The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  Only Gill’s presence mobilized them to hold the front line, but he could sense their despair. All they could hope for was to take as many guvals with them as they could.

  “Your Greatness!”

  A prodac galloped nearby, pulling the reins of a free moulan. Gill jumped on the net, ready to give the regroup order. As soon as the orzacs saw the helmet of the baitar, they formed a wall around him, trying to keep the guvals at bay using the tail spikes.

  “Fall back to the hilltop!” he shouted to cover the noise of the battle.

  The goal was reached. The poisoned guvals had to be lured uphill to die of overheating, while the arcanian trainers would get a surprise…

  He hadn’t even finished the order and the surviving soldiers turned back to the hilltop, the guvals on their tails downing them one by one. It didn’t resemble an organized retreat, but he had no hope that such a thing would be possible.

  While climbing the slope, he spotted a cluster of bushes on the left, above the place where his other orzacs were waiting in ambush. Taking advantage of the thicket, he bridled the moulan to the edge of the forest, followed by a small escort. The rest of the orzacs kept running to the hilltop as ordered, followed by the poisoned guvals.

  The arcanians hurried through the breach opened by the guvals, taking great care to leave no survivors behind by spearing them with their shtitzes, sharp as the thorns of siclides.

  The volley of the tarcaneers took them utterly by surprise; hundreds of missiles, seemingly appearing from nowhere, wreaked havoc in their ranks. Amid the general confusion, they failed to find what hit them until the second salvo, which gave away the chameleons. After a short hesitation, the arcanians turned to face the attackers while the third lethal volley reached them.

  The arcanians threw their shtitzes toward the forest, without seeing their targets. Some appeared to have hit flesh, judging by the green phosphorescent blood gushing from the wounds. They pulled their short, curved swords called phaelles and launched an attack. The dwarves, in full accord with their fighting tradition, threw their tarcanes in the grass and ran screaming into the thick of the forest.

  The arcanians had no trouble figuring out where the chameleons went, following the trails of blood left behind by the wounded ones. When they reached the earlier position of the tarcanners, they stumbled on the invisible bodies lying on the ground.

  Gill knew this was the moment when the orzacs hidden in the woods would launch their attack. He quickly decided to lend them a helping tail.

  “Charge!” he yelled to his small escort, and he bridled his moulan to gallop straight at the enemy line.

  The arcanians, attacked by an enemy that appeared from a place where none should have remained alive, without realizing the feebleness of the force coming at them, turned hastily to confront the new attack—exposing their flank to the thousand orzacs hidden at the forest edge. Right at that moment, the massive charge broke through the bushes crushed under the feet of the moulans and slammed into them with the force of Belamia’s storm in her good days, throwing their ranks in disarray.

  Gill reached the enemies at the same time and engaged them eagerly.

  The arcanians’ main weapons were the guvals, which disappeared somewhere on the hill, chasing the orzacs. Their second weapons were the shtitzes, which they had thrown at the chameleons. Therefore, the majority only had phaelles, which were good in close combat but pretty useless against the riders.

  The lethal tail spikes wreaked havoc among the arcanians. They had barely started to fight and had already lost their cohesion, attacked from two sides and terrified that the chameleons would return to the battlefield.

  Still, Gill’s small escort was in the hardest place, overwhelmed and surrounded from all sides. They had to resist until the help arrived, but it would take time. His riders mowed down the arcanians like an acajaa field during harvest to keep them away from him, but one by one, they were dragged down the nets and hacked to death. With every passing moment, the enemy blades were reaching closer and closer to his shiny armor. Wounded by a phaella, his moulan raised its head, growling in pain. Right then, one of the few remaining shtitzes—most likely aimed at him—speared its mouth, lodging inside the throat. Roaring in agony, the beast fell on its knees and rolled on the ground, dead.

  Deciding to avoid any further mishaps, Gill pulled his feet from the net and jumped off before being caught underneath.

  The nearest enemy rushed forward, ready to strike. Gill fended his phaella and engaged him, using the sarpan as a hammer to make the arcanian lose his balance. But then, without any reason, the enemy soldier crouched in pain. Looking around, Gill realized that other arcanians were falling as if they were hit by invisible sarpans—big, ugly wounds gushing blood through the joints of their armor or their knees…

  The chameleons had returned to the fight! After they ran through the forest around his hidden orzac unit, they came back to raise an invisible wall around him, slicing his enemies with kengo, their ghostly knives!

  The resistance of the arcanians collapsed everywhere. They started to run downhill, screaming in terror. Unfortunately, with all their long legs, they couldn’t outrun the moulans. A terrible slaughter followed: the orzacs knocked them down, breaking their backs, while the dwarves behind them hunted the survivors.

  Gill jumped onto another stray moulan—the fourth that day—and joined the hunting.

  Before long, over half of the arcanians lay dead, and nothing could save the rest of them from the blades of the riders. As the arcanians reached the river, they rushed to cross it without searching for a fjord. The strong currents knocked them off their feet, and many more drowned, pulled down by their armor.

  Gill enjoyed his little victory, but he knew all too well that the battle was far from over. It made no sense to chase the arcanians scattered on the riverbanks—he had to help the others to win the battle. At first, he thought of charging along the dirt road to surround the slobberings. But that would be a mistake because they would arrive right in front of the rikanes—which were much deadlier at close range. As long as Voran’s artillery was still intact, he had no meddling in the valley.

  “Stop!” he yelled. “Pull back to the hill!”

  Without much enthusiasm, the soldiers left the surviving arcanians to escape through their spikes. They spurred their moulans upward to reach the campsite.

  A nightmarish sight awaited them around the sleeping domes and the boulders piled for the hakles. It was there where the last moments of the guvals’ carnage had taken place. It seemed that no orzac escaped alive. Here and there, heaps of dead soldiers piled over a slain guval. Even the deep ravine behind the hill was strewn with bodies. All the guvals died—the last of them, no doubt, killed by the unforgiving poison.

  He looked at the battlefield and noticed that his left wing wasn’t doing well. Despite the heroism of the grahs, the llandro had pushed their way into the valley and climbed the steep ravine, spitting poison at them. The orzacs who were supposed to protect their side had given way under the unrelenting assaults of the slobberings, exposing the flank of the grahs to a legion of monsters. Nibala’s troops were now attacked from two sides and wouldn’t hold for long…

  The slobberings had attacked his army’s center, too, and the center ceased to exist, save for two small groups of orzacs surrounded by a sea of azziles falling rhythmically on their helmets. It would be a matter of minutes before the monsters reached the former orzacs’ camp on the hilltop.

  He raised his hand, stopping his riders’ impetus to charge chaotically downhill to join their comrades.

  “Chameleons on the right,” he ordered, “hit the slobberings when they come this way.” He turned to the orzacs: “Pile up the boulders of the utrils. Release them downhill on my mark.”

  Gill bridled his moulan to turn toward the slobberings. He raised his purple sarpan over his head and pranced his animal to attack the enemy line. He charged alone, yelling of death, with all the pride of a legend
ary hero, as if his strength was enough to shatter the whole flood of monsters.

  At first, the slobberings didn’t notice the lone rider running at them, but soon they realized it was the enemy baitar.

  “Huxile,” babbled a pilteat. “Kill him!” he ordered to those around him, sputtering them abundantly with saliva.

  Grunting and brandishing their azziles, the slobberings turned and rushed his way, screaming, drool oozing out of their gaping mouths. Despite a crazy temptation to hit them, Gill had no desire to kill himself. He turned the moulan from under their goiters and ran up the hill to lure them into the trap.

  “Now!” he yelled at his orzacs as soon as he moved away from the path of the boulders.

  An avalanche of dusty stones began to roll down the steep slope, smashing the pursuers. At the same time, the loud clatter of the tarcanes announced that the chameleons’ skull-breaking weapons had entered the fray…

  On the opposite hill, another view filled him with joy. The first wave of utrils dived on their targets. The catapults, completely taken by surprise, had no chance to fight back; the huge boulders falling from the sky broke all of them and decimated the kerats. In less than a minute, the artillery that terrorized his army, the key of Ugo-Voran’s guaranteed success, was reduced to a pile of splinters and mangled bodies scattered on the hilltop.

  After the attack, the utrils turned back toward the ridge to load another pile of boulders in their hakles.

  “Signal the utrils to attack the llandro,” he ordered the nearby prodac.

  “I’ll do that, Your Greatness,” he exclaimed, turning his moulan to fulfill Gill’s wish.

  “Charge!” shouted Gill, raising his sarpan to start the attack.

  The orzacs followed him at once, charging downhill through the breach made by the avalanche. The blow was tremendous; his riders broke deep into the enemy line, punching the rattled slobberings with the moulan tails.

  For a while, the fight appeared balanced, but time was flowing on his side. Over Gill’s head, volley after volley ripped a path through the air, hissing of destruction and death. The slobberings began to lose ground, decimated by the tarcaneers.

  Elsewhere, too, the fate of the battle was turning in his favor. The llandro were squashed by a new attack of the utrils, while the grahs and the orzacs, seeing that the slobberings were attacked from several directions, increased the pressure to recover the lost space. It wouldn’t be long before the llandro would become history. In that moment, nothing would defend the flank of the slobberings and save them from encirclement.

  The battle was drawing to an end. Soon, he would be able to breathe again, to remove the armor smeared by the thick blood of the enemies and wash in the swirls of the river. But all the water in the world wouldn’t wash the wounds of his kyi… He once dreamed of legendary battles, he imagined the orzac armies charging, he saw the ancient history’s campaigns through the eyes of imagination. He believed an archivist knew everything about such things, and yet, today’s battle revealed something new, something that no legend, no scroll eaten by rukkus had told him: it showed him how war really looked. A hill so beautiful a few hours ago, the green valley, became the scene of terrible carnage.

  The simulation was far too realistic; something like that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. It broke all the patterns of a simple game, it melted away the smack of civilization gained in the last hundred years of technological progress. Laixan the aromary didn’t say in vain that “if you play with death again and again in a thousand perverse ways, if you face your own condition as a mortal, you will feed the desire to be frivolous with the water of life, to sneak under the spikes of the Gondarran assassins.” And he also added: “do not live to enjoy the death of your enemies.” All the cruelty of the ancient world, which the modern Antyrans wanted buried deeply in the history’s dusty pages, resurfaced here like the hideous specter of Arghail rising from the cave of kyis. The Ropolitans had indeed become another species, closer to the savage Antyrans of old. Perhaps that was why they defeated the prophet so easily; perhaps that was why Ugo and Sandara forgot about the palm ritual. Ropolis is not Antyra. Ropolis is the new Zagrada.

  Is this who I’m going to turn into? A savage? he thought pensively. The last days had started the metamorphosis… He had watched, through the eyes of a Sigian, the beautiful Sigia burning, and that marked him forever with the seal of cruelty. From a coward archivist, he became a lethal tool of the so-called Arghail; with every violent encounter his kyi calcified, becoming more and more deprived of empathy, more placid in the face of death.

  Well, maybe he hadn’t found the best moment to think about it. He would see later if he could save some of the former Gillabrian. His kyi’s integrity—a pretty serious concern in normal times—became downright irrelevant in his situation, with Ugo still alive and roaming on the island. So he wrinkled his spikes and totally forgot about it.

  He couldn’t understand why the game wasn’t over yet. The jure’s army was reduced to a pack of slobberings and dogans, the last of which were unable to show even token resistance to his riders’ sarpans. They couldn’t jump uphill, and the heat weakened them for good. By now, someone should have reached Voran and disconnected him.

  The grahs descended the steep ravine covered with dead llandros, surrounding the remaining monsters. It would be a matter of minutes before the last one bit the dirt. Did Ugo run from the battlefield to delay the end? What good would it serve?

  “The utrils have returned!” exclaimed Kizac, who had arrived near him to watch the end of the fight.

  “What utrils?” Then he realized, seeing the two fliers. “Sandara! They found her!”

  “The prisoner is carried to Ricopa by about twenty dogans. They saw them on the trail to the mountain.”

  “Kizac, I’m going after them.”

  “And the battle?”

  “Finish it! If you see Voran… make sure he tastes the blade of your sarpan!”

  “It will be done, Your Greatness.”

  “Gather the utrils. Mount three orzacs on each of them—no, I’d rather have ninety grahs. Make sure there are thirty full triangles. On the rest, bring orzacs.”

  He patiently waited for the required troops to assemble on the hilltop, hoping until the last minute to catch a glimpse of Ugo in the middle of his slobberings. But he waited in vain.

  As soon as the troops climbed on the hakles, they took off hastily to the imposing mountains on the left, the two utrils leading the way.

  He was finally riding an utril! With the scented wind whistling through his spikes, he started to feel the exaltation of flying, the excitement of reining the beast he was holding tightly between his thighs; he felt the power he had over the bundle of flesh sitting between him and the abysmal gulf underneath. His whole kyi awoke to a life he had never experienced, a life he never thought possible. His senses expanded in the surrounding space like oversized antennas; he became aware that the hairs on the back of the utril made a distinct swish in the breeze, he felt all the muscles and the tendons of the giant skin wings working to keep them afloat as if they were his. He felt even the smallest vortices created by the flock’s advance as if he himself was the space and time through which they swam with great haste. It was a feeling of total freedom impossible to describe in words; he even forgot that he hadn’t tasted the edible grass. I’d like to be able to incarnate as an utril, he thought, mesmerized by the prospect.

  A ridge of green stones appeared in front of the pack like the claws of a giant monster ready to grab them. A dusty path meandered a few yards below the edge of the cliff, bordered by a thousand-foot-deep chasm. This is where they passed, realized Gill. Could it be an illusion? He had the impression that if he looked closely, he could see the moisture lost by the ice creatures.

  At that altitude, the grass scales became dry and ragged, the whole mountain resembling a monster from a much older time than that of the ancient Antyrans, the bones of its skeleton protruding through the scaly skin.<
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  The utrils pushed hard to fly over the ridge and around a lofty peak rising to the sky like a tower. Right in front of them was the huge Ricopa Glacier, bordered by ragged, almost vertical walls of barren rock. Its massive ice tongue descended in a fairly straight line down to a green valley—a swamp, really, or at least that was how it looked from high above. Pools of water sparkled among patches of arkanes, the grass of the bogs. The arkanes were much smaller than in the Black Forest; they would hardly reach his knees—most likely due to the coldness. Three bare rock islets were the only solid platforms in the whole valley.

  But it was not the ice tongue that caught his attention. Although he expected the glacier of a goddess to be anything but ordinary, nothing prepared him for the sight in front of his eyes: Dedris’s castle, defying the most cherished laws of nature, was built on its base!

  Five towers about a mile tall, consisting of three segments, each thinner than the one below it, erupted from the ice vein like the sprawled fingers of the giant Froga.86 The first segment rose obliquely toward the mountain wall and not vertically like the other two, at the end being united with the nearby towers by thin ice bridges. The castle appeared to be built entirely of a bluish metal; the outer towers were shorter, while the middle one—undoubtedly the home of the goddess—was the tallest. Metal buttresses anchored the building deep into the mountain. Thanks to them, the glacier flowed downhill while the castle stood in place, slicing the ice. On its whole length, Ricopa’s tongue was split into six slices traversed here and there by huge crevasses.

  Ricopa wasn’t, however, a simple glacier. If the goddess lived in the towers, her monsters infested a town carved in the ice around the castle. The glacier’s tongue had lumps, mounds, ditches, and steps carved in the crevasses—everywhere there were signs that the grotesque servants of the goddess were working day and night for her.