Limit of Vision (46 page)

The engines of our bikes made only a soft hum, and the sound of their tires was like the sound of gentle rain, but in that empty city even these slight noises reverberated like the carousing of vandals.

We rode for a mile, until our street ended suddenly at a wide square, at least two acres in size, surrounded on all sides by decaying buildings that must have once been beautiful. Most had wide stairs and columns and graceful balconies, but all of them were badly damaged. Many had collapsed roofs. Some had fallen walls that had spilled white rubble into the square, each fragment a perfect cube. But it wasn’t the buildings that commanded my attention.

At the center of the square was a working fountain. Thin jets of clear water rose from all around its edge, arching inward for a few feet before falling back to the pool in a splashing rainbow of light. In the center of this pool was a large circular platform raised a foot above the water. It was perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, and rising from its center was a white mast.

The mast was a gigantic structure. It dominated the square, reaching at least ten stories high, and I knew at once that this was the smaller tower we had seen from the highway. A cross pole branched from it at half its height, with arms as wide as the island platform. A second cross pole, half as wide, branched at right angles above the first, and two successively smaller spars split off near the top. White ropes trailed from these arms, their ends touching the stone like the broken strands of some abandoned spiderweb.

I could not imagine what purpose such a structure might serve. I tried to picture it as an antenna, but why give an antenna a position of such prominence in the city? Maybe it was to display banners? But it looked too massive, too powerfully built for that purpose. “Perhaps it’s a folly of the silver,” I said softly.

Liam shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it.” He squinted at the mast, like an artist bent on seeing a scene in its essential shapes. “I think I’ve seen something like this before . . . in a picture maybe.”

“I don’t like it. It gives me a bad feeling.”

“This whole city is a nasty place. Have you noticed we haven’t passed a single temple?”

I hadn’t noticed, but now that he mentioned it, I knew it was true. Temples have a distinctive architecture, with their sprawling walls and one-story structures. We’d seen nothing like that since entering the city. I nodded at the monstrosity in the square. “So what do you think this is?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like I
should
know.” He swung off his bike, kicked down the stand, then opened one of the compartments behind the seat. His savant was there, packed within the thin cushion of his sleeping bag. He took it out, unfolded its narrow wing, and released it. It drifted before him, its silver skin shimmering. “Find a match for this scene if you can,” Liam instructed it. Then he turned to me. “Let’s get out of the sun.”

We drank water and ate chocolate on a veranda held up by tall columns carved to resemble the trunks of royal palms. Our water supply was dwindling rapidly, so I took the filter and walked out into the sun again, filling all our empty water cells from the fountain. There was no wind at all to stir the air and the heat had become overwhelming. Actually frightening. I had never felt anything like it before and I dreaded returning to the narrow streets where the temperature was sure to be even higher. But we would have to move on soon. We needed to know if the second tower could offer us refuge for the night, or if we would have to make the long run to Olino Mesa.

Whether it was the heat or the anxiety this city wakened in me I cannot say, but as I returned to the veranda’s shade I was conscious of my heart fluttering in a weak and rapid beat like the heart of a frightened bird. Liam was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the veranda, studying the mimic screen of his savant. “Did you find something?” I asked as I collapsed beside him.

“Yes. I know where we are now.” He nodded at the screen.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and leaned forward. Displayed on his mimic screen was a ghastly painting. I could see the texture of the paint, so I knew it was not a true image, but that did little to assuage my horror. Pictured there was the very square where we found ourselves, but changed. The white buildings were all of dark gray stone. Thousands of people crowded the pavement, most of them men in uniforms of black and red. Black banners were draped from the balconies of the encircling buildings, while black flags flew from the top of the mast and from the ends of its cross poles. The purpose of the mast was quite clear. At least a hundred tiny figures hung from the cross poles, suspended by black ropes tied about their necks. Their faces were covered, but their legs were shown in postures of kicking, twisting agony. All of them had their hands tied behind their backs.

“
Mother of all!
” I whispered, and turned away, wishing I had not looked, and that I didn’t know.

Liam cleared the mimic screen. “The painting is ancient. It’s supposed to be an illustration of the crusade of Fiaccomo.”

“Fiaccomo?” I knew that name. Everyone did, for Fiaccomo was a legendary figure.

It was said that in the beginning of the world the silver obeyed the will of players and all was paradise. Then the dark god came, and the goddess withdrew from the world to wage war against him. The silver vanished with her, and players were left without food or tools or clothing or the simplest pleasures, for all such things had come to them through the silver. Great armies formed to fight over what remained. Hunger and war were everywhere, and so many players died that none of those left could find a lover and there were no children. The world lay on the edge of ruin.

Fiaccomo had been trained as a warrior, but he loved life, and could not bear to see the world die. So he gathered about him brave players, and together they fought their way past the scavenging armies and ventured into the high mountains, where it was said traces of the goddess might still be found.

The goddess had won her victory over the dark god, but not without cost. The battle had left her wounded and delirious. When Fiaccomo’s entreaties caused her to turn her mind again to the world she was horrified to behold her beautiful land all in ruins and her beloved players sunk in wickedness and war. She came upon the band of heroes in a fury, and in the guise of a silver flood she swept all those good players away. Among them, only Fiaccomo kept his wits. Even as his mind dissolved in the silver, he whispered to the goddess all the desires of his heart, and his passion was so like hers that she loved him, and their minds entwined in a kind of lovemaking never known in the world before and never since, and in those moments of union Fiaccomo seized the creative power of the silver and dreamed the first kobolds into existence.

The goddess gave Fiaccomo back his life, and more, she gave him a gift that he could pass through the silver unscathed, and command its flow when he had need. He returned to the world bringing with him both the silver and the kobolds, and prosperity followed after him, and peace.

That was the legend as I knew it, but the painting Liam had found did not show a time of prosperity or of peace.

“It doesn’t make sense, Liam. This city is a real place. But Fiaccomo is a myth . . . isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“No one can survive the silver,” I insisted. “No one can pass through it unscathed.”

“I won’t argue it with you, Jubilee. I have only told you what the painting is supposed to show.”

I looked out across the brilliant white square, but it was the dark painting I saw.

The past is deep and jumbled and more than half-counterfeited, or so I believe, and we, even with the help of our savants, can recall it only as we recall our dreams, in fragments detached from beginnings and ends. This city had gone through the silver and it was clean to look upon, but it did not feel clean. “Was Fiaccomo supposed to be one of those hanging from the mast?”

“The document didn’t say. But it occurs to me, Jubilee, that in an age without silver or kobolds, there would be no reason to build temples.”

I thought about that, until Liam insisted we move on.

A wide, straight boulevard on the far side of the square led directly to the second tower. It rose high into the cloudless blue sky, its smooth white walls tapering to a narrow summit. Arched windows looked out from a dozen different floors. They did not appear to have glass in them. “If we can get up to the top,” Liam said, “we should be safe.”

A low flight of broad steps led up to the tower’s entrance. We rode our bikes up, the tires bending around the angles of the stairs so that our ride remained smooth and secure. Great double doors stood open, as if inviting us to enter. The first floor was surrounded by the arched windows we had seen from the street. As we had guessed, they were without glass, so light and air passed freely to the inside.

The interior was a single room that encircled a central column where another set of huge doors—I suspected they were elevator doors—looked back at us, but these were closed. “Want to bet we can’t get them open?” Liam asked.

“No thank you.”

We stopped briefly to inspect them, but Liam was right: the closed doors were purely ornamental, like all the others we had seen in this city. “Maybe there’s another way up?” I suggested, trying to sound more confident than I felt. The afternoon was waning, and I did not want to be caught on the open plateau when evening fell.

“Stairs, you’re thinking?” Liam asked.

“It’s worth looking.”

So we rode our bikes around the column, and there it was: a stairwell, with its door standing ajar, just wide enough to allow a bike to pass.

I stopped beside it, and looked in. Daylight reached just far enough to show me a short flight of white stairs that turned back on themselves at a narrow landing. I was surprised to feel a hot breeze flowing over my shoulders and tugging at the strands of my hair, blowing
into
the stairwell as if it were a great chimney piping hot air up. “Feel that wind?” I asked. “There must be an opening somewhere above.” Then I backed up my bike, and gave him a chance to look.

He peered inside. Then, “Awfully convenient,” he said, turning to look at me over his shoulder.

I nodded. “Like we were expected. Does the silver have a sense of humor?”

“Oh, yes,” Liam said. “Sharpest in the world.”

He flicked on his headlight. Then he eased his bike through the door while I followed after him.

The stairs rose in a zigzag column beside the elevator shaft, with a tight, 180-degree turn at the end of each flight. I had to put a foot down for balance and skid the back tire of my bike at every landing while my headlight glittered crazily across white walls. After three flights we found a door, but it was closed and useless. Three flights higher there was another door, also closed. But we could still feel hot air rushing up the stairwell, so we kept going.

We went up past nine floors until finally, on the tenth story, we found an open door. Sunlight spilled onto the landing, but there were no dust motes drifting in the air and that absence seemed as strange as anything I had seen that day.

I followed Liam into the room. It circled the tower’s central column just as the room on the first floor had, though this one was much smaller. Not surprisingly, it was also empty.

I stopped at a window and looked down on the city, blazing white in the afternoon light, with a rainbow iridescence above the rooftops that gave it the aura of a mirage. “It’s too clean,” I said softly. “Too perfect. There’s no dirt. No insects. No birds.” I shook my head, groping to explain what was troubling me. “Even if this city came out of the silver looking like this, it should be showing some wear by now. Some dust or bird dung at least.”

“But there’s nothing,” Liam said.

“It’s like some invisible curator has been keeping it tidy.”

“Don’t scare yourself.”

I raised my chin. I didn’t want him to think I was afraid. “Do you want to spend the night here? We’re high enough. It should be safe.”

I was half hoping he would say no, and instead opt for the long sprint to Olino Mesa. But he kicked down the stand of his bike and dismounted. “It’s so late now, we don’t really have a choice.”

Chapter 4

We were not quite at the top of the tower. There was one more floor above us, but the door to it was closed and sealed, and we did not have the proper tools or kobolds to take it down. So we returned to our room, where a cool breeze soughed through arched windows.

We shared a chilled water cell. Liam splashed some of the water on his face, leaving dark streaks of dust. “Do you want to go out again?” he asked.

We had at least two hours before sunset, but I was afraid to face the heat of the streets, so I shook my head. “It’s too hot. I’m going to rest.”

“Good. I feel the same.”

I looked out the window, at the sheets of rainbow light shimmering over the rooftops. “Anyway, it’s not like we’ve found anything.”

“Finding the square was something.” He pulled a sleeping bag from his saddle bin. “I wonder how old this city is? Ten thousand years? More?”

Who could say? History is deeper than anyone can measure, and as chaotic as the silver. The past is carried forward into the present, while the present is washed away, to be used again in some other age, or so it seemed to me.

“Let’s look around some more tomorrow,” I said. “We can stay until it gets hot. Then head for home.”

We inflated our sleeping bags and Liam fell asleep immediately, but my mind was restless. I lay staring at the blue sky, thinking about the square, and the tiny bodies suspended on ropes. My mind could not cease a lurid speculation on the details of life in an age without silver, or kobolds, or any temple to shelter them. I tried to imagine Fiaccomo as something more than a myth, but I could not. Players cannot pass through the silver unscathed, any more than they can breathe the salty water of the ocean. Living things never emerge from the luminous fogs.

After a while I sat up and gazed out the window again, but southeast this time, to the highway, where I thought I saw the gleam of a passing truck. It was late though, and no truck should have been on that part of the highway at such an hour, so perhaps it was only imagination.

It seemed a long time since we’d said good-bye to my father. I wondered where he was. And I wondered too about the boy, Yaphet Harorele, who I had never seen and never met and who was to be my lover. What was he doing now in faraway Vesarevi? What was he thinking? Would he approve of our expedition to this city? Or would he judge it a dangerous waste of time? I wondered, and before long I decided that the answer to such a question would reveal a lot about a person. Maybe, it would reveal everything that mattered.

Our savants had already been unpacked, their narrow wings unfolded and set adrift near the doorway. I beckoned to mine, signaling it to follow me around to the other side of the room, where the central pillar would lie between me and Liam.