With every passing moment, Harut was becoming weaker and weaker. Then, he saw Gill’s compassionate eyes.
“Why is it doing this?” he moaned, looking at the bracelet.
It was a fateful gesture; the armed hand won the invisible fight, and the next salvo landed in the middle of Harut’s forehead. He fell dead at Gill’s feet.
The Grammians could appear at any moment. Gill hurried to pull the bracelet from Harut’s arm. He activated it in one breath, and the green distortion grid appeared instantly. He breathed easily, realizing that everything was all right.
“Did you miss me?” a voice echoed in his head. It took him several long seconds to recognize it, not because it wasn’t familiar but because he didn’t want to accept that he had heard it for real. It was the voice of the abomination!
Ugo’s avatar had moved inside the bracelet and found a way of controlling it! Ugo—not the Sigian artifact—forced Harut to kill the two initiates, then decorate his own skull with another hole!
“Ugo! What are you doing in my bracelet?” he exclaimed, horrified, realizing that the avatar had an open path to his kyi and could parasitize him as he wished.
“Let your ganglions be in my control. Don’t fight like that fool.” He obviously referred to Harut, who was still smoldering on the floor. “I don’t have time for explanations if you want to get rid of the Grammians.”
Sighing heavily, Gill realized the obnoxious monster was right. If they could get rid of the aliens, he would have more than enough time to learn how the jure got into the bracelet and what he wanted from him—in other words, the conditions of his slavery to the new god. Because he had to admit it: even without expansion, Ugo had managed to morph into one…
His body began to move involuntarily. A hand rose into the air, fell back, then the other, and then the feet moved. Some control movements—they were becoming faster, more and more alien to his own will, which had taken refuge in a pit of darkness in a corner of his kyi, from where it was watching, abashed, how the abomination was using the body of which, until then, it thought it was the master.
“Fine, it works now. Are you ready?”
“Go ahead,” Gill said with a nod, resigned to his fate. For how many times he had abandoned himself in the claws of madness in the last few days?
“All right! Here we go!”
Gill started to run, Ugo controlling all his moves. In one leap, he grabbed the laser lenses of the dead Antyrans, one in each hand, and jumped through the diaphragm door. It was like watching a holoflux compressed to an insane frequency. Gill felt his head cracking because Ugo was moving much faster than his connections could have made it themselves.
He saw the green rectangles pulling the surrounding space with prodigious speed. The continuum divided by the grid lost its discrete attributes, turning into water in front of his amazed eyes—a whirling river whose currents were flowing on the paths channeled by Ugo’s whims.
Then came the blinding laser flashes, followed by the heavy stench of the burned bodies falling to the floor. He was slipping so quickly through the rooms that the Grammian gods and their Antyran allies had no time to see what was killing them. The unforgiving salvos were hitting them from unexpected directions—the ceiling, the floor—seemingly fired from several places at once. Nothing had prepared them to face such an enemy! In less than a minute, no one but Ugo-Gill was alive on the ship.
CHAPTER 13.
“What god? You see another god besides me? Perhaps the nifle’s playing tricks on you?”
As soon as he uttered the last blasphemy, the heavenly fire consumed the blasphemer. Raman the Cruel, the awakener of the gods, wasted away in smoke and ashes. But all knew that Zhan’s punishment had barely begun.
The Book of Creation Inrumiral 2.6: “Zhan’s second awakening: the wrath of fire.”
***
The fires had faded away some time ago, and the smoke blown in the four corners of the plains seemed to have never tainted the clear air of the capital. However, when viewed up close, the Shindam’s Towers—the ones fortunate enough not to collapse altogether—bore the hideous scars of the indiscriminate pillage and burning they were subjected to.
The outskirts were desolate and empty, suffocated in dirt and piles of putrid vegetal litter, yet Alixxor gradually regained its place as the city of gods. Millions of tarjis were roaming on the grass around the three central pyramids. Many had moved into traditional domes made from moulan skins and bones, unused since nomadic times. They tethered their moulans, painted in ritual colors, near the entrance, feeling that living in this way might mysteriously connect them to Zhan’s aroma and to the one of the forty initiates tortured to death on the stairs of Beramis’s pyramid, at the end of the Kids’ War. Here and there, massive hot-air blowers were set to heat the air on the path of the temple officials and chase away the morning frost, now that the firewall no longer protected them.
Thousands of flags and fragrance bowls surrounded the great pyramids. The bustle around them was in complete dissonance with the dead residential areas around the center. Something had set them in motion to the central square of the city.
“My sons!” shouted Baila from the top platform of Zhan’s pyramid. “Finally, the time has come,” he exclaimed, and he raised his arms, holding the ritual murra staffs, over his head. He turned his awed face to the purple sky.
The coldness made the atmosphere’s color more intense. It was obvious that the purple smog would thicken that year much earlier than usual.
“Come back, Zhan-of-Light, to your sons lost in the night!”
“What? Again?” a mischievous character might have asked, rightly remembering that not long ago, a similar invocation had happened on the western plains… which ended rather abruptly when the prophet abandoned his tarjis to the strange gods in the floating mud vats. Still, in the wretched times that followed, no Antyran felt the insatiable urge to make naughty comments. Antyra’s worlds had been hit by a string of calamities, which convinced the majority of the Antyrans they were living the prophesied end of the world. The cold began to show its fangs; a premature winter threatened whatever crops remained, and most of the fateful Antyrans relocated to warmer areas, driving the sinners out of their cozy nests. The world’s centralized planning had gone down in flames while the temples armed millions of tarjis and initiates with the weapons captured from the Shindam.
What could possibly be worse than that?
“Accept his light inside your kyis! Zhan is great!” the prophet said, continuing his incantation.
Long ovations followed his request. The tarjis gathered tightly around the pyramids to hear his words, while the temple officials stood perched on stands placed on the branches of the sacred trees, like some strange fruits scattered in the canopy.
“Sons of the father, show yourselves to our thirsty eyes,” shouted Baila, dangling his sticks above his head.
A tidal wave crossed the crowd, flinging them to the dirt, spikes first. Above their heads, two gray ships of impressive size appeared in the purple sky, throwing long shadows on the magneto-avenues underneath. Gill would have easily recognized them as the enemies of Sigia, the Grammians, if he had been there.
They were floating lower than the tips of the tallest towers in the northwest of the city, so they had to maneuver carefully to avoid an accident. Their distortion field stretched the space around like a giant lens. The buildings superimposed by it became magnified to the point where even the tiny folds of their glass walls were visible in great detail.
From the ground level, the ships appeared surrounded by a strange mist, as if they were seen through heated air. Glanced from sideways, the distortion was easy to locate around the four engines in the back. Also, a smaller deformation whirled around their bow, where they had a number of small spheres dotted with shiny iridescences.