The Well of The Worlds

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 the 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 hope 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.”

“A key?” Klai asked uncertainly. “Between worlds? I wonder if that’s why Nethe wants it so badly. I’ll tell you this much—if she’s to be Goddess in three days, the Isier who’s Goddess now will try to kill her. She won’t give up the Double Mask without a struggle. Nethe will need that Firebird, if there’s any power in it—to help her.”

“There’s power,” Alper said in his thick, deep voice. “And I’ll keep it. If Nethe wants anything from me, she’ll have to—”

“Oh, you idiot,” Klai said wearily. “Nethe’s an Isier, a demigod. In my world you’ll be nothing but a human being, one of the Khom. Don’t you understand?”

Sawyer grinned suddenly. “You’ve been supping with the devil, Alper, you old Khom,” he said. “Now it looks like a damned short spoon you’re holding. Look here. We may need what help we can give each other. You’ve got to release me from this thing—this transceiver. It may be your only weapon against Nethe, if you could use it on her. But once you step out of this hall you’re at her mercy. You’ll need any help you can get.”

“No,” Alper said heavily, his small eyes glinting with suspicion. “I’m free here. I don’t have to leave the hall, the way you do. I’ll just keep the whiphand I’ve got over you and see what happens.”

Sawyer glanced at the curtains which rippled across the corridor’s end, very near them now. Faster and faster the smooth-flowing air swept them forward.

“Like the flow of electrons in a vacuum tube,” Sawyer thought suddenly, seeing the curtains sweep toward him. “You can’t move against the flow, if you happen to be an electron. This end of the tunnel’s the cathode, and—here we go!”

The curtains brushed their faces blindingly. The current of air blew them with final, gentle violence against the cathode. Then they stood bunking at the head of a broad, low flight of steps above an open square, with a stormy sunset lighting the sky above them. Sawyer’s knees felt unsteady. The current had released them and they were dizzyingly free to stand alone.

“This is it,” Klai said softly at his side. He heard the long unsteady breath she drew. “This is Khom’ad. And I’m back again. I’m—home.”