by George Tome
Like an evil oscillator, the cold reality threatened to throw him again in the pit of despair. After all, he had a ridiculously small chance of reaching Regisulben alive. You’ll die in vain, a coward voice whispered in his ears. His preservation instinct was still halfheartedly begging him to find a way to stay alive.
Shut up! he yelled at the storm of thoughts raging inside his kyi. I’m not afraid of you, he thought, looking straight at Baila. I’ll reach Regisulben and tell him how to defeat you, even if I have to drink the water of death to find him!
Without hesitation, he turned his back to the holotheater and walked to the doorstep.
“Maybe you hope your bracelet will change something, but I ask you: What are you going to do when the skies open and the wall of fire disappears? Who’s going to listen to your story when Zhan arrives at my call?” Baila shouted glacially, his voice filled with undisguised hate.
“I’ll see then, Your Greatness. I’ll see then,” he whispered, more to himself.
He rushed out of the room, suddenly worried that Alala might use a portable inductor34 on his tail. But she did nothing to stop him.
It seemed he had escaped… until a guttural mumble resembling a hungry moulan eating from an abundant gattar hit his ears.
“Ha purru si nanweg aga nyi,” it said.
He instinctively turned his eyes toward the holotheater, and he froze again—because for the second time in that day, the creature in front of his eyes didn’t belong to the Antyran world! On the verge of losing his smell, he understood the enormity of the consequences. The gods are already here!
A weird holo-creature was walking in front of the prophet, even though there was no holotheater to hold it. And along with the apparition, a huge artificial cave dug in granite bedrock became visible, entangled with Baila’s hideout. It seemed that the alien holo-device had troubles balancing the depth impression, because it projected part of the god’s cavern inside the large wall behind the prophet. The whole mix-up created the illusion that the prophet was in the same room with the creature, despite the obviously non-Antyran scanning technology and its granular red-gray shades added for a hallucinatory effect. It was an alien hologram meant for a different visual range than theirs!
The god was short, even shorter than Baila, and didn’t look like anything Gill had seen before—not even remotely. The scrawny creature gave an impression of surreal fragility, greatly emphasized by his whitish-gray skin dotted with purple veins—hard to tell if that was their normal color or just a scanning artifact.
The only things adorning his oddly shaped head, bulged out above his eye sockets and positioned on a long, wrinkled neck, were three shiny symbols—or maybe metallic implants—glimmering on the skin above his left eye.
His flattened face, on the other tail, was endowed with a large mouth, full of conical, yellow teeth surrounded by protruding excrescences. A transparent breathing tube came out of the vertical cleft he had in the middle of his face. It was connected to a second, thicker tube that ran horizontally just above the mouth, leading in turn to a device hidden on his back. The god was jerkily breathing a mixture of brown vapors, leaving behind a lingering cloud, hardly miscible with the air of the cavern. The vapors stained the skin of his face in a thin, glossy stripe, all the way from his uni-nostril to the forehead.
A pair of long arms dangled awkwardly from the torso, giving the impression that the alien had no idea what to do with them. The legs were hidden from view by a yellow, tubular fabric sewn from an unknown material, reaching down his calves. Or maybe her calves? From what he had seen so far, Gill wasn’t sure about the creature’s sex, if it even had one. Probably a male would be more appropriate, considering his ugliness, although Gill was pretty sure the gods found the Antyrans equally unattractive.
When the creature got closer, he lifted his dress and fell on the floor, bending his right knee in front of him. Only then did Gill notice that some skins were dangling from his arms like grotesque flight membranes. On closer examination, the skins proved to be simple hangings without ligaments to strengthen them into something useful.
Probably thinking that his weirdness wasn’t shocking enough, the thing bowed his head on the extended foot and stretched his arms around it, as if he was hatching his own knee. After a brief moment, he rose in a smooth motion and walked on as if nothing happened—a heap of jellylike, trembling nodules becoming visible under the skin of his legs.
The bowing seemed so fluid and natural, despite its strangeness, that Gill found it hard to believe it was real and not just his imagination.
Gill couldn’t help but notice the god’s large, translucent eyes, completely colored in a blue-purple hue, dotted by a delicate yellow and black radial pigmentation. Although extremely bulged, they seemed surreally immobile, frozen between the wrinkles of his face. Strange, indeed, because—at least in theory—they should have had a great deal of freedom. The large, shriveled eyelids kept them moist all the time, giving them an oily appearance; the eyelids only moved from the bottom up when their owner blinked.
The hologram didn’t seem to notice Baila but was speaking to Gill!
Soon, it became apparent that the god was in fact talking to an invisible companion whose voice wasn’t rendered. Surely the latter was also watching the hologram and understood the strange language.
Is this how the gods look? he asked himself, convinced that he knew the answer all too well. The Sacred Book didn’t describe their appearance, but the Antyrans always assumed they were made in the gods’ image. Well, it seemed they were terribly mistaken; what he was seeing didn’t have the slightest resemblance to the Antyran species. If Zhan looked like the creature in front of him, the tarjis had to repaint all their flags—the god lacked the vertical iris of the Antyrans, which they could conveniently stretch when they were angry. The whole eye of the god was an oversized iris.
The god was dragging his feet on the stone floor of a gigantic base carved in a mountain, reverberating long echoes throughout the cave. As more and more of the base materialized inside the prophet’s hall, several gray vessels appeared behind the creature. Sigia’s enemies! The ships were small but undoubtedly had the same design as the destroyers Gill had seen in the bracelet’s memory.
The very gods who closed Antyra inside the firewall were the enemies of the Sigians, just as he already suspected! And Baila didn’t lie when he said he could call the gods when he wanted. The hunt for the Sigian destroyer continued after more than 1,250 years, and this time, he was the prey!
“Now you believe me, Gill?” His Greatness reproached him. “You’re looking at one of Zhan’s sons!”
He again quelled the feeling of remorse for refusing the prophet’s offer. He sensed the Sigian writhing inside his head at the very thought of betraying them. We touched, and his kyi is part of me now. The mythical Azaric once said: “To see is to change. But more than that, to see is to change yourself.” And he saw a deadly secret, which changed him for the rest of his life.
For a brief moment, he thought that the god was talking in Antyran because he could suddenly understand the creature’s words. But when he watched his lips, it became obvious that some unknown device was translating the strange babbling as it was spoken. How did the god receive the words of his invisible companion? Then he saw a small metallic disk glued to a wrinkled area at the base of the skull, although he didn’t notice any hearing lobe. The creature had no gills, but despite this shortcoming, his kind had managed to evolve some sort of hearing directly through the skin. The comparative anatomy will have to wait for another day, if that’s ever going to come, he thought bitterly.
When the god spoke again, his hasty words betrayed a fanatical desire to serve unconditionally.
“They didn’t say their plans, but they’ll be back soon,” he said in a rush. “The other ships are waiting here,” he said, pointing to the bottom of the cavern. “Do you give the order of attack?” He listened for the answer, then continued: “If the temples lose the w
ar, if would be hard for us to hide from the Antyrans. The rebels are becoming bolder by the day!”
The god was waiting obediently for a new message. Gill understood, however, that his petrified face was in fact a chimera thrown over a whirling, deep ocean. He barely saw the god for a few moments, yet he already sensed the truth: somewhere, at great depths, lay the shores of fear embedded there since time immemorial, a fear that turned him into the unliving creature in front of his eyes. He couldn’t tell how he knew this, but it was no mere illusion. An Antyran was rarely mistaken about such things, especially a disciple of the ancient caste Guk35 for smell-and-kyi like himself. Maybe the smell gave the god away, even though nothing of the creature’s flavor could reach him from a hologram.
Like most Antyrans, Gill was able to turn the images into aromas to smell them—and they spoke volumes about the appearance in front of him. Or maybe the eyes, something inside his abyssal looks, betrayed him that he wasn’t entirely devoid of feelings as he appeared, although they were locked in an unreachable corner of his kyi…
“I’m the ninety-eighth avatar, and we never saw them in all our stored memories,” he exclaimed. “But we know their description from the slaves.”
The creature paused again, listening to another order.
“Yes, Your Greatness, we’ll cancel the scouting, and nobody goes out anymore,” he said, for the first time moving his eyes independently from the rest of his head. “Great Baila, may I show you the coordinates from the satellite? There’s little time left in case you change your wish—”
Great Baila? Since the prophet was in his hall and obviously not part of the conversation, it could only mean Gill was watching a hologram recorded in the past, and the creature addressed whichever Baila lived at the time of scanning! What kind of rebels was he talking about? Could it be the Kids’ War, the only time in the post-Raman history when the “rebels” challenged the power of the temples?
What surprised Gill most was the humble appearance of the god: definitely not the right stance when speaking with an Antyran, be it the prophet himself! Baila was giving orders to one of Zhan’s children? That was beyond any imaginable heresy!
Even worse, he began to suspect that the alien in front of him wasn’t really alive. The tone of his speech, his gestures—or rather, the lack of them—his looks, reminded Gill of the artificial intelligences. The AI jet drivers and the food handlers were twins of the creature, born from the same printer—except that the alien seemed to have even fewer feelings than them. The god was an automaton of flesh and bones. Even if he was hatched from a male and a female of his species, he couldn’t experience the independence of a real kyi; his purpose was to serve.
The alien touched a cube made of black stone reaching up to his waist, and the block woke up to life. A translucent miniature hologram bordered by strange symbols rose above the stone; it was a map, on which the creature picked a place.
After a few moments, the godly base and everything inside disappeared from the prophet’s hall, replaced by a familiar sight scanned from orbit. Gill immediately recognized the Roch-Alixxor mountain range. Judging by the hue of the acajaa fields on the horizon, it had to be close to the harvest time. The ice tongues of the famous glaciers reached much farther downhill than he remembered—another proof that the hologram had to be hundreds of years old. No doubt, from the times of the Kids’ War, which happened 652 years ago!
Although the alien was gone, his voice could still be heard.
“The news didn’t reach Alixxor yet to ruin their morale, and Olgarh already launched the attack through the western pass. And the problem’s right here,” the god exclaimed. “They were found by the rebel scouts.”
The image followed a huge alpine valley flanked by steep walls, at least three miles high, traversed by a massive glacier on which tens of thousands of soldiers were marching uphill.
Several large infantry units were closely followed by packs of slingers mounted on battle moulans, their tail spikes covered in sharp metal sheaths. Some of the giant animals carried huge siege weapons, while others had long poles with metal spikes fitted on their sides, to break the enemy ranks during frontal assaults.
Their banners representing Zhan’s angry eye were waving in the harsh, freezing wind of the vardannes, which covered their armor and weapons in a thick crust of ice. The temple column was on its way to attack the rebel-held city of Alixxor!
In front of the army, a row of pathmakers had laid wooden bridges over the large crevasses opened in their path. The rickety decks cracked and creaked from all their joints at the hurried passing of the bloodthirsty horde. Sometimes, the icy whirls of a turbulent river flowing deep under the glacier could be glimpsed in the purple abyss of the crevices.
Suddenly, a light shimmered on a nearby cliff, quickly followed by another one across the valley. One by one, other lights joined the chatter. Before long, a storm of signals lit the summits along the path while the army in the valley marched on, entirely oblivious that its moves were closely watched from great heights.
The eye in the sky reached the line of the pathmakers, and then it slowly drifted over the narrow valley unfolding in front of them. After several large curves, it reached a large depression opened in the right wall. In that very place, the glacier turned left toward the jagged slopes of a nearby peak, while the path followed a large valley bordered by gentle hills leading down to the wondrous Alixxoran plains. Far away, at the horizon, the top of the pyramids and the towering crowns of the murra trees could be seen above the purple mist like the magical islands of a warm, peaceful ocean.
A few more steps, just a few more, and nothing would remain between the sharp steel of their sarpans and the city of the Eternal Pyramids! The rebel capital would fall, ending the bloody war…
The eye in the sky moved back to the ice tongue, stopping at the right wall of the valley. It changed its spectrum and swept the ice diligently in search of something: the snow was still white, but thousands and thousands of red spots became visible under it. Thermal targets, some small, others large—a whole army was buried under the snow, completely hidden, waiting to ambush the temple soldiers!
Gill felt the excitement surging to the tip of his tail, for he was seeing the battle of the Klikoh Glacier, the turning point of the rebellion that saved the Antyrans from Baila’s rule! A rebellion that eventually became the Shindam’s dictatorship…
Without warning, the canyon disappeared, and the hologram of the godly cavern crashed again into Baila’s great hall. At first, Gill thought that the base was empty, but then he saw the god shaking uncontrollably in a corner while he listened to a new message in the neck implant. The god’s eyes became reddish, his cheekbones taking on the same jellylike consistency of the feet nodules. His original inertia melted away, despite his inner struggle to keep calm and cold. All his anxieties, so carefully hidden until then, burst open like a horde of unstoppable guvals.
Before Gill had a chance to realize what was happening, a strange vibration whipped the air, greatly amplified by the giant cavern. In a couple of seconds, the source became visible: a ship appeared on the right side of the hologram, landing in front of the others. This was perhaps the missing party the god had talked about earlier.
“Great Baila, your sons returned from the Mordavia temple with wonderful news!” the god exclaimed, deeply agitated. “Give us your light, to all of us who honored the seal of the covenant!”
The words took Gill by surprise. Ikkla, the nostril of the inner kyi, woke up with a painful awareness of their meaning, wrinkling his head spikes. “Give us your light, to all of us who honored the seal of the covenant!” was a ritual saying of the Inrumiral narrative, and he just heard it coming from the mouth of a god! The newly acquired insight dispelled his awe rather brutally: Antyra’s Book of Creation Inrumiral wasn’t written by the grays to “convince” the Antyrans to worship them as their gods—they actually believed in the same religion! Suddenly, the humility of the creature in front of the p
rophet and his use of ritual phrases made perfect sense. But then… who’s Baila? Who are the gods of the gods?
“The cloning line is valid,” the hologram of the god mumbled in a low voice, more to himself, while his eyes shimmered and twitched in the muffled fight to regain his unliving rigidity.
The god became speechless, overcome by emotion. After a brief moment of confusion, in which he apparently didn’t know what to do, he fell on the floor, bending his right knee in front of him. He rested his head on his thigh and covered it with his skin hangings.
This time, though, he didn’t rise up. He dropped like a lifeless object, like a bizarre trophy from another world, becoming part of the rock, as dead and cold as the gray heart of the stone. Maybe he died, thought Gill. The possibility didn’t surprise him at all, coming from such a strange creature. After all, he knew of a few Antyran animals capable of dying from a good scare.
A group of aliens dressed in rubberlike suits emerged from the ship, this time looking very much alive, despite the deadly glare in their eyes.
Gill couldn’t help but wonder if they belonged to a different, albeit related, species because as fragile was the first creature, as big and strong were the newcomers. They had muscular arms and legs, without the slightest trace of skin hangings or jelly nodules. On the other tail, their heads were not nearly as large; in fact, they looked funnily small on their oversized bodies, although they had the weird bulge above their eye sockets. And another small detail: they were identical!
When they saw the first god lying on the floor, they turned their surprised eyes toward Gill and sped up their steps. As soon as they reached the body, they stopped and bent their heads in submission. That was all. No lying down, no hatching knees… not that they would have been able to do it even if they wanted to, judging by the girth of their legs.
The creatures didn’t seem to care about the “fallen god” at their feet. One of them touched the disk glued on his neck.