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 terrible 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…
The barriers of semantics lay in details, and Gill knew it better than anyone. The less Baila found about what happened in the valley, the more chances he had to live another day. He was feeling bad for having to “tempt” the agent to take his own life, but the Antyran had seen him using the grid.
After he reached the narrow valley, he quickly jumped around Alala’s dome, using the bracelet to hide his moves. He had no desire to find out if there were any agents lurking nearby, and he needed to reach his magneto-jet to return to Alixxor. The Shindam had to be saved by all means, if only to prevent the temples from taking over the orbital platforms and the retinal scanners hidden in many public areas.
Gill was a bit worried that Regisulben might ask him to hand over the bracelet. Since he had no intention of doing so, the Shindam most likely would step on his tail, too. He’d be forced to run to Antyra III and hide in Ropolis, the capital of the mining world—the only town where both the temples and the council had a purely symbolic presence. He had no clue how to get there and how the architects of the artificial intelligences would greet him. However, it couldn’t be worse than in Alixxor.
Gill raised his head slowly over the pile of snow. At first, he couldn’t find the agents in the parking lot, but then he saw them about six feet behind his jet. It looked like he couldn’t get any closer without being noticed. He pulled back stealthily, taking great pains to avoid any noise. He had to find a way to distract them long enough to reach his vehicle,
Looking around, Gill quickly noticed several gray boulders flanking the icy path leading to the dome. The hardest part was to pull them out of the ice shell, but after a few hits, he managed to dislodge one of impressive size. He approached the parking lot with the stone in his arms.
It seemed that the strange disappearance of the air-jet had confused the agents, judging by their frantic calls for reinforcements. After swinging the boulder a few times, Gill threw it upward as hard as he could. It might have fallen right at his feet, were it not for the distortion grid. The rock reached a foot from the ground, and… disappeared.
The chatter of the two agents was rudely interrupted by a huge rock, seemingly coming out of nowhere, which landed right on the head spikes of one of them. With a short gasp, the Antyran collapsed on his back like a broken decoy. The loud cracking sound left no doubt that the blow had broken his skull.