The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  He instinctively felt that he was slipping again into a temporal knot, sensing that the following minutes would become essential for the bracelet’s survival. The safest thing to do now was to employ the smell-kyi acuity to reveal the path: Should he disconnect to evade through the skylight, or search a way out of the dark forest?

  He was smelling a web of possibilities, most of them ending with him ripped apart by metallic licants or paralyzed by an inductor hidden in a mirage, yet the riskiest roads were in the virtual world, where Ugo was making the rules, and the surprises couldn’t be possibly anticipated by a newcomer. Still, he decided to stay in the simulation as long as he wasn’t in obvious danger. At least he wouldn’t have to kill anyone…

  When he reached the waterhole leading to Tormalin, he decided to keep running away from the jure—it made no sense to travel back to the prison glade. Suddenly, a gust of cold wind hissing with the screams of a thousand guvals came from behind, twisting the branches and shaking their needle leaves in his head. Could it be that the jure finally discovered his little ruse?

  Forgetting all caution, he started to run as fast as his feet could carry him.

  The dark forest was colluding with the enemy to prevent his escape; the heavy branches were hurting his face with their needle leaves while his feet were stumbling on the unidentifiable scraps of rotten vegetation or sinking in the mud up to the ankles. And all this time, he had to follow an ephemeral path that didn’t allow itself to be followed.

  Due to his haste, he was hit pretty badly by a tree trunk he didn’t notice, yet he pushed his body to run even faster, with all the risk of sinking in the stinking mud hidden under the putrid, unstable platform he was running on.

  Covered in mud and frozen to the bones, he felt that his feet couldn’t carry his weight any longer. Whoever designed this world has outdone himself—and perhaps even exaggerated a bit with the realism of the details, he thought. It would have been quite useful—since he was in a virtual world—to be able to run without getting tired, but that didn’t happen at all.

  Suddenly, his left leg sank deep into a pit hidden under rotten debris. Afraid that he might sink in the mud, he flung himself onto his belly, rolling over the decayed stumps. He barely got to his feet, gathering the scraps of will he still had to keep playing an absurd game whose aim he didn’t understand.

  As he went on the trail, his eyes spotted the hole on which he had stumbled. The water collected inside was crystal clear, an improbable reality in a sea of mud dotted by murky, pestilential puddles that stunk awfully. The resemblance to the other exit immediately struck him. Could it be another gate?

  A cold gush of wind came from behind, reminding him that time was running out. He rushed to pull the rotting branches that blocked the entry until the hole became big enough to fit his size. Without hesitating this time, he jumped headfirst into the frozen fountain. From the first mouthful of water, he found, relieved, that it was breathable. He began to swim through a gallery dug in pink granite, stained by blue dots and shimmering mica.

  The light at the end of the tunnel was much stronger than the last time. Through the clear water, he could already see trees mirrored in the pit, trees that had nothing of the sinister looks of the black forest. A thin rod landed in the water, making ripples on its surface. After a second, it stretched with a pop and covered almost all of the opening, leaving him in the dark. He didn’t understand what had happened, but when he reached the end of the underwater tunnel and pushed it aside, he realized it was a seed. In the new realm, the tekals were shedding their seeds…

  The majestic tekal trees around him were part of a hilltop forest in the middle of stripping its carnivorous seeds under the breath of a fresh breeze. As soon as the rods touched the earth, they popped in a cloud of dust, opening their fleshy pulp, red as the hearts of fire—a bait for the hungry licants. Of course, it was a deadly trap, because the licants glued on them ended up digested, food for the tender plants to grow roots in the juicy earth.

  Soon, the living carpet covered most of the ground, and Gill could hardly walk without stepping on it.

  The land was strewn with massive blocks of marble, their milky crags rising through the rug of seeds. So much tekal on the imaginary island, and so little left on Antyra I! The extinction of the licants wasn’t exactly a great idea; the forests with the most prized wood were dwindling with every felled tree, and no new seeds were growing roots in the absence of the energy-rich meal offering.

  The waterhole through which he exited had a circular marble railing carved by skilled hands. The excess water trickled over the lip of the basin, directly into a trough for watering moulans. It was a small fountain built for the travelers walking on the nearby path to quench their thirst.

  In a few steps, he got out of the forest. The hill bordered a green river meadow covered by the same strange discoidal grass he had seen in Tormalin, dotted here and there by dwarf bushes riddled with curved thorns. Nearby, the slope was gentle, but further downhill, it became steep and rocky, hiding its base.

  On the other part of the valley, there was another hill, taller than the one where he stood, strewn with thick bushes and round like the baldness of a zabulan.72

  A wide and shallow river flowed from the narrow valley at his left. After a large meander, it quickly disappeared from sight, hidden by a dense forest.

  The valley was apparently followed by a dirt road on his left, flanked on both sides by steep, forested ravines, dotted with jagged rock ridges. Farther away, in the same direction, he saw a huge mountain split by an impressive glacial trough, carved by the glittering tongue of a huge glacier.

  He filled his chest with fresh air. Millions of small, yellow stems of vermalin dotted the green, juicy grass covering the hill; their sweet scent caressed his nostrils, helping him to forget the awful stench of the black swamps.

  The road in the valley had to go somewhere; Gill decided to reach it by following the small creek that flowed from the portal fountain. The trail was muddy, and he had to step on the flat, sparkling mica rocks in its riverbed.

  He hadn’t descended much when his eyes were drawn by a patch of mud that had a footprint in it. A small dent filled with standing water, in which there was a… foot-glove73 of a child?

  He grabbed it between two fingers and pulled it out of the mud. Immediately, he noticed it was lighter than a snowflake and didn’t look like a glove but, rather, like a tiny leather shoe, shaped for a foot with two equal fingers. At first glance, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, but then he understood the riddle—the trees, the sky, the grass, his palm, all were mirrored by the shoe in his hand. A shoe of a chameleon dwarf!

  The virtual world didn’t cease to surprise him. The tiny object came as a tail blow in the face of the normality he thought—for a moment—that he had regained.

  Getting over the initial shock, he looked carefully around. Soon, he noticed that other footprints similar to the first one riddled the muddy creek. A whole bunch of chameleons had recently passed through the area.

  Driven by curiosity, he went after them to see where they led.

  They were so well camouflaged, and his senses were so untrained to locate them, that he almost stumbled into them. He had reached right in the middle of their pack before he noticed them, when they moved out of his way—hundreds of dwarf chameleons, all around him! Up close, they were betrayed by the tremor of the air, resembling the whirling refraction of a wildfire.

  Their transparency reminded him of the sinister shadow that had attacked him in the prison meadow. Save for their diminutive stature, the dwarves were strikingly similar to the virtual Ugo. The jure wouldn’t have any difficulty hiding among their ranks, he worried.

  The chameleons were mythical creatures of the folklore before Zhan’s coming—usually described as more or less similar to an Antyran, but missing the tail and gills. Instead, the legends told of a pair of oversized funnels surrounding their hearing alveoli, and sly little eyes placed close to
the nostrils.

  Since they were in a meadow, they had naturally “borrowed” the dark green color of the grass—even their sparse head spikes became green. The white of their eyes, however, contrasted with the rest of their appearance—and also the conical gray teeth, which became visible when their owners displayed a foolish grin if they noticed they were being looked at.

  One of the dwarves approached him and took a deep bow. The others immediately followed suit by putting their little palms on the grass. Without a word, the first creature unwrapped a piece of metal from under the folds of his mantle and handed it over.

  The object resembled the scratching claws used in antiquity, quite similar to the ones he had a chance to study in the vaults of the Archivists Tower. But the grayish-white shiny color, which left him no doubt it was cast of platinum, and the prominence of the claws were good hints that it had a different significance altogether. He knew it, of course, all too well: the Brocat of Loyalty, which meant that the chameleons put themselves under his direct command. Command to do what? Could the creatures be the avatars of some Ropolitans? Or maybe artificial intelligences with some functions in this twisted world? He suspected that he had stumbled into a land of legends, a game…

  He reached out for the brocat, hoping to get some answers. Indeed, as soon as he took it in his palm, a gentle breeze started to blow several yards away, quickly turning into a violent dust devil that swirled the grass disks and dry vegetation in its dizzying dance. A hole of darkness appeared at the base of the twister—a rupture in the space structure that expanded to make room for a… a white, translucent sphere, taller than his stature. It could only be the portal sphere Urdun had told him about!

  Without delay, the side facing him opened lengthwise, and a young female stepped out of the object. She had swarthy skin and childish features—playful blue eyes deep as the Blue Crevice, complemented by a slightly open mouth showing her perfect teeth, framed by fleshy, prominent lips. She was the kind of female that everyone liked from the first glance, except for the tarjis—who would have surely been offended by the boldness of her tunic, which generously exposed her left shoulder.

  The outline of her delicate body, combined with the firmness of her muscles—which could be guessed under the slippery fabric of her clothes—deeply unsettled him. Gill wasn’t able to fully understand the reason. Was she deceiving him with hidden aromas? He felt the dashing pulse of his hearts beating wildly in his head spikes, but then he remembered Urdun’s sayings, that in the virtual world, everyone looked as they wished. He had no way of knowing what kind of shell lay abandoned in the fluff of a greasy nest, crammed in a cave she might share with other bixanids immersed in trance.

  Four disproportionately tall, muscular individuals descended from the same sphere right after the female. They were most likely artificial intelligences; they looked identical and were dressed in yellow tunics embroidered with strange symbols. Moreover, he could read the text painted in blue on their right asymmetrical shoulder: “Property of the Games Registry—Valley A2—Statistics.”

  Just as he was about to greet her, he saw the scar on her bare shoulder—an utril with open wings, incised deeply in her skin. On Zhan’s eye, a grah! Only they used such tribal tattoos! That explained the robustness of her making, the feeling of wildness barely tamed by a smattering of etiquette—her strangeness that he smelled from the first moment their eyes met.

  As an archivist, he knew all too well the origin of the grahs. They had a common ancestor with the Antyrans, but a fateful migration of the North Pole right in the middle of the only continent, some five hundred thousand years prior, had split the two populations. Strong and violent, swift to shed blood but honoring truth and justice, passionate in love as well as in hate, the grahs went through countless wars, alliances, and even marriages with the Antyrans—although, in most cases, the fruits of such unnatural bindings were born sterile and didn’t live long.

  Everything came to an end some 1,282 years ago after the battle of the Black Hill and the inevitable fall of Zagrada, the grah capital, the city of the magnificent ice temples. The cruel Baitar Raman had unleashed his Gondarran assassins, who did an exemplary job of wiping out the grah civilization from Antyra’s surface—proving an effectiveness that scared even the Antyrans, with all the gratuitous violence exhibited by the soldiers in the turbulent times in which they lived.

  So fierce was the onslaught that the few grah survivors never recovered to form a nation or even a modest settlement. Not that they became extinct, for some clusters remained scattered here and there, especially the ones already living in the Antyran cities. But the magnitude of the massacre created a huge moral dilemma. The Antyrans instinctively knew that the only feeling a grah could harbor for them was hatred, hatred for their species, for the color of their eyes, for the lack of a tattoo—hatred they were meant to carry in their kyis until the end of time. Therefore, from that day on, no one trusted the grahs. They were expelled from the city centers, forced to live a nomadic life, without education, forced to do the dirtiest or most degrading things that Antyrans themselves didn’t want to do.

  Each time a crime or transgression happened, the bloodthirsty crowd took to the streets or forests to hunt grahs. It seemed that the evil escaped from its bindings on that fateful day caused its own ridiculous justification, like a siclide wildfire creating its own weather. It forced them to do more harm to blur the previous one, to enter a loop that would haunt them forever, feeding on the madness that consumed Zagrada’s temples and the defenseless bodies of its inhabitants.

  In time, the surviving grahs became miners and metalworkers, skilled artisans—the most famous being Adamonde himself—the blacksmith who forged the sarpan Ucancarul and the Saurra tail-sheaths belonging to Raman’s moulan. These artifacts became the most cherished Antyran symbols of late antiquity, but they were all lost during Zhan’s attack on Raman’s capital, some thirty-two years after the fall of Zagrada.

  During the last century, the grahs had disappeared from Alixxor and other large cities—but seemingly not from Ropolis. After all, Antyra III was a mining world, and the grahs were miners and great metalworkers. It shouldn’t be surprising that they found the best hideout in the Blue Crevice, which shielded them from the curiosity of the officials. Moreover, the terrible life in the underground might have forced the residents, regardless of their species, to rely on one another, to share the meager crumbles of flour and the deadly risks they had to face every day; it would have been the perfect environment to erase preconceptions…

  Gill didn’t think he had a bias toward them, and yet he felt instinctively that it wouldn’t be easy to trust the female. He suspected the feeling was mutual. Either way, however, he succeeded. He had managed to break Ugo’s web!

  He greeted her warmly by spinning his right palm, but she didn’t bother to answer. Not again, he thought, disappointed—but then he remembered he was wearing the dull, expressionless face of the flour dealers, identical to that of the four giants following her.

  “Get him!” she ordered in a voice loaded with surprising hostility for someone so pleasant-looking, seeding the certainty that he hadn’t escaped from Ugo’s trap. Could she be one of Ugo’s many faces, even though the voice didn’t resemble his at all? Or maybe another creature under his control?

  Two of the four companions jumped forward surprisingly fast for their size and restrained his hands as he frantically struggled to reach the interface. It took him only a moment to realize he had fallen into a trap, his ganglions exposed and at the mercy of the ice monster!

  Bewildered, he tried to understand why he hadn’t moved more swiftly, why he was captured so easily. He had allowed himself to be disturbed by the female’s presence. Her childish appearance numbed his reactions, and the attack took him completely by surprise.

  “How did you get here?” whipped her question.

  “I passed through a tunnel,” he said, looking in the direction of the riverbed through which he descended.
“From an isla—”

  “You know cheating is punished!” she yelled angrily, cutting his words. “You thought we wouldn’t catch an illegal entry in a game?”

  “What are you talking abo—”

  “From this moment on, you have lost the right of the bixan. The council will block your avatar!” She turned to the other two creatures. “Find his sphere!” she ordered.

  “But I don’t—”

  “Silence! You will talk only in front of the council before banishment!”

  The two AIs were squeezing him in their palms, as large as the cups of magneto-bulldozers, crushing his arms and forcing him to make un-Antyran efforts to abstain from screaming in pain. The other two were searching for something on the ground—as if a portal sphere could be so small as to become lost in the discoidal grass crushed under the chameleons’ little feet.

  Unable to find anything, they pulled ultraviolet laser lenses from their belts and swept the air around, seemingly at random.

  “Chameleons!” screamed Gill, writhing in the grasp of the AIs. “You swore loyalty to me! Save my tail!”

  The chameleons were staring at him, grinning stupidly when they met his eyes… but predictably, they did nothing to save him from the trap. So much for their Brocat of Loyalty, he thought, angered.

  “It’s an order!” he cried in another desperate attempt to mobilize them—unfortunately, just as successful as the first one.

  The grah female burst into a crystalline laughter, holding her belly with both hands.

  “Are you crazy? You know it’s a game, right?” Then she gazed at him suspiciously. “Who—”

  “We can’t find his portal,” one of the AIs interrupted.

  “Search again! No, just pull off his interface, and he’s going to fall on the portal island. Wait,” she told the two who held him immobilized. “I’m going to jump first to make sure he won’t escape.” She made a sign to the other two giants to enter the portal, and she turned back to leave.