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 thing, 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 of 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 for 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 that riveted the eye was the scattered throng of other figures, as far as Sawyer could see, gliding swiftly away from 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 th
e 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 glitering 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—”
She broke off quite suddenly, catching her breath with a sharp gasp. Her fingers dug into Sawyer’s arm in a convulsion of unexpected terror.
“Oh no!” she cried. “Oh, I can’t go on! I can’t go back.” She tried frantically to whirl and retrace her steps. The furs she wore impeded her and her boots got no traction on the floor. She kicked them off and in sandaled feet made the most furious efforts to move against that forward-flowing current. But she made no headway at all.
“What is it?” Sawyer asked. “Tell us what you remember, Klai. What are you afraid of?”
“N-Nethe,” Klai said. She turned quickly, with a shiver, toward those slowly approaching curtains beyond which the robed figures were still vanishing, blank mask-faces turned backward, to watch them with unseeing stares. “I remember—the Isier. When my grandfather was a temple slave, Nethe was already the Goddess-elect. The next priestess in line to wear the Double mask if the Goddess had to give it up. I’ve been away—” Here she touched her cheek wonderingly, as if her own body were as strange to her as these new-found memories.
“I’ve been away for two whole years, unless time runs differently on Earth. I had to leave. I can’t go back! I was a chosen sacrifice to feed the Firebirds! What shall I do?”
She flashed a wild, pale glance up at Sawyer.
“Wait,” he said. “Let’s get this clear. At the far end of this tunnel you think—there’s another world, is that it? Your world?”
“Think?” she echoed desperately. “I know! You saw Nethe. You see these others, these Isier. Do you imagine you’re still in your own world? Do they look like people from Earth? Of course I know!”
Sawyer looked down at her thoughtfully. He looked at the blank-faced, receding masks, the tall, distorted figures sweeping forward above their own reflections in the shining floor. With a great effort he turned his head to look back at the closed wall they had come through. He wondered if someone had struck him over the head in the mine, and left him lying there on the wet floor dreaming feverish dreams.
“Dream or not,” he said, “we’d better face it. Alper, you can move against this current. See if you can stop us.”
Ponderously Alper swung his huge body before them in a reluctant effort. The smooth air-pressure carried them on, and himself with them, as easily as if he had not tried at all. Stepping aside, he took Klai’s wrist in a firm grip and braced his heavy legs. Her forward motion carried him along without a pause, his feet sliding on the ice-like floor.
Sawyer sighed. “Well, it was worth trying. What comes next, Klai? What’s out there beyond those curtains?”
“The city,” she said impatiently, still making futile, scrambling tries to resist the forward flowing air. “Khom’ad, my world. Oh, there’s so much to remember! It’s all hazy, even now. I know this much—Nethe’s dangerous!”
“Tell us what you remember about her,” Sawyer said. “Quick! There may not be much time.”
“She’s an Isier, an immortal, one of the race of gods who rule Khom’ad.
“They never grow old. Nothing can hurt them. Even the Goddess would rule forever, unless trouble came and her people blamed her for it.”
“Goddess?” Sawyer asked.
“Not really. Just an Isier like Nethe, only with great powers, and wearing the Double Mask and the Dark Robe. As Nethe will in three days, if she wasn’t lying. I wonder! In the time I’ve been gone, the troubles must have got worse in Khom’ad or Nethe couldn’t hop
e for a change of Goddesses.”
“Troubles?” Sawyer prompted. “Anything that will affect us when we come out? Tell me what you remember.”
“Trouble among the gods,” Klai said uncertainly. “How could we Khom know the reasons? But the Isier had begun to—to vanish like mist sometimes, and nobody knew why. And there were strange, ugly, frightening people who came up from the world below, and not even the Isier could kill them. Mostly, for the Khom, the trouble meant sacrifices, though. Many sacrifices. Far more than the Isier ever used to need. They’ll take me for an accepted sacrifice when we come to the end of this place, and I’ll go to feed the Firebirds in the next ceremony—”
“Maybe not,” Sawyer said. “There may be some other way. Tell us what the Firebirds are. Like that thing Alper has?”
She shook her head in confusion. “You saw the Firebirds. The ghosts. The flying things that take the uranium out of pitchblende. That was something new to me. In Khom’ad we knew nothing of the Firebirds—only that deep down in the Well of the Worlds, where the sacrifices are thrown, sometimes a flicker of wings moves. That’s why the Isier call it the Firebird Well, and the sacrifices feed the Firebirds. But in Khom’ad we never saw a real, living thing like those ghosts in the mine. Of course we didn’t know about uranium, either.”
She paused. “How strange it seems. Double memories all down the line. Everything double—Earth and Khom’ad.”
“And this thing?” Alper asked, holding up his hand with the gold bar.
“I don’t know. Nethe called it the Firebird. I suppose it’s a symbol, a talisman. Opened, it looks like them, doesn’t it? And it seemed to—summon them, did you think? You saw how the air shook and grew brighter when you held its wings open.”
“It opened the wall when we came through,” Alper said. “I know that—I saw it. But it seems to open one way only.”
The Well of The Worlds Page 4