The Sigian Bracelet Page 14

  One of them was a clumsy giant, not exactly a running prodigy. His companion, on the other tail, was definitely fast, and after several steps, he had already jumped to the lead.

  The slight advance he enjoyed wouldn’t serve him any good if he couldn’t find a place to hide from the air-jet and the other dangers lurking around. Time was racing against him; in open space, he was a helpless target, and even if he managed to follow the winding valley all the way to the glacier tongue, he had no climbing gear to help him cross the crevasses—let alone to survive the frosty night.

  Gill reached a rugged area dotted with black stumps of rock, covered here and there by a frozen layer of snow piled up by the relentless blow of the vardannes. The sharp stone edges piercing through the white crust resembled the broken weapons abandoned on a field after a bloody battle.

  He was running without purpose, without direction, without feeling the cold wind or the sharp stones under his feet, oblivious to everything around him. Gill knew all too well that he was doomed, yet he refused to think of it as long as it didn’t happen. He was fleeing from his hunters, but in equal measure, he was running from his own cowardice because he felt that if they caught him, he might give them the bracelet. I am a Sigian soldier, he told himself over and over again, hoping to find a trace of their power. He needed time to get used to the thought of dying. A quick death was the only honorable exit from the trap, the only logical choice given the prospect of the lengthy tortures reserved for his sorry tail.

  After a while, Gill had to slow down, exhausted. He noticed that the walls were drawing closer; to his dismay, he understood that he had inadvertently left the main stream and now followed a small secondary canyon opened in the wall. What if it led to nowhere? He couldn’t turn back with the hunters on his trail!

  The bracelet was still on his arm, animated by the strange life to which he awoke it after so many years. It looked as if it was trying to help him escape, the green rectangles pulsing around obstacles to make them easier to spot.

  The valley became narrower and narrower; he glanced at the steep walls through the fog of exhaustion, trying to find a way to crawl up on the rocky ridge. Unfortunately, there was no opening or even a crack large enough for this.

  After a few dozen yards, the distance between the hundred-foot-high vertical walls narrowed to less than six feet. He was in a gorge cut by a small creek, now frozen solid, forcing him to run on clear ice. In his mad rush, he slipped several times and fell on the rocks of the riverbed, but he rose each time without feeling any pain and continued to run as fast as he could.

  Gill felt his pulse beating madly in the recessive gills behind his ears; his mouth dried up in the effort to squeeze the last drops of strength out of his tormented muscles. Only the fear of getting caught kept moving his legs, but he knew he had reached the end of the tail.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen—after the next curve, a nasty surprise awaited him: the gorge ended in a frozen whirlpool, and a fifty-foot-high ice cascade blocked his path! He could hear the creek flowing under the ice to the small lake below his feet.

  The walls around him were eighty feet high, and the only way out was the trail he just came from. He fell on his knees, crushed by the foolishness of his rebellion. It didn’t have to end like this! He looked at the artifact, a storm of thoughts crossing his kyi: could he hide it somewhere? Or type a wrong code and blow himself into pieces? Every way he looked at it, he was going to die, and what hurt him most wasn’t the end of his rather insignificant life but the thought that the secret of the Sigians would die along with him.

  The steps approached quickly. He could hear the heavy breathing of one of the agents. His temples dripping wet, Gill touched his forehead to the wall of the frozen waterfall. His kyi was screaming in despair, but he kept his mouth shut—even though it hardly mattered now.

  He could try to blackmail the agents, saying he’d blow up the bracelet, but they surely had inductors. They would paralyze him without much fuss, and Baila would be delighted to show him the pleasures of the gods’ neural probes.

  It will end quickly. Death is the only way, he thought, trying to gather his courage. Although he knew all too well what he had to do, this time, the preservation instinct was too strong to overcome. Angered by his cowardliness, he thought about all the Sigians who died for their dream. “Give me your strength,” he mumbled.

  Gill looked at the waterfall for the last time. He had no way to climb it, but he pressed his hands on the ice, as if he could stick to it. The heroes of the ancient world were able to break the mountains to follow their quests, and he was stuck here, stopped by a tiny wall. He felt so helpless. He wished he could have their powers to drag the edge of the waterfall to his feet.

  In a gesture of futility, he stretched his left hand toward the edge. And then came the surprise. Instead of feeling the cold air of the evening, he touched… a rock! A rock covered in ice! It took him several long seconds to admit that he was actually touching the edge of the waterfall, fifty feet above him!

  I’ve lost my kyi! he thought, not knowing anymore what was real and what was fantasy.

  He raised his other arm hesitantly, convinced that this time, he wouldn’t reach anything. But again, he felt the icy stone.

  It wasn’t the best moment to analyze the absurdity of the situation. Right when the first of his pursuers came around the corner, he grabbed the stone edge with both hands and pulled his body upward. In an instant, he found himself lying on his belly, fifty feet higher than the place where he stood a moment ago!

  He rolled onto his back, stunned by the enormity of what had just happened. Surely I’m hallucinating, he thought, hoping he hadn’t lost his smell. A day like this could shake anyone’s disbeliefs, for what were his chances of surviving all he went through, without the direct intervention of the gods? The jump up the waterfall alone was so unlikely that it eclipsed by far all the crazy things he had ever heard of. Reality lost its logic, as if the very fabric of space-time—in which he was so fiercely anchored before Tadeo’s fateful call—unraveled around him, leaving a deadly chaos behind.

  Gill remembered that his pursuer was in the gorge below; he turned cautiously to his left to look over the rocky rim.

  The fear on his face left no doubt that the Antyran realized the madness in which he had landed—tail first. One thought kept yelling in the agent’s kyi: Arghail! Abrian had invoked him with his arms raised, and the god of darkness took him over the waterfall! Only Arghail could do such things for his children, precisely as the prophet had foretold! The corruption in the monster’s vicinity would seep into any pervious kyi…

  He made brief eye contact with Gill and then leaped back in terror, too afraid to raise his head again. After a few quick steps, he turned around and hid behind the bend of the riverbed to shield himself from Gill’s view.39 Only then did he stop and pull a laser lens from his belt.

  “Burgu! Burgu!” the echo carried his whining through the valley. “Hurry up, will you?”

  The screams woke him up to action. He had to disappear fast if he had the slightest intention of benefitting from his small victory. Yet, before resuming the aimless chase, he had to understand how he had climbed the waterfall. Gill didn’t dare to hope for a miracle, but maybe the rules of the hunt were about to change.

  The answer had something to do with the Sigian artifact. It had to be the grid that divided the space into green squares!

  Despite the noisy protests of his tormented limbs, he got to his feet and looked at the frozen riverbed in front of him. He picked an area about fifty feet away, at the edge of the green rectangles, and wished to reach there. Nothing happened.

  “Mmm, it doesn’t work like that,” he noticed loudly. “I want to go there,” he ordered, pointing a finger at the spot. Still nothing. He made a step in the direction. To his disappointment, he only advanced one step. He couldn’t understand what was happening. The bracelet only works when it wants to! he thought,
angered.

  Suddenly, driven by inspiration, he looked again at the spot and made sure that the thickened rectangle framed it. Then he mentally grabbed the box and dragged it at his feet. In an instant, the frame came near him, pulling the space along with it!

  “This is it!”

  He stepped inside the green box. His hearts almost broke his chest wall when he realized he had moved fifty feet! He framed another spot at the end of the grid and walked in. Again, he jumped fifty feet!

  The revelation came with the punch of a thousand lightning strikes. He recalled the jelly sphere in the command room of the Sigian spaceship. The soldier pushed his hands inside it, and the destroyer followed his moves, jumping through the ripples of the space fabric. But they seemingly had such marvelous technology that they could actually twist the space on much smaller scales, with the help of the golden bracelets linked to their kyis! No wonder the Antyran gods chased their secrets so relentlessly!

  The enormity of the discovery overwhelmed him: he could jump through space like a spaceship! His kyi exulted that his long-ago-dead friends hadn’t abandoned him, that their help came at the right time to save his life when there was no way of saving it. And for the first time that day, he didn’t feel like a dry siclide tossed around by destiny’s vardannes. Now, he had a chance to fight for his life…

  It was true that the Sigians trapped on Antyra were hunted to death, but they were foreign to these lands. This is my home, he thought. You won’t get me that easy!

  The ominous noise of an air-jet could only mean that more trouble was on the way. Most likely, the two agents had called the spy jet to lift them over the waterfall. Indeed, a vehicle descended slowly on the frozen lake, out of his sight.

  Deciding to use the chance, he sprang through the stream bed, pulling the space along the way to increase his speed. But after about a thousand feet, the walls became taller, and Gill worried he might get stuck in the canyon, even with all the help of the bracelet.

  Luckily, on the right wall, he spotted an embedded rock large enough to climb on. Two giant jumps later, he was out of the gorge.

  In front of him lay a smooth, snow-covered plateau, flanked by impressive vertical walls dotted by ice patches and large cracks running chaotically in all directions. The place was similar to the valley around Alala’s dome, except for a forest of ash tubes40 rising in the middle of the plateau like a petrified forest. Hot water was seeping from the top of some of them, a sign that the springs that had created them long ago were still active.

  The tubes looked like a great hiding spot; without thinking too much, Gill ran toward them, pulling the space along the way. The narrow walls of the creek he just left reverberated with the sound of an air-jet turbine squeezed to full power, the vibration growing in intensity as his pursuers approached.

  Gill stormed into the stone forest, sinking in hot mud at each step. The steam clouds warmed his limbs, numbed by frostbite, but he quickly found out, disappointed, that the fog didn’t help him much—he couldn’t see more than a couple of feet, which rendered the bracelet’s grid useless. And without the grid, he was leaving copious footprints behind. On top of that, he was sinking deeper and deeper, and soon he had to stop altogether to avoid getting stuck or even drowning in the treacherous swamp.

  The ship hovered above the rock forest while scanning the ground with its thermal and motion sensors. Unfortunately for the hunters, the steam clouds were glowing so brightly on the ship’s displays that they couldn’t see anything. After a while, they changed the tactic and made several slow passes through the towers, stalking the ground with a purple spotlight; twice they flew near the tube behind which Gill hid in the mud, without spotting him.

  Seeing that they couldn’t find him this way, either, the pilots landed at the edge of the stony forest. Even before touching the ground, the two agents jumped out and hurried to follow Gill’s footprints left in the mud.

  Gill had no way of hiding from them. He thought about running out of the forest. Even if they saw him in the thick fog, he could outrun them with ease now, and the air-jet would lose some time in picking them up again. There was no alternative; to stand still would have meant suicide. Yet something was keeping him from turning his back on them and running like a coward. An inner voice he didn’t recognize as his whispered him to fight. It whispered more and more loudly and convincingly, until the small hole through which he had a chance to sneak unseen behind the agents closed its door.

  Unbelievable, he thought. He, who had never been confronted with violent encounters, heard the calls of war and was eager to join them. It took him one crazy day to transform into a soldier, ready to confront the Antyran gods. Gill felt he was about to finally live up to the courage of the Sigians. That was why it became so important to stay: he had to stand on his feet and conquer his fears. Then, he had to fight back.

  After he breathed the damp mist a couple more times, he decided it was about time to start the madness. Ignoring the Antyrans on the ground, he waited for the air-jet to reach his vicinity, lying low in the mud to avoid detection. Then, as he heard the turbine moving away, he jumped from behind the funnel and saw the hot reactor nozzle shining through the mist like a giant torch, dispelling the fog around the air-jet. Thanks to the disturbances, he managed to get a glimpse of a nearby tube on the right, and he quickly dragged the space in front of it on the path of the flying vehicle.

  The pilots had no idea what happened, for their time left to live was too short to even wonder. Although they weren’t flying fast, the jet smashed into the ash-rock like a bloated licant on a window. A massive crack appeared in the tube. Large slabs broke off it and fell into the hot mud, closely followed by the mangled vehicle.

  A wave of boiling water burst out of the huge hole, and the upper part of the funnel collapsed as well, completely burying the air-jet.

  Hearing the noise of the crash, the two agents on the ground froze several feet from the place where Gill was hiding. They couldn’t see what had happened to their companions, but they guessed the terrible truth: Arghail had struck again to protect his children. They lost the courage to move forward, too afraid of the monster hungry for their kyis who was lurking in the thick mist.

  Taking advantage of their shock, Gill ran out of the fog toward a nearby small hill—little more than a cluster of loose rocks clumped together under a thin cover of icy snow. The agents heard the loud splash of his steps, and after a short hesitation, they limped after him. When Gill reached the middle of the slope, he jumped behind a rock large enough to offer some protection.

  The skinny agent pulled his laser and aimed it at the rock, but the other one quickly grabbed his arm—obviously, they had orders to get him alive. He pointed a finger at the ground to ask him to stand still, and he began to move cautiously toward Gill’s right.

  Unwilling to let the agent reach too close to him, Gill dragged the space and jumped to the top of the hill, hiding behind another pile of rocks. Terrified by this new demonstration, the skinny one cried, panicked: “Burgu! Draw your paralyzer!”

  Burgu finally pulled an inductor from his belt and turned it on, trembling, even though Gill was clearly out of range.

  The skinny agent stood still with his feet apart, aiming at the pile of stones. It seemed that the panic drove him to disobey the orders.

  “Whatever you are, don’t move, or I’ll blow you to pieces! Protect us, Zhan, from the night’s corruption!” he shouted in a hoarse voice.

  Gill raised his head to spy on Burgu, and he accidentally crossed gazes with the skinny Antyran. That was too much for the agent, who started to shoot in a frenzy. He didn’t aim deliberately to kill Gill, but he was blowing the rocks piece by piece to prevent him from raising his head again.

  Burgu was climbing slowly toward Gill’s position when a seemingly absurd thing happened: his next step brought him thirty feet to the right, directly in the line of fire between the skinny agent and Gill. He didn’t have time to recover from surprise, as a terri
ble burning sensation seared his abdomen. Haunted by the darkest foreboding, he touched his belly and looked at his hands, astonished. They were green with blood! His partner’s salvo had shredded his body.

  He fell to the ground without a wail, ready to meet Zhan, relieved that Arghail’s temptation had no time to corrupt him.

  The skinny agent, realizing that he was again alone with Gill-Arghail—this time for good, whined, “Burgu! I’m sorry, Burgu!”

  When he saw Gill rising to his feet behind the pile of rocks, he turned to run, but he tripped, his lens falling from his grasp as he dropped to the ground. He quickly jumped up and started to run downhill, screaming in terror. It didn’t even cross his tail to lift the weapon—it would have been a waste of time.

  After reaching a good distance away from the hill, the agent gathered enough courage to look back to make sure he wasn’t followed. He sighed, relieved that he was alone, but then he glanced, from the corner of his eye, a color stripe jumping behind a pile of boulders. He knew all too well what it meant: Arghail was coming for his kyi! And he couldn’t run anymore, as the gorge was right in front of him.

  Compelled by an unseen hand, he turned back to face his doom. Gillabrian was standing a few steps away, gazing at him without blinking. The agent couldn’t resist: their eyes met, and even though he had prepared all his life for this moment, nothing could protect him from the intensity of the corruption that hit him like Belamia’s supersonic winds. The iris of the archivist, deeper than the ocean, seared an evil incantation in his kyi.

  The Antyran felt his entrails burning, as if Arghail had poured molten phosphorous in his mouth. The seal of darkness was turning him into the very thing he feared most! His kyi would be lost forever!

  With a huge effort, the agent broke the eye contact. Disfigured by terror, he turned slowly toward the abyss and jumped into the void. While falling, he flapped his arms as if he was trying to fly…