There was a jolt that made Sawyer’s head swim as he dropped again down the stairsteps of the orbits, this time into the ring only second from the innermost ring of all. He paid no attention. He was only irritated because the jolt made him lose his focus for an instant upon the battle.
For Nethe had overreached herself. She had counted too heavily on dealing a killing stroke, and her mask was too high overhead to parry the Goddess’s snake-like twist of recovery. The golden blood still poured, and one black-robed arm hung useless, but with the other hand the Goddess flashed her mask sidewise in a treacherous spiraling sweep. It was an intricate motion, executed with consummate skill, for it seemed to follow exactly and at tremendous speed the spiraling of the power-streams around the cyclotron, to ride with them and perhaps for one brief instant to force more violence out of them through the deflecting-plates which were the eyes of the mask.
She spun her mask to face Nethe’s. Eye to eye, face to face, the two Gorgon glares poured their killing energy into one another’s smiling faces. Fire flared up from that square, head-on meeting of terrible beams. Nethe’s shriek of maniacal fury heralded what had happened even before the blaze faded between the masks. When it cleared, a long, low cry went up from the circling watchers. For one eye of Nethe’s mask was blind. The beam had burned out.
With half her fighting strength destroyed, she whirled in redoubled rage at the crippled Goddess, her single beam weaving a net of green fire all about that swaying, parrying figure in black robes. Desperately the Goddess, one-handed but quicker than lightning, wove her own net of defense against the onslaught. And the drain upon the power in the Well grew heavier…
Electrons dropped like snow now out of the innermost ring. The Well flared, sank, flared again as the lives of the sacrifices fed it briefly, pouring violence into the cyclotron for the Goddesses to wield like flaming swords.
Jolt! Sawyer dropped again. For the penultimate time he dropped. Now he rode the innermost ring, and the next drop would be into the fire.
The fire? He looked down. He looked straight into the Well. And it was bright, bright, bright…
It burned the eye and the brain behind it.
It was not bright at all.
That painful glare transmuted suddenly as he neared it into a beauty that ensnared the very soul. The Well was a wide ring around a flatness and a glassiness like a mirror that reflected only the golden glow of the sky. In the ring glimmered a whirling, spinning, tumbling tumult of—was it molten light, bubbling up from the heart of the world? Bubbling up out of Earth’s Pole? Was it a tossing fountain? He could put no name to it. But the tumble and tumult of the fiery pool drew the eye and the mind irresistibly. That tossing motion burned inward to his brain, fusing with it, drawing him down along a chord of his own vision.
He was dropping, dropping…
He wanted to drop. He had to see this thing clearer, closer. Even so near, he thought hazily, the bubbles were still impossible to focus on. What were they? Bubbling liquid metal, cool and bright, like mercury? No, for they were discontinuous. Each tossing, luminous shape was separate, and there was a pattern in their motion. They seemed to weave a dance in and out of the very fabric of his brain, pulling him down into the heart of the beautiful pool, the lovely, tossing dance, the irrestible shimmer and play of enchanting motion…
“Alper!” he shouted suddenly, the sound of his own voice coming back to him deafeningly from the spinning walls of his hexagon.
And Alper responded. In quick, broken bursts the noise of his own blood thundered like deep bells through the chambers of the skull, the hiss of breathing was the steam of a gigantic turbine driving through his head.
With a shuddering breath Sawyer drew back from the terrible beauty of the pool. He knew what it was, now. Or what it represented. This was a sight no human eye had ever seen before, even in an analogy like the pool.
It was the complex, weaving dance of the nucleus inside the atom. One by one the electrons had drawn inward to hurl themselves into the strong, terrible pull of the protons in the heart of the atom. His turn, now…
But once before, a hurtling electron had paused. Once before he had seen a victim seem to gather himself and resist for a second the merging into that beautiful, fearful dance. Thunder beat strongly in Sawyer’s skull and he shut his eyes and let all the revulsion against death that dwells instinct in the mind of man repel the enchantment of the Well.
He dropped no farther.
The Well was an empty mirror in the center of the ring, the mouth of a pool that opened downward on the sun. It yawned for him, but he did not drop. And the brilliance began faintly to haze over, as if a breath had blown across the shining mirror.
Below him the green blades of the Gorgon masks flashed and crossed and hissed upon one another. The murderous strokes wove too fast for the eye to follow. But as he hovered, they seemed to slow. The blades grew paler. The hissing fell softer on the ear.
The Goddess stepped back a pace and looked up. And Nethe, breathing hard, lowered her one-eyed mask and tipped her head back, staring too. Recognition suddenly glowed in her eyes, and she laughed a wild, high gong-note of mirthless greeting.
It was time, and past time, for Sawyer to reach into his pocket, where the Firebird lay. What would happen if he flashed it in her face he did not know but he had no choice now. At any moment he would fall straight into the heart of the boiling Well, and after that there would be no more decisions to make.
He reached for the Firebird—and he could not move.
Some power he could not fight held him as rigid as all the other victims spinning in their electronic shells above the Well. His mind was free, but his body he could not move by the slightest twitch of a muscle, the least shiver of a finger.
“Alper!” he called desperately. “Step it up! Not too much, but more!”
The continuous low thunder that moved almost unnoticed in his brain grew louder as an express train approaching along a track grows louder, louder, more deafeningly near—
“Hold it!” Sawyer said suddenly. “Keep it there. Wait!”
For from below him, and not far off, another thunder sounded like an externalized echo—the sudden, deep boom of an explosion. In the ring of angels intent upon the duel across the Well, Isier heads turned incredulously toward that sound which might almost have burst within the walls of the Temple itself.
It was within the Temple.
It came again, and with it now the crash and the long, sliding rumble of falling walls, just beyond the glow of the golden heavens which wreathed them in.
Then the glass floor rocked beneath the circle of thrones. A crash as of vast glass walls toppling sounded terrifyingly near. The Isier sprang to their feet in one long, undulant wave of rising crowns and tossing robes, whirling outward to face the source of this incredible interruption. For one last instant Sawyer saw them all standing solidly upon emptiness while satellite electrons swung upon their orbits around a sun, and the illusion of circling worlds and gods striding through the void held firm.
Then a great rift opened in the golden heavens. Shards of glass fell shivering through the mist and slid in a great avalanche across the glassy floor. The walls came crashing and great fragments of the falling universe toppled through a gap in the fabric of the heavens, letting appalling glimpses of reality gleam through beyond it.
Through that widening gap a tumult of savages poured across the glass floor toward the waiting angels.