Alper was suddenly conscious again, his eyes glaring up at them. His hand went toward his pocket. Sawyer bent, trapped the hand, hove the big man roughly to his feet.
“This way,” Zatri said, breathless but calm. “Come along!” and they set off down the alley toward its blind end, squeezing past the blaze of the stable. Alper was a ponderous weight between them.
A door at the alley’s end gave under Zatri’s expert attention. He shouted across his shoulder to his men, and Sawyer, looking back, saw the single remaining Isier locked in a Laocoon struggle with a dozen sinuous, writhing Sselli, their eyes blazing golden in the reflected firelight.
This was the moment for which Alper must have been hoarding all his remaining strength. For with one enormous, desperate heave he threw all his great bulk into the balance and snapped the hold Sawyer and Zatri had locked upon his arms. He reeled back against the firelit wall, gasping, laughing, triumphant, his hand dropping like a striking snake toward his pocket.
Sawyer, staggering from that mighty thrust which must have used up a dangerous supply of energy, braced himself for the killing shock. But Alper, hand upon the control, could afford to speak first. He jerked his big head toward Zatri and said, still gasping for breath:
“Tell him—got to lead us—to the Temple, now!”
“Whose side are you on, Alper?” Sawyer asked wearily. “Was all that planning back there a trick? Or were you lying when you said the Goddess made a bargain?”
“I’m on Alper’s side, you young fool,” Alper assured him, still half-drunk with his sudden victory. “No, it wasn’t a trick. Or a lie. She did bargain—my life for the Firebird. But I don’t believe her. I told you, we’re lower than dogs to the Isier. She might spare my life but she wouldn’t send me home and she certainly wouldn’t give me the Firebird. I want that or nothing. That’s why my plan about Nethe still stands—if the old man will lead us. Will he?” He moved his hand in his pocket significantly. “You’d better talk him into it, my boy!”
The words could have meant nothing to Zatri, but the motion did, and Zatri had his own ideas about the immediate future. In the wavering firelight he seemed to flicker with swift action as his hand shot out, casting a loop of silvery cord…
The coil of it flashed downward about Alper’s neck and drew tight, tight, cut into the jowled throat stanglingly. Alper stood perfectly motionless. But he spoke.
“Tell him to drop it,” he said. “Sawyer! It’s your life!”
“Say no,” Zatri told Sawyer quietly. “I can guess what he said. I’m sorry, young man, but I must think of Klai now. Tell him not to move until I order it. I can kill him with one pull. I am old, but I’m strong.”
“Sawyer, do you want to die?” Alper demanded desperately. “Tell him—”
“He says of course you can kill me,” Sawyer said, almost with indifference. “But you’ll die first. He’s thinking of Klai, Alper. I don’t—”
Zatri said, “Tell him he must take his hand from his pocket. Tell him I’ll pull the noose if he doesn’t. He fears death—he’ll do as I say. I think he knows that no life, not yours or my own, can stand between me and what I must do now.”
Sawyer translated. Slowly, sullenly, Alper lifted his hand from his pocket. Sawyer had a sudden spark of hope and said, “Zatri, make him release me from the transceiver!”
Alper burst out violently, “No! I won’t do that! As long as I have that I’ve got—even if you kill me—no! —”
“He would not,” Zatri said. “I know. We’re both old men, Alper and I, and we understand each other.” He chuckled softly. “I’ll lead you to the Temple now. Do you know why I changed my mind, why I’ll give Alper his chance at the Firebird and immortality?”
“Why?” Sawyer asked.
“It takes more than the Firebird to make a man a god,” Zatri said. “I’m too old—my mind wasn’t clear about this until just now. Alper could achieve immortality, yes—but never invulnerability!” He smiled. “Tell him that,” he said.
Zatri said softly through the mask, “Beyond this point, we talk in whispers.”
Sawyer looked back along the low tunnel twisting out of sight. They had come a long and devious way underground since they left the noisy streets. Zatri, still carefully holding the cord that noosed Alper’s neck, was fumbling at the wall. Rectangular stone blocks hewn perhaps a thousand years ago had been put together with a luminous mortar that glowed with a clear, soft light, so that they stood in what looked like an endless trellis of shining squares.
Zatri gave a little sigh of satisfaction and a door-sized square of the wall before him went dead, the glowing mortar fading as if a switch had cut off a flow of electrons through it. He pushed gently and the whole square receded, letting a soft golden light shine into the trellised passage.
“If we’re lucky,” Zatri said, turning his masked face to Sawyer, “there won’t be any guards outside. The ceremony’s under way, and all the Isier who aren’t out fighting should be in the Hall of the Worlds. We’re directly under it now, and the cells of the sacrifices are just outside. There’s no danger of their escaping.” He chuckled with a curious, sardonic note Sawyer did not understand. “The only way they could escape,” he said, “is a way the Isier needn’t worry about. Come along, and be careful!”
Sawyer followed the two old men through the wall.
It seemed to him that he had stepped out at the foot of Niagara. He stood half-stunned for a moment, his head craned back, staring up at the golden waterfall which rose up, up, up into misty infinities overhead. They stood at the foot of a long ramp that wound upward across the face of the waterfall in gentle zig-zags like a streak of frozen lightning patterning the golden sway above.
The sway was the motion of curtains that looked as if they were woven of bright gold light, hanging straight out of a golden sky. Tier after tier of them rippled slowly in deep, changing folds to no tangible breeze, brushing the ramp with level after ascending level of golden hems.
“We go up,” Zatri said in a whisper. “Keep still, both of you. If anyone comes, get behind the curtains—and pray!”
They went fast, stilling the noise of their feet on the ramps. At the third level Zatri began to twitch the curtains aside and peer quickly behind them without pausing in his climb. At the fifth level they found her…
A tiny room like a bee’s cell opened behind its curtain, hexagonal, walled with a continual crawl of colors that flowed, merged, faded and renewed themselves continually in a motion so compelling the eye followed them in fascinated wonder.
“Don’t look,” Zatri warned them. “That’s hypnosis. Tell Alper. We need him.”
Sawyer murmured his warning without turning his head, for he was staring through the blurred wall at the dreaming figure of Klai, kneeling upon the small hexagon of the cell’s floor, her hands loose in her lap, her head thrown back, staring up in a daze at the changing spectra as they crept across the walls.
Through the blur of colors, Sawyer caught a glimpse of a chamber beyond so vast, so overpoweringly strange that he jerked his gaze away instinctively, afraid to look, afraid to believe his eyes.
Zatri rapped softly on the glassy wall of the hexagon before him. Klai stirred a little, a very little, and subsided again, her head lolling back, her eyes upon the patterns. He rapped again. Very slowly she turned.
“Good,” Zatri said in a whisper. “It’s not too late. We can still save her. Young man—” He turned, fixing Sawyer with a strangely intent gaze. “I have something to ask you,” he said softly. “Listen carefully. I have my own plan all laid. It involves risk to everyone. I want you to understand that can’t be helped. There’s no alternative for any of us except a life of endless slavery under the Isier rule.”
He paused, gave Sawyer a look of curious appeal, and said, “So I must ask you this. Do you have the Firebird now? ”