Linda Nagata - Memory

At the sound of his name he froze, one hand on the first notch.

“Go on up,” the gruff voice commanded. “There’s little time.”

Ficer Elmi. I had heard him speak last night.

But Jolly did not climb up. “Is it her?” he asked, his voice glassed with fear. “You said it was only one player who came here.”

“It was only one.”

“Jolly,” I said softly. “It is me. Jubilee.”

He stared upward, but it was dark and I could not see his face.

“Come up,” I urged. “Hurry.”

The gruff voice backed me. “Be up, Jolly, now. Before the silver awakes.”

Jolly obeyed, though he climbed hesitantly.

“Haul the rope,” the old man reminded me.

I scrambled to do it. A fierce tug brought the bike swinging into the air. I shifted my grip and hauled again. “Hurry,” I pleaded. “The silver is close.”

“We’ve a minute,” Ficer Elmi said.

The bike cleared the ledge. I secured the rope, then swung the boom in just as Jolly reached the top. Moki was frantic, bouncing around on the edge of the cliff and barking so that I feared he would slip over or that he would knock Jolly off. “Moki!” I shouted. “Back up! Back up!”

Just then a faint gleam of silver ignited on the flat below. Jolly saw it and twisted around. “Ficer!”

“I’m here,” Ficer answered, his voice comfortingly close. “Just below. Now climb .”

Jolly scrambled onto the ledge, and Ficer followed behind him. Moki was beside himself, barking and dancing, and I was fighting with the cable, struggling to get it unclipped from the bike, a task made hard by the darkness and my shaking hands. Ficer knelt beside me. His callused hands helped with the hasp. “It’ll be heavy this night,” he murmured. “Can you not feel the weight of silver in every breath?”

I could. “Why were you out so late?”

“We were to meet three, not one.”

Jolly squatted among the shadows beside the door, cradling Moki in his arms. “We thought you might be him,” he said in a voice so low I suspected he still wasn’t sure.

“I’m not him. But things have happened. Come. We’ll talk inside.”

Even before Ficer sealed the door, Jolly turned to me and asked the question I dreaded most. “Why were you the one who came, Jubilee? Where is my father?”

“He is gone, Jolly. Gone to the silver.”

Not a flicker of surprise could I see on his face, only grief. He must have guessed the truth long before. Indeed, nothing else could have kept our father away. Now Jolly’s gaze fixed me in a way I remembered well. “Tell me how it happened.”

And I would have, there on the doorstep, but Ficer intervened. “We’ll have time to tell our stories when we’ve settled in.” He mounted his bike. “Azure is not a true temple and the kobolds are poorly tended. We’ll be safer on the highest floor.”

Jolly rode on the back of Ficer’s bike, with Moki cradled in his arms. They went first, while I followed them up the wide stairway, lit from above by optical tubes that glinted against the blue stone. Dead kobold shells crunched beneath our tires, and the taste of dust was in my mouth. It was easy to think we were the first players to enter that refuge in a hundred years. All looked abandoned, yet the sweet scent of temple kobolds permeated the air.

“There is no keeper here,” Ficer assured me when I questioned him on the matter. “Not in my memory, or the memory of anyone I have known.”

The stairs climbed in three long flights to a chamber of startling size, as wide as the auditorium at Halibury, though the ceiling was so low I could have jumped and touched it. The air was fresh and for good reason: nine bell-shaped chimneys perforated the rock. I supposed they were made to bring air into the cavern, but they also served as excellent conduits of sand, for mounds of it were piled beneath each vent.

Ficer sat astride his bike, watching me as I studied the chamber, as if waiting on my reaction. He was a tall man, thin and dark and sun-wrinkled so that pale dust was trapped in the deep fissures of his skin. Even so, and even though his hair was silvery white, he did not seem old. This puzzled me, until I decided he was an artifact of the desert, as much as the clean stone and the blowing sand, and I left it at that. “This is the well room,” he announced, when I refused to make any comment.

I smiled, sure he was having fun with me. Then I looked again at the mounds of sand on the floor. Was I supposed to believe each one was the mouth of a well? But I had never heard of a temple with more than one well. Even the oldest temple at Xahiclan was said to have only one, though it was vast in size.

Ficer smiled. “You don’t believe me? Take a look.”

I glanced at Jolly, but his face was turned away. My grief was older than his, and my curiosity was strong. So I dropped the kickstand on my bike and ventured across the chamber—to find it was just as Ficer had said. The mounds of sand were not made by the wind blowing grains into the ventilation shafts. Instead, the shafts appeared to have been carved over centuries by the traffic of stone-eating kobolds flying up from the mouths of nine wells that perforated the floor.

“It’s a natural wonder,” Ficer said. “More so, because the wells die out every few years, but always they come back to life. No one can explain it.”

I wondered how often Maya’s scholars came this way, and if their theory of silver tides could say anything about this strange concentration of wells. “But why is there no keeper?”

“Azure is a strange place. A place to pass through. No one I know has ever stayed more than three nights. Too much history.” He waved a sun-blackened hand, indicating the double stairway on the opposite side of the chamber, that rose without rails to the right and left. “There are chambers and passages all through the rock, enough room for a hundred people, or more than a hundred if they’re not desert folk. But the only way into the refuge is by those notches we climbed. What kind of people would wall themselves in like that? Not a happy people, I expect. Not at all.”

I looked around, and despite the large size of the chamber I felt a sense of entrapment.

Ficer nodded. “Some say the memory of those who made this place is still here, locked up in the rock. That’s how it seems to me.”

Though I had known Ficer only a few minutes, I could not imagine him being frightened by ghost stories. So perhaps there truly was something strange about this place. “There aren’t any bogies here, are there?” I asked suspiciously.

“You know of bogies?”

“I met one.”

He grunted. “Nasty things, spawned in greed. There have always been players who would try to protect the wealth of one life until they could find it in the next, and some, even worse, who could not endure the thought of others trespassing in the ruins of their estates, so they used bogies to guard them, even through the silver. But there are no bogies here. Just memories, and that’s enough.”

“We’ll be all right, though?” Jolly asked, his voice hoarse, little more than a whisper, though when he looked up at Ficer his eyes were dry. “This one night?”

Ficer gave him a reassuring smile. “Sure we will. And tomorrow we’ll do our part for the temple before we go.”

“For the next player,” Jolly said with a solemn nod, as if repeating a phrase he’d heard many times before.

“For the next player,” Ficer agreed.

We laid our sleeping bags in a small side chamber. I shared out some of my dwindling supply of packaged food, while Ficer brought out dried meat and fruit. I didn’t know how to ask the questions that were most important to me—what had happened to Jolly, where he had been, what he knew of Kaphiri. Also, I knew if I started asking questions, I would have to answer them too, and I was reluctant to say more about my father. There was a quality to Jolly’s face, a fragility, that frightened me. I couldn’t guess what he’d been through, or how much more he could bear. What if he blamed himself for my father’s death? Kaphiri had come seeking him after all.