Nilla touched her jawbone with slender phalanges. 'You can go back now, if you like. I won't hold you against your will.'
Sarah thought about it. She was going to die in just a few minutes anyway. Would it be easier if she just stayed there in paradise or whatever it was? She kicked at some of the bones at her feet and a fine powdery dust blew up, the dust of bones so old they had been worn down by eternity and yet still something remained. Her own memories were in that dust, in a very real way. Everybody's were. As the dust spun and billowed around her she felt her brain working, felt the memories flooding through her. Some of her memories concerned Ayaan. Ayaan was back in the real world. Would Ayaan think she was being abandoned? Sarah dug in the bone meal with her hallux. The dust brought up memories, random memories, but literally'as she stirred the dust her brain cast itself backwards on days she recalled of her life. The day she had ridden a camel with the Bedouins. Wow, that had been a good day. The day her father had told her she was going away to boarding school in Switzerland and she cried because she was afraid of all the white girls with their straight hair. The day Ayaan had first let her hold a pistol. The day Nilla told her that she had been asked the riddle and that she had failed to answer it properly.
Wait a minute. What riddle? She'd thought Nilla was speaking in metaphor. Yet there was something about the eididh, something in its very nature that seemed to make metaphor impossible. Things in that stripped-down place were simplified, unsophisticated. Complex thoughts couldn't even get started, much less develop.
'Wait,' Sarah said.
'There's not much else I can do in here but wait,' Nilla told her. 'And in another sense there's no such thing. What's on your mind?'
'The riddle,' Sarah said. 'When Mael Mag Och said I had failed I assumed that my role was to kill the Tsarevich, that I had failed at that.' The thought in her head squirmed: it was getting too complicated and she might lose it. She calmed herself and tried to simplify. She said it out loud like a postulate. 'He planned for me to kill the Tsarevich. I failed.'
Nilla squatted down at the shore of the lake and picked up a pelvis out of the piled bones. Perhaps she was accessing a memory of her own. 'No, no. That was Ayaan's job.'
'I'm just supposed to answer the riddle.' Sarah tried on the sentence for size. It fit like the second leg of a syllogism, almost audibly clicking into place. Now she just needed the conclusion.
'Yes. That was my idea. It was the only way I agreed to be a part of all this. I said we had to give the human race a chance. It's only fair, right? So he thought up a riddle. If one of you could guess the answer he would submit to you. He would call off the end of the world. This wasn't something he offered lightly, mind you. It took us years of arguing back and forth to figure out our deal. For him it means going against his god's commandment. But druids think of riddles as a class of magic spells. They can't resist them'he figured Teuagh would understand that.' Nilla's head inclined forward, bowing in sadness. 'It's too bad you didn't figure it out until now. You might have worked out the answer in time.'
'The next day,' Sarah said. She had it.
'I beg your pardon?' Nilla asked. She had no eyes, nor eyebrows or lashes to register surprise. But she dropped the pelvis she'd been holding as if it had turned red hot.
'The riddle. He asked me the riddle, just a little while ago. 'What's more important than the end of the world?'' Sarah wanted to slap herself on the forehead but she was afraid the bones of her hand would just fall off.
The answer was easier than the question. Ayaan had shown her as much, by way of example. By example of her entire life and also by recent events.