The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  He turned his eyes to the sky, searching Zhan’s approval for the so-called “decision” to abandon the power. Of course, it was an egregious lie, if only by judging the savagery of the battles fought during the Kids’ War—and Gill knew it better than anyone else. The last thing Baila IX had done willingly was to “abandon” the power. But Baila XXI, of course, was free to say anything as long as there were millions eager to sip every word and believe any absurdity.

  Suddenly, he started to scream hysterically.

  “One thing we asked them when we left them to rule. One thing, Antyrans, only one thing: do not enter Arghail’s cursed cities!”

  This time, the tarjis forgot even to breathe.

  “Let me ask you, is it so hard to understand why we demanded that? Is it so difficult to follow?”

  Gill already knew what was about to happen—it had become predictable. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes from Baila XXI’s lips.

  “What have they done? They entered the forbidden places? Yes, they did, but to make their crime even more heinous, they brought Arghail and his offspring here!” Baila shouted, pointing a finger to the ground. “And set them free!”

  A scream of terror erupted from the crowd. Baila XXI rolled his unforgiving eyes above the square, raising the hologram to make sure all the viewers could see it.

  “The righteous can still do something! Arghail is in a base in western Alixxor, and we, under Zhan’s colors, will go inside to fight the final battle. The end of times is nigh, as prophecies foretold!”

  Hearing the terrible words, the crowd fell to the ground, bowing their heads in the dust.

  “As for the council, one thing I have to say: the peace is over! From now on, I’m ruling Antyra, and whoever refuses to submit to my authority will be squashed like a puny licant! It’s time to defeat the evil, once and for all!”

  Baila had just declared war on the Shindam! A war smoldering for the last 652 years broke out, and Gill, in the most unfortunate way, was right in the middle of it! However, one thing puzzled him: how could Baila have the tail to claim that the bones belonged to Arghail’s children? It would have made more sense to believe that the remnants were of Zhan’s sons crashed on Antyra II during their holy attack 1,250 years ago!

  Of course, now that he had connected to the golden bracelet and felt the gods’ deep sorrow at the loss of their homeworld, Gill couldn’t imagine that they had found no better pastime than flying to Antyra, cramming it with craters, and killing its primitive inhabitants. No, he didn’t believe that Tadeo’s bones belonged to Zhan’s sons or to Arghail’s children. But Baila had no way of knowing this; the only explanation was that the prophet couldn’t care less what exactly Tadeo held in his hands. The things that really mattered to him were the circumstances. The temples had lost the power 652 years ago, and now he had a chance to win it back. It was the perfect timing for a new civil war: the extraordinary coincidence of the artifacts’ arrival to Alixxor during Karajoo gave him a great reason to launch his attack right when he had an army in the capital.

  “Tadeo risked too much! Now everyone knows about Arghail’s bones!” exclaimed Alala, worried.

  Gill was startled by her words, surprised and hurt to hear her referring to the bones of the bracelets’ bearers like that.

  “Why do you think it’s Arghail? Arghail is but a legend! Maybe Baila is holding something else in his hands. What if they’re Zhan’s sons? What if one of their fire chariots fell on Antyra II?”

  “Gill, look outside,” she whispered, turning his face to the window, to the tarjis swarming in the streets. “For our sake, don’t tell anyone about this ‘theory.’ Forget the blasphemy! I don’t like being ripped to pieces. Tadeo never cared about consequences, and look where his tail is now!”

  The Shindam’s holofluxes were streaming the dawn of madness. Tens of thousands of tarjis flooded the surroundings of the Holograms Tower, heading toward the transmission domes, breaking the locked doors. Others jumped on the chameleons parked at the crossroads and quickly seized them.

  “Antyrans, the tarjis have jumped the fences! They’re breaking everything! Please help us!” cried a panicked female.

  “Arghail, in Tadeo’s hands? On Zhan’s eye, does anyone know about this?” they heard one of the archivists exclaim through the open door.

  “I saw Alala earlier in Tadeo’s archive,” said Antumar.

  “We have to go now!” whispered Gill, taking her hand again.

  They ran down the corridor and reached the secondary stairs before the other archivists could see them.

  Outside the Archivists Tower, all hell had broken loose. Loud screams and shouts followed the rivers of tarjis running amok on the streets. Most of them were running toward the central and western districts to take over the Shindam’s Towers and the subterranean base.

  Gill steered his magneto-jet carefully to avoid the chaos, limping toward his dome.

  “Why aren’t we going to the mountains?” asked Alala, surprised by the direction.

  “I have to get something from my home,” he said. He was worried about the bracelet hidden in the fluff of his nest.

  “Millions of Antyrans are leaving the city! If we get out now, we might have a chance!”

  Gill didn’t make the slightest move to change their direction.

  “Come on! I have a couple of things there,” she insisted. “I’ll lend you one of my tunics.”

  “Sorry, but I have to reach my home by all means!”

  “Is it more important than our lives?”

  “Yes!”

  Once inside his dome, he snatched the bracelet from the fluff, took a deep breath, and pulled it on his forearm, under the sleeve. He grabbed a few cans of food before rushing back to the jet where Alala waited.

  Barely moments into their journey out, they came upon a huge column of magneto-jets stretching on for miles. The traffic was already strangled by the newly made refugees, and soon it stopped altogether. In a storm of hysterical screams, the Antyrans were leaving their jets in the middle of the road. Weighed down with bags of all sizes and colors, they began to trickle, then flood, out of the city on foot.

  “Too late! What do we do now?” asked Alala, panicked.

  Gill had no intention of remaining trapped at Baila’s mercy. However, it would be nearly impossible to reach the recreation dome on foot because they had no tents to survive the cold nights in the mountains until they arrived at their destination. Apparently, they had run out of options—but as the great aromary Laixan22 used to say, “That’s how the reality always looks when glanced through the lenses of desperation.”

  Gill felt an eerie calm growing around him, shielding him from the madness, and this time the process smelled so pungent that he almost instantly found the stalker’s path. He shut down the magneto-jet’s annoying artificial intelligence and the main safety sensors. Then, he turned the jet toward the ditch bordering the magneto-highway while pushing the throttle to the limit.

  “What are you doing?” Alala screamed, terrified.

  The jet jumped over the ditch, landing in the middle of a rugged field. The earth was covered by a purple carpet of primitive, jagged grass, each blade riding the others like the fur of a monstrous creature. Here and there, some tall, green23 bushes had lodged their deep roots through the grassy mattress.

  Unsurprisingly, the magnetic cushion ceased to work outside of the road. Their vehicle fell to the ground like a rock, jerking to a stop. Ignoring the scared look on Alala’s face, Gill reduced the width of the fusion nozzles—well beyond the point where any sane Antyran would consider it to be pure madness—and again pushed the throttle stick to the limit. The roaring jet sprang forward and caught speed, raising a burning cloud of debris in its wake. He found, relieved, that he could still steer it from the nozzle and the four gas blowers placed around the front mask. Even though they were running directly on the ground, the titan-alloy shield protected them well. His only annoyance was that in some places the herbs and sh
rubs were growing nearly as tall as the magneto-jet, obstructing his view.

  After a while, they left the weeds and reached one of the acajaa farms at the city’s outskirts. The acajaa crops were thankfully smaller than the bushes, so it was like sailing on a sea. An orange stream of juice trailed in their wake, exploded from the purple stems crushed under their jet. With his hand firmly on the stick, he glanced at Alala and saw her smiling, seduced by the adventure’s aroma.

  They kept shadowing the magneto-highway full of panicked Antyrans walking among the stuck vehicles. He was hoping to get back on the magnetic field, but the traffic jam went on for miles and miles, spreading its coils as far as he could see. After a while, it became obvious they wouldn’t be able to return to the road anytime soon: for the next few miles, the magneto-highway was raised on pylons, and when it went back to the ground level, it was fully covered. The vardannes suddenly strengthened their force, and he had to keep the stick steady to drive in a straight line.

  “I hope all the siclides have passed for today,” said Alala.

  She had barely finished when a purple wall at least fifteen feet tall appeared behind the magneto-road. In a twitch of a tail, it crossed the highway’s transparent ceiling and rolled toward them.

  Before they could do anything, the tide reached them and covered their jet, which jerked to a stop, unable to force its way through. They were stuck in complete darkness, covered by a huge mountain of thorny shrubs.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I still have a couple of settings to disable,” Gill grinned. He canceled all the basic safety features of the fusion reactor.

  “You’re mad!” she exclaimed, laughing. “You’re going to get us blown into pieces!”

  Without a word, he again pushed the throttle stick to the limit. Howling in protest, the vehicle burst forward, digging a tunnel through the siclides. Behind them, the huge, bluish flames of the reactor set the plants on fire, lighting the gallery opened in their wake.

  With the reactor’s magnetic trap close to the melting point, and the alarms screaming maddeningly, they burst out of the siclides trap. A wide river stretched in front of them. Luckily, the banks were gentle, so he steered the jet onto the water, careful to reduce the power in the overloaded reactor.

  They crossed the river, raising a hissing cloud of steam in their wake. Shortly after climbing the opposite shore, his hearts started to bounce back to life. The magneto-highway in front of them was uncovered and, even better, completely deserted. He jumped over the ditch and landed in the middle of the lane. Immediately, the jet lifted on the magnetic cushion and caught speed.

  After they reached the mountains, they left the coastal highway for a narrow magneto-road leading to the crest. As they climbed above the purple barrier, they saw the platforms of the three big pyramids in Alixxor rising above the evening fog like three distant islands in a stormy sea.

  The road followed a huge glacial trough carved deep into the stone wall. The recreation dome was in a secondary valley on the left side of the trough, surrounded by eight-thousand-feet-tall walls.

  Gondarra’s landmass was once a continent in its own right, but several dozen million years ago, it had slammed violently into the much larger Antyran continent. It was this collision that gave birth to the Roch-Alixxors, the highest mountain range of the stellar system, its peaks reaching over sixty-five thousand feet in height. And even after all these years, the crunching was still going strong.

  Viewed from Gondarra’s swampy plains, the mountains resembled two huge stairs made of fifteen-thousand-foot vertical rock walls and scarred by several deep glacial calderas. Massive granite blocks dotted the plateaus, abandoned there by ancient glaciations. On the edges, countless foamy streams were flowing into the abyss in a madness of waterfalls. On the lower plateau, a large river fed by the glaciers, called “Oleia’s tears,” was falling off the cliff in a twelve-thousand-feet-high waterfall. During the summer days, when the vardannes were the strongest, nothing reached the ground—the river turned directly into clouds.

  The recreation domes were scattered up to thirteen thousand feet, along the valleys close to the roads. But on the highest plateau, at over thirty thousand feet, there was a whole village of space domes available only to the Shindam’s elite in search of new thrills—like trekking the high-altitude glaciers dressed in spacesuits. Of course, the domes had an artificial atmosphere just like a spaceship, and reaching them was possible only in specially designed air-jets.

  They were still climbing the coils of the narrow valley when Gill heard a strange, thunderous noise in the distance—a low rumble broken by violent hissings. Before they had a chance to understand what was about to happen, a column of huge armored chameleons belonging to the Shindam’s order, floating on magnetic cushions, was upon them. With their cloaks fully activated, they were almost invisible. The war machines had folded the plastic wheels and extended their wings to jump24 over the road’s many bends.

  Finally realizing the danger, he braked violently and stopped the magneto-jet by the wayside while the endless column of armored chameleons passed a tail’s tip away from their vehicle. After the soldiers went on their way, he waited a bit more to make sure the peril was over, and then he cautiously approached the last crossroads before their valley.

  “What’s that?” asked Alala, pointing at a cloud of black smoke rising above the regarth shrubs.

  As they drove closer, they saw the remains of at least three magneto-jets scattered on the road. The eye with a vertical iris painted on them meant they belonged to the temples. It seemed the chameleons had blasted them on the fly, without bothering to clean up the mess.

  They passed the macabre scene without slowing down. At the crossroads, he turned right on a narrow magneto-trail leading to a secluded valley. The place seemed truly isolated, and Gill hoped to finally find some peace, at least until the end of the madness.

  CHAPTER 5.

  Left alone in the comfy nest of a chamber offered by Alala, Gill gazed at the bracelet with the enthusiasm of someone having to grab a poisoned guval by the tail. The ancient aromaries told countless stories about arrogant mortals meddling with the gods.25 Sometimes they rubbed their tails together, like the foolish Voran falling in love with the goddess Dedris, while other times they stole the gods’ possessions. Predictably, it never ended well for the Antyrans.

  Just like the ancient heroes, he was playing with their lives, and yet he knew all too well he couldn’t back off now. He was never a hero, but no matter the risks, he had to find the truth about the end of their ancient world, to search the answers hidden inside the bracelet’s dreams. After all, that’s why he became an archivist: to discover the past. And he was about to succeed beyond his wildest dreams, even though there was a “small” chance of getting killed by the artifact.

  He took a deep breath and typed the symbols on the console, deciding to ignore the consequences.

  Much to his relief, it worked this time, too, and the scan started right after he pressed the last button. It began with a couple of rhomboid lights and explosive flashes in shades of yellow.

  Very soon, things spun out of control. The patterns in his head became more and more elaborate until they reached a bewildering complexity, the bright textures turning into fractals of an indescribable beauty.

  After a while, the colors faded, and the maddening rush finally came to a halt. The peace didn’t last long, though, as the rhomboids were replaced by the metallic taste he loathed so much. This time, he was determined to resist to the end, no matter how hard it might get.

  He was trying to relax when, without warning, a huge fountain of darkness opened in his path and sucked him into the black abyss.

  The dizzying fall lasted only for a moment. As soon as the rattle was gone, thousands and thousands of lights started to shine into the darkness. The stars appeared again!

  Some of the lights were barely visible in the night while others glimmered like the guiding pyres of the anc
ient fleets. In several places, hundreds—or maybe thousands—crowded in a dense knot. But most of them lay in a long, narrow diagonal strip—there had to be millions in the ethereal foam. He gulped in disbelief, overwhelmed by the sheer size of the structure.

  He was looking at the sky through the eyes of the bracelet bearer, on a huge display wall in the ship’s bridge. It was the same spaceship visited earlier in the morning.

  The patch of sky was devoid of stars, except for a particularly shiny one. Although the ship was still far from it, they had already entered the system because a small, brownish planet flipped on the screen. It was a frozen world, where life had no chance to flourish. The gods’ vessel quickly turned toward the star and accelerated.

  As soon as they passed the planet, the commander made a sign. A tiny area expanded on the whole wall, and they spotted two planets right in the middle of it, seemingly revolving around each other. The bigger one, about 50 percent larger than its companion, had a reddish-orange hue resembling the deserts of Antyra II. The smaller one looked similar to the first world seen on the display—same color and consistency. They weren’t close enough to the star to escape the spell of eternal ice.

  The image magnified, and the gods became very nervous. Gill could sense their fear without getting the reason, but something bad was happening on the planets. Suddenly, he felt afraid for his life. Even though he realized he wasn’t truly there, he couldn’t think rationally. It was the gods’ fear—no, their certainty—that soon, they’d die in battle.

  The images expanded again. Gill couldn’t understand how they did it; the lens had to be larger than the whole ship to get such resolution!

  From up close, the smaller planet didn’t look anything like he imagined. Far from frozen and without atmosphere, it was draped in a thick, brown smog. Through the mist, he glimpsed lakes and rivers made of a black substance. Could they be hydrocarbons? he asked himself, skipping a couple of heartbeats at the very thought that something like that could ever exist. He even noticed a huge volcano spitting the same black fluid at great heights. The eruption climbed vertically in a thick, continuous stream, then curved gracefully under the high-altitude winds, and finally rained on the ground. Deep channels drained the substance into a large lake, pooled in a crater.