by George Tome
“Wait till I tell Forbat what happened here! You’ll see how—”
“Ha-ha, you’ll tell Forbat! Well, I have a little surprise for you… Disconnect them!” he ordered his ice creatures, boiling in rage.
Seeing the puzzled mugs of his monsters, which probably didn’t understand the concept of “disconnection,” he shouted, “Kill them! What are you waiting for?”
With a loud scream, the dogans rushed toward them while the creatures from the balconies began to launch a hail of icicles over their heads. As soon as they threw a spear, another one grew in their hands.
They were drawing their sap from the hearts of the glacier, so Gill expected their ammunition to last for quite a while. He took Sandara’s hand and pulled her to a wall close to the underground river. They were sheltered from the rain of spears, but the dogans would soon reach their place and trample them to death…
“What do we do now?” Gill asked her.
Sandara shook her head, disheartened, looking at the unfolding carnage. They could do nothing but wait. Attacked from all sides, their little army became thinner by the second.
“I should have imagined it wouldn’t be a fair fight,” she said, clenching her fists.
“I don’t understand—if Ugo is Dedris, who’s Voran?” he asked, bewildered.
“There’s no Voran,” she explained. “Ugo joined the game as Dedris from the beginning. There’s no way I could have expected this,” she said, trying to justify herself. “From Ricopa, he couldn’t lead his army.”
“Then who led them?”
“The slobbering pilteats—I’m sure he gave them detailed orders before the battle.”
Behind them, the avalanche of dogans tore a hole in the overstretched ranks of the grahs and swallowed them one by one while the rain of icicles speared the ones stubborn enough to still fight them.
“Any idea where your shell is?” the female asked.
“It’s… complicated,” Gill said, realizing he was unable to tell where he was held in the catacombs.
“Then Ugo won,” she concluded.
He was searching frantically for a solution, although his efforts seemed utterly futile. Not wanting to offer Ugo the pleasure of disconnecting him, he thought of doing it with his own hand while he was still able to move. Still, he hesitated: Should he tell the female he could escape through the skylight?
He deeply inhaled the aromas of the pathkeeper still fresh in his olfactory memory, convinced that the ruckus around him was hiding the chance to escape connected… There had to be a way to do it. He had defeated Ugo’s army, killed the slobberings and guvals, but in a twist of genius, the jure had turned the tides of the battle in his favor.
Gill was aware that one of the reasons Ugo always won was the fame that surrounded him, the others’ expectation of losing. “If you go to war convinced that you will lose, you will lose,” said Laixan. Yet Gill didn’t have this complex; he couldn’t afford to. Deeply inhaling the recessive aroma, he imagined time’s knot like a pendulum, its recoil strong enough to throw him back on the shores of peace. He flexed his thoughts on imaginary levers, testing their strength, probing the resistance of the node’s fabric, deciding to topple it again—to turn over the reality and defeat Ugo like he defeated his monsters on the hill.
As usual, the proper lever lay right in front of his spikes, too obvious to be noticed by others.
“Maybe he didn’t win,” he whispered.
He turned Sandara to face him. Abandoning all courtesy, he grabbed her by the armor’s thongs, beginning to undress her.
“What are you doing?” she exclaimed, surprised.
“Help me!” he urged her, without giving any details.
In less than a minute, they were both out of their armor.
“Now what?” The female threw him an inquiring look, trying to find out whether he had lost his scent.
Gill smashed the ice railing of the river, slipped his left arm around her waist, and jumped with her into the torrent. Immediately, the icy water covered them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t breathable like that in the portal tunnels. Even worse, the water was so cold that his tortured muscles contracted involuntary, squeezing the air out of his lungs. His whole existence collapsed to the point of un-Antyran torture where his only goal was to take a breath of air through the suffocating splashes—all the while he was sliding at breakneck speed along the ice bed, slamming into the banks and being pulled under by whirls.
Sometimes they managed to glimpse large halls and beautiful bridges raised by the dogans before they disappeared in an instant, covered by the wild foam. A few times the river widened into small lakes, which they crossed faster than a tailbeat, followed by steeper slopes where the riverbed narrowed again.
Riding on a mountain of water, Gill and Sandara fell down a small waterfall, still clinging to each other. Just when he was hoping that they were about to get out, Gill realized the ceiling was drawing dangerously low.
“We’re in big trouble,” he mumbled, sliding through a flooded section.
Luckily for them, it didn’t last long. After two more meanders, the twilight became visible through a large opening—a sign they were about to get out of the glacier. Large boulders lay scattered in the riverbed, so Gill pulled Sandara by his side to protect her from any sharp crags.
As they tumbled out of the glacier, a sharp blow to his head rendered Gill unconscious. Sandara grabbed him under his shoulders, fighting to keep his head above the water. It was an almost-impossible task in the strong torrent, but the riverbank was only a few tail-lengths away.
“Don’t you die on me,” she cried, breathing heavily. “Wake up!”
After a moment longer than eternity, Gill came back to his senses. Moaning in pain, he rolled on his knees, the foam climbing up to his chest.
Helped by Sandara, he managed to get to his trembling feet.
“Did we make it?” he muttered, squeezed of energy.
“Almost,” answered a voice that didn’t belong to the female.
They turned just in time to see Ugo-Dedris riding the ice llandro out of the glacier—almost as fast as the icy torrent. But the llandro was unable to skid over the arkanes, so it stopped at the end of the ice slope.
Ugo dismounted in a hurry and rushed toward them, pulling the purple sarpan from its sheath. He didn’t wear a helmet anymore. The ugly gash on his forehead, dripping green blood on his face, hinted that he may have lost it when his head had met a thick icicle. Gill could see his face, transformed by a bizarre male–female metamorphosis, close enough to Ugo’s real features that he could be recognized easily. If Dedris was considered the most beautiful female that dreams could ever imagine, the face in front of them was born from a nightmare…
The flood of dogans was no doubt left behind, and no other ice creature could be seen.
“Well, well, well, do I smell a romance?” Ugo guffawed insolently, noticing how Sandara was holding Gill’s arm protectively. “I’m glad you already followed my advice, but this male isn’t a good match for you. He has to go,” he said with fake sadness in voice.
“I won’t let you harm him! You’ll have to kill me first!” she shouted.
“No! I want you to see how your little protégé goes away. Then you can tell the old rag all the details!”
“Ugo, please, you can’t do this!” she implored.
“You know I have a thing for you… but this time I find myself forced to say nay,” he snuffled. “Now get out of my way!”
With a shout, Sandara let go of Gill’s arm and jumped toward Ugo-Dedris, wobbling on the slippery stones in the riverbed. The jure greeted her with a brutal blow from the armor’s sleeve, throwing her on her back. Using her last drop of energy, Sandara jumped to her feet, just in time to receive another savage blow in the sternum from the sarpan’s handle. She collapsed in a whirlpool and clung to a rock nearby, too exhausted to pull herself out of the water and face another attack from the abomination.
“I have to admit,
I’m impressed!” the jure said, turning to Gill. “You escaped through my spikes, beat my army, and escaped again. But I’m afraid this time your luck is over.”
“Don’t touch him!” shouted Sandara. “I promise—”
“Great female! A bit balky if you don’t know how to handle her,” he confessed, pointing at Sandara. “I’ve known her since she was an egg this small,” he said, showing him his clenched fist. What do you know… good ol’ times. Me and Forbat were friends…”
“A friendship betrayed like all the good things you once believed in!” she reproached him bitterly.
“What’s wrong with me?” exclaimed Ugo. “I’m wasting my time on your tail. Understand me, Gillabrian, I have nothing against you. I would gladly ask you to join me, but I know you won’t—as long as you don’t understand my purposes. And I have no time to explain them,” he said, as if he felt the need to apologize for what he was going to do. He looked around and muttered, more to himself, “Anyway, after the expansion, this place will be redecorated…”
Despite the crippling numbness, Gill felt a slight bump in his feet. Peeking down slowly to avoid arousing Ugo’s suspicion, he realized with his spikes wrinkled that it was his sarpan, which he had lost somewhere along the wild ride in the river. He tried to move slightly upstream to make sure he wouldn’t lose it through the slippery stones, hoping that the evening’s glare on the surface of the crystal-clear water would hide the blade from Ugo-Dedris’s prying eyes.
“I wish it could be easier… but I’m afraid we have to connect you to Tormalin by force,” the jure exclaimed. Then he started to walk the few remaining steps to him.
Faking a terrible fright, Gill bent his body to the right, close to the foamy water, protecting his head with the left hand in a ridiculous defense attempt.
“It doesn’t hurt… too much,” Ugo grinned, ready to thrust the tip of the sarpan into his neck.
In the meantime, Gill’s right hand gently slipped into the water and grabbed the handle of his own sarpan. He jerked suddenly, thrusting it into Ugo’s hip through an armor joint.
“Aaaargh!” the jure yelled, surprised, and grabbed Gill’s neck with his left hand while Gill released his weapon’s handle and seized Ugo’s right arm to prevent him from using his blade.
They both fell in the whirling water, tumbling over the rock slabs. Gill got to his feet, but Ugo-Dedris’s armor became stuck between two jagged stones, leaving him pinned down on his back in the cold stream, almost entirely covered by foam. After wiping the water from his forehead, Gill unceremoniously propped one foot on Ugo’s body and pulled the sarpan out of his hip.
“Good night!” he wished mockingly, and he thrust his blade under Ugo’s chin.
In an instant, Ugo’s avatar evaporated. And along with him, the whole island.
CHAPTER 12.
The long shadows loomed across the foam of the millions of stars crowded in the galactic plane. Their dark silhouettes, without windows or visible engines, resembled the strange seeds of some plants from a hallucinatory herbarium. The front side was bulged and bent in six asymmetrical swells around a reddish-orange opening, which led straight to the machine’s bowels.
The strange devices stopped all at once to sniff the space through the red eye; they seemed to have a silent chat before they moved again, this time to form a huge circle. The back of each seed opened like a flower, revealing a metal rod that had several green, glowing tubes twisted around it. The petals extended until they touched the side ones of the nearby probes.
A second, larger circle assembled around them.
In a blink of an eye, the inside of the two circles became unclear. The stars grew very bright and stretched parallel to the circumference of the rings, the ones on the edges more distorted than the ones closer to the center.
All the ships were flying in formation, except for the motherprobe, which slipped away from them. When it reached about a mile from the circles, it opened in the opposite direction to reveal six tongues of shiny metal arched toward the center of the rings.
The opening of the motherprobe was the signal: the probes of the smaller ring started to move in circle, first slowly, then faster and faster, distorting more and more the sticky space between them, chasing the spaghettified stars until the ones on the edges found themselves accomplice to the rush of the vortex, beginning to rotate their fusiform shape. The larger ring then turned in the opposite direction; as their rotation reached an insane speed, the image became clear and thousands of times larger than before.
The distortion had turned the space into a giant telescope, in whose center the motherprobe was scanning the dark depths, waiting for something…
It didn’t have long to wait: a blinding flash exploded inside the distortion. In a split second, it seemed as if the whole sky burst into fire, the wall of flames whirling like a mad torrent before it quickly decreased in intensity. Right in the middle of the distortion, a new star was born… the newest acquisition of the galactic catalog, named Antyra.
Deep in the bowels of the motherprobe, a blurred image formed, successive blinks making it clearer and clearer. With every click the resolution increased, the probe peeling away another level of darkness. Its hungry eye drank in the zoom’s details, working to find the source of the space distortion that had hidden Antyra for so long.
An area close to the star expanded until it turned into a planet. From a small dot, it grew so large that the scorched surface, wrinkled by deep valleys, became visible. The calculations led the center of the eye to drift near a crevice that any Antyran would have recognized immediately. It was, of course, the Blue Crevice!
The probes broke formation and turned back into the night, heading the way they had come from, running in a compact deformation front to pass the light of the firewall. After they covered a good distance, they stopped and did the circle routine again, this time without hesitation. The wall of fire erupted with all the power of the wrath kept in check by the distorter for 1,250 years. And after each harvest of photons, the resolution in the eye of the motherprobe increased.
Somewhere, not far from the place where the sarken petals were working hard at triangulation, twelve massive ghosts—this time belonging to Grammia—were sinking into the night in the opposite direction, toward Antyra. Although their speed was great, it was no match for what they could have enjoyed, had a galactic highway been built. In the future, the Federation might approve a plan to link it to the closest quadrant node—and maybe the approval would be easier to get because there was no competing interest for the string to have a different route than a direct link between Antyra and the closest space road.
The technological marvel of the galactic highways was possible thanks to the sarken road workers and their wondrous rail-planets. They built the roads by heating matter in the enormous wombs of their worlds to a temperature never seen since the birth of the universe. The fire crucible then cooled it a bit, while a small gravitational fluctuation caused a topological defect to form during the phase transition—which was the birth of a superstring.
The road was made of microscopic superstring rings parallel to one another and in perfect balance, like a necklace. Their gravity stabilized the thread, preventing the rings from fusing; therefore, only the ends had to be anchored. Countless buoys were placed along the route to raise tachyon alarms for the ships in traffic if the smallest problem occurred along the way.
Of course, it would have been better to spin a single thread, a long superstring to anchor the ships and amplify their deformation front, but despite that, its diameter wasn’t larger than a proton; a few dozen miles of the superstring would reach the mass of a planet. The Federation simply didn’t have enough energy for such a continuum.
***
The white mist dispelled from Gill’s eyes, and the slight feeling of dizziness passed in a blink.
The return of consciousness found him lying on the grass, close to a cave opened in a limestone cliff of a tall mountain. The erosion h
ad turned the limestone into a forest of sharp rocks, resembling the thorns of an angered llandro.
Not far from him, several forked paths led to more and more caves—a true labyrinth impossible to navigate without guidance. Above the entrance of each cavern was a carved name, written in archaic letters. On the nearest one, he could read the name: “Acanthia.”
Even though the touch of the icy river had disappeared from his bones, he still felt exhausted from his warring adventure. And he wasn’t the only one. A few steps from him, Sandara was resting on the discoidal grass, leaning against her portal sphere.
The grah female slowly turned her astonished eyes on him, as if she just saw the chimera of a nifle slipping through the white pinnacles.
“Gill! What have you done?” she exclaimed, admiration gleaming in her playful eyes, calling him for the first time by his short name. “You defeated the jure! I must be dreaming!” She burst into laughter.
“Then we’re both dreaming the same dream,” he said, grinning broadly, and rose to meet her.
Exhausted, she made an effort to get on her feet. Gill rushed to take her hand to help her. Only then he glimpsed a tear in the fabric of the cliff, where a portal had recently leaked into nothingness.
“Ugo,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “He’s probably running to the parhontes.”
“We must stop him!” he exclaimed, pinched by Sandara’s words.
“Relax—he’s running for nothing. They’re still locked in the circle; that’s why Forbat didn’t get my message. We have more important things to do right now.” She smiled, pointing her finger behind him. “I don’t think there’s anyone to deserve a portal more than you. Step inside!”
He turned back and saw a white sphere, about three yards in diameter, waiting docile in the grass. His portal! He rushed in, surprised that it was ’slightly’ larger than what could be guessed from the outside. There were countless huge rooms built from all sorts of unbelievable minerals, crossed by blue veins and connected by arched hallways with elegant ceilings. A palace worthy of a baitar—or even greater.