The Mountain of Kept Memory

by Rachel Neumeier

  “Ah,” said Laasat.

  “So,” said Oressa, “I think Bherijda and my father really can threaten the Kieba, in which case, we should send a couple of messengers to Caras. They can try to get word to Gulien and Gajdosik about Addas. But we should go east. If we come in on the Kieba’s side and defeat her enemies and wrap them up for her, she should be grateful, shouldn’t she? And if they can’t threaten her, then she might not even notice them, but we can still surprise them and defeat them, can’t we? And then we won’t have to worry about them coming suddenly back to Caras and interfering with my brother and your prince. Isn’t that right?”

  All the Tamaristans were looking at her with varying expressions of surprise, except for Laasat, who looked resigned instead. He said, but with an inflection that made it a question, “Your Highness, you can’t think that Prince Bherijda can actually threaten the Keppa now that she’s been forewarned by my own prince’s attempt?”

  “I do think maybe he can. Bherijda had magisters with him, lots of them, I saw them, and he has something else, some kind of artifact or a fragment of an artifact, and who knows what that might do? Besides, my father would never have gone east unless he thought he could not only challenge the Kieba, but win. And if he thinks he can, then I think so too.”

  “I believe last time she was distracted—”

  “What makes you think she isn’t still? From what she said, that plague she was worried about is still out there and she still needs to fix it, or else everybody in the world, almost, could die. Oh,” Oressa added at his startled horror, “I suppose you weren’t there when she explained that part. But it’s true, or I guess it’s true, and what if Bherijda’s magisters know too much about the wrong things? They might be just like Djerkest, only worse. After all,” she added, realizing as she said it that this too was true, “Bherijda also knows that the Kieba must be forewarned, and he still marched away east. Maybe he’s stupid, I don’t know, but my father isn’t, and he also went east. We have to go east too.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Gulien dreamed.

  He dreamed of Elaru, white and red towers on three hills—white stone and red brick—large houses near the towers and then small, crowded homes farther out, then farms, broad pastures and fields, and beyond the fields, woodlots that rose up into the encircling hills. It had been a beautiful land and a handsome city. He glimpsed it as it had been and as it now was, images mingling and confusing.

  The plague had destroyed Elaru. It was the worst kind: a mist of dusky purple and black that crept between the towers and among the houses and out into the farmlands. It clung to anything living that it touched, ate into the living tissues of beast or bird, person or plant. When it moved on, it left behind only bursting clouds of black and purple, dead wood and wisps of hair and downy feathers blowing on the wind. There were not many living people left in Elaru now, and Gulien could not help but be glad, because watching them die was unbearable. The people had died, along with their cattle and their dogs and the birds that built nests in the eaves of their houses and the slender trees that had lined their streets.

  Fire destroyed the mist, so the people of Elaru had burned much of their own city, trying to protect some islands of safety. But their efforts had largely failed, because the mist could creep across charred ground and ash, and because sometimes a bird, caught by the mist and fleeing in terror, carried its corruption from one place into another before it died. So he had established his own firebreak—no, he hadn’t; it had been the Kieba. He forgot who he was sometimes, memory and vision shifting behind his mind’s eye. His sense of self had become fragile, scattered across ages of fragmentary memory.

  This had been a green, gentle country, all this land. He remembered it, or some part of him remembered it; a thousand years of memory scattered in his mind, a thousand views of Elaru as a village and a town and an energetic, ambitious city, and then later, a quieter and more gracious city, after the capital of Gontai had been moved west toward the sea. Those weren’t his memories, but he remembered them—more clearly if he dwelled on the visions that came to him. Sometimes he wanted to remember the past. Sometimes that seemed better than gazing down upon ruined Elaru now. His firebreak—the Kieba’s encircling firebreak—a circle of char and ash five miles wide, surrounded the city. War golems stalked within that wide strip of land, burning anything living that tried to cross it, burning the creeping mist as well. The mist caught fire easily, burning in tiny vivid flickers. It had to burn. He, they, he, the Kieba, they had to burn it, had to keep the firebreak inviolate lest the plague escape to burn out across the land, across all of Gontai.

  Every time the horror of it truly struck him, the vision broke and he found himself again, dazed and blinking, his own and other memories tangling in his mind. That happened again now, and Gulien came to himself, back in the Kieba’s crystalline chair, its needles piercing his hands and wrists. He didn’t feel them. Or only as a sensation of cold. The falcon of steel and glass perched on his shoulder. Its sharp talons pierced his skin through his shirt. That hurt. He was glad of the small pain. It helped him remember who he was.

  Closing his eyes, he pressed his head back against the cold crystal of the chair. How many times had he dreamed and then lost the dream? How many times lost himself in the Kieba’s memory and then staggered out of it, back into his own body and mind and self?

  He would never manage the coolness of mind necessary to master the kephalos. It was impossible.

  “You will learn to engage gently, watch unmoved, and accept calmly the memories and thoughts and visions the kephalos gives you,” the Kieba had told him.

  Gulien had followed the glittering falcon through Berakalan’s door into the Tomb of the Gods and discovered at once he did not depend on the kephalos’s guidance to find Ysiddre’s door and her white stairway and the room carved out of crystalline memory at the heart of the mountain. He had remembered the way. It seemed . . . it seemed like his own memory. That was how far he had come, even then. He had come that way twice—had it been twice?—but he couldn’t even tell whether that was his own memory or not. Sometimes it seemed to him he might have run up Ysiddre’s stairway a hundred times before, or a thousand times.

  But he had met the Kieba there. He was almost certain that part was his own memory. She had been standing absolutely still in the exact center of the room, her back to the chair, while all around her visions sleeted through the surrounding crystal: visions of the surrounding drylands and Caras, of the sea and mountains, of cities and landscapes Gulien did not recognize, or half recognized.

  Trying to ignore the fragmentary images, he had said to the Kieba, “You sent for me. Because my father and Bherijda are coming, and they’re a danger to you, and you need my help.” It seemed unbelievable, put into plain words, but the Kieba had nodded, her expression absent, as though this was so obvious that most of her attention was still on other things.

  “Parianasaku’s Capture,” the Kieba had murmured. “And Tonkaïan’s Resolve. Yes. An awkward combination.” She had looked at Gulien as though she was really looking at something else, something invisible in the air before him, or maybe something a thousand miles beyond him. “Yes,” she said. “You must take Parianasaku’s Capture and prevent Bherijda Garamanaj from achieving his ambition. Or if you cannot take the Capture, then you will have no choice but to master the kephalos and establish your identity and your aspect, defeating both Osir Madalin and Prince Bherijda that way. You are not ready to master the kephalos, but there is no time now for you to make yourself ready.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gulien had admitted to her. “I don’t understand why you need me when you have so much power and knowledge and I have so little. But I’ll do what I can to help.”

  She nodded, though still vaguely, as though she had hardly heard him. “Also, the plague in Elaru must be contained. There is no time for that, either. There is always time, but now all the seconds and minutes and days have run through our hands and there is n
o time left.”

  “Kieba,” said the kephalos, flat and cold.

  The Kieba had blinked, seeming to come to herself. “Yes.” She had looked at Gulien then as though she saw him. “Gulien. Good.” She indicated the crystalline chair. “You will establish your identity and define your principal aspect. You will attempt that now, while I remain able to guide and protect you. We must hope that there will be enough time for that; or, if there is not, then you must assuredly take Parianasaku’s Capture from Osir Madalin. One or the other, without fail. Do you understand?”

  That much Gulien thought he understand. Or at least he accepted that it was true. “I’ll try, Kieba.”

  “Yes,” she said. She nodded toward the chair.

  It was a small, sharp little movement, almost birdlike—rather like the sharp way the glass-and-steel falcon moved, in fact—and Gulien, who was already moving to obey that gesture, blinked in surprise and stopped where he stood. A realization unfolded all at once: Intuition, suspicion, disbelief, and conviction all whipped through his mind between that one step and the next.

  The Kieba, seeing him stop, tilted her head in that odd little gesture of hers, almost but not quite human, and Gulien exclaimed, “You’re a golem!” Then he stood, shocked—by the idea, by the certainty he felt, by the sound of the declaration made out loud, and most of all by his own boldness, or maybe foolishness, in blurting it out like that.

  The Kieba gazed at him, silent. She didn’t look offended. She didn’t look surprised. Or maybe she did look surprised, but it was the wrong kind of surprise—surprise that he should make that accusation, but not shock at the accusation itself. So he knew it was true. But he had already been certain. It explained everything. She had said it herself: I am not entirely myself. She had told him that. That had been clear enough, but he had not understood. Now that statement made perfect sense.

  Gulien stared at the Kieba’s eyes. They looked like real human eyes. Her face looked like a real human face—or very nearly. She looked like a real person. But he knew she wasn’t. He said, “You told me. You almost told me. But I didn’t understand.”

  “You do not understand yet, I think. It is true that this body is a golem, but it does not belong to the kephalos. I mastered the kephalos. This body belongs to me. I inhabit it. When I—she—when the woman I was began to die, the seat of my awareness, the source of my mastery, shifted to dwell primarily within this body.”

  “A temporary measure,” stated the kephalos.

  “Yes. Temporary,” the Kieba conceded. “For the present I am able to inhabit this body primarily, but I must occasionally inhabit my living body. Thus my primary identity maintains coherence. Even after the death of my living body, my primary identity will be sustained for some time by long familiarity. But without the coherence of a living body, that cannot last.”

  “I see.” Gulien hesitated. “How long . . .?”

  “My living body will fail entirely within another year.” The Kieba didn’t sound very concerned about this, even when she added, “My primary identity will lose its coherence within another year after that. When that identity becomes incoherent, this body will become neither more nor less than any other golem.”

  So the kephalos could continue to use her golem body even after she was dead. All the way dead. That was truly horrible. Gulien didn’t say so.

  The kephalos stated, “The living body will fail, and I will then be left without a Kieba. This circumstance is forbidden. Multiple claimants exist. It is my prerogative to support a preferred candidate. I do not consider it probable that Bherijda Garamanaj will provide suitable material from which to make an appropriate Kieba.”

  “Ah.” Gulien saw now why the kephalos had sent for him so urgently. He felt very cold, and gripped his hands together tightly. “You think, I gather, that I might provide suitable material.”

  “I believe it may prove so,” the kephalos said, cold as ever. “In order to take up the Kieba’s primary aspect, a claimant must possess a clear sense of responsibility to the larger world. In order to take up the Kieba’s subsidiary aspect, a claimant must be prepared to wield power, yet without seeking power as a goal in itself. I do not consider Bherijda Garamanaj likely to possess these intrinsic qualities, Gulien Madalin. But I believe that you do.”

  Before Gulien could begin to frame an argument, the Kieba added, “Bherijda Garamanaj may not own the qualities desirable in a Kieba, but he may nevertheless possess the qualities necessary to master the kephalos. Were my own identity fully secure, I would be able to prevent him from making any attempt to establish himself as a claimant. But under these peculiar circumstances, Osir Madalin may be able to use Parianasaku’s Capture to enclose my awareness and separate me from the kephalos. Then Bherijda Garamanaj will most likely have the capacity to destroy my primary awareness and identity. My primary identity no longer has sufficient resilience to withstand such an attack. Then I would not be able to prevent him from mastering the kephalos.”

  Gulien took a deep breath, trying to wrap his understanding around all this. He had always known his future. It had always been laid out for him, and now . . . Now he didn’t know, except that what the Kieba wanted of him, what the kephalos wanted, was too much, too big, too strange. He asked helplessly, “But my father also seeks to master the kephalos. Is that what you believe? Maybe . . . maybe he would . . .”

  “Osir Madalin is not a claimant,” said the Kieba. “He merely seeks to destroy me. He has, I believe, little awareness of the kephalos as an entity. His intentions are simple to understand. However, I suspect Bherijda Garamanaj wishes to become a god.”

  “Bherijda wants to . . .” Gulien glanced from the Kieba to the chair, and around at the room with its thousands of flashing visions falling through its crystalline walls. “He can’t do that, surely. Can he? Not even if he wins here—wins everything. The Kieba was never a goddess. Bherijda can’t make himself into a god.” He didn’t ask it as a question. He was certain he was right. Those visions were memory, crystallized memory, and some of them—some of them he almost recognized.

  “Certainly not,” agreed the Kieba. “All the gods are dead.”

  Her eyes glinted—not human eyes after all; not quite. Gulien wondered how he had ever mistaken her for anything but a golem. Though not an ordinary golem. He believed that, too. He asked tentatively, “How many—how many Kiebas have there been, since the ending of the age of the gods?”

  “Nine. I am the ninth. My name was Tanothlan. I was a woman of a land called Karanan, in Gontai. On my fifth birthday I was given a crystal shaped like a star, as all the women of my family were given crystals. I wore this fragment of living crystal all my life, but of all my sisters, the predisposition took firm root only in me. When the Kieba came for me, I left my family and my children and took up memory and duty. When she died, I took up also the primary aspect of Ysiddro, patron of healing and the living world, and the subsidiary aspect of Ysiddre, patron of memory, and left my name behind.”

  Gulien could almost remember that. Or something like that. He remembered a girl named Tanothlan, and then the young woman who had grown into that name, and then the older woman who had at last taken up the burden handed off to her, as it had been handed off from one Kieba to the next for . . . “Three thousand years,” he murmured.

  “Indeed. Five women came before me, and three men,” agreed the Kieba. “Not so many over the course of three thousand years. We live a long time, those of us who succeed in mastering the kephalos. Though we are not generally expected to . . . linger, after our deaths. Manian Sinai did not linger. There was no need. His successor was prepared to take up his affiliation and aspect and identity. You will remember them all, in time.”

  “Manian Sinai was the first Kieba.”

  “You remember. Yes. He was not a god. But he was more than a man. That is why his identity attracts you with its strength and coherence. More than one strong Kieba has drawn his secondary identity from the memories of Manian Sinai. So will
you. That is already established.”

  The crystal that surrounded them suddenly clouded, all its images vanishing within a shimmering misty darkness. The Kieba did not appear concerned by this. She said absently, “I remember the gods. So do you. Or you will.”

  Gulien shook his head, not because he didn’t believe this, but because—despite himself—he was not at all certain he wanted those memories. He almost thought he glimpsed something of the gods now, or had, or would. Time seemed to slide around him, and he took an abrupt step and set his hand against the crystalline wall to steady himself.

  The Kieba took no notice. She said, still speaking as though to herself, “Once the gods were beautiful and terrible, so powerful they could reshape the world and walk amid the stars. Now they are gone into the eternal dark. But we remember. As we should. They deserve to be remembered. But the gods were difficult masters in those last years. When they discovered they had made a terrible error and would die of it, many of them became . . . capricious.”

  Gulien nodded, listening to her with his eyes closed. With his eyes closed, he almost thought he could glimpse the gods themselves. Beautiful and terrible. And dying. They had taken a long, long time to die. He whispered, “A terrible error. Yes.”

  “Yes. One of the gods made a mistake,” the Kieba agreed. “Or perhaps one of them deliberately chose to destroy all the world. We do not remember. We remember that others tried to stop that destruction, but they could not. The best of them—Ysiddre, Eneolioir, Umadancu, most determinedly Ysiddro—when they finally knew they would fail and die, they made Manian Sinai into the first Kieba. He was not a god. But when they finished, he was not human. But he was human enough that he wished to protect the human people who were left in the world after the gods were gone.”

  Gulien almost thought he remembered something of this. The tale the Kieba was telling him slotted into a framework, familiar, recognizable. He knew how the tale ended. He knew what the Kieba was going to say. She was going to say—