As soon as his utril put its claws on ice, it fell down. Gill had no intention of waiting to be dragged around like the unlucky orzac, so he quickly pulled his feet from the net. He jumped off the animal before they reached the wall, and after tumbling several yards on the ice, he stopped. A rustle of wings and loud bangs, followed by screams, told him that the others also had a rough landing.
Galvanized by fear, his pulse almost bursting the spikes, he jumped forward to clear the way. Too late! The next utril slammed him off his feet. Gill grabbed its fur, struggling to avoid being pulled underneath, while the cavern became the stage of general chaos. A scramble of bodies, thuds, and screams of pain filled the tunnels, duly multiplied and carried away by echoes.
In less than a minute, they had all somehow landed. Gill was relieved that most of his soldiers were now on their feet, but looking back, he realized they couldn’t leave on the same path. The cave was too narrow and abrupt for his utrils to fly upward; without ropes or feet nails, there was no hope of doing it on foot, either.
It became obvious that they had to leave the utrils behind. The road was too slippery, and the panicked animals seemed unable to do even simple things, like keep their balance or find their way in the bluish twilight.
Not far from them, the cave led to one of the glacier’s canyons—surely the largest one, carved by the goddess’s tower. Dedris’s road, the main artery of the underground city, was smooth and quite steep, requiring some skill in keeping one’s balance. The curved walls bore traces of the friction with the metal that sliced them—in several places, they had a number of symmetric ripples running parallel to the fissure. As he had seen from above, the canyon was narrower at the top, its edges mostly welded together.
They were in the middle of an enchanted world of sparkling caves bathed in bluish light. The myriad galleries around them were strewn with stalactites, artificial columns, bridges, and skillfully carved walls. All, absolutely all, were made of the only material available in abundance: Ricopa’s ice.
When he had flown over the glacier, he could hear the underground river roaring under the ice sheet. Here, the water gushed forcefully into the blue light of the canyon, flowing in a translucent channel that bordered the main road, crossed by richly decorated ice bridges. Nowhere was truly dark. Even in places where the light couldn’t reach the city through crevasses or cracks in the walls, the sparkling dark-blue ice was lightened by the star’s rays trickling all the way down from the surface.
Gill left several soldiers who had been injured in the stampede to guard the utrils while he walked down the canyon with the rest of them. He knew Sandara couldn’t be far away, but he worried that his spectacular landing had been heard far away and that the dogans would bypass them through the side galleries. However, the echoes carried the ruckus through dozens of caves, and he pretty much doubted that the female’s escort would know for sure which canyon they had breached and how far in they landed.
One thing really concerned him: the town seemed strangely deserted—nobody tried to block their way. This can’t be good, he told himself. He peered into the deepest galleries, trying to glimpse their inhabitants, but no one was there.
A series of lights sparkled in the distance. Even though he couldn’t see them directly, the curved walls reflected the light of the torches from far away. He hurriedly signaled his troops to hide in the nearby galleries and threw himself behind a wall of ice, trying to become as small as possible.
The rustle increased in intensity. When Sandara’s dogans arrived in front of him, he jumped out of hiding.
“Charge! Leave no one alive!” he ordered his soldiers.
Seeing the surprise of the monsters, he hoped for a moment that they had fallen into his trap, but then he realized that the ruse worked both ways—because not only his orzacs jumped to their feet!
The short wall hiding him began to unbind, forming large cracks that looked suspiciously like limbs. The wall he pressed his face on was a dogan! More and more monsters came to life around them. Some support columns, thick stalagmites, ice blocks—seemingly collapsed from the ceiling—and even two bridge rails woke up to attack them by surprise.
The fight swirled in an instant, Gill’s troops being attacked from all sides.
The dogans were using their fists like a pair of gorgs to knock the soldiers down and crush them under their weight. The good thing was that they had no room to jump over one another. The bad thing was that they were piling over the fallen orzacs to smother them. Several times it even happened that the floor suddenly swallowed a fighter, closing again without a trace. If the others didn’t notice the disappearance or didn’t break the floor fast enough, the captive had no chance of escape.
Gill chopped off the head of the dogan-wall before it could finish the transformation and rushed forward. He reached Sandara, and with one stroke, he cut in half one of the dogans carrying her. The monsters in the back tried to raise a wall around the prisoner, but they were hindered by the narrowness of the gallery.
They didn’t have torches in a true sense of the word, as heat was their greatest enemy. They used the raisin of the glimset root, which, once dipped in the water, shone like fire.
Wham! Wham! Two monsters lost their heads, shattered by a gorg. A grah triangle had joined him in the assault of the escort. Under their savage blows, the ice creatures crumbled in deformed shards. He bounced Sandara to her feet, but she lost her balance; her limbs were numb from being caught in the ice shackles for so long. She didn’t whine, though, for she was a grah.
Gill slipped his arms under her knees and around her waist to carry her into the small shelter where he had hidden before. Sandara had lost her helmet. He could see her playful eyes looking at him with surprise, unable to understand the puzzle of his presence there. He took her palms in his hands and rubbed them gently to restore the blood circulation while his soldiers made a wall around them to keep the monsters at bay.
“On Zhan’s eye, how did you find me?” she asked, amazed.
“My utrils followed you. Can you walk? We have to get out of here,” he murmured, feeling a shiver of urgency pinching him by the tail.
The grah shook her head.
“Have I told you I never met an Antyran more stubborn than you?” she teased him. “This is how you understood to hide?”
“I didn’t fancy your plan,” he grinned. “I thought it’s better to fight Ugo than hide like a coward.”
“Hahaha, fight Ugo,” she said, giggling, looking at him like she was talking to a mad Antyran. “You realize now what a foolish idea crossed your spikes?”
“Why? I beat him.”
“You beat him,” she exclaimed mockingly. “You didn’t pick the best time for foul-smelling jokes.”
“You better tell me how to stop the game! I defeated his army, but the game isn’t over yet! Why?”
“What do you mean… you defeated his army?” She looked at him, suddenly serious, trying to read the depths of his kyi—a difficult task, considering that he was wearing the empty face of the AI flour dealer.
“How many times do I have to repeat that I beat him?” he replied. “I’m an archivist.”
“Oh!”
However big was the hope, her kyi obstinately refused to accept that such nonsense could have taken place—that a stranger, for the first time in Uralia, who had never played a virtual game, had defeated the jure of Ropolis! But the inflection of his voice didn’t leave room for deceit. As she sat, undecided, not knowing how to react or what to say, she felt she could glance for a moment beyond the emptiness of the standard AI face he was wearing. And beyond it, howling more hoarsely than Belamia’s madness, she glimpsed the colossal storm raging in the depths of the Antyran’s kyi, a storm that Baila and the millions of tarjis under his command had slammed into. She finally understood her mistake. She had let herself be blinded by Ugo’s unique condition, but she had lost sight of the one of Gillabrian—the Antyran who, although hunted on three planets, arrived in Ropolis right under Baila’s spikes. And he wasn’t a mere Antyran but an archivist—a keeper of the ancient history, a sarpan’s tip of the Shindam’s heresy against the temples! If someone could defeat Ugo in the legend of Acanthia, it had to be an archivist! In that moment she believed him, and the shock of the revelation took her breath away.