He had to act while he still lived. He had to force his one hand to obedience. He shut his eyes, called to the very limit of endurance upon the tumult in his brain, and—touched the Firebird with his fingertips.
Between thumb and finger he snapped the bright wings open…
XIV
Strength poured through him in a golden flood. The Firebird seemed to leap in his hand a little, as if it struggled toward the Well in which its rightful place stood empty, so very near now, waiting for its return. If it went into the Well again the last path to Earth would close forever. And if it did not go in—how long could Sawyer, even with this new strength flooding him, resist the pull of that hypnotic dance?
The choice was not his to make. For as the golden wings spread in his hand, Nethe was loosing her last, her fatal stroke straight into her adversary’s face. The newly slashed hand that held the Goddess’s mask dropped helpless before Nethe’s green-bladed blow, and the Goddess for an instant stood undefended. Nethe’s single-eyed weapon swung its Gorgon glare in a long sweep across the Goddess’s masked face. And the Goddess cried out in a high, thin scream that echoed inside the Goddess-Mask she wore, and reeled—
Reeled forward, toward the Firebird. Her masked eyes burned as she saw it. She stumbled around the edge of the Well, toward Sawyer and the precious thing he held.
Perhaps Nethe felt and saw from the corner of her eyes the sudden spread of sparkling wings above her. Perhaps she only followed the Goddess’s lifted gaze. But she whirled as the Goddess’s weapon lowered. She too saw the Firebird hovering in Sawyer’s hand, no more than head-high above her now…
Did the Firebird’s burning power dispel all lesser powers around it? Or did Nethe’s sweeping gesture as she whirled dissolve the cell that held Sawyer prisoner above the platform? He did not know, but the shining blur of the walls around him vanished and he fell six feet through golden air to land staggering for balance upon that floor of glass above the abyss.
The Firebird was Nethe’s for the taking. How could he resist her now? Dazed by the suddenness of his fall, he could only stumble backward away from her and the Well. Beyond her shoulder he saw the oncoming Goddess, eyes blazing through the jewels of her Goddess-Mask, heard her scream out Nethe’s name—saw her swing her weapon shoulder-high with one last, tremendous effort, steadying her slashed hand as she lifted it…
Nethe seemed to whirl in mid-air to meet that final desperate attack. She swung her own weapon around to face the Goddess’s, holding it before her like a shield. Face to face and eye to eye the two masks fronted each other, the blazing eye-beams the Goddess wielded smashing the full power of their terrible green blades into the one-eyed face of Nethe’s mask.
And Nethe’s mask went dead.
She looked down at it, for an instant ludicrously dismayed, holding the useless shield against her with both hands. Then suddenly she laughed, a wild, despairing shriek of ironic merriment. She flung the blind thing from her and twisted like a striking snake straight toward Sawyer and the Firebird.
The impact of her hurtling weight sent him half-stunned to the glass floor. He felt the Firebird snatched from his fingers and heard in his very ear her wild, triumphant scream of unbearable joy as at last, at long last, she closed her hands upon the talisman that could still mean triumph for her.
The scream hung ringing on the air for a moment, full of sound of victory. Then its timbre changed. For the twin beams of the Goddess’s deadly mask swept the air above Sawyer’s head, and Nethe’s scream changed to a long cry of piercing, inhuman pain…
Looking up from the floor, Sawyer saw her towering for one last instant impossibly tall above him, the shining Firebird held high, and the two pale-green beams of the weapon that killed her transfixing her robed body from side to side. She stood there in the moment of her triumph, pinned through by the two green swords, the Firebird pouring useless power through a body no longer able to contain it.
If the Sselli died slowly, the Isier could die more slowly still. It seemed to Sawyer that she stood there an eternity. He saw the inhuman fury, the inhuman despair of her face. He saw it change to implacable determination. She was dead already, and she knew it, as she writhed snake-like toward the Goddess with resolution clear upon her dazzling face. If she could not uphold her own claim to godhood, then no one should win. No one at all. She would bring her whole race crashing with her if she must fall. In no other way could she prove her godhood, but in this way she could and would…
Sawyer saw the flash of her ice-robes streaming, the gush of her luminous blood, the blinding brilliance of the Firebird open and sparkling in her hands, as she hurled herself upon the Goddess. The great blades of the mask still flared between them, but Nethe was beyond the fear of death now. She flung herself forward against the beams that pierced her, straight upon the tall, dark figure of her slayer.
For an instant Sawyer saw them reeling together, in dazzling silhouette against the bubbling fire of the Well behind them. He saw them sway, heard the two voices mingling in a terrible, bell-clear cry. Then together they reeled backward and fell…
The Well received them both.
And with them, flashing and sparkling, fell the Firebird, open-winged, and the end of the race of gods.
Swaying on his feet, dazed and half-blinded by the dazzle of the Well, Sawyer saw them fall. And as they fell, they changed.
Light like vapor seemed to smoke out around them. The molecules of their bodies seemed to disperse and disarrange until only a dance of swarming molecular mist swirled where the two relentlessly interlocked bodies had vanished. And then the mist began to reassemble…
Long, serpentine limbs dawned in that golden haze, condensed into two writhing bodies with the hideous squat heads of the Sselli, and the great, empty, jewel-clear eyes.
He had known it. He had been certain of it, in that well of the mind below the level of awareness. They were the same, not two races sprung from one stock but the same. The Isier were the Sselli. All the ancient myths of Earth slid dimly through his memory that dealt with the splitting—the fission—of life-forms. Legends of the doppelanger, of possession and exorcism and the divisions between Jekyll and Hyde in all their varied forms.
What unknown link in the bridge between mortal life and atomic energy had the Isier spanned when they first altered themselves into immortal isotopes of their natural form by the lost science of the Well of the Worlds?
No one would ever know, now, but it had been an alteration of deadly danger to themselves, for the instability of the isotope was something which they could not control in this time of crisis. When the Well functioned they had been safe enough, but it was very clear now what peril overtook them when the Well ceased to flow with the energy they required to keep them stable in Isier-form. Energy failed and their bodies flickered down the scale to the next isotopic shape, which was the Sselli…
And the end was not yet. The full circle of the change had not yet closed.
The falling, changing bodies dropped out of sight down the dimension-piercing Well whose other end linked to Earth. There was silence for an instant, while the ring of nuclear patterns tumbled on in its serene, endless dance.