Alper paused. Sawyer felt a tremor of some violent emotion shake the ponderous body that leaned against him. Then in a suddenly thin voice the old man called aloud:
“Nethe? Nethe, are you here?”
A familiar ripple of laughter sounded out of the darkness beyond the dancing wings of fire. It was the only answer, but when Alper heard it he drew a deep breath and shuffled forward resolutely, keeping his face turned toward the wings of light.
Sawyer asked softly. “What are they? Do you know? Did they kill the man?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care,” Alper said. “Hurry. All I do know is Nethe’s there and I can get energy again. Youth again! Hurry!”
Sawyer hesitated. He thought, “Is this my chance? If he gets more energy, it may be too late, but now, while he still wants something of me—”
Without completing the thought, he sprang into sudden, violent action, leaping back away from Alper and the flames, disengaging his arm from Alper’s weight and clearing his own right hand for the quick sidewise blow that would free him, if he were lucky, from the tyranny of the old man’s power.
“Last chance,” he told himself as he sprang. “Maybe he was lying. Maybe not. Maybe if he’s knocked out I can get the transceiver control away from him. Maybe—”
Thunder and lightning crashed downward again in the familiar path through the center of his head. The tunnel wheeled dizzily, flashing with lights that were not all the winged ghosts. Alper’s heavy hand shut around Sawyer’s wrist before his brain cleared.
“Come on! Hurry! Don’t make me do it again! There isn’t time!”
Staggering and dazed, Sawyer let himself be pulled forward. The winged flames seemed to consider them as they stumbled past, to flutter a little and then subside again as if in some radiant feast upon the dead man on the floor. Shuddering and dizzy, Sawyer accepted the old man’s weight once more, let himself be urged on into the darkness beyond the flames.
Before them the shaft widened. There was light again, a broad circle of it upon the wall, like the light of a distant flash-beam, pale and wide. Flattened against the light, Klai stood motionless, pressing her back to the rock and staring straight before her into the shadows.
SAWYER stared, shook his head and stared again. The light came from behind the girl. It fell through the solid rock, from some point beyond. Klai was motionless, her head thrown back, her palms flat against the wall, and suddenly Sawyer realized that her immobility was deceptive, no choice of hers. For she was trying frantically to move.
And she could not. Like a moth pinned upon the circle of light she stood, fought hard and could not stir a finger. Only her quick breath and the flash of her eyes and the glint of her white teeth beneath the pretty upper lip as she spoke showed that she was alive at all. Her voice sounded frantic.
“You can’t do this!” she cried into the shadows. “You’re not allowed to! You’re not the Goddess!”
Automatically Sawyer turned his head to follow her gaze. In the darkness a luminous shadow stirred. Nethe was a preternaturally tall figure clothed in shadows, holding them about her like a veil through which her face gleamed dimly. Try as he would, Sawyer could not focus upon the figure and the features under the veil. But the voice was clear, very strong and sweet, with such music latent in it as an angel might hold latent, not choosing to release the full volume in a world so limited as Earth.
“I will be Goddess, soon enough,” Nethe said. “How do you know me, Khom? You are a Khom! A real Khom, not an earthling. How did you get here, girl?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” Klai’s voice wavered. “But you’re not the Goddess. You can’t be, without the Double Mask. Oh, I wish I could remember—” Nethe’s voice broke in sharply, in a language full of curious double consonants that lisped like diphthongs. Her words crackled. Klai caught her breath in a sound like a sob.
“I don’t understand you! I don’t remember! Who are you? Why—” Alper’s forward lurch cut off the words. From the corner of her eye she saw the motion, gasped, and tried in vain to turn her head.
“Nethe—” Alper said.
Klai’s blue eyes rolled sidewise. “Who is it? Alper, is it you?”
“Be still, Klai,” the old man said. “If you want to live, be quiet.”
“Why should the life of a Khom matter?” Nethe asked derisively. “Even to a Khom? I’m finished with you now, old Khom. I have the girl!”
“Don’t do it, Nethe!” Alper’s voice was desperate. “I’ll lose the mine if you kill her! Then you won’t get the ore at all.”
“Your little Khom troubles are so important to you Khom,” Nethe said. “But not really important at all.”
“Her body will be found!” Alper cried with the callous desperation of despair. “They’ll get me for murdering her! Nethe, you can’t do it!”
“Body?” Nethe said contemptuously. “The body won’t be here. I must question this girl before she dies. She is a Khom. If I had known that before—but how could I? All you animals look so much alike, and the girl spoke your tongue until just now, when I was about to kill her. Well, by doing that she’s gained herself a reprieve—until she tells me how she passed through the Gate. I must understand that. But I had not intended . . . oh, it doesn’t matter. I know a way—a safe place to question this Khom. And this time I may never need to return to your bleak world. So—goodbye, old Khom.”
The willowy, bending figure swooped forward, trailing shadows. Out of the veils one arm suddenly thrust, incredibly long, incredibly graceful. Between finger and thumb a sudden brilliance sprang out. She held what looked like a little golden bar six inches long. She seemed to press it and it split into wheat-shaped wings, a tiny duplicate of the ghosts behind them in the passage. The wings unfurled golden fire, shot out brilliance that dazzled the eye. Holding the thing high before her, she swept forward toward Klai. And as she neared the wall, the circle of light grew brighter and brighter.
Alper’s caught breath seemed to strangle him. The instant the shining thing sparked in Nethe’s hand he had seemed to galvanize into a sudden convulsion of excitement. He thrust Sawyer away with what must have been his last remaining dregs of energy, and lurched forward upon Nethe like a man magnetized by what he saw, helpless to hold back from it.
“Give it to me, Nethe!” he cried in a hollow voice, reaching out both hands. “Nethe, let me have it! Let me touch it once more! Nethe, I—”
Sawyer, seeing the old man’s hand out of that fatal pocket, leaped past him like a spring released. He didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish, but Nethe seemed the obvious antagonist just now and he thought, with one stroke of clarity in his otherwise confused brain, that if he could snatch the sparkling wings out of her hand he might hold the key to more than it was possible yet to understand.
Everything happened with dazzling suddenness.
HIS outstretched arms closed about the tall, shadow-veiled figure in the instant before Alper reached her. Under the veil he felt a body preternaturally slender, impossibly lithe, very hard and stronger than a steel cable. Shocked and startled by the feel of it, he hung on hard. He had hoped to control her with one arm while he reached for the shining tiling, but this was like trying to hold the Midgard Serpent.
He heard her scream—one wild, furious, ringing cry like a struck gong, resonant with music and incandescent with rage. The steel cable of her body sprang to violent life, lashing like a snake in his arms. He knew he could not hold her. But he could hang on for a moment. Gasping, shocked into witlessness, he clasped that writhing column—
Alper shouted, a strangled cry. Past Sawyer’s face something bright flashed sparkling toward the floor. Alper swooped, snatching it in midair, lunging against Sawyer as he did so. The impact struck Sawyer off balance, and Nethe whirled out of his arms like a tornado swaying sidewise.
Alper was a man transfigured. The sparkling thing seemed to bathe him in radiance, and the years dropped visibly from him as he stood there clutching it. The sag o
f his body straightened, his heavy cheeks grew firm, his eyes glowed with fanatical triumph. He whirled like a young man, strong and quick.
“So this was it!” he cried. “This was where the energy came from!”
“Give it back to me!” Nethe screamed, swooping forward. “You don’t know what you’re doing! You can get too much energy, old Khom. Look, the Gate’s beginning to open! Give it back!” Alper whirled away from her, laughing drunkenly. Sawyer could see now that it was not youth that had transfigured him. The old face was old still, but firm with an unnatural firmness. The old body was still heavy and thick, but energy seemed to pour through it in a golden torrent.
Nethe swooped and snatched with both hands for the sparkling thing. Alper, spinning to elude her, struck the wall a violent blow with the bright opened wings. There was a ring of wild music, as if the rock had been an answering gong, and the circle of light grew too bright to look at. Klai was a shadow in silhouette against that brilliance.
“Close it, Alper!” Nethe screamed in the dazzle. “We’ll all be drawn through!
Alper! Close the Firebird! Keep it, but close it!”
The air was ringing all around them. The circle of light was a tunnel’s mouth, round, glowing, and leading down a long, diminishing circular hallway carved out of ice . . .
A current seemed to catch them all and whirl them toward the tunnel. Nethe’s cry of rage and despair made the ice-walls ring. There was a humming and a whistling in the air, and a sudden storm of light-wings beat about their ears. The wheat-shaped flames from the tunnel were fluttering past, flattening themselves upon the tunnel walls, glittering and fading . . .
Alper, with belated terror, snapped the golden thing in his hands shut. But it was too late. The current had them. They were whirling and falling, and walls of ice spun by endlessly around and around their flight . . .
IV
THERE was an instant of such cold that Sawyer felt as if all the molecules of his body were shrinking-together and clashing like crystals. Then he stood firm on a solid floor, gazing before him down a long, circular tunnel, pale green like ice. He was not alone, for Klai was at his side, her knees sagging a little, and Alper stood three paces beyond, one hand against the ice-like wall and the other still clenched tight around the precious thing he held.
These weren’t important. The thing I that riveted the eye was the scattered throng of other figures, as far as Sawyer could see, gliding swiftly away from I them down the tunnel. All of them were tall people, inhumanly willowy, and all of them seemed to be walking backward. Blank, blind faces smiled palely behind them as they walked.
Sawyer glanced at Klai. Her eyes were round and dazed and questioning. He looked at Alper, and met the same look of dazed bewilderment there. Tentatively Sawyer spoke.
“Alper,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
His voice echoed hollowly down the hall. Alper tried twice before he could get the words out.
“Yes, I hear you. Where—”
“Where are we?” Sawyer asked in the same breath, echoing the same question. The younger man grinned bleakly, and Alper seemed to pull himself together with a strong effort, straightened, looked down at his own heavy body and laughed suddenly, a sound thick with triumph. Moving with powerful ease, he stepped away from the wall of green ice, solid and opaque behind them. On the other side of it, did the mine and Fortuna lie?
“I don’t know where we are,” Alper said. “But I know how we got here. This.” He unclosed his hand and the golden bar caught the light of the tunnel and gleamed softly. Alper’s thick fingers pressed it. Flat gold wings opened in a sparkling V and fringes of fire sprang out of them. Alper grinned and slapped the gold-winged symbol flat against the ice. It rang faintly and sweetly.
Nothing else happened.
Alper grunted with dismay, drew his arm back and slapped the thing again upon the ice. Still nothing, though a glow seemed to be growing in the air around them.
“Close it! Alper, close it!”
All of them turned. And for the first time, clearly, without her veil of shadow, they saw the woman called Nethe.
Among all those oblivious, drifting figures that receded from them down the corridor of ice, one alone seemed really animate. The rest moved like people in a trance. But one turned his head and looked at them blazingly over its shoulder from thirty feet down the hall. The motion made suddenly clear the mystery of all those blank, backward-staring faces.
The faces were masks. The real faces of the trance-gripped people fronted forward. But Janus-like at the backs of their heads, the masks stared blind-eyed and smiling. Only Nethe twisted frantically, as if in the grip of some irresistible forward flow, trying to look back.
THEY saw her face. A strange, inhuman face, brilliant with more than human vitality. It was narrow, pointed at the chin, widening toward enormous, lustrous, snake-like eyes half-veiled under heavy lids. Her mouth was a thin crimson crescent, curving upward like one of the half-mad smiles the early Etruscans carved upon their marble statues.
Her body, like the bodies of the dreaming shapes she moved among, was no more human than a figure by El Greco, and no less human. All of them had the slender, oddly spiraling distortion of height which El Greco gave his people. And like them, the elongated lines lent a curious grace and rightness to her body which made humanity seem warped and wrong by contrast.
She too wore one of the pale, smiling masks upon the back of her head, turned in profile as she twisted to look back. If she had hair you could not see it. Across the crown of her head, dividing mask and face, a glass crown ran in undulant loops. At her ears hung earrings like tiny perforated spheres inside which a gentle light glowed softly. Every motion sent points of patterned glitter moving across her cheeks as the earrings swung.
She was dressed like all the others of her kind here, in a flowing garment the color of pale green ice, sweeping free from a broad flat collar like a surplice. And she was struggling frantically to turn.
“Close it!” she cried again. “Quick! You can’t go back that way!”
Now the air was shivering more violently. Sawyer said, “Shut it, Alper,” and tried to turn and step back the three paces that parted them.
He could not do it.
Firmly, inexorably, the air resisted him. Not with a solid pressure, but more as if a stream of tiny, tingling points flowed constantly out of the wall behind them.
“I’ve been trying, too,” Klai said quietly. “You can’t. You can’t even stand still. Look, we’re starting to move.” Stumbling against the increasing pressure, Sawyer fought briefly and in vain. Ahead of them Nethe was struggling too, frantically, her strange face dazzling with anger and—was it anxiety? The current swept her and the figures like her as if on a strong, smooth breeze that flowed fast. Distance was already widening between them as she stretched out a demanding hand and called:
“Alper! Come to me! You have the Firebird, so you can move. Give it back!” Alper laughed, an intoxicated sound. He had snapped the glittering wings shut and the air was quiet again, the light gone. He held the Firebird up derisively.
“You’ve doled me out my last measure!” he shouted to the receding Nethe. “Now I’ll get it from the source! You fool, why should I give it up now?”
“I need it!” Nethe called despairingly. “You don’t know what you’re doing! What does your little Khom life matter, compared to mine! I don’t dare go out, without the Firebird!” Her voice grew threatening. “Do you think when we come to the end of this passage I won’t kill you and take it back? Hurry, Khom, hurry!” Already her voice was growing hollow with the echoes that reverberated from the walls of ice as distance drew out between them.
“Give it back!” she cried, from far away, a small, diminishing figure with blazing eyes. “Give it back and I’ll let you live! But hurry, hurry, before I—” One of the swiftly receding figures among which she moved swerved sidewise and brushed her shoulder jarringly. She twisted her head to look forward, and her wild,
high cry of anger and despair made all the echoes ring. Those blank-faced, receding replicas of herself seemed to pay no attention to anything that was happening around them, not even to the echoes of Nethe’s scream, but the increasing speed that swept them all along was swirling them now together toward a slow ripple of motion that closed off the far end of the tunnel.
Pale, ice-colored curtains swayed continuously there, like the aurora borealis, Sawyer thought—the same folds, the same motion. And between those folds, by ones and twos, the gliding figures were sweeping out of sight into some unguessable world beyond the tunnel.
“Alper!” Nethe’s strong, singing cry made the echoes roll like music. “Alper, it’s too late! Listen to me! Listen very carefully! They’ve seen me from outside by now. The Goddess will be waiting to trap me. I’ll get to you if I can, but hide the Firebird! Show it to no one! If you want to live, keep it hidden until I come for you. Don’t—”
A sudden wall of silence cut her voice off sharply. Nethe had vanished between the rippling curtains, straining her face around toward them to the last, the great, baleful eyes burning with urgency.
ALPER shut his hand nervously over the closed Firebird, rubbed his face with a heavy hand, and looked doubtfully at Klai.
“I—I don’t understand,” he said. “Are we dreaming? Where are we? Klai, she seemed to think you—do you know what’s happening?”
Klai held tighter to Sawyer’s arm. The two of them were walking forward slowly now, under the gentle, irresistible pressure of the air. Alper took two or three quick steps to catch up with them.
“It isn’t a dream,” Klai said hesitantly, her strange accent oddly thicker than before. “It’s more as if I’d dreamed about Fortuna and the Pole. I’m only beginning to wake again now to the real world. My world—at the end of this hall. Khom’ad, where my people live. Where the—the Isier rule. Where—”
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