The Well of The Worlds

IX

A 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 battlecries 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 cautious 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 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 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 battle-ground. “We’re going upstairs by the trapdoor.”

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 receive 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.

“You’re safe?” she demanded. “Am I still dreaming. Are you all right? I got you into trouble you didn’t bargain for when I dragged you into my problems, didn’t I? I’m awfully sorry. I—”

“Keep it in English!” Sawyer broke in. “I can’t understand Khom! We’re all in trouble and we’ll have to help each other out.” He touched the soot-stain on her cheek. “What’s been happening to you?”

“The Isier guards came,” she said simply. “We knew they would, of course. They burned grandfather’s house and we just got away in time. They’re still hunting for me. Probably they’d have found me already if this attack on the city hadn’t started. Were you involved in that? Do tell me what’s been happening to you!”

A crisp phrase from behind her made Klai turn. The old man was smiling at them, but his blue eyes stayed cool and wary. He stroked the stable cat with unvaried smoothness, but what he said made Klai pull herself together and turn Sawyer to face the old man.

“Zatri is his name,” she said. “He’s my grandfather, and he’s a wonderful man. He says there isn’t much time to waste. I told him about the Firebird and what Nethe said back there on the steps, before the Goddess came. The Firebird’s something we don’t know about, but grandfather thinks it may be very important. He wants to know what’s been happening, but there may not be time for much talk. The Sselli are beginning to swarm up into the city, and we may have fighting in the streets too close for comfort. Grandfather hopes you may have some information we can use.”

“What sort of information?” Sawyer asked.

Klai repeated the question and the old man’s eyes gleamed as he leaned forward, speaking in urgent syllables.

“For a thousand years,” Klai translated soberly when he finished, “the Isier have enslaved our people. We aren’t allowed freedom of any kind, not even freedom to think or to learn. To the Isier we’re simply animals. Grandfather thinks this may be our chance to put an end to their rule.

“He wants you to know he wouldn’t have risked the lives of his men when they rescued me from the Isier, not even to save his own grandchild, if he hadn’t hoped I’d brought back some sort of information we could use, from wherever I’d been. Well, I didn’t. But he thinks maybe you might.”

“Wait a minute,” Sawyer said. “Tell him I’m with him if he wants to make trouble for the Isier. I got into this in the first place to stop the looting of uranium from Fortuna. I know a lot more about that than I did. I want to get back to Earth and finish my job. I’d like to stay alive, too. I’d just as soon you did.” He smiled at her. “But I wouldn’t interfere with the Isier now, even if I could. Without them, who’s going to prevent the Sselli from killing us all? Have the Khom any defense against them?”

She shook her head, gave him a troubled glance. “From what I hear, not even the Isier can actually destroy them. They seem to be a little—oh, overawed, terrified—by the Isier. But not when they’re in a frenzy, like right now. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“I wish I knew a little more about those savages,” Sawyer said. “Surely you’ve developed some way to deal with them, or you’d all be dead.”

“But they’re new!” Klai said. “They only began to trouble us when the Isier Well went dry. We Khom aren’t supposed to know about that, of course, but my grandfather was a Temple slave for a long, long time, and he knows all sorts of secret listening posts in the Temple. We even know why the Isier fear the Sselli.

“Sselli means—well, younger brother, but with a strong sense of hatred and rivalry. The Isier say the Goddess committed some frightful sin in allowing the Well to die. Now the whole race is being punished. The Isier originated down below in the lower world, the Under-Shell. It’s forbidden land. Nobody ever goes there. But soon after the Well died, lights began to shine down there, and then the Sselli started to wander up the floating islands and make a lot of trouble. They’re invulnerable, like the Isier themselves. The theory is that a new race of potential gods is being reared in the Isier homeland, to take over when they’re strong enough. So naturally, the Isier hate and fear the Sselli.”

“But they don’t look like the Isier,” Sawyer complained. “How could they evolve into—”

“I know,” Klai broke in. “It puzzles the Isier, too. And yet in many ways they are like. Remember this, too. The Firebirds began on Earth when the Sselli began here. And you never see the Firebirds in Khom’ad. They seem to exist only on Earth.”

“At the other end of the Well,” Sawyer said. “Now that’s very interesting. There must be some connection. The three forms of life must be three facets of a single problem. But—”

The belling cry of an Isier from close outside broke sharply into his words.

For an instant the deepest silence dwelt upon the stable, broken only by the crunching of the ponies in their stalls, and from far off a rising noise of battle. The Sselli had not been audible when Sawyer first got here. That must mean they had gained a foothold on the upper world and were carrying the battle straight into the heart of the Isier-ruled city. If the Isier have weapons, he thought grimly, they’d better start limbering them up.

The silence held for half a minute. Then there was a sudden outburst of scuffling, stamping, ringing cries from Isier throats, and above it a fierce, wild scream that Sawyer thought could come from one throat only.

“Nethe!” he said, and whirled toward the door.

Zatri, moving faster than seemed possible, was at his very elbow when he got the door open. The old man snapped an order and someone put out the lamp. Then there was a great surge toward the neck of the alley to see what the trouble was.

Nethe was the trouble. A little way off down the street Sawyer saw her familiar figure, the luminous earrings swinging wildly, struggling between two tall Isier who were carrying her serenely forward down the street toward the Temple. She writhed and fought and spat violent bursts of speech at them. They did not seem to hear. The backward-facing masks of all three turned a blank, uninterested stare at the little knot of humans who watched from the alley.

“She must have followed us after all,” Sawyer said. “Well, that takes care of Nethe. I wonder what the Goddess will do?”

“Force her into the Unsealing ceremony,” Klai said, from a prudent shelter behind him. “And that will be the end of one or the other of them. But whichever wins, the Isier rule will go on the way it always has, unless we find a way to fan this trouble higher. Come back. We’ve got a lot of planning to do.”

“All right,” Sawyer said. “But tell me one thing. What the devil are those masks for?”

A voice from the street corner just beyond their alley said calmly:

“That’s an interesting question, my boy. Look what I’ve brought you.”

Sawyer knew that voice. The thick organ-tones could belong to one man only. He turned and said, “Alper!”

The ponderous figure of Alper moved toward them. He was walking effortlessly still, so the power the Firebird gave him had not yet waned, but there was already a suggestion of a drag to his gait, and his heavy figure stooped a little.

In each hand he carried a pale, smiling, blind-eyed Isier mask.