The two guards pointed to a concealed opening. Gill obeyed the order and walked through the stone, hoping to finally meet the architects.
Beyond the rock was a small, darkened room… and no welcome committee. Another prison, even smaller and more unwelcome than the first one. Ridiculous! He had no time to waste with foolish riddles. Gill turned back to exit through the hologram, but he banged his head on the door.
He rubbed his spikes, which were pulsing in pain, and stretched his hands to find a way to open it. His fingers disappeared into the camouflage and met the coldness of a metallic wall. He was captive! Furious by the finding, he banged his fist on the wall and shouted from all his gills, “Open the door!”
No one bothered to answer, so Gill abandoned the futile attempt to get out. He looked around his prison and saw two nests filled with a pinkish synthetic fluff of poor quality. He wasn’t alone, as he thought: someone was coiled in one of them. Gill approached cautiously, but his companion was a skeletal old Antyran sunk into a deep trance—his body pierced by feeding tubes and other machines whose functions were not entirely clear to Gill.
There was a holophone near the small holotheater dug into the floor. He had to admit, he had never seen something that old—surely a device brought by the first wave of colonists. The room had no windows, except for a tiny skylight ten feet from the floor, a tired propeller spinning slowly in it. He carefully pulled the space in front of the opening and looked through the distortion. There was a small, deserted street bordered by several rooms.
While contemplating the street view, he realized that the room became brighter. Gill turned in time to see a hologram materialized without warning in the holotheater—a rudeness hard to accept under normal circumstances.
The visitor was visible down to the waist, and nothing of his room could be seen in Gill’s holophone—which again was a serious lack of manners according to the Antyran protocols. He could clearly read the message: they treated him as a prisoner and not as their guest.
His companion had a face slightly rounder than the average Antyran, with smaller but very expressive eyes. The thick spikes on his head betrayed an extraordinary robustness. Overall, he looked more like a fighter than an architect.
Gill welcomed him with the standard salute by turning his palm up and down, but he received no reply other than an icy gaze that seemed sharp enough to drill out the secrets locked inside his skull.
“I’ve two questions for you,” the Antyran started dryly, without introducing himself. “How did you get here, and why?”
The voice… it was the one he heard in the holophones of the sleeping rebels. Maybe he judged him wrongly, maybe he was one of the city’s architects… However, Gill only needed a glance to decide he didn’t trust him a bit. The Antyran was precisely the last being on Antyra he would entrust with the secrets of the Sigian bracelet.
“I’m Gillabrian,” he replied, pretending he didn’t notice his coldness.
“I’d be astonished to find one Antyran who doesn’t know who you are after the prophet’s fine efforts!” the Antyran exploded. “That’s not what I asked!”
“If you know who I am, and if the ritual of the palm has any meaning for you, I demand to know who I’m talking to,” he said, deciding to fight back. He had nothing to win by appearing weak in front of such a bully. True, the events were not under his control, but they weren’t entirely under his questioner’s will, either, even though it seemed he entertained the idea.
“I’m asking the questions here! Restrain yourself from asking anything, and give me the answers I seek!”
“In that case, I’m afraid we have reached a dead end,” Gill said, raising the stakes. “I refuse.”
“All right! After all, I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. My name is Ugo. Now, answer my questions!”
“I ran from Alixxor in one of the transporters that attacked Ropolis and I… I ended up down here,” he babbled, realizing he had no way to give a plausible explanation without involving the Sigian artifact.
“Let me get this straight: you left Alixxor hunted by millions of tarjis in one of Baila’s own ships, you jumped into the crevice in the middle of the fight, and then you stepped into Ropolis alive and well—unlike the other servants of the prophet who all lay mangled on the bottom of the rift. Are you a nifle?” Ugo exclaimed mockingly.
Gill’s biggest worry—that he would be considered an agent of the temples—became true. Surely, Zhan’s angry eye painted on his chest didn’t help much…
“You think I’m Baila’s agent?”
“How else would you be here?” Ugo grinned.
“I want to talk to the architects. But not through this installation. I want to meet them in flesh and bones,” he said firmly.
“Does Baila truly believe we’re that stupid?” Ugo said with a laugh. “He must have known he wouldn’t be able to set foot in the tunnels, so he devised the perfect plan: make up a nice story about a famous repulsive to soothe our vigilance, send him over to meet the architects, and when we gather together like a bunch of silly licants… boom! You blast us to smithereens with some infernal implant!”
Gill realized he wouldn’t get anywhere with the Antyran. The only progress was that he learned the name of his jailer. Ugo’s distrust was justified, and surely they’d keep him prisoner… Maybe they would even try to scan him for implants, in which case he would have to run to protect the secret of the bracelet. He didn’t want to flee again and unleash another round of unrestrained violence, but lately, he didn’t pick his path…
And he had learned one more thing about Ugo: he said “when we gather together” when he talked about the architects, which meant he was one of them.
“If Baila sent me, don’t you think I would have a plausible story? Who comes with such a dumb plan? You have to believe me!” exclaimed Gill.
“First tell me why you’re here!”
The individual moved his head slightly, and Gill realized something wasn’t right. The movement was very small—a few degrees at most—but the dizzying speed betrayed him. It was too fast for a normal Antyran, and Gill was pretty sure the archaic device had nothing to do with it. Ugo had his own secrets…
Gill closed the thought in his kyi, deciding not to ignore the happening. He would think later of the implications.
For the moment, he had to force a meeting with the others. Whether successful or not, he might learn something from his attempt. Did Ugo represent all the architects or only himself? Perhaps seeing how he escaped the metal licants, he figured that Gill had an unbelievable weapon and wanted to get his hands on it without telling the others. That would explain why he asked him to wear a helmet. Maybe the rest of the townsfolk had no idea about his presence here… Maybe the trance soldiers were mere shells, unable to remember anything when they woke up…
Way too often, even in history’s darkest hours, unscrupulous individuals tried to take advantage of the unfolding events for their own interest. Or maybe he was wrong in all his assumptions. As an archivist, he was aware that in the short time since he had entered the caves, he had no way to understand even a shred of this bizarre world’s ramifications. Unfortunately, he had to march forward, no matter how deep and frightening the darkness became.
“I’ll speak only to the architects! Even through holophone, if there’s no other way,” he insisted.
“If those are your conditions, so be it. You’ll find that we have other methods to extract the truth from the traitors! We offered you the easy way out, but you refused it.”
Ugo reached out angrily to shut down the holoflux, but he stopped and looked insistently at the old Antyran coiled in the nearby nest as if he expected him to wake up at any moment.