by George Tome
Ricopa reminded him of the so-called Antyran cities from the misty legends of the last glaciation, whose names—if they existed in reality—had waned from the collective memory thousands of years ago… The Antyrans, like Dedris, apparently had ice towns. Of course, not carved in glaciers because they flow, move, and crack all the time—only the gods or the architects of a virtual realm could build them there. The stories told that the Antyrans had dug cities in the huge icecap covering the northern lowlands, which sometimes reached a mile in thickness and whose slow motion they didn’t bother to notice.
As they approached, Gill saw three large holes opening into the glacier’s tongue—the city gates, richly adorned with ice sculptures and surrounded by white slabs of rocks scattered through the swamp. He had already learned that things weren’t exactly what they looked like in Acanthia-under-Star. The white spots might rise to life if he approached them.
Three rivers flowed out of the gates, joining their foamy waters before they disappeared into the swamp.
“There they are,” an orzac shouted, pointing at the pack of dogans in the shadow of the glacier, moving hastily toward the main entrance.
Gill saw them, too, even though the silhouettes were hard to distinguish near the ice tongue. It became obvious that they had no way of preventing their entry in the cold darkness. In a few moments, the ice creatures were inside Ricopa.
They had arrived too late!
Gill bridled his utril to fly in circles around the entry, trying to think of something. It would take precious time to force their entry in the city, time they didn’t have… and how could they catch Sandara in the ice tunnels, forcing their way uphill with the ice monsters raining on their heads?
He landed on the glacier in a flat area without crevasses. Down in the darkness, he would be exposed to a huge risk, perhaps as big as the charge against the guvals. It didn’t seem a good idea to stretch his luck—he knew all too well the kind of traps he could expect from the dogans… Still, he needed her advice on how to end the game. The battle was over, and he was still stranded in Acanthia-under-Star.
Some of the orzacs followed his example and landed hard on the slippery ice, doing some comical pirouettes with their flying mastodons. Several utrils circled the skies to spy Sandara’s escort through the eyes of the crevasses and the canyon of the central fissure. If only he could find an opening big enough to get in front of the dogans!
“Find me a crevice to enter!” he shouted, waving at his orzacs to fly to the castle.
His band took off in a V formation, sniffing each little crack of the glacier to find a proper entrance. He eyed a few places where they could get in—stairs carved in steep crevasses or the ice domes of some tall buildings that could be breached, but he wanted an opening large enough to fly on their utrils.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t use the giant canyons sliced by the towers—they were too rugged to fly along. Their wild bends full of pointy juts and the narrow lips of the rift wouldn’t give their utrils any chance of bringing them down in one piece. They had to look for something else.
His soldiers finally found a huge abyss, a circular opening of an unfinished dome. Gill pushed his utril down without hesitation, closely followed by his companions. As they descended, the color of the walls changed from snow white to milky blue, then dark blue… strange colors to Gill’s eyes; on Antyra I, the hearts of the glaciers were purple because of the bacteria floating in the planet’s air.
The floor of the dome was full of ice boulders piled up for the construction of the ceiling, making landing impossible. The only way inside the womb of the glacier was a large archway opened in the downward wall. A scout flyer disappeared without incident into the blue cave. Gill, along with the rest of his fellows, followed him closely.
The gallery wasn’t as large as he thought; his utril panicked and started to hit the walls with its wings, keeping him glued on the net, praying to Zhan to protect him from being squashed on the tunnel’s ceiling. When the slope became gentler, the leading soldier tried to land. His utril rolled on its left side and slid downhill through the cave, dragging him along, his left foot trapped in the net. After a few dozen yards, they slammed into a wall with a loud thud.
As soon as his utril put its claws on ice, it fell down. Gill had no intention of waiting to be dragged around like the unlucky orzac, so he quickly pulled his feet from the net. He jumped off the animal before they reached the wall, and after tumbling several yards on the ice, he stopped. A rustle of wings and loud bangs, followed by screams, told him that the others also had a rough landing.
Galvanized by fear, his pulse almost bursting the spikes, he jumped forward to clear the way. Too late! The next utril slammed him off his feet. Gill grabbed its fur, struggling to avoid being pulled underneath, while the cavern became the stage of general chaos. A scramble of bodies, thuds, and screams of pain filled the tunnels, duly multiplied and carried away by echoes.
In less than a minute, they had all somehow landed. Gill was relieved that most of his soldiers were now on their feet, but looking back, he realized they couldn’t leave on the same path. The cave was too narrow and abrupt for his utrils to fly upward; without ropes or feet nails, there was no hope of doing it on foot, either.
It became obvious that they had to leave the utrils behind. The road was too slippery, and the panicked animals seemed unable to do even simple things, like keep their balance or find their way in the bluish twilight.
Not far from them, the cave led to one of the glacier’s canyons—surely the largest one, carved by the goddess’s tower. Dedris’s road, the main artery of the underground city, was smooth and quite steep, requiring some skill in keeping one’s balance. The curved walls bore traces of the friction with the metal that sliced them—in several places, they had a number of symmetric ripples running parallel to the fissure. As he had seen from above, the canyon was narrower at the top, its edges mostly welded together.
They were in the middle of an enchanted world of sparkling caves bathed in bluish light. The myriad galleries around them were strewn with stalactites, artificial columns, bridges, and skillfully carved walls. All, absolutely all, were made of the only material available in abundance: Ricopa’s ice.
When he had flown over the glacier, he could hear the underground river roaring under the ice sheet. Here, the water gushed forcefully into the blue light of the canyon, flowing in a translucent channel that bordered the main road, crossed by richly decorated ice bridges. Nowhere was truly dark. Even in places where the light couldn’t reach the city through crevasses or cracks in the walls, the sparkling dark-blue ice was lightened by the star’s rays trickling all the way down from the surface.
Gill left several soldiers who had been injured in the stampede to guard the utrils while he walked down the canyon with the rest of them. He knew Sandara couldn’t be far away, but he worried that his spectacular landing had been heard far away and that the dogans would bypass them through the side galleries. However, the echoes carried the ruckus through dozens of caves, and he pretty much doubted that the female’s escort would know for sure which canyon they had breached and how far in they landed.
One thing really concerned him: the town seemed strangely deserted—nobody tried to block their way. This can’t be good, he told himself. He peered into the deepest galleries, trying to glimpse their inhabitants, but no one was there.
A series of lights sparkled in the distance. Even though he couldn’t see them directly, the curved walls reflected the light of the torches from far away. He hurriedly signaled his troops to hide in the nearby galleries and threw himself behind a wall of ice, trying to become as small as possible.
The rustle increased in intensity. When Sandara’s dogans arrived in front of him, he jumped out of hiding.
“Charge! Leave no one alive!” he ordered his soldiers.
Seeing the surprise of the monsters, he hoped for a moment that they had fallen into his trap, but then he realized that the ruse worke
d both ways—because not only his orzacs jumped to their feet!
The short wall hiding him began to unbind, forming large cracks that looked suspiciously like limbs. The wall he pressed his face on was a dogan! More and more monsters came to life around them. Some support columns, thick stalagmites, ice blocks—seemingly collapsed from the ceiling—and even two bridge rails woke up to attack them by surprise.
The fight swirled in an instant, Gill’s troops being attacked from all sides.
The dogans were using their fists like a pair of gorgs to knock the soldiers down and crush them under their weight. The good thing was that they had no room to jump over one another. The bad thing was that they were piling over the fallen orzacs to smother them. Several times it even happened that the floor suddenly swallowed a fighter, closing again without a trace. If the others didn’t notice the disappearance or didn’t break the floor fast enough, the captive had no chance of escape.
Gill chopped off the head of the dogan-wall before it could finish the transformation and rushed forward. He reached Sandara, and with one stroke, he cut in half one of the dogans carrying her. The monsters in the back tried to raise a wall around the prisoner, but they were hindered by the narrowness of the gallery.
They didn’t have torches in a true sense of the word, as heat was their greatest enemy. They used the raisin of the glimset root, which, once dipped in the water, shone like fire.
Wham! Wham! Two monsters lost their heads, shattered by a gorg. A grah triangle had joined him in the assault of the escort. Under their savage blows, the ice creatures crumbled in deformed shards. He bounced Sandara to her feet, but she lost her balance; her limbs were numb from being caught in the ice shackles for so long. She didn’t whine, though, for she was a grah.
Gill slipped his arms under her knees and around her waist to carry her into the small shelter where he had hidden before. Sandara had lost her helmet. He could see her playful eyes looking at him with surprise, unable to understand the puzzle of his presence there. He took her palms in his hands and rubbed them gently to restore the blood circulation while his soldiers made a wall around them to keep the monsters at bay.
“On Zhan’s eye, how did you find me?” she asked, amazed.
“My utrils followed you. Can you walk? We have to get out of here,” he murmured, feeling a shiver of urgency pinching him by the tail.
The grah shook her head.
“Have I told you I never met an Antyran more stubborn than you?” she teased him. “This is how you understood to hide?”
“I didn’t fancy your plan,” he grinned. “I thought it’s better to fight Ugo than hide like a coward.”
“Hahaha, fight Ugo,” she said, giggling, looking at him like she was talking to a mad Antyran. “You realize now what a foolish idea crossed your spikes?”
“Why? I beat him.”
“You beat him,” she exclaimed mockingly. “You didn’t pick the best time for foul-smelling jokes.”
“You better tell me how to stop the game! I defeated his army, but the game isn’t over yet! Why?”
“What do you mean… you defeated his army?” She looked at him, suddenly serious, trying to read the depths of his kyi—a difficult task, considering that he was wearing the empty face of the AI flour dealer.
“How many times do I have to repeat that I beat him?” he replied. “I’m an archivist.”
“Oh!”
However big was the hope, her kyi obstinately refused to accept that such nonsense could have taken place—that a stranger, for the first time in Uralia, who had never played a virtual game, had defeated the jure of Ropolis! But the inflection of his voice didn’t leave room for deceit. As she sat, undecided, not knowing how to react or what to say, she felt she could glance for a moment beyond the emptiness of the standard AI face he was wearing. And beyond it, howling more hoarsely than Belamia’s madness, she glimpsed the colossal storm raging in the depths of the Antyran’s kyi, a storm that Baila and the millions of tarjis under his command had slammed into. She finally understood her mistake. She had let herself be blinded by Ugo’s unique condition, but she had lost sight of the one of Gillabrian—the Antyran who, although hunted on three planets, arrived in Ropolis right under Baila’s spikes. And he wasn’t a mere Antyran but an archivist—a keeper of the ancient history, a sarpan’s tip of the Shindam’s heresy against the temples! If someone could defeat Ugo in the legend of Acanthia, it had to be an archivist! In that moment she believed him, and the shock of the revelation took her breath away.
“Sorry, Gillabrian, I underestimated you!” she exclaimed, remorseful.
“I figured that out,” he said, smiling.
“I should have imagined that the one hunted by Baila would be no ordinary Antyran!”
“Leave that. How do we stop the game?”
“I don’t understand what is happening,” she said, shaking her head. “Forbat should have gotten my message by now…”
“Sandara! Why is the game not finished yet?” he exclaimed impatiently.
“Did you kill all the monsters?”
“I don’t think I missed any. Ugo wasn’t supposed to be in the middle of his army?”
“Yes. Unless—”
She didn’t finish the sentence… The roars of agony of their utrils reached them, accompanied by a faint, unidentified murmur.
“We have to get out of here. Now!” exclaimed Gill, grabbing her arm to hurry her up.
An orzac handed her the sarpan of a fallen soldier.
They jumped into battle shoulder by shoulder to clear the way to the swampy valley. With all the furious onslaught, he indulged for a tailbeat to look at her, curious to see how she handled the sarpan. And handle she did! He watched in amazement the un-Antyran speed of her blows, the way she equally used the tip and the blade of her sarpan to spill the dogans’ water, the deadly accuracy of the forearm spikes, her elegant movements forgiving no enemy and wasting no energy—Sandara was so much more than a fruit from the wild seed of her race, she was the art of war in the purest form. The grahs had always been renowned fighters, and Sandara had a place among the best of them. He had never seen such sarpan mastery in his whole life—surely the female had played a lot of games in Uralia!
A rain of icicles started to fall in the canyon.
“The dogans are on the glacier! Hurry!” Gill shouted to the soldiers in the rear guard, signaling the grahs to move in front of the band. They quickly disengaged and joined the attack.
Led by Sandara, the grahs quickly reduced the opposition of the dogans to a shapeless pile of ice, bloodied with water springs. From time to time, dogans from side galleries jumped over them—the only way they could cross the grah falchies—but they rarely managed to make an impression before adding their bodies to the mangled remains on the glacier’s floor. The orzac rear guard, however, had serious trouble holding back the flood of monsters poised to cut off their retreat.
They advanced fast. After a while, the band reached a square split in two by the underground river, a large crossroads where the canyon widened considerably. Along the walls, a row of strange buildings resembling the monumental temples of ancient Zagrada surrounded the square. The majority had impressive terraces supported by translucent columns, worthy of the offerings intended for Pixihe, Colhan, or Antyra. This time, Gill feared they would be the ones sacrificed because the terraces provided an easy way of bombarding from above. Dozens of transparent ice bridges connected the platforms and the many roads coming out of the side galleries.
As if to answer his misgivings, a flood of dogans burst from the side roads in front of them, blocking their advance. The front line became dangerously thin, trying to cover the whole width of the opening. Just then, the unidentified faint noise in the distance—which he at first connected with the demise of the utrils, could be heard again. This time it was approaching fast, turning into a low hum, then into a distant roll resembling Belamia’s thunder. Gradually, the thunder coalesced into distinct sounds—a so
rt of deep rumbling, as if the mountain’s dams had broken, spitting a colossal stone avalanche at them. The rocky tide became louder and louder, till it finally exploded on the terraces, shaking the walls of the canyon and scattering countless echoes through the caverns of the ice monsters.
Gill was expecting to see huge rocks cascading from the terraces and burying them in the vein of the glacier. Instead of that, hundreds of translucent ice creatures appeared on the platforms, ready to attack them. Twice as tall as the dogans, they had slender waists and large, red eyes. In a loud crack, they fused their feet to the floor, becoming one with the glacier. Long icicles, as sharp as rikanes, appeared from their thin arms.
Then came the silence. Even his soldiers forgot to fight—quite understandably, given that their chances of getting away with their lives were just reduced to naught. The pack of creatures on the top of the highest terrace split in two, making room for an ice llandro to silently slip in front of them. The llandro was ridden by an Antyran female in red armor, holding a purple sarpan in her hand. Gill didn’t need introductions to recognize the goddess Dedris!
“Well, well, could it be little Sandara?” spoke Dedris with Ugo’s voice. “The one who always meddles her tail in matters of no concern for her?”
“The intrigues of Uralia’s traitors!” the grah female exploded.
“Ohh, ohh,” Ugo-Dedris said with a sigh. “What terrible words for such young lips. Your words hurt me grievously,” he said with pretended suffering in his voice. “You’d better use your energy to make Forbat a grandpa and keep him away from the muddle-kyi council,” he laughed.
“Take heed what you say, abomination!” Sandara burst out, enraged.
“Abomination? That’s how you talk to an old friend?” the goddess scolded her.
“The Ugo I knew and cherished died a long time ago. You’re just a corrupted shell!”
“Me, a corrupted shell!” yelled Ugo, angered in turn. “You crossed the tail, you and those weaklings! I can smell the stench of your father’s intrigues from up here. You beg me to save your spikes, then you treat me like—”