One of the AIs touched his ear again.
“Only Gillabrian enters,” he said, relaying Forbat’s message.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Sandara said, betraying her worries. “Take care,” she said, taking his hands into hers. “Ignore my fate; there’s no time for heroics. Tell them I told you about Kaura, about Ugo’s death.”
She let go of his hands, accompanying him with her eyes as he went inside, filled with a bitter feeling that she would never see him again. Our world is changing… The inherited instability will overflow here. And everything depends on you, my dear Gill, on the direction you push it, she thought, allowing herself to realize the enormity of the stakes, now that the things no longer depended on her.
“Zhan be with you,” she whispered the ritual wish.
Zhan… or rather, Arghail, Gill thought, grinning in his kyi as he walked inside the hall.
The dome housed a steep holotheater surrounded by warm nests carved in the purest tekal vein, their mimetic fluff imbued with the scent of the councilors coiled inside. Red vines from the white rock of the ceiling combined in intricate patterns to form four bizarre eyes in the middle of the dome, seemingly guarding the smooth running of the council’s meeting.
Right in the center of the room, there was a huge “group” nest placed so that the speakers didn’t have to show their backs to anyone. And the floor… the floor was missing altogether! Kaura’s abyss opened under their feet, animated by the eternal fight between the brown clouds and the gray funnels from the valleys dug by ancestral deluges. The storm was more agitated than usual; a weird cyclonelike structure boiling in rage seemed to show that the hideous life on Kaura’s surface pulsed in resonance with the kyi of the architects, that it wasn’t immune to the madness happening on Landolin, and that it understood, in its own sinister way, the gravity of the things happening lately…
Seemingly without noticing the little detail of the missing floor, a vigorous individual—despite the old age he didn’t bother to hide—stepped into the void to meet him. His sharp eyes reminded Gill of Sandara. Undoubtedly, he was her father, Forbat. A grah had become the prim-parhonte of a large city, something unheard of since the fall of Zagrada!
Gill involuntary stopped at the edge of the abyss, hesitating to step into what appeared to be a bottomless pit. Since he didn’t want to show any weakness, he ignored his fears and stepped into the void. Of course, he didn’t fall—the nonexistent floor sustained his feet just like any normal surface. In a few steps, he reached the central nest where Forbat was already coiled.
The councilors didn’t particularly notice him, being involved in an unbelievable ruckus. Among them, the oldest ones, undoubtedly kaura, were saying farewell to their fellow younger architects, shaking their forearms. His intuition, trained by the most complex Guk math-estimate canons, couldn’t overlook the gestures… It was an “end-of-the-world” feeling, telling him that the important decisions had already been made. In his absence.
“I’m Gillabrian,” he growled in a hoarse voice, trying to get the parhontes’ attention, without much success, though.
“Yes, we know that,” Forbat interrupted him. He seemed friendly, even… pitiful, if he smelled him right. “We were waiting for you. Ugo told us about your presence here.”
“Did he also say he kept me hostage on Ropolis and attacked my kyi?”
“I’ll explain everything,” the prim-parhonte said, smiling. “He confessed that he hid you from us.”
“He said that?” Gill exclaimed, incredulous. “Where is Ugo?” He looked around, but he couldn’t see the jure. “You sent him to the prison island?”
“No one arrested him.”
Before he could say anything, Forbat continued, “We’ll… accept the armistice asked by the temples.”
“The temples asked for a truce?” Gill exclaimed, surprised by the news.
Again, the paths smelled by his kyi’s nostril crumbled effortlessly at the contact with reality. If Ugo just told the parhontes that Gill was in Ropolis, when did the architects have time to speak to the temples—and even more outlandishly, when did they have time to conclude an armistice?
“Baila asked for a truce yesterday,” he explained, as if he could read Gill’s thoughts. “We are so glad we found you,” Forbat said, looking at him in a strange way.
Cold shivers ran through his veins. That’s why the parhontes had already agreed to the armistice, that’s why they remained locked in the circle for the whole day, and that’s why Forbat couldn’t help him in Acanthia… perhaps he didn’t even get Sandara’s message.
Did the temples guess he was in Ropolis? Or maybe the truce had nothing to do with him… Should he dare to hope he could sneak onto a refugee ship and go back to Antyra I?
“What are the terms of the truce?” Gill asked with his spikes wrinkled, hoping to hear that the end of hostilities had nothing to do with him.
“We open the city and evacuate the population. Uralia will be deleted, and all the intelligences will be destroyed.”
“So you’re willing to surrender without a fight.”
“We have no chance,” said Forbat with pain in his voice. “The nukes—”
“What is going to happen to the elders, the intubated?” Gill avoided the name kaura to hide his knowledge about their nature. As long as the safety of the Sigian artifact wasn’t at stake, it made no sense to betray Sandara.
“A message is relayed as we speak. The Antyrans able to disconnect without dying will do it right now. The others… we are going to activate the immortality chips.”
***
In the darkness of a dusty cave on level 7, several warriors coiled comfortably in a group nest to feast on a sizable pile of bixan seeds after the bloody clash in the catacombs. They were all taking part in the great hunt on Hidardo, reserved for Firalia 9’s soldiers.
The hunted creatures were invented by the architects for this game. They were giant pseudo-armored creatures called malasses, which could fly with dizzying speed. The landscape was the huge desert streaked by the mountain ranges and canyons of Antyra II, faithfully reproduced on the game island.
At the given signal, the hunters, armed to the tail with explosive disk launchers and riding some futuristic air-jets, took off to hunt the malasses through Belamia’s whirls and on the plateaus burned by the merciless heat of the star.
Petoballin, one of the aces, threw himself enthusiastically in the wild race for the lead places. Maybe today would be the big day when he’d see his name reaching the top spot, engraved in symbols of ibral!
Peto quickly managed to hunt seven malasses and was just chasing the eighth, very agile and stubborn—as stubborn to stay alive as he was to shoot it—through a giant canyon leading to the foamy Orizabia Ocean. Since all his senses were trained on the poisonous thorn of the malassa, he overlooked the first signs of the end, but at some point, he realized that something wasn’t right. Time started to twist, to flow in slow motion, changing the reality under his very eyes, hitting it with waves of distortions, each stronger than the previous one.
He jerked the stick madly to fend off the imperfections of the virtual continuum splashed in his direction.