“I won’t tell you that,” Nethe said, with a flash of brilliant anger. “Go ahead and jump if you want to. I will tell you this much—they feed on the energy in the uranium at your world’s pole. They can drink energy from the Khom, too. They could drink from you. Perhaps, in time, they will.” She gave him a dangerous look.
“What would happen,” Sawyer inquired, “if the Goddess knew you had the Firebird?”
“Perhaps she does. But she doesn’t intend to let anyone else know the Firebird’s gone from the Well. The Well is her trust—her charge. Do you suppose she would want to advertise the fact that she allowed—that she stole the Firebird?”
Sawyer grinned. He felt quite sure now who had really stolen that strange talisman. Perhaps Nethe read his face, for she went on:
“Would you like to go to her with your story? The first thing the Goddess would force you to do is reveal where you’ve hidden the Firebird. She has powers I haven’t—yet. And the second thing she would do would be to seal your mouth forever, so you could never reveal that the Goddess had failed her trust. She wears the Double Mask, and she intends to keep on wearing it—by killing me, if she can, at the Unsealing. And if I die, the Goddess will make no bargains with a Khom like you. Why do you suppose I didn’t simply wait for you outside the Temple?”
“For Alper, you mean,” Sawyer said. “Well, why didn’t you? What were you afraid of?”
“The soldiers of the Goddess, of course,” Nethe said. “I’ve disobeyed the summons to the Unsealing. I intend to keep on disobeying it as long as I can hide, but where can I hide from the Goddess in Khom’ad? Nowhere, for long, without the Firebird to open a Gate past which even the Goddess can’t follow me.”
“The Gate to Earth?” Sawyer asked. Nethe hesitated for an instant. “Somewhere else, then?” Sawyer went on speculatively, watching her. “Back in the uranium mine, you intended to take Klai through the Gate to question her—but I don’t think it was to Khom’ad. Then we all were sucked through into that ice-hall, so . . .” Sawyer paused, nodded once, and continued briskly, “So Perhaps that’s a necessary way-station to wherever you’d intended to take Klai.
But you couldn’t finish the trip without the Firebird. The current in the ice-hall carried you away—carried all of us away except Alper, who had the Firebird then.”
“Never mind that,” Nethe said impatiently. “You understand now that I’m desperate. The city’s alive with soldiers searching for Khom sacrifices—during the Unsealing, the Well drinks up many lives. And outside the city, the Goddess has ways of finding me—so now I intend to get the Firebird, or you can jump.” She took a long, smooth forward step.
“Make up your mind, animal. Is it yes or no?”
SAWYER glanced down again into the swimming abysses below, combed now by long, slanting shafts of reflection from the fire that glowed just beyond the hill. He had been watching considerable activity growing and changing down there, where the rising islands floated in the light of the false sunrise from above.
“Just a moment, Nethe,” he said. “One little matter you haven’t considered yet. I don’t know if you realize it, but your fire has become quite an attraction among the—Sselli, you called them? I think there’s going to be some excitement in Khom’ad very soon now. Climb that rock beside you and you can see. Not too near, though! Careful! I can always jump.”
She hissed at him scornfully, put her foot in a pocket of rock and climbed until she could see what he meant. Then she sucked her breath in with a sound of consternation.
In the ruddy glow of the fire reflecting downward from Khom’ad’s underside, the floating lands were alive with great hordes of climbing Sselli, clambering swiftly upward toward the glow, leaping from isle to rising isle, springing the dangling roots and swarming up them like creatures under a spell of hypnotized fascination. Their blank, lifted eyes reflected red and flat in the light which drew them on.
At this moment a violent shock made the ground jump like a spurred horse under Sawyer’s feet. Nethe swore in Isier and slid helpless down the rock to which she had been clinging. Only Sawyer’s instinctive embrace of his tree saved him from pitching to destruction over the cliff. As it was, he struck his head painfully against the trunk and saw stars for a moment.
Then the island under him swung ponderously around in a full quarter-turn. Something brushed his face with a familiar network and he looked up in time to receive a moist smack in the cheek from a dripping tree-root. The island had risen until it all but touched the underhang of Khom’ad, and the roots which were dripping now with rain from the upper world brushed the tree-tops of the island.
Overhead, floating like the gates of heaven, loomed through darkness and rain the high iron doors and the granite wall of Khom’s gateway. The doors were opening. The bells rang wildly all through the city now.
Sawyer clasped his tree and watched.
IX
WATERFALL of human figures was pouring over the lip of the upper world. The light of the reflecting fire caught on steel tubes and coils of the mysterious Khom weapons, flashed on long blades like bayonets. The dark torrent glittered as it leaped, and the island shook with the impact of the falling human torrent.
They were shouting as they came.
The deep booming cries of the savages answered like inhuman echoes. Reptilian heads sunk flatly between their shoulders, long arms swinging, knives flashing, they surged forward to meet the Khom.
Above the roar of the human battle-cries and the deep bellows of the Sselli, a great, clear, belling shout rang like a golden gong, struck three times. A second cry, and then a third, joined in the ringing sound, three voices that overlapped like ripples in a pool. And over the brink of the human waterfall as it poured between the gates, three godlike figures came.
Three tall Isiers waded head and shoulders above the dark human tide. Above the heads of the Khom they swung three great whips of flame, crackling and snapping like leashed lightning. They were shouting, in the voices of angry angels, deep and golden and terrible.
Here at last, Sawyer thought, came something that might have a chance against the Sselli.
At the first sound of those golden shouts, Nethe writhed around anxiously, hissing with anger. She gave Sawyer a hot, baleful look, hesitated, took a step toward him. Very quickly he turned too, leaned perilously over the abyss, and said across his shoulder, “You haven’t got a chance. I’ll jump and you know it.”
In the way she lashed around in an agony of indecision to look again at the oncoming Isier, Sawyer was startled to see a curious likeness to the motion of the Sselli, the same strong, sinuous, violent ripple of El Greco distortions.
“Don’t think you’ve won!” she spat at him, her great eyes luminous with rage. “I’ve told you things too dangerous for you to know. You won’t get away! I’ll—” She bit off the rest of the words, smiled at him fiercely, and then with one ripple of sinuous motion hurled herself sidewise off the rock and vanished between two low hills away from the direction of the fighting.
He strained his eyes among the shadows, seeing nothing. Perhaps she had really gone. And, of course, perhaps not. He took a few cautions steps inland, watching the battle.
The first ranks of the human waterfall poured forward. In a long, sinuous wave the Sselli leaped to meet them, and the shock of their impact made the island stagger.
The Isier were wading through the turmoil, their whips of fire crackling and coiling brilliantly in the air before them. Their great voices rang above the deep-throated roars of the Sselli and the wild human shouts and cries. Above it all the iron alarm-bells still rolled forth their clangor on the reverberating air. The half-smothered light of the blazing cloak shot low shafts of light between upper world and island to illuminate the battle from below. It was like the light of hell-fire glowing up from the nether pit.
Sawyer saw the foremost Isier and a Sselli come face to face in the wild, tossing turmoil of the battle. A spark of hatred seemed to leap out between them.
The eyes of the savage blazed and upon the Isier’s godlike face a fury of disdain burned incandescently. He swung his fiery whip high, brought it curling down to wrap the monstrous, reptilian being in a coil of lightning.
The Sselli howled, reeled, fell . . . but it did not die. Sawyer watched eagerly. He saw the creature sink, hesitate, then shake its flat head and struggle up again, sluggish and dazed but still fighting.
There was a rattle and scuffling among the stones between two hills, and a human head wearing a pointed cap came into silhouette paused, shouted something and came pelting full-tilt down the little ravine toward Sawyer, waving eagerly. Sawyer jumped back to his tree, ready to immolate himself if this were a trick.
The running Khom burst out into the reflecting light of the fire and dashed panting toward Sawyer, still waving. He was gasping out a single syllable, over and over, but too indistinctly to mean anything. Sawyer hesitated.
Then dimly recognition began to dawn. That pointed cap. That dark face. He had last seen them receding with frightful speed down the wrong end of a telescope as he fell through the air-well—
THE MAN pulled up sharply when he saw the sheer drop of the cliff beside which Sawyer stood. He got his breath, nodded rapidly, and said, “Klai! Klai!” For one wild moment the word meant nothing. Then Sawyer sprang forward, shook the man by the shoulders and echoed, “Klai? Klai?” in senseless repetition.
The man grinned broadly, nodded many times and seized Sawyer by the arm, urging him away from the edge. Sawyer allowed himself to be pulled toward the fighting, though he kept a wary lookout all around him. His mind was clicking bits of logic into place. Uselessly he spoke in English to his excited guide.
“You followed me from the prison,” he said. “You saw me fall and the islands rise, with the savages on them. Was it you who sounded the alarm? Are you taking me to Klai now?”
The little man said, “Klai,” many times over, nodded, urged Sawyer to greater speed. He paused on the height of a low hill above the battle. Clearly he had hoped to make his way across that struggling turmoil and up through the city gates. Equally clearly, no such thing was possible now, with the fight spread so widely.
Sawyer glanced speculatively toward the dark overhang of the great looming continent that floated above them. The island had pressed itself up close beneath the shell of the upper world. Perhaps two-thirds of it thrust out free and clear into the space before the city gates, like a gigantic doorstep leading into infinity.
In the upper world, rain still fell. The part of the island which had undershot the upper world was sheltered, but through that roof, not far away, a shaft of rain drove downward slantingly in intermittent gusts. There was an opening there, in the crust of the upper world. Sawyer thought he knew that opening.
He said, “Come on,” and seized his companion by the arm. The little man resisted unexpectedly, plucked Sawyer’s sleeve and pointed. Sawyer turned to look.
They stood just below the crest of the hill. Below them, across the broad, broken pavement, the fighting raged under gusts of fitful rain. On the far side Sawyer saw Nethe swaying between the trees, peering out at them and up, her face white with excitement and rage. The earrings glinted across her cheeks. She kept the trees between herself and the striding Isier, and her eyes burned upon the hilltop that hid Sawyer.
“She knows we’re here,” Sawyer said uselessly, in English. “We’ve got to get away before she can work around toward us. Come on!” But he did not move. Something very curious about Nethe’s eyes had struck him suddenly. He stood for an instant staring down in fascination, and a strange new idea began to stir formlessly in his mind.
For by sheer chance one of the savages had glanced blindly up toward Sawyer in the instant that Nethe lifted her own face. And Sawyer saw its eyes . . .
They were the same eyes. Large, oval, lucent as jewels, the same shape, the same set and angle in the head. The Sselli’s were blank as two clear gems. But except for the fiery mind behind one pair of eyes and the total mindlessness behind the other, they might have been the same eyes reflected in two differing faces.
SAWYER’S guide tugged at him again. Reluctantly, dazed with the strange idea that seemed to mean nothing, he turned away. And once more something stopped him. Something else spectacular was happening down below.
An Isier, wading forward like an angel scourging demons before him, came stalking through the tides of his human allies, swinging his whip of flame. A flung knife shot from the hand of a Sselli and flashed toward him. The Isier smiled with godlike scorn. The knife rang upon his ice-robed chest as if upon a wall of steel. A flash of pure energy seemed to gleam between the blade and the Isier. The knife fell harmlessly away—
But the Isier stood as if frozen. For a long, immobile second he stood there, his face suddenly blank, his eyes glazing. Then a burst of shimmering heat sprang out around him in a halo that made the battle-scenes behind him quiver when glimpsed through that haze.
The next instant he was gone.
Sselli and Khom alike leaped back as if scorched from that fading bright spot where he had stood. They looked blankly at each other, shook their heads dazedly, and then the battle swept forward and closed like water over the spot where the Isier had been.
When an Isier uses up more energy than he possesses, he seems to—to vaporize . . . So Nethe had said in her long, reluctant talk beside the brink of the island.
Shaking his own head, bewildered by the ideas that were beginning to take shape in his mind about the Isier, Sawyer turned away. He had one small errand to perform before he returned to the the city. And it would have to be a secret errand, even from his guide.
“Come along,” he said, leading the little man firmly away from the battleground. “We’re going upstairs by the trap-door.”
Rain still fell through the familiar air-well down which Sawyer had fallen. The hole floated in the world’s overhang, ten feet above the island. The well-remembered tap-root trailed downward upon the ground, dragging its broken end.
“You first,” Sawyer said, making appropriate gestures. The little man leaped for the root, shinnied rapidly upward and scrambled out of sight over the edge.
Sawyer followed, more slowly, scanning the damp soil he passed with an anxious eye. It seemed too good to be true, but there was the familiar burrow with the rock blocking it. He exhaled deeply, pulled out the rock, dropped it, thrust his fist into the hole and in another moment felt the precious golden bar of the Firebird throbbing warmly against his hand.
He dropped the terrible, wonderful, dangerous thing into his pocket and went rapidly up the rope. The little man Waited grinning at the top to help him over the edge.
TWICE in their devious, rapid course through the dark streets of the city Sawyer’s guide paused, drew back into a doorway and whistled softly in warning to Sawyer. The city was alive with excited Khom, but this little man had a knowledge of byways so complete that they never had to cross a lighted thoroughfare.
He had a sixth sense about pursuit, too, for the second time he pulled Sawyer into hiding they saw the flash of white robes behind them, dodging out of sight, and a faint, luminous glow that was almost certainly Nethe’s earrings.
“So that was her idea,” Sawyer thought. “She had to hide when the Goddess’s soldiers started that beachhead attack on the island. But now? Maybe she thinks she can track me to the Firebird.” He shut his hand on the warm glow in his pocket, thinking, “She didn’t see me get it when I climbed the root. She couldn’t have, or she’d have caught up with me by now. No, she’s still following hoping I’ll give myself away.”
The little guide tapped Sawyer softly on the shoulder, tinkered for an instant with the door in whose shadow they hid, then pushed it soundlessly open and led the way through total darkness down rickety stairs and out a low window in the back. They plunged into another alley and set off at a rapid trot.
It occurred to Sawyer as he ran that he had better post Alper on current events or he might recei
ve a jolt from the transceiver when it would do the most harm. So, in a whisper, he talked eerily to the distant, unseen enemy who controlled his life while he ran through an unknown city at a stranger’s heels, toward an unknown goal.
That goal turned out to be a cul-de-sac alley, dark and smelling not unpleasantly of hay and stabled animals. Sawyer’s companion rattled his nails in a brisk code on a half-seen door. Two Khom came up quietly out of nowhere, peered into their faces, exchanged murmurs and withdrew. The door opened. Quickly Sawyer and his guide slipped through.
A lantern burning some pungent smelling oil swung from a low rafter, its motion making the shadows seem to rock dizzily. The heads of leopard-spotted ponies nodded drowsily over their stalls along both walls. Under the lantern reddish chickens scratched and pecked at the chaff-strewn floor. And all around the walls one simultaneous motion of turning bodies, turning heads, quickly narrowing eyes, greeted the newcomers.
The stable was packed with Khom. They sat three deep along the stalls, clogged the corners, swung their legs over the hay-fringed edges of the mows above the ponies. Their eyes glinted in the lantern-light and they held themselves alertly poised, ready for any trouble that came, from any source.
At the far end of the stable, on a bale of hay, a plump old man sat with a striped cat on his knees. And beside him, fast asleep on a spread blue cloak, lay Klai with her hand under her cheek, smudges of smoke and ash on her face, and her pretty teeth showing a little under her lip.
The old man shook her gently. Her eyes came open instantly, deep blue and blank with sleep. Then she scrambled up, cried, “Sawyer!” and stumbled forward, still dazed from slumber but smiling, reaching out her hands.
He took them eagerly. It was tremendously consoling to see a familiar face again and speak English to it. But she was, at first, babbling out phrases in her own tongue. He said, “Wait a minute! Hello!” and she laughed, shook her head with confusion, and changed over to English, though strange phrases kept tumbling into it in her excitement.
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