His flattened face, on the other tail, was endowed with a large mouth, full of conical, yellow teeth surrounded by protruding excrescences. A transparent breathing tube came out of the vertical cleft he had in the middle of his face. It was connected to a second, thicker tube that ran horizontally just above the mouth, leading in turn to a device hidden on his back. The god was jerkily breathing a mixture of brown vapors, leaving behind a lingering cloud, hardly miscible with the air of the cavern. The vapors stained the skin of his face in a thin, glossy stripe, all the way from his uni-nostril to the forehead.
A pair of long arms dangled awkwardly from the torso, giving the impression that the alien had no idea what to do with them. The legs were hidden from view by a yellow, tubular fabric sewn from an unknown material, reaching down his calves. Or maybe her calves? From what he had seen so far, Gill wasn’t sure about the creature’s sex, if it even had one. Probably a male would be more appropriate, considering his ugliness, although Gill was pretty sure the gods found the Antyrans equally unattractive.
When the creature got closer, he lifted his dress and fell on the floor, bending his right knee in front of him. Only then did Gill notice that some skins were dangling from his arms like grotesque flight membranes. On closer examination, the skins proved to be simple hangings without ligaments to strengthen them into something useful.
Probably thinking that his weirdness wasn’t shocking enough, the thing bowed his head on the extended foot and stretched his arms around it, as if he was hatching his own knee. After a brief moment, he rose in a smooth motion and walked on as if nothing happened—a heap of jellylike, trembling nodules becoming visible under the skin of his legs.
The bowing seemed so fluid and natural, despite its strangeness, that Gill found it hard to believe it was real and not just his imagination.
Gill couldn’t help but notice the god’s large, translucent eyes, completely colored in a blue-purple hue, dotted by a delicate yellow and black radial pigmentation. Although extremely bulged, they seemed surreally immobile, frozen between the wrinkles of his face. Strange, indeed, because—at least in theory—they should have had a great deal of freedom. The large, shriveled eyelids kept them moist all the time, giving them an oily appearance; the eyelids only moved from the bottom up when their owner blinked.
The hologram didn’t seem to notice Baila but was speaking to Gill!
Soon, it became apparent that the god was in fact talking to an invisible companion whose voice wasn’t rendered. Surely the latter was also watching the hologram and understood the strange language.
Is this how the gods look? he asked himself, convinced that he knew the answer all too well. The Sacred Book didn’t describe their appearance, but the Antyrans always assumed they were made in the gods’ image. Well, it seemed they were terribly mistaken; what he was seeing didn’t have the slightest resemblance to the Antyran species. If Zhan looked like the creature in front of him, the tarjis had to repaint all their flags—the god lacked the vertical iris of the Antyrans, which they could conveniently stretch when they were angry. The whole eye of the god was an oversized iris.
The god was dragging his feet on the stone floor of a gigantic base carved in a mountain, reverberating long echoes throughout the cave. As more and more of the base materialized inside the prophet’s hall, several gray vessels appeared behind the creature. Sigia’s enemies! The ships were small but undoubtedly had the same design as the destroyers Gill had seen in the bracelet’s memory.
The very gods who closed Antyra inside the firewall were the enemies of the Sigians, just as he already suspected! And Baila didn’t lie when he said he could call the gods when he wanted. The hunt for the Sigian destroyer continued after more than 1,250 years, and this time, he was the prey!
“Now you believe me, Gill?” His Greatness reproached him. “You’re looking at one of Zhan’s sons!”
He again quelled the feeling of remorse for refusing the prophet’s offer. He sensed the Sigian writhing inside his head at the very thought of betraying them. We touched, and his kyi is part of me now. The mythical Azaric once said: “To see is to change. But more than that, to see is to change yourself.” And he saw a deadly secret, which changed him for the rest of his life.
For a brief moment, he thought that the god was talking in Antyran because he could suddenly understand the creature’s words. But when he watched his lips, it became obvious that some unknown device was translating the strange babbling as it was spoken. How did the god receive the words of his invisible companion? Then he saw a small metallic disk glued to a wrinkled area at the base of the skull, although he didn’t notice any hearing lobe. The creature had no gills, but despite this shortcoming, his kind had managed to evolve some sort of hearing directly through the skin. The comparative anatomy will have to wait for another day, if that’s ever going to come, he thought bitterly.
When the god spoke again, his hasty words betrayed a fanatical desire to serve unconditionally.
“They didn’t say their plans, but they’ll be back soon,” he said in a rush. “The other ships are waiting here,” he said, pointing to the bottom of the cavern. “Do you give the order of attack?” He listened for the answer, then continued: “If the temples lose the war, if would be hard for us to hide from the Antyrans. The rebels are becoming bolder by the day!”
The god was waiting obediently for a new message. Gill understood, however, that his petrified face was in fact a chimera thrown over a whirling, deep ocean. He barely saw the god for a few moments, yet he already sensed the truth: somewhere, at great depths, lay the shores of fear embedded there since time immemorial, a fear that turned him into the unliving creature in front of his eyes. He couldn’t tell how he knew this, but it was no mere illusion. An Antyran was rarely mistaken about such things, especially a disciple of the ancient caste Guk35 for smell-and-kyi like himself. Maybe the smell gave the god away, even though nothing of the creature’s flavor could reach him from a hologram.
Like most Antyrans, Gill was able to turn the images into aromas to smell them—and they spoke volumes about the appearance in front of him. Or maybe the eyes, something inside his abyssal looks, betrayed him that he wasn’t entirely devoid of feelings as he appeared, although they were locked in an unreachable corner of his kyi…
“I’m the ninety-eighth avatar, and we never saw them in all our stored memories,” he exclaimed. “But we know their description from the slaves.”
The creature paused again, listening to another order.
“Yes, Your Greatness, we’ll cancel the scouting, and nobody goes out anymore,” he said, for the first time moving his eyes independently from the rest of his head. “Great Baila, may I show you the coordinates from the satellite? There’s little time left in case you change your wish—”
Great Baila? Since the prophet was in his hall and obviously not part of the conversation, it could only mean Gill was watching a hologram recorded in the past, and the creature addressed whichever Baila lived at the time of scanning! What kind of rebels was he talking about? Could it be the Kids’ War, the only time in the post-Raman history when the “rebels” challenged the power of the temples?
What surprised Gill most was the humble appearance of the god: definitely not the right stance when speaking with an Antyran, be it the prophet himself! Baila was giving orders to one of Zhan’s children? That was beyond any imaginable heresy!