He was finally riding an utril! With the scented wind whistling through his spikes, he started to feel the exaltation of flying, the excitement of reining the beast he was holding tightly between his thighs; he felt the power he had over the bundle of flesh sitting between him and the abysmal gulf underneath. His whole kyi awoke to a life he had never experienced, a life he never thought possible. His senses expanded in the surrounding space like oversized antennas; he became aware that the hairs on the back of the utril made a distinct swish in the breeze, he felt all the muscles and the tendons of the giant skin wings working to keep them afloat as if they were his. He felt even the smallest vortices created by the flock’s advance as if he himself was the space and time through which they swam with great haste. It was a feeling of total freedom impossible to describe in words; he even forgot that he hadn’t tasted the edible grass. I’d like to be able to incarnate as an utril, he thought, mesmerized by the prospect.
A ridge of green stones appeared in front of the pack like the claws of a giant monster ready to grab them. A dusty path meandered a few yards below the edge of the cliff, bordered by a thousand-foot-deep chasm. This is where they passed, realized Gill. Could it be an illusion? He had the impression that if he looked closely, he could see the moisture lost by the ice creatures.
At that altitude, the grass scales became dry and ragged, the whole mountain resembling a monster from a much older time than that of the ancient Antyrans, the bones of its skeleton protruding through the scaly skin.
The utrils pushed hard to fly over the ridge and around a lofty peak rising to the sky like a tower. Right in front of them was the huge Ricopa Glacier, bordered by ragged, almost vertical walls of barren rock. Its massive ice tongue descended in a fairly straight line down to a green valley—a swamp, really, or at least that was how it looked from high above. Pools of water sparkled among patches of arkanes, the grass of the bogs. The arkanes were much smaller than in the Black Forest; they would hardly reach his knees—most likely due to the coldness. Three bare rock islets were the only solid platforms in the whole valley.
But it was not the ice tongue that caught his attention. Although he expected the glacier of a goddess to be anything but ordinary, nothing prepared him for the sight in front of his eyes: Dedris’s castle, defying the most cherished laws of nature, was built on its base!
Five towers about a mile tall, consisting of three segments, each thinner than the one below it, erupted from the ice vein like the sprawled fingers of the giant Froga.86 The first segment rose obliquely toward the mountain wall and not vertically like the other two, at the end being united with the nearby towers by thin ice bridges. The castle appeared to be built entirely of a bluish metal; the outer towers were shorter, while the middle one—undoubtedly the home of the goddess—was the tallest. Metal buttresses anchored the building deep into the mountain. Thanks to them, the glacier flowed downhill while the castle stood in place, slicing the ice. On its whole length, Ricopa’s tongue was split into six slices traversed here and there by huge crevasses.
Ricopa wasn’t, however, a simple glacier. If the goddess lived in the towers, her monsters infested a town carved in the ice around the castle. The glacier’s tongue had lumps, mounds, ditches, and steps carved in the crevasses—everywhere there were signs that the grotesque servants of the goddess were working day and night for her.
Ricopa reminded him of the so-called Antyran cities from the misty legends of the last glaciation, whose names—if they existed in reality—had waned from the collective memory thousands of years ago… The Antyrans, like Dedris, apparently had ice towns. Of course, not carved in glaciers because they flow, move, and crack all the time—only the gods or the architects of a virtual realm could build them there. The stories told that the Antyrans had dug cities in the huge icecap covering the northern lowlands, which sometimes reached a mile in thickness and whose slow motion they didn’t bother to notice.
As they approached, Gill saw three large holes opening into the glacier’s tongue—the city gates, richly adorned with ice sculptures and surrounded by white slabs of rocks scattered through the swamp. He had already learned that things weren’t exactly what they looked like in Acanthia-under-Star. The white spots might rise to life if he approached them.
Three rivers flowed out of the gates, joining their foamy waters before they disappeared into the swamp.
“There they are,” an orzac shouted, pointing at the pack of dogans in the shadow of the glacier, moving hastily toward the main entrance.
Gill saw them, too, even though the silhouettes were hard to distinguish near the ice tongue. It became obvious that they had no way of preventing their entry in the cold darkness. In a few moments, the ice creatures were inside Ricopa.
They had arrived too late!
Gill bridled his utril to fly in circles around the entry, trying to think of something. It would take precious time to force their entry in the city, time they didn’t have… and how could they catch Sandara in the ice tunnels, forcing their way uphill with the ice monsters raining on their heads?
He landed on the glacier in a flat area without crevasses. Down in the darkness, he would be exposed to a huge risk, perhaps as big as the charge against the guvals. It didn’t seem a good idea to stretch his luck—he knew all too well the kind of traps he could expect from the dogans… Still, he needed her advice on how to end the game. The battle was over, and he was still stranded in Acanthia-under-Star.
Some of the orzacs followed his example and landed hard on the slippery ice, doing some comical pirouettes with their flying mastodons. Several utrils circled the skies to spy Sandara’s escort through the eyes of the crevasses and the canyon of the central fissure. If only he could find an opening big enough to get in front of the dogans!
“Find me a crevice to enter!” he shouted, waving at his orzacs to fly to the castle.
His band took off in a V formation, sniffing each little crack of the glacier to find a proper entrance. He eyed a few places where they could get in—stairs carved in steep crevasses or the ice domes of some tall buildings that could be breached, but he wanted an opening large enough to fly on their utrils.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t use the giant canyons sliced by the towers—they were too rugged to fly along. Their wild bends full of pointy juts and the narrow lips of the rift wouldn’t give their utrils any chance of bringing them down in one piece. They had to look for something else.
His soldiers finally found a huge abyss, a circular opening of an unfinished dome. Gill pushed his utril down without hesitation, closely followed by his companions. As they descended, the color of the walls changed from snow white to milky blue, then dark blue… strange colors to Gill’s eyes; on Antyra I, the hearts of the glaciers were purple because of the bacteria floating in the planet’s air.
The floor of the dome was full of ice boulders piled up for the construction of the ceiling, making landing impossible. The only way inside the womb of the glacier was a large archway opened in the downward wall. A scout flyer disappeared without incident into the blue cave. Gill, along with the rest of his fellows, followed him closely.
The gallery wasn’t as large as he thought; his utril panicked and started to hit the walls with its wings, keeping him glued on the net, praying to Zhan to protect him from being squashed on the tunnel’s ceiling. When the slope became gentler, the leading soldier tried to land. His utril rolled on its left side and slid downhill through the cave, dragging him along, his left foot trapped in the net. After a few dozen yards, they slammed into a wall with a loud thud.