It was warm against his fingers. It glinted faintly in the grey light of the abyss.
He pressed it gently and felt the bars move apart in his fingers. For an instant the dazzling wings sprang open between thumb and forefinger, very near his face. A light like sunshine bathed him, showing up every glittering grain of soil in the overhang so near his head. And a wonderful fount of sheer strength poured through him gloriously . . .
“The Firebird!” Nethe cried, above him and out of sight. She must be able to see the radiance though she could not see the device itself. There was a soft thud as she threw herself flat on the lip of the shaft. “You have it! she cried. “I see the fire! Give it to me and I’ll save you!”
But Sawyer even in his extremity knew better than that. He dared not let the Firebird stay open more than the few seconds necessary to replenish his failing strength. He did not know what dangers lay latent in it. He had a horrid vision of the winged Firebirds swarming about him out of nowhere, out of some Gateway opened in infinity, while he hung helpless to fight them off.
He snapped the bright wings shut. The fountain of energy died, but that pouring of sheer power seemed to have stored itself in his nerves and muscles, for he felt marvelously refreshed, no longer hungry or thirsty.
At any rate, he thought, Nethe was not going to get the Firebird.
He had been looking for a safe hiding place. Now that it was too late, he had found the ideal spot. He pushed the closed golden bar of the talisman into the burrow, digging it firmly into the soil against the rock. Then he found a second rock and jammed it tightly in after the first.
After that, he tried to climb the ropelike root, but the extra energy he had gained brought him only up to the edge of the overhang which began to crumble precariously as he dangled, the root slipping and jolting. He stopped climbing and simply hung on till the dirt stopped showering past him. Above him, there was more of an opening now, and he thought he caught a glimpse of Nethe.
Pretty problem.
Certainly he couldn’t hold on forever here. But if he fell, she wouldn’t get the Firebird. Its hiding place might be precarious. It too might fall. The squirrel might tunnel around the rock, guided by its insatiable curiosity, and become the wealthiest squirrel in creation by finding the Firebird for itself. In any case Nethe would not get it.
So, he thought grimly, he was in a position to bargain. He turned gingerly on his root and craned up the air-well.
“Nethe,” he called. “Can you hear me?”
HER brilliant face appeared like magic over the grassy verge. The grass dripped, and showers of rain drove now and then down the open well and blew in gusts past Sawyer’s cheek.
“If you can get me up,” he told Nethe. “I’ll bargain with you.”
She stretched out a demanding hand. “I don’t trust you. Give me the Fire? bird first.”
Sawyer sighed. “All right. You’ll have to stretch a little farther, though. Here, reach!”
The smooth, narrow, subtly distorted hand waved blindly a foot above his face. Sawyer laughed aloud and seized her around the wrist with a desperate grip. He pulled, one threatening, experimental tug.
“Got you now!” he said. “Pull me up or we both go down.”
The scream of sheer fury that rang out from her just above his head made him jump convulsively. In the same instant the arm he held lashed into frenzies of writhing in a wild effort to shake him off. It was like holding a twisting serpent. The root he hung upon swayed and jolted, began ominously to creak. His own teeth were rattling with the violence of the struggle. He hung on for dear life, shouting above the furious, hissing curses she was gasping out as she fought:
“Stop it! Nethe, stop it! Hold still or we’re both done for! Pull me up!”
“I can’t pull you up, you fool,” Nethe said wildly.
“That’s interesting, in view of the bargain you were trying to make.” Sawyer told her, locking his grip harder around the lashing wrist. “Now—I come up or you come down.”
He heard the breath hiss through her teeth. He smiled up into the brilliant face straining down above him, almost too bright to look at because of the blaze in her large, inhuman eyes and the look of incandescence behind the fierce grimace. Looking at her. his heart sank a little. He thought. “No one with a face like that could ever give in. She won’t. She’d rather die.”
“I’m slipping,” he told her in an almost conversational voice. “This root’s slippery and my hand’s sweating. Last chance, Nethe.”
The baleful eyes flashed at him, flashed past him into the abyss. The root was slipping through his fingers faster and faster. Nethe slid farther over the edge, hissing furiously. She was halfway over the verge now, and the luminous earrings swung forward like tiny lamps to light their way to destruction. Then Sawyer felt the root quiver between his fingers, heard it snap.
“Well, it was an interesting life, while it lasted,” he said mildly, looking up into Nethe’s face.
Then the root broke, and for a dizzying second they swung suspended, held only by Nethe’s furious grip on some other anchoring root invisible to Sawyer A look he could not read crossed her face fleetingly. He saw that she gave one downward glance into the abyss. He saw the look of brief, half-incredulous, exultant triumph light her blazing face. Nethe laughed—and let go.
WHICH of the things that flashed through his mind came first in importance as he fell? He could not be sure. Time too seemed to have broken free of chronology and stood still around him.
He saw in the opening of the air-well, as Nethe’s body whipped through, a man’s dark face with a pointed cap above it, peering over the edge of the dripping grass, watching them go down. He saw it with photographic clarity, noting how every detail stood out even as the face and the ragged hole it peered through receded and dwindled above him into something as tiny as the world at the wrong end of a telescope. The watcher’s chin rested on the dark, wet grass as he lay flat, looking over the edge of the world, and the grass was like a dripping beard under his chin. Beard and all, he shot away upward to a pinpoint and then whirled clockwise across the sky and vanished.
All around them as they dropped turning through the abyss Nethe’s long, ringing scream of laughter echoed. They trailed it like a comet’s tail of clear sound.
As they shot downward through the whistling air, that dark storm-cloud which Sawyer had been dimly aware of under him all this while seemed to be floating to intercept them squarely. It shot upward to receive them. Was this why Nethe had laughed and let go, after her incredulous, triumphant glance downward? Even if it was, what use would a cloud be to save them?
It was, Sawyer realized with unwondering surprise, a tree-bearing cloud . . .
Quite suddenly branches were crackling all around him. Leaves whipped past his face. A deep cradle of limbs bowed strongly beneath the impact of his fall, received him, and sprang upward, tossing him into the air again. He thought, “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.” But the trees of this world were friendly to him if the people were not. Twice they intercepted his fall. What good a cloud-borne tree would do him, ultimately seemed doubtful. But it was comforting to feel branches under him.
“Good trees,” he thought approvingly. “Kind, clever, intelligent trees, hold me up.”
The tree at this point cracked him sharply across the head with a broken limb.
For once in his life Sawyer was very grateful indeed for the oblivion that swallowed him up.
HE SEEMED to be lying on a hard, uneven pavement. Shadows flickered across it in a silvery gray dimness. Paved clouds were wholly outside his experience and he tried to lift his head to see more, whereupon a hand slammed his skull down ringingly upon the stones.
“Where is it?” Nethe’s voice demanded in a hot, fierce hiss. She must have been ransacking his coat, for she let go so suddenly that he rolled over hard upon uneven rocks, and stars swam before his dazed eyes. “What did you do with the Firebird? I know you had it. Where is it now
?”
She bent over him, her blazing gaze a foot above his, the bright lanterns at her ears sending patterns of light into his eyes. Above her in a silvery twilight dark trees tossed. Through them, lowering like a storm-cloud to end all storm-clouds, he could see the black hanging bulk of the upper world, perhaps fifty feet overhead. Rain shot down past its verge in misty gusts.
“Maybe I dropped it,” Sawyer said, struggling up. “Where are we? On a cloud?”
“We’re on one of the floating islands,” Nethe told him impatiently. “Did you drop it? Answer me!” And she shook him with violent eagerness.
Sawyer felt the lump on his forehead where the branch had struck him. He looked up. Broken limbs and the shower of leaves about him on the pavement attested to their passage. It had been a minor miracle that both of them survived the fall. So that dark cloud had masked an island? A floating island? He struck the pavement a tentative blow.
“Is it safe?” he asked nervously. “What holds it up?”
“What holds the sun up?” Nethe asked with exasperation. “How do I know? Where is the Firebird? Answer me quickly, before I kill you!”
It occurred to Sawyer belatedly that if she thought it gone forever, she would probably carry out her threat. “Treat me well and I’ll tell you,” he said rapidly. “I dropped it when we fell. I saw where it landed. You’ll never find it without—” She cast a quick glance around her in the dimness.
“Where did it fall?” she demanded. “Quick!”
“I won’t tell you,” he said.
Nethe’s serpentine arm shot out and her hard hand cuffed him viciously across the side of the head. Her strength was tremendous. With the other hand she caught him as he fell, locked an iron grip on his forearm and twisted hard.
Between her shining teeth she said, “Answer me, Khom!”
The energy the Firebird had poured through him gave Sawyer strength to struggle. He shook his ringing head and lurched heavily away, putting his full weight on her grip to block her and swinging an edge-of-the-palm blow straight for the side of her neck, under the luminous earring.
Her flesh was inhuman, cool and hard. The blow jolted her a little, and she hissed in fury, twisting his arm up still farther so that the muscles creaked and he felt the joint give dangerously. The sweat sprang out on his forehead. He set his teeth and said in a thin, tight voice:
“Go on. Break it.”
She glanced at him in surprise.
“I’m not a Khom,” he said in a grating voice. “Break it. I won’t talk. You can bargain all you like or you can kill me, but—”
She twisted harder. He caught his breath and struck futilely at her again, trying stubbornly to give with the twist to save his arm as long as he could. She would certainly have broken it, he thought in the next few seconds if a new element had not entered into their conflict.
A jagged stone sang through the air between them, flying out of nowhere, and struck Nethe across the forehead, sending her reeling.
SAWYER prudently dropped flat, massaging his freed arm and searching the shadows with useless wariness. At the back of his mind was the knowledge that a stone that size should have knocked Nethe’s brains out. He was quite certain, though it had happened almost too quickly to be sure, that at the instant of contact between missile and Isier head, a flash of brilliance had sprung out as though to cushion the impact. Presumably it had sprung from the Isier skull. So they really were invulnerable? That showed clearly why Nethe had been willing to risk the long drop through empty space to this floating islet. The fall that might have killed Sawyer had it not been for cushioning trees would have left the Isier woman unharmed.
There was no time to reflect about this, for Nethe had not touched the ground before tumult burst noisily from the trees. In the wake of the thrown rock a dark, indistinguishable horde of bodies hurtled upon them through the silver gloom.
Sawyer could not see them very clearly. He did not want to. There was a singular repulsiveness about their gait and the set of their heads on their squat shoulders. They were certainly not human. Even the Isier race seemed the very prototype of humanity by contrast. Yet they walked on two legs, and they could throw stones, and use artifacts. At least, Sawyer caught glints of long steely blades flashing among the mob that was overwhelming the pavement and surrounding him.
They moved with such preternatural speed that the musk-smelling creatures were all around Sawyer while he was still futilely gathering his wits and Nethe was picking herself up dizzily from the pavement. Sawyer felt strong, hard hands close on all his limbs at once. Struggling in vain, he was hauled upright with bonebreaking ease. They handled him as if he weighed no more than a straw man, and were no more breakable. It seemed sheer good luck that they did not bend his limbs backward, snapping every joint, as they put him on his feet.
He peered around him in the gloom. Were they tall or not tall? Their height seemed to keep changing, and in a moment he realized why. They had heads like turtles, shallow-skulled on thick, retractable necks that could squat down into their heavy shoulders or stretch high. It seemed to him that their long, terribly powerful limbs were boneless, for they moved with an incongruous grace.
They breathed a hot, musky breath in his face, pulling him from one to another, exchanging strangely musical grunts and trills in which pitch rather than words seemed to convey what little meaning moved through their shallow heads. In the dark their great pale eyes were like luminous jewels, perfectly empty, ringing him in.
One of them boomed resonantly in its throat, with a noise like drums echoing in a vault, and reached casually for Sawyer’s head with both hands. Large, cold, musk-smelling, they closed around his face and ears twisting. In a matter of seconds, he knew quite well, his head would part from his shoulders.
Between thumb and spread fingers of the great hand across his face, he saw Nethe, resisting capture with far more success than Sawyer, stemming as she did from a far stronger race.
He shouted to her, his voice muffled against the musky palm of the savage: “Nethe—Nethe!”
AN EXPLOSION of sound and fury seemed to burst out among the knot of savages ringing Nethe in. He saw it only dimly, filtered between great spread fingers and blurred by his own swimming senses, but it looked as if Nethe had called upon some unfathomable source of incandescent power, for she whirled suddenly among her captors with a violence that sent them spinning. Her face lighted up with a blaze from within. Her eyes burned like lamps and she moved so fast she seemed to leave streaks of luminescence in the air around her.
At the same instant she lifted her voice in a cry like a struck gong. No human throat could have uttered a sound so resonant, so sustained, so clear. Sawyer had a mad notion that he could see the separate sound-waves of it spreading outward in luminous rings.
The savages responded surprisingly. Their hands fell free and Sawyer, wrenching his arms from the loosening grips that held them, massaged his aching neck with both hands and stared in bewilderment around the clearing. Every reptilian head was turned to Nethe, every pair of bright, empty, jewel-like eyes was fixed on her.
With great presence of mind Sawyer snatched a long knife from the nearest slack hand and plunged it up to the hilt in the deep chest of the savage before him.
“No!” Nethe called, from the other side of the group. “Don’t waste your time—listen! Strip off that cloak. Throw it away. Quick, before it destroys you!”
Fumbling in dazed obedience at the fabric, Sawyer had one incredulous glimpse of the savage he had stabbed. The creature was watching Nethe in blurred fascination. It did not even look down when the blade entered its chest. One large paw came up and plucked the dagger out as if it had been a pin thrust through clothing. The savage chest showed no wound. The dark, reptilian flesh healed itself as the blade withdrew and there might never have been a stabbing at all. except that from the point of the blade two or three drops of golden, luminous blood dripped and vanished.
“Invulnerable!” Sawyer thought,
a vague resentment stirring in him. “Everyone’s invulnerable but me.” And then he thought no more, for the cloak had begun to smoulder under his hands.
He got it off just in time. Like a Nessus-shirt it was turning to pure fire even as he tossed it, and the billowing folds settled down upon the pavement in a heap of flame, white-hot from hem to hood before it struck the ground.
The oval jewel-eyes of the savages followed its motion as if in hypnosis, every flattened head swinging round, every eye giving back a white flame of reflection. Nethe was forgotten. Sawyer was forgotten. They were moths around a flame, and it drew them irresistibly until their dark backs closing around the fire all but shut out its glow.
Sawyer had one brief, shuddering thought of what Nethe could have done to him with that shirt of Nessus any moment she chose, if his life hadn’t been important to her at the time. How she had done it remained an enigma, but the thing of utter blackness had in one instant become a thing of blinding light, growing brighter and brighter as the savages flocked around it, and apparently not actually burning for it did not consume itself. Whatever it fed on, it continued to blaze higher, and the savages continued to surge excitedly around it, more of them appearing out of the woods at every flare of the cloak.
On the other side of that mindlessly phototropic crowd he caught a flash of Nethe’s lantern earrings as she dodged futilely, trying to get to him, and he came back to the realization of danger with a start. She had saved him for her own purposes, but it mattered little whether he was dismembered fatally by a savage or an Isier, and dismemberment would certainly be his end if she caught him.
He whirled and ran . . .
VIII
BEYOND the fringe of trees a range of dark hills rose against the silver mist of the sky. Sawyer labored stumbling up the slope, with no clear plan except to put space between himself and Nethe. He did net forget that this was an island, improbably drifting in space. He watched the ground underfoot suspiciously, and presently, between two hills, caught a glimpse of low-lying silver fog that looked like the brink of creation.
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