Linda Nagata - Memory

He did allow Liam and Udondi inside. Liam still wore the patch over his injured eye. He held my hand for a long time, looking pleased, but troubled too. Udondi remarked again and again on my luck, speaking a little too loudly. As Emil had said, my survival was unnatural. So what explained it? Looking on their worried faces, I guessed they knew something I did not.

“Why am I alive?” I asked at last. “You all know, don’t you?”

The far corners of the room suddenly commanded their complete attention.

“Emil,” I insisted, “you said there was an exception to the blood poisoning. What exception? You must tell me. Please.”

His eyebrows did a zigzag dance. “Ah. Well. Your case is fascinating, you see, because you suffered harm from the traveler’s blood, though you did not die.”

“That’s right,” Udondi said. “You should have suffered no effect at all, if—” She caught herself. Her gaze met Liam’s.

“If what?” I demanded.

She sighed. “If your blood crossed with the blood of your lover.”

I must have misheard! But Liam confirmed it. “It’s the only exception,” he said gruffly. “A player cannot be poisoned by the blood of her lover.”

I stared at him, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. “Kaphiri is not my lover.”

“I know it.”

“Yaphet is my lover!”

“Jubilee, I know it.”

“Still, that is the only known exception,” Udondi said.

I closed my eyes, hearing again his harsh voice: I could almost think you were her , come again. He had said those words to me. And he had looked like Yaphet. He had looked so very much like him…

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Liam said. “If… if there was something between you, you’d have sensed it…” He hesitated, waiting for me to deny I’d felt anything, but I could not. “Anyway, you should have suffered no harm, if it had been that way. As it was, you nearly died.”

“But she had two lovers, didn’t she?” I whispered.

“Don’t think about that,” Udondi commanded, though she might as well have ordered me not to breathe.

Still, there was good news to be shared. Jolly had called while I was feverish. As it turned out, he’d never received my message. It seemed his rescuer, this Ficer Elmi, had heard a report of strangers in the town where Jolly first appeared—strangers with a lively interest in the odd incident of the boy who stepped out of the silver. Ficer Elmi had decided that an expedition into the desert was long overdue, so he and Jolly had spent the past few days exploring the ruins of lost, unmapped stations.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked. “If the stations are in ruins, surely it’s because their kobold wells have failed?”

Liam shrugged. “This Ficer Elmi has apparently survived the Iraliad for a hundred twenty years. I’ve no doubt Jolly is safer with him than he’ll be with us… uh, I’m not sure I said that right.”

“Such confidence!” Udondi chided, but her smile didn’t last. “Still it’s true. We’ll need to think hard on our next move.”

To that end they planned to set out within the hour, to scout the land to the north looking for any sign of a new assault against us. “But you can’t go on without me,” I protested.

Udondi took my hand. “We’re not. We’re going north, not east, and we’ll be back by tomorrow evening. That’s how long you have to regain your strength. It’s not much time.”

I shrugged. “If you come back so late, we won’t be able to leave until the morning anyway.”

Liam scowled, the way he did when he was uneasy. “The scholars here think that maybe the silver will come late, both tonight and tomorrow night. We’re thinking of leaving tomorrow in the evening, to throw off pursuit.”

Travel the Iraliad at dusk? “Liam, that’s crazy. If you’re trusting to my luck—”

“Oh, no. Your luck’s too harsh to trust, Jubilee. But these scholars—they’ve studied the flow of silver here for over a century. They’re sure enough of their predictions that they came back last night after full dark had fallen.”

We talked some more about it. I didn’t like the idea of traveling at night, but they badgered me into a promise that I would at least consider it, and soon after that they took their leave.

I wanted to watch them ride away, but Maya came into the room and told me I must not raise the shade or show myself at any window. “Kaphiri may be watching, or he may have sent someone, to learn if you lived or not. Don’t give away the truth. It’s better for you if he thinks you’re dead.”

I should have been dead, but there was something monstrous inside me that had let me live.

“Do you believe us now?” I asked Maya as she turned to leave the room. “Do you understand why we did as we did?”

She stopped at the door and looked back at me. Wariness, or maybe regret, lurked in her eyes. Her tall, stern frame seemed a little stooped. “All the time you were outside,” she said, so softly I had to strain to hear, “I was standing just within the front doors. I heard everything he said to you.”

I couldn’t think what to answer. She had been there, but she had not helped me. Maybe there had been no way she could help, and still…

I looked at the shade, at the sunlight streaming in, until I heard the door close.

Emil returned soon after that, shuffling in his time-weighted gait, a white shawl held about his shoulders. He sat beside my bed and asked after my health and we talked. I could feel his curiosity, but he was too polite to guide the conversation toward Kaphiri. So I did it for him: “If he was my lover, we should have known each other right away, but we didn’t. Still, he suspected. The blood poisoning was a test.”

“One you did not truly pass.”

“Would he see it that way?”

Emil’s thin shoulders rose in the slightest of shrugs. “He is far older than any player should be. Who can say what he thinks, or what pains his heart might still feel?”

“He hates her.”

Emil nodded. “I’m afraid it’s so. I met him once.”

“You met him? Are you from Lish? I thought he was known only in Lish.”

“In Lish they believe he is known only in Lish, but we have known him longer in the Iraliad. I grew up in the desert, and I returned here when my wandering was done. When I was a boy, it wasn’t uncommon to see the traveler. My own encounter occurred when I was twelve. He came at dusk, to the gate of the enclave my father tended in Bakran. It was my duty that evening to seal the gate, so I saw him first. He told me he wanted to buy food, but he would not enter the enclave. I ran to report this strange incident, and some among the cessants were very excited. They went out to speak with him and I…” Emil smiled. “I listened at the gate.

“Ah, the traveler! He was not a man you could easily forget. Frighteningly intelligent. A natural scholar. He did not look it, but he was ancient even then, and it was apparent he had not spent his days in idleness. The cessants questioned him on many subjects, and the range, the depth of his knowledge, it astounded me, even then when I was twelve. But his bitterness was as obvious as his brilliance. He had examined life without embracing it, and for all I could tell, he loved nothing.

“At last one of the cessants asked the question that is always first in the minds of all of us who have been defeated by the great search: why are so many players condemned to a life of loneliness?

“The traveler answered with these words: ‘Because this world was broken, along with the goddess who made it. We are all condemned to a cycle of death and birth and terrible loneliness, that can be stopped only by a final great flood of silver.’