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.