The party halted. The foremost Isier pursed his thin, curved lips and whistled like a flute, with a woodwind tremolo, very clean and sweet. Afterward they stood waiting in the rain.
Just as the copper curtain began to quiver and part, a disturbance began at the mouth of an alley at Sawyer’s elbow. He could not see very clearly into it because of the slanting light and the rain, but there was a sudden rabble of men and animals rushing toward them, in a tumult of shouting and whinnying. Cartwheels rumbled noisily between the reverberating walls, and all the noises multiplied with echoes.
As nearly as Sawyer could tell, several carts loaded high with something that looked and smelled very like wet raw wool were hurtling toward them behind wildly running horses, little shaggy beasts incongruously spotted like leopards. In the foremost cart rode a plump elderly man in the apron-like tunic of a street vendor. His feet were braced on the cart’s edge, and he bent forward to lash the leopard-spotted ponies to even greater speed, his thin fringe of white whiskers streaming in the wind.
Behind him rumbled other carts, men shouting and running at top speed to keep pace. And behind them men shouted and dogs barked, while windows flew open to let interested heads pop out. There was complete bedlam quite suddenly, between the Isier’s whistle and the first quiver of the gate curtain.
Then the whole noisy rabble was upon them. The excited little horses plunged kicking and snorting through the column waiting before the Temple. Every dog within earshot had already begun to yap earsplittingly, the horses whinnied with a sound almost like a human scream, and the shouting men burst out among the careening carts, raining blows upon the horses, kicking at the dogs which had sprung up so magically underfoot.
Even the lordly Isiers gave way before this onslaught. Sawyer felt his elbow gripped in an iron clasp and let himself be pulled sidewise against the wall of the nearest house. The Isiers were shouting too now, in deep, bell-like roars of anger and command. A horse kicked frantically. Its cart overturned with a tremendous clatter, and great wool-bales rolled heavily in the wet street.
By sheer chance, in all this tumult, Sawyer caught Klai’s eye. Her face was electrified with excitement and dawning hope. She leaned forward as far as she could in the grip of her captor, scanning the faces of the running men. Sawyer saw the first glow of hope beginning to dim. He thought incongruously of the unhappy Lise Bolkonskaya with her inadequate upper lip and her seduisant charms, and then lurched heavily against the grip of the Isier behind him.
The lurch became a genuine skid as his foot struck a puddle of crimson rain on the pavement. The Isier staggered, trying to hold him up. Sawyer jerked the Isier a little forward in an apparent attempt to regain balance, caught the tall creature across his hip as they fell together, and slid with him full-tilt into the Isier who held Klai.
It was the chance she had been waiting for. With a tremendous wriggle, like a rabbit deftly skinning itself in a single motion, she writhed out of her fur-lined coat, and with an agile bound was at the side of the foremost cart as it thundered past. The plump old man shouted “Klai!” and bent to sweep her up. With a leap and a wriggle over the sideboard she made her goal, and the cart thundered on triumphantly, never slackening speed. Grandpa, Sawyer thought, as the crowd of drivers, shouting with a note of triumph now, closed in after her.
All hope of following them failed as a hand like iron closed on Sawyer’s shoulder. He gave a mental shrug and scrambled to his feet. The tumult swept away up another alley and died as if by magic. Two of the Isier looped up their ropes and set off at a long, silent pace after the vanished uproar. A few of the more hysterical dogs followed down the alley, shrilling, but most of them were quiet now, and the whole episode might well have been a dream.
Except for one thing, Sawyer thought. Klai’s empty coat, its furry hood drooping forward over its collapsed chest with a pathetic look of dejection, still dangling from the hands of the surprised Isier who had held her. Sawyer was aware of a sharp stab of nostalgia, seeing that familiar garment tenantless, the girl as gone as if she had never existed, swallowed up in a city that was both hers and utterly strange to her.
It had all happened so quickly that the curtain was still parting slowly in the center and drawing back while the uproar faded into stillness. Inside the flickering mesh a glassy corridor stretched. Sawyer’s captor pushed him forward under the faintly crackling copper folds. He glanced back at Klai’s abandoned coat, lying face down in the street in an attitude of despair. Then the curtains swept shut again and all sound from the outer world ended abruptly.
Alper sat on a low ledge of glass in a bare glass cell and stared at Sawyer. Sawyer sat on the floor in the opposite corner, hugged his knees and stared at Alper.
Alper said, “You’re a fool.”
Sawyer paid no attention.
“You helped her escape,” Alper pursued. “That was idiotic of you. We’ll probably both suffer for it.”
Sawyer let his gaze rove once more around the bare, smooth walls, translucent and faintly green, only to return to Alper’s face without encountering anything worth lingering on in the journey. There was probably a door in the wall. They had entered by a door. But it had sealed itself shut so thoroughly as to be quite invisible now. Light came through an unseen source, high up near one corner of the cell.
“I don’t like this either,” he said slowly. “Not one bit. I want out just as much as you do. It looks to me as though we’re both in the same boat now.”
“Boat!” Alper said. “World! This isn’t Earth. I don’t understand any—”
“You probably understand more about it than I do. If we intend to try to make any plans, you’d better tell me what you know. About Nethe, for example. Didn’t she give you any hint that this—this world existed?”
“No,” Alper said sullenly. “She came to me at Fortuna, just as you saw her. Shadowy. I thought I was dreaming at first. But when she touched me with her closed fist and I felt energy beginning to pour through me—” He glanced in triumph at the Firebird in his hand—“after that, I gave her anything she wanted.”
“Uranium ore?”
“Yes. She didn’t want uranium mined out and taken away, and that’s why I was trying to close the mine, of course. But I had no idea of—all this.”
“We’d better start getting used to it,” Sawyer said. “And we’ll have a better chance working together than as enemies. So how about a truce? Obviously I can’t send a report back to Toronto now. We may be here for quite a while.”
Alper nodded grudgingly.
“Fine,” Sawyer said. “Then the first thing is to take this transceiver off my head.”
“No,” Alper said.
“Why not? Controlling me won’t help you a bit right now, will it?”
“It might stop you from trying to kill me,” Alper said, his grey eyes wary with suspicion. “I know what I’d do in your shoes, young man.”
“You’re a fool,” Sawyer observed.
Alper thought for a time.
“All right,” he said. “A truce might be the best thing right now. Say we do work together, from now on. But the transceiver stays on your head—as insurance. Now. You spoke about making plans. What, for example?”
Sawyer wrapped his arms around his knees again.
“The only practical one I can suggest, at present,” he said sourly, “is waiting.”
VI
They had been sitting silent for about ten minutes, exchanging occasional looks of dislike, when a curious humming sound began to be heard from a corner of the cell opposite to the door by which they had entered. Both turned to look. Low down in the corner a square of the wall about three feet across had begun to shimmer violently. As they watched, the surface of the square became translucent, showed for a moment or two a complex hexagonal crystalline pattern, and then broke up entirely into a pale green vapor which puffed outward into the cell with a burst of quick heat that brought sweat to their foreheads.