Limit of Vision (44 page)

Moki woke me, his sharp high bark like an electric shock. I sat up. Jolly had fallen asleep where he’d been sitting. Now his head jerked up. I was astonished to see motes of silver dancing in his hair and over his hands and in the folds of his clothes. He turned to the window.

The silver light was brighter than I had ever seen it. Jolly was silhouetted in its glow. He rose slowly to his knees, staring out the window like someone mesmerized.

“Jolly!” I spoke past Moki’s frantic yipping. “There is silver on you.”

He looked at his hands. Then he swiped them against his pants as if to wipe the evidence of silver away, but the motes would not leave. “It’s too late,” he whispered. “I called it, and now it’s coming.”

At first I didn’t know what he meant. Then Moki went ominously silent, and a moment later the silver rose over the windowsill. It had rolled up through the orchard all the way to the temple. Now it spilled through the window and into the room: a luminous stream that spread in a smoky pool across the floor. Its fresh, crisp scent filled my lungs and planted a quiet terror in my heart.

I crept backward, to the far corner of my bed, pulling my blanket of stars with me until I felt the wall against my shoulders. I could see no way to escape, for the silver had already rolled up against the door.

“
Mommy!
” I whispered it like a spell, a word with magical warding powers. “
Mommy
.” Too frightened to shout.

The silver started to rise. It inflated in ghostly tendrils that swirled toward Jolly, who seemed hypnotized by it, for he didn’t move. I reached out, grabbing a fold of his shirt where the silver motes were thinnest, and I yanked him backward. “Get away from it!” I whispered. “Move back. Move back.”

He seemed to wake up. Had he still been asleep? He scrambled into my corner. Moki came with him, barking frantically again. I put my hand over his muzzle and hissed at him to
hush!
I did not want Mama to wake. What would happen if she hurried to our room, if she threw open the door? She would be taken.

“
Go away!
” Jolly whispered. “
I didn’t mean it
.”

He had boxed me into the corner, put himself between me and the looming silver fog. Never had I seen silver so close. I peered past him, in terror, in wonder. It looked grainy. As if it were a cloud made of millions of tiny particles just like the silver motes that clung to him.

The cloud touched the edge of my bed.

Jolly started to creep away from me, moving toward it. “No,” I whimpered. “Don’t go.”

I grabbed his shirt again and tried to drag him back, but he turned on me in fury. “Don’t touch me! If the silver takes one of us, it’ll take the other too if we make a bridge for it to cross.”

“I don’t care!” I started to cry, but I didn’t touch him again. I held on to Moki instead, who was trembling in my lap. “
I want Mama
.
I want Dad
.”

“I do too,” Jolly said in a soft, shaky voice. Then a tendril of silver slipped across the bed and touched his knee. For a moment the tendril glowed brighter. Then it flashed over him, expanding across his legs, his torso, his arms, his face, all of him, in a raw second. For one more second he knelt on the bed like a statue of a boy cast in silver. Then the cloud rolled over him, hiding his terrible shape within a curtain of perfect silence.

I couldn’t breathe. Air wouldn’t come into my chest. I pressed myself against the wall and held on to Moki, wanting to scream, wanting it almost as badly as I wanted air, but I didn’t dare because I didn’t want Mama to come into the room and be stolen by the silver too. Even when the glittering mist began to retreat, leaving the foot of the bed empty, with ancient letters newly written in gold on the bed frame and on the stone floor, I stayed silent in my corner. I waited until the cloud had drifted out of the room—not out of the window, for the window was gone, and most of the bedroom’s wall with it, dissolved in the silver, just like Jolly.

I stared out at the orchard, wondering why the trees had remained unchanged, but silver was like that: sometimes it would leave things and sometimes it would change them, but it always took the players it touched, and animals too. I waited, until the last wisp still clinging to the ruined wall evaporated from existence. Then I screamed.

Chapter 2

If a child should ask,
What is the world?
a parent might answer, “It is a ring-shaped island of life made by the goddess in defiance of the frozen dark between the stars. On the outer rim of this ring there is mostly land, and that is where we live. On the inner rim there is only ocean. We have day and night because the world-ring spins around its own imaginary axis. At the same time it follows another, greater circle around the sun so that we see different stars in different seasons.” These are the simple facts everyone accepts.

But if a child should ask,
What is the silver?
the answer might take many forms:

“It is a fog of glowing particles that arises at night to rebuild the world.”

“It is a remnant of the world’s creation.”

“It is the memory of the world.”

“It is the dreaming mind of the wounded goddess and you must never go near her! Her dreams will swallow any player they touch. Do you want to be swallowed up by the silver? No? Then stay inside at night. Never wander.”

What is the silver? After Jolly was taken, that question was never far from my mind. I interviewed my mother, I consulted libraries for their opinions, and I asked the passing truckers what they thought. It was from the truckers I first heard the rumor that the silver was rising. The oldest among them had lived more than two hundred years, and they swore it was a different world from the one in which they’d been born: “
The roads were safer in those days. The silver did not come so often, nor flood so deep.
”

Sometimes their younger companions would scoff, but as I grew older, even the youths insisted they had seen a change. “
The silver is rising, higher every year, as if it would drown the world.
”

I began to keep records. I noted the nights on which the silver appeared, how often it touched the temple’s perimeter wall, and how often it passed over. That first year I kept count, it reached the orchard only once, but in the second year it breached the wall three times, and seven times in the year after that.

I was fifteen when I showed these notes to my mother. Her expression was grim as she studied them. “Kavasphir is a wild land,” she admitted, handing the notes back to me.

“Do you think the silver is rising?”

She was hesitant in her answer. “All things move in cycles.”

“I have heard the silver moves in a cycle of a thousand years. That it grows more abundant with time, until the world seems on the verge of drowning in it . . . and then it is driven back until there is almost no silver left and that is almost as bad.”

My mother said, “I have heard that too.”

I waited for her to elaborate, to explain why this was a foolish rumor, but she was lost in thought. It was night, and we sat together in her bedroom, the only sound that of the fountain playing in the garden beyond the open window.

At last I spoke again, my voice hushed. “Do you think it’s true?”

“It’s hard to know for sure.”

“But it could be?”

“The world is old, and most of our past forgotten. But fragments remain. In the libraries . . . and in the lettered stone and the follies the silver makes. There is enough to convince most scholars that the world has passed through many ages of history. Sometimes the silver was common. Other times it was rare. No one can say why.”

“No one has explained it?”

She shrugged. “Many have tried to explain it, but none in a manner to convince me. Players love stories, but they do not always love facts.” We traded a smile. “Don’t be afraid, Jubilee. Perhaps the silver
is
rising, but I don’t think we are on the verge of drowning just yet.”

What is the silver?
Eventually I decided it must be all the things players claimed it to be. It was a remnant of the world’s creation: that was how it was able to disassemble solid objects, breaking them down into its gleaming fog while it compiled new objects in their places. It was the memory of the world, mapping the structure of everything it touched, so that it could bring ancient objects forward in time—to create meaningless follies in the wilderness, or to deposit veins of valuable ore in the exposed rock of the Kavasphir Hills. And it was the mind of a dreaming goddess, or at least of some savant of an ancient world far more learned than ours. This I allowed only because of a handful of legends. Mostly the silver acted in a way that seemed random, and unaware. Now and then though, there were stories of some tool or talisman brought forward through time, delivered at a crucial moment, as if someone beyond the silver sought to move the pieces . . .

But why only now and then?

I would look at the scar on the back of my hand, remembering the night Jolly was taken, and I would wonder.

I never told my mother how I got that scar. It was a strange mark: an intricate ridge of reddish tissue that didn’t fade as any normal scar would. I would look at it, and wonder: Had I caused Jolly’s death with my adventure in the kobold well? For neither I nor anyone else could explain why the silver had been able to breach the temple that night.

But if ever I got to thinking it might be my fault, I would remember what Jolly had said, a moment before the silver spilled over the windowsill:
I
called it, and now it’s coming.
Those words were engraved in my memory, though how he—or anyone—could summon the wild chaos of silver I didn’t know.

There was much I didn’t know, but I swore it would not always be so.

I was never lonely in those years. By the time I was seventeen, the count of my younger siblings had grown to six and I had long since corrupted my nearest sister, Emia, and our oldest brother after her, Rizal, and made them my companions in many adventures that our parents did not approve. But I abandoned them that year, when my father’s brother came to live with us.

I haven’t said much about my father. In a sense, there isn’t much to say. He was a wayfarer who had traveled a third of the way around the ring of the world to find his destined lover, and during his years on the road he had many adventures, and many narrow escapes. Then one sunny day he found his way to the enclave of Halibury, and as he’d done in hundreds of enclaves before, he went to see the matchmaker.

That self-righteous old man wanted nothing more than to send this foreign ruffian on his way. But against all expectation, this Kedato Panandi turned out to possess the blood pattern that matched my mother’s. The matchmaker sent a note to her at Temple Huacho, giving the worst description.

My mother was not a young woman. She’d given up wayfaring ten years before. Having reached her late forties, she’d settled her mind to a single life. Now she read the matchmaker’s description and was afraid. The body speaks its own language. What if this stranger truly was a wicked man? And what if she loved him anyway? Such things happened. This was no perfect world.

So she dithered in her answer, until finally Kedato bribed the matchmaker’s assistant and got her name. The body speaks its own language. They were married on the day they met, and though she was twenty years older than her husband and far more learned, Kedato Panandi was a gentle, intelligent man, and together they were able to make a marriage of love and of respect. Theirs was the same story told in a thousand romantic tales out of history. (No one tells the stories with bad endings.) Read any of these to understand my father.

Like his older brother, Liam Panandi too had traveled alone a third of the way around the ring of the world, stopping at every enclave he passed to visit the matchmaker and enter his blood pattern into the local market pool. But he had not found a lover yet.

Who hasn’t paused to wonder why the world is made this way? Our dogs, and the animals that run wild, are all able to mate freely: any male and any female of their species together stand a good chance of producing offspring. So why is life harder for men and women? Why do our bodies speak in individual languages that almost no one else can understand?

“Because the goddess who left us here was wicked and cruel.” That’s what Liam growled, that first night he was with us, still surly from the road, and I thought he might be right. Who else but a wantonly powerful goddess could find romance in the notion that only one lover exists for all of us, in all the vast world?

There was no question of Liam and I becoming lovers. We were not a match. But he was only twenty-five while I was already seventeen, and we soon became good friends, hunting and exploring the wilderness around Temple Huacho until my sister complained I had forgotten her name.

Late in that year my father announced a plan to journey to Xahiclan. He liked to travel, so three or four times a year he would take the truck to Halibury or Xahiclan, bringing one of the children along with him each time. I whispered to Liam that we should grab the seats.

I’d heard a rumor in the market that there had been a great flood of silver on the Jowádela Plateau, and that truckers from Xahiclan had since sighted a vast field of newly deposited ruins north of the highway. The site was nearly three hundred miles from Temple Huacho, but Liam and I had fared as far as a hundred miles over roadless wilderness, camping overnight on hilltops before returning home. So three hundred miles didn’t sound so far, especially if we could ride most of the way in the truck.

My father was agreeable. So we loaded our off-road bikes onto the truck, shoved our savants in beside them, then climbed into the cab, waving good-bye to my jealous siblings and promising to bring them trophies from the ruins, if there were any to be found.

The morning was brilliant, the air steamy after a night of hard rain. We set off down the hill on a switchback road that had been rebuilt six times in the last year alone, after being destroyed by the night fogs. By contrast, the bramble of sweet raspberries surrounding the road never seemed to change.

That was the fickle nature of the silver: no one could say what its particles would seize and transform, and what would emerge unchanged from its fog, except that animate creatures could not survive the least contact with it—not the deer of the forest or the cats that hunted them, the birds or the insects or the players—and no living thing had ever been returned by it to the world.

That is why in some languages the silver is called
the fog of souls
.’ It is true that in their last exhalations the dying breathe forth clouds of silver that sink to the bedding or the floor, and then quickly vanish. This silver is said to contain the memory of the life that has passed, but I have done the math, and in a thousand years there are not enough dead to explain the silver that arises in just one night. So it would seem that human souls are but a small part of the memory of a world.

At the bottom of the hill the brambles came to an end, and shortly after that so did the pavement. For the next sixty miles we made our own road, driving through shallow vales filled with nodding fields of shoulder-high grass.

Long before I was born, a crew of engineers had passed through Kavasphir, laying out a route for an army of road-building kobolds to follow. For three months a smooth ribbon of pavement linked Temple Huacho to the Xahiclan highway. Then the silver rose, and in one night erased the road. What impressed me most about this story was that the road had lasted ninety days. In my lifetime I would expect it to be gone in less than ten.

So there were no roads in Kavasphir, but I didn’t mind. The slopes were gentle, and riding in the truck on its gliding suspension, propelled by silent engines through oceans of grass as high as the windows, I would pretend I was a bird, skimming the valleys on my smooth wings, free.

We stopped once in late morning, on a rise of land between two wide vales where a folly had been deposited by a recent flood of silver. It was an arched gateway of blue lapis lazuli sprouting between the rock outcroppings that stood watch in the narrow pass. The gateway’s two decorated pillars held up a sloping roof studded with stone dragons peeking out from under the shingle. The surrounding rocks were also decorated, with a frieze depicting a busy enclave populated by thousands of fanciful animals carrying on at tasks of trade and entertainment as if they were players.

My father frowned at the lovely obstruction, and offered his mundane assessment: “It’s too narrow to get the truck through.” And there was no way to drive around.

But it was early in the day so I wasn’t worried. “Out,” I said to Liam, pushing him toward the door. “I want to read the inscriptions.”

“I can read them from here,” Liam said as he slid off the seat and dropped to the ground. “It says ‘Luck and goodwill.’ It’s what these follies always say.”

But Kedato didn’t agree. “It’s neither one for us if we can’t get through.”

“We’ll get through,” I said as I scrambled out of the truck. Then I hurried to read the inscriptions while I still could.

The language was a version of the Ano syllabary: spiky symbols carved deep in the mottled blue stone and painted in gold leaf to make them stand out. I made out “luck” and “prosperity” so Liam was not far wrong. But there was far more that I could not read just yet, so I went to the back of the truck to retrieve my savant.

Kedato and Liam were there, arguing over which kobolds to use against the gate. My father glanced up at me, and smiled. He knew what I had come for. My savant was already unloaded, floating beside him at shoulder height. “Hurry and make your pictures,” he said. “We need to be on our way.”

“A minute,” I assured him. “No more.”

I crooked a finger at the device. The savant was a feather-light aerostat, held up by the low pressure of air within its slender wing. Gel lenses at the wing tips gave it sight, and fine wires embedded in its paper-thin shell acted as antennas so it could link to the market. Its surface was mimic, so it could assume the blue color of the day sky and disappear from sight, or drop to ground level and act as a video window when I wished to visit the market at night. The intelligence within it was based on a scholar of ancient languages who had lived in an enclave called Pesmir that was abandoned six hundred years ago when the silver began to encroach upon its borders.

Under my direction the savant surveyed the folly, recording both the carvings and the gateway from every side while Liam made jokes about what the symbols might mean. “This column here,” he said, pointing to stacked symbols on the inside of the gateway, “means ‘give us a kiss and you can go past.’”

“Give us a bite, more likely,” Kedato said. “The silver has left us a pretty gate, but it’s in the wrong place. If a trucker making the run to Huacho found himself stopped by this in the late afternoon, it could be his death gate.”

That was the hazard of travel: the silver changed things unpredictably. It could build a folly to block a narrow pass, or re-lay a road in a false direction, or leave a wilderness of towering stone where a road used to be. Truckers passed news of changes into the market—assuming the hilltop antennas were still standing, which wasn’t always true. Temple Huacho was cut off from the market several times every year when silver broke our chain of communication.

My father had selected his kobolds. They were a model of lithophores, stone eaters. Tiny as termites, they worked in much the same way. He emptied a vial of the little mechanics along both sides of the gateway. Their gray bodies crawled off in random directions until one stumbled into the stone. It must have emitted a signal, because all the others instantly turned and joined it. They set to work, chewing passages into the lapis rock, so that after a few seconds all that could be seen of them was a fine stream of dust dribbling out of a hundred tiny holes.

We sat on the ground beyond the gate and had a light lunch and waited.

From this ridge we could look ahead into the next valley. It was much like the one we had just left, carpeted in green shoulder-high grass, with broad-leafed trees owning the higher slopes. I watched a herd of antelope foraging on the western side; only the sharp points of their long horns were visible above the grass.

“It must have been a major flood to reach this high,” Liam said.

I glanced back at the lapis gate, then up at the hilltops and saw what he meant. Silver flowed downhill, which meant that both valleys must have been flooded to several hundred feet before the tide could drown this pass. Only the peaks of the rocks that framed the gate could have remained above it . . . unless the flood had started here on the ridge?

Kedato said, “It was a flood like this that took Jolly.”

I glanced at my scar, and frowned.

My father spoke again, in a voice soft and thoughtful, while I watched the antelope leave the grass to disappear one by one into the forest. “In all my traveling, I’ve never seen a land as turbulent as these hills. They say it’s worse in the high mountains or in the basin of the Iraliad, but no one wants to live in those places. This”—his hand swept in a gesture that took in the valley before us—“it’s a beautiful land, but never at rest. Never safe.”

This was the silver as a creative force, one that reworked the shape of the land, creating new landforms and bringing veins of pure metals and semiprecious building stone writhing into existence.

More fascinating to me was the silver as memory, the dreaming goddess who remembered the past, trading it sometimes for the present, so that an ancient, undisturbed forest might stand for centuries on a high mesa, until some great silver flood washed it away, rearing a ruined enclave in its place—one that had disappeared into the silver thousands of years before, or so we told ourselves.

But even when the silver brought forward objects from the past, it did not rebuild them exactly as they must have been. The folly that blocked our road might truly have been made of lapis lazuli in its first life, but I have seen newly laid roads of jade running for miles from nowhere to nowhere. I have seen walls of sulfur and statues of salt, or quartz-lined pools in wilderness vales, connected to no other structure.

The silver returned ancient texts too, but most often as fossilized lettered stone in which the writing was compressed, and illegible. Only in rare specimens could fragments be read—though I was always happy to try my skill. Languages came easily to me. They were my talent. Not that I was quick to figure them out. It was just that I already knew them, and only had to struggle to recover the memory, no doubt carried forward from my past lives.

As I sat on that ridge, with the sun climbing toward noon and a soft breeze whispering in the grass below us, I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a quieter time, when silver came rarely and then only in shallow tides that rejuvenated the lowland soil but did little more. What would it be like to be alive in a time when things did not change? When there was no danger, no threat of anything new? I could not imagine it. In the Kavasphir Hills the past was always erupting, while at the same time everything was kept fresh and new by the silver’s flood. When I thought about what had happened to Jolly I hated the silver, but I could not envision a world without it.