“Hold it!” Sawyer said suddenly. “Keep it there. Wait!”
For from below him, and not far off, another thunder sounded like an externalized echo—the sudden, deep boom of an explosion. In the ring of angels intent upon the duel across the Well, Isier heads turned incredulously toward that sound which might almost have burst within the walls of the Temple itself.
It was within the Temple.
It came again, and with it now the crash and the long, sliding rumble of falling walls, just beyond the glow of the golden heavens which wreathed them in.
THEN the glass floor rocked beneath the circle of thrones. A crash as of vast glass walls toppling sounded terrifyingly near. The Isier sprang to their feet in one long, undulant wave of rising crowns and tossing robes, whirling outward to face the source of this incredible interruption. For one last instant Sawyer saw them all standing solidly upon emptiness while satellite electrons swung upon their orbits around a sun, and the illusion of circling worlds and gods striding through the void held firm.
Then a great rift opened in the golden heavens. Shards of glass fell shivering through the mist and slid in a great avalanche across the glassy floor. The walls came crashing and great fragments of the falling universe toppled through a gap in the fabric of the heavens, letting appalling glimpses of reality gleam through beyond it.
Through that widening gap a tumult of savages poured across the glass floor toward the waiting angels.
For an instant the Isier stood stunned. Sheer incredulity held them motionless. That the wall could be breached must seem the rankest impossibility to their godlike minds, trained for a thousand years to the expectation of submission from all their world. That this holy of holies could be violated, that these serpentine savages from the world below could be swarming toward them brandishing knives and bellowing their deep, mindless roars, must have a quality of nightmare to the Isier.
So they stood for a moment paralyzed with disbelief.
Then the Goddess screamed to them, and they came alive. The Goddess screamed, and a great, resounding golden chorus of answering shouts replied. Some strange and terrible revulsion seemed to sparkle to life as the assembly of gods swept forward in a wave of ice-colored robes, walking on air, shouting as they surged into combat with the Sselli. Revulsion of like for like, Sawyer thought, remembering the golden blood that was still gushing from the Goddess, and the drop of golden blood that had hung upon his knife-blade when the wound closed in the chest of the Sselli he had stabbed.
INVULNERABLE race surged forward toward invulnerable race as the savage horde swept across the glass floor toward the gods. For one moment Sawyer saw the blind backward masks of the Isier ranks, facing him and the Well and the battling Goddesses with dispassionate indifference, as if these were the past and of no interest to the race of gods. Then the Goddess screamed out another cry, and from the charging gods a long, ringing shout of triumph went up, and all through their ranks robed arms rose in a gesture of sheer sweeping joy.
Over their heads with both hands the Isier swept their masks. Now at last the faces which had regarded the past so long and so impassively soared around to face the future. But impassive no longer. Serene no longer. They still smiled their pale curved smiles, but now the smile was terrible, and the eyes above them shot out the twin beams of fiery swords.
Sawyer saw them flame in the very face of the foremost Sselli, already reaching out his long, sinuous arms to grapple with the foremost Isier. The twin rays pierced that thick, scaled chest at the base of the neck, where the sunken head drew down. He saw them go through like light through darkness and emerge in a blurred shimmer at the savage’s back.
The great, snake-like creature reeled. For an instant the jewel-eyes glared with the same fluorescent greenish glow as the twin beams that pierced him. Then a deep, booming roar burst from him and he hurled himself headlong upon the Isier, golden blood bubbling from his chest.
The Isier tried in vain, with a gesture of fierce repulsion, to fling him away, the mask he held slanting a Gorgon glance of pale violence toward the ceiling. But the savage was not dead. Not yet. With a terrible vitality he writhed his long limbs about the Isier, clawing for the mask. The two struggled titanically, reeled, seemed to revolve in a slow, desperate waltz across the glass floor. The blood of the savage was gushing in a broadening pool at their feet, and Sawyer, watching it spread, realized suddenly that it spread no longer on a flat surface. It was spilling over an unseen verge of glass and falling like golden mist into emptiness . . .
The transparent platform that held up the thrones was not a solid floor across the abyss. It was a circle floating in haze, held to the golden walls by an intricate pattern of glass bridges that left room for the circling electrons to wheel unhindered over and around and down under the bubbling Well.
Over the edge the Sselli and his Isier enemy toppled, still locked in an embrace of mutual hatred and revulsion. The mask fell with them, raking the misty heavens of the chamber with its pale death-stare of green rays.
AS IF their fall had broken a spell that held him fascinated, Sawyer came back to life and his own danger. Fiercely he wrenched at the paralysis that held him motionless, for he realized that in another moment or two a burden would be levied upon the Well that not all the sacrifices spinning in their orbits might suffice to bear. This unleashing of every mask at once would demand energy such as the Well might never have been called upon to supply before in all its thousand years.
He focused with desperate intensity upon the sounds of his own private thunder in the cavities of the brain, focused blindly and strove with all his power to break the paralysis . . . And very slightly he moved one hand. Very slightly.
The floating shell under him jolted hard. He opened his eyes and saw in one all-comprehensive flash the battlefield in midair, reeling and staggering with godlike figures and serpentine Sselli gushing golden blood, the two races so like in so many ways that they might almost be the same race seen through distorting lenses in two differing forms—
That thought rang a bell in his memory he had no time to follow. For his cell jolted downward again, and he saw that the drain upon the Well had begun already. The tumble of bright motion below filmed over mistily as every mask drew deep upon the source of all Isier power.
Instantly past Sawyer fell a rain of spinning hexagon-cells, each carrying downward a victim to swell the energy of the Well. Swiftly they dropped, and with each immolation fire seemed to blaze upward from the bubbling ring below. Sawyer set his teeth, called “Alper! More!” and steeled himself to keep his mind awake in the stunning impact of the thunder that followed.
For this last act of immolation, it seemed, must be a voluntary plunge into the Well. The nucleus draws the electron with a summons of mutual irresistible attraction. And if the victim resisted, he could save himself—for awhile. It was why hypnosis had to be part of the initial ceremony. It was why Sawyer could resist, keep his cell suspended against the strong downward pull, so long as his mind kept free. But the irresistible sparkling dance of the patterns below was too powerful to resist forever . . .
He strained to move his right arm such a little distance, such an impossible distance toward the pocket where the Firebird lay. Was it moving? He could not be sure. He looked down at the terrible panorama below him, seeing the Sselli mowed like serpentine grain before the long green scythes of the Isier, but a grain that would not fall when it was severed. Great pools of shining blood lay suspended as if in empty air on the glass floor, and over the edges of the platform by twos and threes Isier and Sselli pitched screaming, the savages coiling about the bodies of their reapers and dragging them down like dead men still fighting the angels who destroyed them.
It came to Sawyer suddenly why this place of ceremony was called the Hall of the Worlds. That ring of thrones encircling the fiery Well was the symbol in two dimensions of the world of Khom’ad encircling the Under-Shell.
Violently he wrenched at his right arm and felt
it move, wrenched again and touched his pocket with the tips of his fingers. He could not be sure that the Firebird would save him. But he was wholly lost if he did nothing, for the pull of the Well was growing stronger. He would not look at it. He would not think of it. But through the bones and the nerves it called him, and in the center of his brain it spun its compelling patterns, until the atoms of his own body felt the summons and grew restless in their paths.
Down about him snowed the summoned sacrifices to feed the Well and keep the green swords flashing. Directly below him he saw Nethe, ignoring the battleground beyond her, stoop and sweep a long sudden slash across the relaxed guard the Goddess had let down to watch her people fighting . . .
It raked the single hand in which the Goddess held her weapon. The other arm hung limp, and blood dripped down her fingertips and sparkled on the glassy floor. Nethe’s one-eyed weapon seared across her knuckles. She whirled and swung her mask up in defense, but slowly, too slowly—
Sawyer’s cell jolted once more and hung just above the bubbling Well. The concentrated thunder in his brain was already as strong as he could endure without the danger of blacking out entirely. He could not call on Alper to increase it. He could feel in his own body the treachery of his atomic structure answering the lovely and terrible call of the Well, his nerves accepting what his mind rejected, flesh and bone responding while the will that should control them still said, “Live!” though flesh and bone cried ecstatically, “Die! Die!”
He had to act while he still lived. He had to force his one hand to obedience. He shut his eyes, called to the very limit of endurance upon the tumult in his brain, and—touched the Firebird with his fingertips.
Between thumb and finger he. snapped the bright wings open . . .
XIV
STRENGTH poured through him in a golden flood. The Firebird seemed to leap in his hand a little, as if it struggled toward the Well in which its rightful place stood empty, so very near now, waiting for its return. If it went into the Well again the last path to Earth would close forever. And if it did not go in—how long could Sawyer, even with this new strength flooding him, resist the pull of that hypnotic dance?
The choice was not his to make. For as the golden wings spread in his hand, Nethe was loosing her last, her fatal stroke straight into her adversary’s face.
The newly slashed hand that held the Goddess’s mask dropped helpless before Nethe’s green-bladed blow, and the Goddess for an instant stood undefended. Nethe’s single-eyed weapon swung its Gorgon glare in a long sweep across the Goddess’s masked face. And the Goddess cried out in a high, thin scream that echoed inside the Goddess-Mask she wore, and reeled—
Reeled forward, toward the Firebird. Her masked eyes burned as she saw it. She stumbled around the edge of the Well, toward Sawyer and the precious thing he held.
Perhaps Nethe felt and saw from the corner of her eyes the sudden spread of sparkling wings above her. Perhaps she only followed the Goddess’s lifted gaze. But she whirled as the Goddess’s weapon lowered. She too saw the Firebird hovering in Sawyer’s hand, no more than head-high above her now . . .
Did the Firebird’s burning power dispel all lesser powers around it? Or did Nethe’s sweeping gesture as she whirled dissolve the cell that held Sawyer prisoner above the platform? He did not know, but the shining blur of the walls around him vanished and he fell six feet through golden air to land staggering for balance upon that floor of glass above the abyss.
The Firebird was Nethe’s for the taking. How could he resist her now? Dazed by the suddenness of his fall, he could only stumble backward away from her and the Well. Beyond her shoulder he saw the oncoming Goddess, eyes blazing through the jewels of her Goddess-Mask, heard her scream out Nethe’s name—saw her swing her weapon shoulder-high with one last, tremendous effort, steadying her slashed hand as she lifted it . . .
Nethe seemed to whirl in mid-air to meet that final desperate attack. She swung her own weapon around to face the Goddess’s, holding it before her like a shield. Face to face and eye to eye the two masks fronted each other, the blazing eye-beams the Goddess wielded smashing the full power of their terrible green blades into the one-eyed face of Nethe’s mask.
And Nethe’s mask went dead.
She looked down at it, for an instant ludicrously dismayed, holding the useless shield against her with both hands. Then suddenly she laughed, a wild, despairing shriek of ironic merriment. She flung the blind thing from her and twisted like a striking snake straight toward Sawyer and the Firebird.
The impact of her hurtling weight sent him half-stunned to the glass floor. He felt the Firebird snatched from his fingers and heard in his very ear her wild, triumphant scream of unbearable joy as at last, at long last, she closed her hands upon the talisman that could still mean triumph for her.
The scream hung ringing on the air for a moment, full of the sound of victory. Then its timbre changed. For the twin beams of the Goddess’s deadly mask swept the air above Sawyer’s head, and Nethe’s scream changed to a long cry of piercing, inhuman pain . . .
Looking up from the floor, Sawyer saw her towering for one last instant impossibly tall above him, the shining Firebird held high, and the two pale-green beams of the weapon that killed her transfixing her robed body from side to side. She stood there in the moment of her triumph, pinned through by the two green swords, the Firebird pouring useless power through a body no longer able to contain it.
If the Sselli died slowly, the Isier could be more slowly still. It seemed to Sawyer that she stood there an eternity. He saw the inhuman fury, the inhuman despair of her face. He saw it change to implacable determination. She was dead already, and she knew it, as she writhed snake-like toward the Goddess with resolution clear upon her dazzling face. If she could not uphold her own claim to godhood, then no one should win. No one at all. She would bring her whole race crashing with her if she must fall. In no other way could she prove her godhood, but in this way she could and would . . .
Sawyer saw the flash of her ice-robes streaming, the gush of her luminous blood, the blinding brilliance of the Firebird open and sparkling in her hands, as she hurled herself upon the Goddess. The great blades of the mask still flared between them, but Nethe was beyond the fear of death now. She flung herself forward against the beams that pierced her, straight upon the tall, dark figure of her slayer.
For an instant Sawyer saw them reeling together, in dazzling silhouette against the bubbling fire of the Well behind them. He saw them sway, heard the two voices mingling in a terrible, bell-clear cry. Then together they reeled backward and fell . . .
The Well received them both.
And with them, flashing and sparkling, fell the Firebird, open-winged, and the end of the race of gods.
SWAYING on his feet, dazed and halfblinded by the dazzle of the Well, Sawyer saw them fall. And as they fell, they changed.
Light like vapor seemed to smoke out around them. The molecules of their bodies seemed to disperse and disarrange until only a dance of swarming molecular mist swirled where the two relentlessly interlocked bodies had vanished. And then the mist began to reassemble . . .
Long, serpentine limbs dawned in that golden haze, condensed into two writhing bodies with the hideous squat heads of the Sselli, and the great, empty, jewel-clear eyes.
He had known it. He had been certain of it, in that well of the mind below the level of awareness. They were the same, not two races sprung from one stock but the same. The Isier were the Sselli. All the ancient myths of Earth slid dimly through his memory that dealt with the splitting—the fission—of life-forms. Legends of the doppelanger, of possession and exorcism and the divisions between Jekyll and Hyde in all their varied forms.
What unknown link in the bridge between mortal life and atomic energy had the Isier spanned when they first altered themselves into immortal isotopes of their natural form by the lost science of the Well of the Worlds?
No one would ever know, now, but it had been an altera
tion of deadly danger to themselves, for the instability of the isotope was something which they could not control in this time of crisis. When the Well functioned they had been safe enough, but it was very clear now what peril overtook them when the Well ceased to flow with the energy they required to keep them stable in Isier-form. Energy failed and their bodies flickered down the scale to the next isotopic shape, which was the Sselli . . .
And the end was not yet. The full circle of the change had not yet closed.
The falling, changing bodies dropped out of sight down the dimension-piercing Well whose other end linked to Earth. There was silence for an instant, while the ring of nuclear patterns tumbled on in its serene, endless dance.
Far off, as if it were happening in another world, the battle between Sselli and Isier still raged, a suicidal struggle of a single race pitted against itself by that strange, uncontrollable hatred of like for like. Locked in the relentless embrace of mutual destruction, they still pitched screaming over the rim of the symbolic world toward nothingness, screaming as angels might have screamed who fell over heaven’s walls in the War of the Seraphs.
Then, far down in the Well as Sawyer stared after the vanished Goddesses, wings began to flicker, lights began to rise.
Sawyer flung himself flat upon the glass floor, hugged it, strove to be unreal, not there, dead and vanished. For he knew that flicker. He had seen it before, in the Fortuna mine out of which in some incredible way it was now rising, and there was no power in creation that could control it now, with Nethe gone and the summoning symbol with her.
Now the Well was open and uncontrolled, drawing upon the full destruction latent in Earth’s poles, and through it, upon other dimensions and other spaces no human mind could grasp.
Up out of the Well a geyser of fountaining violence came pouring. And the geyser was full of the flicker of V-shaped wings and the high, ringing song of the Firebirds, as the whole exploding force of the magnetic fields beyond the Well burst upward into Khom’ad.
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