Linda Nagata - Memory

“Aye,” Ficer said. “It’s why I’m going now.”

“But why? Ficer, where do you have to go that you must be there today? If the silver rises, you could die. Jolly—” I turned to my brother for support. “You must convince him.”

“He won’t listen,” Jolly said softly. My brother looked as frightened as I felt.

“Ficer—”

“No,” he said gently. “Don’t argue more. I’ve lived my life in this desert, and I’ve traveled on worse days than this—”

“But you don’t have to go—”

“That’s not how I see it.” He started his bike, its soft purr resonate against the stone walls. “They could be in danger at the Temple of the Sisters. The traveler knows you were there. I must see to that… and too, I must speak with the old man. There is too much here I don’t understand.”

“But Emil doesn’t understand it either. None of us does. And—and—” I bowed my head. I didn’t know what to do, what I should do. “I am worried for them too,” I confessed. “And for you. None of you asked to be caught up in this.”

“Neither did you.”

That didn’t matter. “We’ll come with you.”

“No,” Ficer said. “You’ll stay here, at least until the weather clears. Your duty is to Jolly now.”

“But it may be I can keep you safe from the silver.”

“Jolly said as much. But believe that I am safe enough. Stay here with your brother. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s the best refuge you’ll find. I’ll come back if I can, but don’t wait for me once the weather clears. If your heart tells you to go, then you must go. Do you understand?”

So we went down to the gate. Jolly and I worked the winch, lowering his bike over the side while he climbed down the notch steps. Though it was day, the light was dim. There seemed to be no colors anywhere, and the scent of silver was very strong. Ficer called back to us once: “Set your savant to listen at dusk. I’ll call if I can.”

Then he was gone away.

The caverns seemed a haunted place after Ficer left, a grim prison of cold stone and memories, and the prospect of sleeping there another night had me in a quiet terror. It wasn’t long before Jolly and I decided to flee to the mesa top.

It was gloomy there with the sun lost behind a ceiling of low clouds, but it was still incomparably brighter than the caverns. We stood on the cliff’s edge and looked out across the plain. Silver glittered in every drainage and depression and for a long time we saw no sign of Ficer. Then Jolly spied a plume of dust far to the south, and we agreed it must be him, though it might have been a dust devil, or even a small landslide.

My savant had received no messages from Liam, Udondi, or Yaphet. I told Jolly not to be discouraged. We were not in the range of any working antenna, so any communications would be line-of-sight only, meaning the sender was no more than a few hours away. I tried not to show my own disappointment, tucking it away beside my terror of the coming night.

We spent the morning exploring a tangle of pocket canyons in the mesa top, while silver gathered ever more thickly on the plain below. There were dead kobold wells in almost every ravine, so that we soon learned to be wary of holes as we beat paths through the desert brush.

There were birds everywhere, and day-flying bats as well. A constant, mad twittering filled the brush, and each time we descended into a new ravine, Moki would charge ahead of us, sending a storm of winged creatures into the air. The flocks would circle just above the ravines, keeping low, as if they feared being seen, and indeed, after a while a hawk appeared overhead, and then Moki could not get the flocks to stir at all.

I wondered where the birds went on the nights when silver climbed higher than the mesa top. I imagined them spending the whole night on the wing, gliding in a luminous space between the bright silver and the ethereal gleam of the Bow of Heaven. With such thoughts in my mind I fell asleep in a nest of grass and I did not waken again until the evening.

We went to retrieve the savant, and to wait for a message from Ficer, but night gathered and no message came. The plain below us was a luminous sea, and overhead was only darkness. We stayed there until silver began to gleam among the ravines on the mesa top. Then we retreated into the cavern and sealed the door.

I made it my strategy to put off sleep as long as possible. To this end, I persuaded Jolly to explore with me the labyrinth of the cavern. He had not slept in the afternoon, and I could see fatigue on his face, but he set off gamely beside me. We took a flashlight, and picking one of the many dark tunnels that branched from our well-lit hallway, we set out to see what there might be.

Within a few steps the tunnel began to descend. That was no surprise, as we were encamped at the top of the caverns. Still, it made me anxious, for silver lay all around the plateau.

Shadows jumped away from the beam of our flashlight, while dead kobold shells crunched unpleasantly under our feet. Worse, the scent of their living relatives faded the farther along we went, and I soon began to fantasize that I could smell silver seeping into the cavern.

Then Moki hesitated, peering ahead into the darkness and growling.

Kaphiri. My heart thundered and my skin grew flush as I imagined him climbing up that tunnel from the sea of silver that surrounded our keep. But there was no sound of footsteps and I could not imagine how anyone could walk among the dead kobold shells without sound. So I edged forward and Jolly went with me, and in a few steps we came upon a chamber so broad our flashlight beam could not find the other side.

Cautiously, we entered that great space. The ceiling was high, maybe thirty feet, while the walls that stood within reach of our light curved as if part of a great circle. “Is it an audience chamber?” I wondered, remembering the audience chamber of Ki-Faun that I had seen within my dream.

Jolly said, “It’s big enough to be a marketplace.”

There was no evidence of either function. All we found within reach of the light was a broken bike, shrouded in dust and missing its wheels, lying forlornly beside a knee-high midden of bird bones. Moki growled over these things while we examined them. Then Jolly took the flashlight, and casting its light about, he searched the shadows. He did not have to say what he was looking for. I followed him, expecting to see the bones of the bike’s owner materialize in the gloom. Instead the light picked out a purple pigment on the walls.

“Look at that,” Jolly said. “Is it writing?” He edged forward, until the light revealed a scrawl of purple lettering covering the wall from the height of my head to the floor. “It is writing. Jubilee, can you read it? No, wait. I can read it .”

Indeed, the script and the language were the same as ours. It had been done in a chalk of purple tint that had since acquired some moisture from the air so that it shone like enameled paint. “Look how the letters have begun to drip,” I said. “This cannot be too old.”

Jolly was eagerly deciphering the rough lines. “It’s a journal. Look here. ‘Today the silver subsided beneath the gate. I try not to hope for tomorrow.’ That is dated ‘day twelve.’” Jolly scowled. “Does that mean a player was trapped here for twelve days?”

“For far longer than that, I would guess,” I said, gazing down the length of the wall. The writing continued at least as far as the light reached.

It came to both of us then, that we might be trapped at Azure for many days, and it was as if the room grew colder, the walls harder, the reverberations of our voices a little more loud. “The longer we are here,” Jolly said, “the better chance Kaphiri will have of finding us.”