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 tril
ls 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 not 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.
It was. He came out on the height of the next hill and pulled up sharply, seizing the trunk of a leaning tree to steady himself. He and the tree leaned together over the abyss. This was the shore of space. Eddies of mist lapped against the sheer drop at his very toes. The tree dangled its roots as a more familiar tree had done far above. Sawyer could see them swaying gently outward below, which probably meant the island was in motion.
Clasping the tree, he leaned out farther, shuddering, and saw that what he had from above taken to be dark clouds were actually islands, many of them, each carrying a cumulus over its center, drifting slowly in long, descending festoons between the upper world and that far-off, shadowy, mysterious world below. Almost like stairsteps, he thought. If you watched your chance, you might climb up from island to island as they rose and fell in their drifting, until, from the topmost, you could reach Khom’ad—
Was that why the city gates were guarded? Did they expect attack?
He glanced up, and caught his breath as he saw that the vast, impending thundercloud which was the under-side of Khom’ad glowed crimson and flickered with glancing white flashes and gleams. It looked like the end of the world. Then he realized that what he saw was nothing more sinister than the burning cloak, which must have become quite a respectable holocaust by now, sending down strong reflections from the overhang of the world above.
He saw something else, too, when he looked back. Two twinkling points of light were moving rapidly toward him up the ravine. Nethe had found her quarry. Sawyer clasped the tree and urged Providence to remember him. For he was quite literally between the devil and the deep. Nethe cut off retreat, and the abyss was a long way down.
Nethe saw him, silhouetted against the silver sky. She laughed in triumph, a clear, strong, musical laugh.
“One last chance,” she called to him as she came. “If you tell me where the Firebird is before I get to you, I’ll let you live.”
Sawyer looked down. He dangled a tentative foot over the void.
“All right,” he told her clearly. “That’s close enough. Stop right there. If you’ve got anything to say, I can hear you. But say it from where you are, because I’d rather jump than let you kill me.”
Nethe laughed, but a little hesitantly. She slowed, and then came on. Sawyer leaned far out. Rocks crumbled underfoot and rattled across the edge.
Nethe paused uncertainly.
“Be sensible, Khom,” she urged. “You can’t stand there forever. I’ll get you when you give out. You have to sleep. You—”
“I’m not a Khom,” Sawyer said in a patient voice. “You can’t order me around and you may as well get used to it. I know where the Firebird fell. And not on this island, incidentally.” He glanced down and wondered if he really did see the motion of crowding figures on the next lower land below.
“Tell me and I’ll spare your life,” Nethe offered, taking a tentative forward step. Casually Sawyer kicked another stone over the edge. She stopped.
“I might tell you,” he said, “if you made it worth my while. Otherwise I’ll just wait until the island grounds against the mainland. I can see they float. I can imagine what the gates of Khom’ad are guarded against. They must be expecting an attack. What made you dr
op us both on this island, anyhow? Didn’t you know it was crawling with these savages?”
“I didn’t mean to drop either of us on this one,” Nethe told him with some asperity. “If you hadn’t made such a fuss about falling we’d have struck a smaller island. It was right under you when you first dropped. But you had to hang on to that root and argue. So—”
“So that was the plan,” Sawyer murmured. “Drop Alper far enough to kill him and then loot the corpse. Well, now you’ve caught a Tartar. What do you offer me if I give up the Firebird?”
“Death if you don’t!” Nethe cried, and surged forward three eager steps. “So you have it? On you?”
Sawyer kicked another stone over the edge.
“Imagine that’s me,” he said. “With the Firebird.” She paused reluctantly. “No, I haven’t got it on me,” he went on. “You know that, you searched me, didn’t you? Besides, if I had it do you think I’d stay here? I’d use it. I’d—I’d open up the Gateway and go right back where I came from.”
“You fool, you couldn’t open the Gateway,” Nethe said contemptuously.
“Alper did,” Sawyer reminded her.
“There’s more to opening a door than waving a key around,” she told him aloofly. “If I hadn’t already unlocked the Gateway to send Klai through, the Firebird wouldn’t have had any effect at all except to call the real Firebirds down the tunnel.”
“What are real Firebirds?” Sawyer inquired with interest.
Before she could answer, a new sound began to shake the air and both looked up quickly. The deep, heavy clangor of a great bell from somewhere above began to beat wildly through the abyss. Some resonance in its pitch made the island shiver slightly at every peal.
“They’ve seen the islands rising,” Nethe said, her face turned upward and away and her mask seeming to regard Sawyer with a disinterested stare. “It’s the Khom alarm-bell.”
While the echoes still rang, a second bell, farther off, took up the signal, and far away, at the very verge of hearing, a third began heavily to toll. Sawyer imagined the mobilization at the city gates, and he hoped the tuba-shaped weapons were better fit to deal with the savages than a knife through the chest had been.
The Well of The Worlds Page 8
