect.

Udondi’s teeth flashed white. “We will ask Elek to see to it that he leaves this morning with the Ano truckers. He will be far away—and so shall we!—by the time he is conscious enough to protest.”

At the courtyard gate I called again to Moki, and this time he came. I put him in his bin. Then we let our bikes roll through the expansive gardens propelled by gravity alone. Elek waited for us at the outer wall, ghostlike in her white robe. If she was surprised to see Udondi in our company, she showed no sign. We stopped to talk with her, and she agreed to do what she could with Indevar. Then she took my hand. “I thought I knew the rules of the world, but all that changed the night the wizard came. Now myths are coming real, and I don’t know anymore what is possible and what is not. Perhaps it will be up to you to find out.” Then she hugged me, and I thanked her, and we left Temple Nathé behind.

At first we followed the highway south, as if to return to Temple Huacho. But once we rounded the hills that guarded the valley’s end we left the road, striking east into a trackless land of low hills and scattered trees. By dawn we’d put seventy miles behind us.

Udondi had her own field glasses. When the sun was well up we stopped, and she and Liam searched our trail, but they found no sign of pursuit. “Anyway, it’s too soon,” Liam said.

Udondi returned her field glasses to a battered saddle box. “Only if Indevar is alone.”

“Are you suspecting the Ano truckers too?”

“Better to be cautious, that’s all.”

Udondi had assured us that Indevar would sleep until noon, but what then? If he woke on a truck bound for Xahiclan, he might not get a ride back for many days. But if the truckers left him behind, it would be easy for him to find his way to Temple Huacho.

So I sent a message of warning to my mother, giving detailed descriptions of Mica Indevar and all the Ano truckers, and I instructed her to give no welcome to any of them should they appear at the temple gate. She surprised me with a reply even before I put my savant away: Jubilee, I will be cautious. But when the silver rises, all travelers are welcome at Temple Huacho.

What other answer had I expected? She was who she was, and I loved her for it, but it made me angry just the same. I felt torn. I wanted to be at Temple Huacho where I could protect my mother. But if I went home, I would be abandoning Jolly and that I could not do.

The day started bright and clear, but by midmorning clouds gathered, dark to match my mood. The land was changing too. We made good time in the gentle hills east of the highway, but our progress slowed as we entered a rising land of crumpled stone cut by steep ravines. When I looked back I was startled to see how far above the lowlands we had climbed. “Are these mountains?” I asked, looking ahead at a highland curtained by clouds.

“Not true mountains,” Udondi said. “This is the western escarpment of the Kalang Crescent. This part of the Kalang runs some eight hundred miles north to south, dividing the western lands from the southern reaches of the Iraliad. We’re near to its northern limit, where the escarpment swings easterly, to make a great crescent reaching far into the desert.” She frowned at the heights. “The plateau is supposed to be only twenty-five hundred feet high, though it looks higher to me. Anyway, it’s high enough to catch the clouds that come from the northern ocean, so it’ll be wet up there, and densely forested. But it’s also an empty land, and there’s a good chance we can make our way along the eastern spur without being seen. Then we could descend into the Iraliad, far beyond the reach of any permanent highway.”

This encyclopedic answer amazed me. “But I didn’t think you’d been in these lands before. How do you know so much of what is here?”

Udondi smiled. “I am new to this region. But I try to understand the temper of the land wherever I am, even if I’m only passing through… just in case something happens and I find myself in quiet flight before sunrise.”

I blushed, for I had not once thought to look at a map. I could not remember ever using one. There had never been a need. I knew every dell, every stream in Kavasphir, I knew how to find the highway, I knew how to follow the highway to Halibury, or Xahiclan—but every geography beyond that was only a vague reference in my mind.

By contrast, Liam had traveled a third of the way around the world and Udondi had likely wandered much farther. Her battered bike looked as if it had been all the way around the ring, though it still ran smooth and fast. I felt childish beside them, and very foolish, but also grateful I was not alone. “It’s lucky for Jolly he doesn’t have to count on just me to find him,” I said around a sudden constriction in my throat. “Or both of us might be lost forever.”

“If you got lost it would not be forever,” Liam said gruffly. “Jolly would not have a worry.”

I smiled my gratitude, but then I nodded again at the cloud-shrouded heights. All my life I had heard of the hazards of mountains. “Even if these are just little mountains, do we want to enter them? I have always heard there is a great danger of silver in any highland, and surely we cannot journey all the way down the eastern spur before nightfall?”

“Not unless we find a way to fly,” Udondi answered with a grin. “This is a rough land.”

“There’s no sign at all it’s settled,” Liam said doubtfully.

“That’s true. East and south there are no temples recorded on any maps I’ve seen. If we follow the Kalang Crescent we’ll have to camp for several nights, but it’s said silver is rarely seen in that forest. It’s an old land. Very old. We could be safe from Kaphiri there, at least for a while, for he cannot appear at will in a land where there is no silver, and he cannot bring the silver to such a place unless he first travels there like an ordinary man.”

“And if we go north?” Liam asked. “Following the foot of the crescent?”

“The terrain will get easier. In a hundred fifty miles or so there will even be a small highway that runs along the base of the Kalang and into the desert. There are temples there we could take shelter in, but…”

“But where there are temples, there are also truckers,” I finished for her.

“So the wise course would be to chance the forest,” Liam said, “except I have to wonder, if this land is as quiet as you say, why have we seen no sign of settlements? Safe lands are not so common that players will overlook them year after year.”

Udondi turned her hands palm up. “I truly don’t know. But no land is safe without a sheltering temple and there are none here.”

For myself, I wanted to travel unobserved for as many days as possible and I was willing to risk mountains, albeit small ones, to do that. So after a few more minutes of discussion we agreed to try the Kalang Crescent, and we set out again on our climb toward the clouds.

There is a problem with forests where abundant rain falls. It’s a matter of recursion. Dominating everything is the primary forest of tall trees, but beneath that there is a smaller forest of slender shrubs and fallen trunks, and beneath these are smaller species still, and for all I know there are greater and lesser levels of microforests among the mosses that grow upon the ground.