As it happened, the same shrill dog gave him his first clue that he was perhaps being followed. The dog subsided after he had passed, only to burst into sudden fresh hysteria when Sawyer was a hundred feet away. He stepped into the deepest shadow he could find and looked back suspiciously. But the shadows gave shelter to his follower too, if he had one, and he saw only the empty street, heard only the furious, muffled yappings and the assault of scratching nails upon a door.
He went on after awhile, because there seemed no alternative. At least, he himself was totally invisible as long as he stayed in the shadows. He kept a careful watch behind him after that.
The faceted thing that linked him to Alper was grotesquely like a third ear laid flat against his very thoughts. What ever he said to Nethe, when he met her, he would be saying to Alper too if Alper chose to listen. And whatever Nethe said, Alper would hear. They could make no bargain in which Alper was not a partner. Always supposing, of course, that Alper let him live, once be awoke and found Sawyer and the Firebird gone. But that was an occupational risk Swayer could not avoid. He could only ignore it, and wait.
Nethe’s summons came steadily for about fifteen minutes from the same direction, and Sawyer walked fast, keeping an alert watch, hoping this time to come within earshot of her before she shot off on another erratic flight.
Journey’s end came very suddenly.
The signal hummed strong and clear. Sawyer turned a corner and stopped so suddenly his feet skidded on the wet street. He drew back into a doorway and peered out, cursing Nethe silently. For before him a broad, lighted thoroughfare led up to and ended abruptly at a great fortified gate. High stone walls stretched left and right from it. This was clearly the very edge of the city, and for the first time Sawyer realized it was a city that expected trouble from outside.
The gate was high, and closed with enormous iron doors. On the wall-top Khom guards leaned, keeping an intent watch outward, toward some invisible source of danger in the night. Other guards, Khom in metal-studded tunics and carrying what were probably weapons but looked more like tubas, patrolled the gate.
One of the Isier, looming like a god above the short humans, was exchanging words loftily with a Khom officer. There was a great deal of orderly activity, and Sawyer’s uneasiness increased. For the summons in his ears seemed to come from directly beyond the gate, from out there in the dark.
Were the Isier searching for Nethe too? What would happen if Sawyer stepped boldly out and handed the Firebird over to this supercilious godling? What, on the other hand, would happen to him if he went blindly in answer to Nethe’s summons? He struggled with ambivalent confusion for a while. But if he surrendered now, he would be at the mercy of the unknown. Nethe’s reactions at least he could predict to some slight degree. Cautiously he withdrew down the alley. What he wanted now was an unguarded stretch of this wall.
He found it at the end of a quiet alley, got over the wall by way of a handy shed roof, and came down lightly upon wet grass in darkness on the other side. He seemed to be standing in open country, for he could make out rolling treetops, lashed by rain, and a very faint line where sky and land met between two clumps of trees.
A pinpoint of light flashed and went out again near the trees.
“Here I am,” Nethe’s voice said impatiently. “Come on. Hurry! Straight toward me and you’re all right.”
Cautiously, taking his time, Sawyer set out toward the light. Wet grass was slippery underfoot. The robe he wore was waterproof, but trickles of rain beat in his face under the edges of the hood and wind whipped its folds around his wet legs. He could make out only a dim, pale blur of a face under the trees. Between the tossing branches a brighter luminescence glowed faintly, as if a large body of water stretched away from a nearby shore, gathering all the light in the sky to its reflecting surface.
When he was about twenty feet away, Nethe said, “Wait,” and was silent for a moment while he stood there with the wind whipping the cloak around his legs and the rain streaming in his face.
Then Nethe laughed, a soft, low, triumphant sound.
“All right,” she said. “Run!”
Something about that laugh, and the tone she spoke in, rang a warning bell far back in Sawyer’s mind. He moved forward obediently, but he did not run. He felt a strange sort of tingling caution all over his body, as if the nerve-endings in his skin were desperately alert to catch the first hint of a danger he suspected but could not identify. For some senseless reason he found himself counting his strides as he moved rapidly forward toward the trees.
Seven long steps thudded softly on grass and solid ground. The eighth came down on empty space and he pitched forward into nothingness. Above him the low laugh sounded again, gloating with triumph, and footsteps drummed rapidly on turf as Nethe hurried forward to watch him fall.
VII
With desperate, rapid clarity, like a man drowning, Sawyer took in at one whirling glance what lay below him. In one burst of understanding he saw almost every detail of what lay below.
The luminous void beyond the trees was not an ocean. It was an empty abyss of air. The trees rimmed what must be the farthest outpost of solid land on this outer shell of creation where the city stood. But below, infinitely far below, in infinitely wide space, swam another planet. Clouds floated milkily in a pale silver sky. Some of them must be storm-clouds, for they were ominously black, and drifting close below him.
He had fallen through some break in the soil a little way inland from the crumbling edges of the world. Nethe must have lined herself carefully up with that well-opening to infinity, deliberately urged him to run so that he would be certain to pitch free, with no chance to catch himself.
And for an endless, curdling moment of sheer panic he did fall free. Then something whipped by his face and with the drowning man’s instant reflex he clenched both hands into the netted mass that had lashed against him as he dropped.
The fall broke. With a neck-wrenching jerk, momentum snapped him around in a wide pendulum-swing. Far below, the distant world seemed to lurch up toward its northern horizon, climbing half the sky, only to fall back again sickeningly in the opposite direction. Sawyer shut his eyes and clawed both hands deep into the saving nets that still snapped and crackled terrifyingly, letting him down with little sudden jerks as more of their filaments gave beneath his weight. With infinite caution he opened his eyes. So precarious was his support that the very act of lifting his lids might, he felt, put a fatal added weight upon the thing which held him.
Now he could see. A dim, luminous glow filled the whole vast, incredible emptiness over which he dangled. Straight down under his swinging feet the distant world floated. This net he hung on seemed to be an interlaced mesh of tree roots. The shell of soil must be very thin here, so near the edge. The trees grew partly in soil and partly in air, their roots dangling in the void. There hung a little distance away, just within reach, if he dared reach, thicker and still stronger strands. But at the moment it seemed to him that it would be absolutely fatal to move a muscle.
A little shower of pebbles rattled down on his head and shoulders. Greatly daring, he tilted his head back a little. Over the crumbling edge of this air-well down which he had fallen, Nethe’s bright, dangerous face peered hopefully. He saw disappointment cloud it. He still lived.
She said, “Oh,” in a rather dashed voice. Sawyer said nothing. He dared not speak. He was measuring the distance to the stronger roots, and wondering what would happen if he supported his whole weight on the meshes he held with one hand while he stretched for the security of the larger ones. He thought he would fall.