The panic spread like wildfire, and many more slipped into the crevasses, pushed aside by their frightened companions in the rush to reach solid ice.
Another surprise strike, launched by a small elite sakka unit hidden on a hillside at the rear of the enemy column, smashed the nearby bridges, trapping over half of the temple army. In one blow, the rear guard became cut off from the others, who had no place to retreat except the icy tombs under their feet.
The temple pathmakers in the vanguard had bigger worries than having to reach back to rebuild the broken bridges; quicker than unfastening a tail tip, the bloodthirsty rebels crashed down the hillside and smashed their scattered flanks, closely followed by another deadly volley of the sakka.
Under the onslaught, the soldiers in the vanguard had no time to form ranks. Soon, most of them were either mowed down or pushed into the crevasses.
The other troops caught in the encirclement ran forward to meet the rebels. The surviving pathmakers laid new bridges to replace the broken ones, and for a while, a bloody battle ensued over the crevasses. Antyrans with death in their eyes and hatred in their kyis were fighting and falling together to their doom. In their mad rush to mangle one another, their plight often ended with the bridges breaking under their feet, unable to hold the weight of the heavy armor and moulans.
Both the rebels and the temples threw more and more bridges over the cracks, widening the battlefront with astounding speed. Soon, some abysses were decked from one end to the other.
The temple slingers, stretched several miles behind the front line, were unable to make an impression on the rebels. A few volleys launched by the ones closer to the battle ended up hitting their own troops, adding to the general chaos.
Meanwhile, the rebel sakka spread their salvos, filling the valley with the heavy stench of burned flesh and the wailing of the wounded. Crevasse after crevasse, bridge after bridge, the temple troops were losing ground, bowing under the ferocity of the attack. Soon, they were unable to resist anymore. Screaming in terror, the soldiers broke at once and turned their backs on the enemy to flee the massacre, pushing aside the troops coming to their rescue from behind.
The chaos that followed was easy to imagine. Lacking the help of their pathmakers, disorganized and running on the entire width of the glacier, Baila’s soldiers fell by the thousands in the blue cracks opened under their feet; they crowded the few remaining bridges, breaking them or slipping off the edges. Most had no idea that their retreat was blocked, pushing one another to their death in a vain attempt to run for their lives. In all this time, the rebels advanced quickly, capturing the ones who begged for mercy on their knees.
Without warning, the strange hologram melted away for the second time.
“Now do you believe me, Gill, that only the bracelet matters?” Baila asked him.
He didn’t answer, but for once he had to agree: the bracelet was all that mattered. And he didn’t feel the slightest tail pinch to part with it.
“I don’t understand why it blew up,” the prophet moaned, “without anyone wearing it.”
“They’ll work on aliens, too, except for our enemies,” Gill murmured Deko’s words.
“What did you say?” asked Baila.
“I remembered an old friend,” he said, smiling.
“For the last time, I’m telling you: the gods want your bracelet! You have no use for it, and in return, you’ll get everything! You’ll get more than you ever dreamed of, from the very hands of our grateful gods!”
Then he asked him, grinning broadly, “What say you?”
An embarrassing silence sank in the room. Baila’s face darkened, realizing that Gill wouldn’t accept this time, either.
“Why do you hesitate?” Alala asked him. “Don’t you understand you can’t refuse such a—”
“Sorry,” he replied coldly, “the bracelet is not for giving.”
“Think well,” hissed Baila. “You can’t hide from me forever! And if I don’t find you, the gods will. Oh, yes, they will! If you walk through that door, I’ll take my hand off your spikes!”
“I don’t get it; why are you doing this to yourself?” the female insisted.
“The cloud cities were beautiful beyond words.”
“What are you talking about?” exclaimed Alala, convinced that Arghail’s corruption ate his kyi.
“The grays mowed them down without mercy. One by one, they fell to the ground… Time itself froze in the face of such atrocity! When they reached the black seas, giant fires climbed to the orbit—”
“You’re mad!” she barked at him.
“On Zhan’s eye, you saw Arghail’s secrets!” exclaimed Baila, almost falling on his back, as if Arghail himself had leaped in front of him.
This can’t be good, thought Gill. Again, he had that annoying feeling that Baila was much more than he seemed. But he had to take his chances; after all, as long as the gods didn’t return to their “Antyran children,” the Shindam’s fate was hardly sealed. Was Baila bluffing as usual, or could he really call them? He said with his own mouth that not even the gods could pass the firewall as they pleased.
Are you going to open the firewall for me? I guess there’s only one way to find out, he grinned in his kyi.
“See, Your Greatness, I can’t help Zhan. Such cruelty can’t be served, not even to save my life. You said we should talk openly. Then why don’t you say the true name of your master? I can’t serve Arghail like you do, Your Greatness,” he threw it in his face and turned to the door to run out.
An intricate network of roads crisscrossed the huge mountain range. If he managed to reach them alive, he’d have dozens of tunnels to hide his tracks. The Shindam would have been more than able to find a fugitive using their eyes in the sky,37 but the temples didn’t have the same capabilities. At least not yet.
“Don’t run from me, little Antyran. We have other means to reach our goals. I hope you realize that. The neural probes are not a pleasure,” Baila threatened him.
Gill didn’t consider the prophet worthy of an answer.
“I’ll make sure your agony will be long!” the prophet screamed in a high-pitched voice, watching him angrily as he went out.
“You’ll never get me alive!” he replied defiantly from the doorstep, then turned his back to step outside.
He knew he made the right choice; too many had died to guard the secret for him to betray them like that. He had to help the beings from the bracelet’s dreams, to help a civilization lost in the mist of time to be reborn from its ashes. Maybe the decision would lead to his death, but he had to keep fighting the “Sigian war” into which he had been dragged. No, he thought, it’s our war, too. When the Sigians hid on Antyra, they unwillingly entangled their destiny with that of the Antyrans. The firewall separated them from the rest of the universe, and from that day on, the war against the gray gods became theirs, too.
Gill opened the door and rushed to the jet, his pulse beating madly in the head spikes; he could hear Baila’s hologram shouting something behind him, surely an order for the tarjis to get on his tail. The hunting began!
After the first few steps, he felt the cold air biting his skin. The temperature was falling quickly, a normal thing considering he was at an altitude of over eight thousand feet, and it was close to nightfall.
He ran, the snow cracking under his feet, around a small cliff that hid the parking lot. The transparent ceiling of the magneto-jet became visible over the mounds of snow left on the sides of the road.
Only a few steps remained between him and the relative safety of his vehicle, when… he ran out of luck: he stumbled upon two silhouettes hidden by the snow piles. It only took him a heartbeat to understand the terrible truth. The temple agents! How did they arrive so quickly? Most likely they had been there all along.