She was dressed like all the others of her kind here, in a flowing garment the color of pale green ice, sweeping free from a broad flat collar like a surplice. And she was struggling frantically to turn.
“Close it!” she cried again. “Quick! You can’t go back that way!”
Now the air was shivering more violently. Sawyer said, “Shut it, Alper,” and tried to turn and step back the three paces that parted them.
He could not do it.
Firmly, inexorably, the air resisted him. Not with a solid pressure, but more as if a stream of tiny, tingling points flowed constantly out of the wall behind them.
“I’ve been trying, too,” Klai said quietly. “You can’t. You can’t even stand still. Look, we’re starting to move.”
Stumbling against the increasing pressure, Sawyer fought briefly and in vain. Ahead of them Nethe was struggling too, frantically, her strange face dazzling with anger and—was it anxiety? The current swept her and the figures like her as if on a strong, smooth breeze that flowed fast. Distance was already widening between them as she stretched out a demanding hand and called:
“Alper! Come to me! You have the Firebird, so you can move. Give it back!”
Alper laughed, an intoxicated sound. He had snapped the glitering wings shut and the air was quiet again, the light gone. He held the Firebird up derisively.
“You’ve doled me out my last measure!” he shouted to the receding Nethe. “Now I’ll get it from the source! You fool, why should I give it up now?”
“I need it!” Nethe called despairingly. “You don’t know what you’re doing! What does your little Khom life matter, compared to mine! I don’t dare go out, without the Firebird!” Her voice grew threatening. “Do you think when we come to the end of this passage I won’t kill you and take it back? Hurry, Khom, hurry!” Already her voice was growing hollow with the echoes that reverberated from the walls of ice as distance drew out between them.
“Give it back!” she cried, from far away, a small, diminishing figure with blazing eyes. “Give it back and I’ll let you live! But hurry, hurry, before I—”
One of the swiftly receding figures among which she moved swerved sidewise and brushed her shoulder jarringly. She twisted her head to look forward, and her wild, high cry of anger and despair made all the echoes ring. Those blank-faced, receding replicas of herself seemed to pay no attention to anything that was happening around them, not even to the echoes of Nethe’s scream, but the increasing speed that swept them all along was swirling them now together toward a slow ripple of motion that closed off the far end of the tunnel.
Pale, ice-colored curtains swayed continuously there, like the aurora borealis, Sawyer thought—the same folds, the same motion. And between those folds, by ones and twos, the gliding figures were sweeping out of sight into some unguessable world beyond the tunnel.
“Alper!” Nethe’s strong, singing cry made the echoes roll like music. “Alper, it’s too late! Listen to me! Listen very carefully! They’ve seen me from outside by now. The Goddess will be waiting to trap me. I’ll get to you if I can, but hide the Firebird! Show it to no one! If you want to live, keep it hidden until I come for you. Don’t—”
A sudden wall of silence cut her voice off sharply. Nethe had vanished between the rippling curtains, straining her face around toward them to the last, the great, baleful eyes burning with urgency.
Alper shut his hand nervously over the closed Firebird, rubbed his face with a heavy hand, and looked doubtfully at Klai.
“I—I don’t understand,” he said. “Are we dreaming? Where are we? Klai, she seemed to think you—do you know what’s happening?”
Klai held tighter to Sawyer’s arm. The two of them were walking forward slowly now, under the gentle, irresistible pressure of the air. Alper took two or three quick steps to catch up with them.
“It isn’t a dream,” Klai said hesitantly, her strange accent oddly thicker than before. “It’s more as if I’d dreamed about Fortuna and the Pole. I’m only beginning to wake again now to the real world. My world—at the end of this hall. Khom’ad, where my people live. Where the—the Isier rule. Where—”
She broke off quite suddenly, catching her breath with a sharp gasp. Her fingers dug into Sawyer’s arm in a convulsion of unexpected terror.
“Oh no!” she cried. “Oh, I can’t go on! I can’t go back.” She tried frantically to whirl and retrace her steps. The furs she wore impeded her and her boots got no traction on the floor. She kicked them off and in sandaled feet made the most furious efforts to move against that forward-flowing current. But she made no headway at all.
“What is it?” Sawyer asked. “Tell us what you remember, Klai. What are you afraid of?”
“N-Nethe,” Klai said. She turned quickly, with a shiver, toward those slowly approaching curtains beyond which the robed figures were still vanishing, blank mask-faces turned backward, to watch them with unseeing stares. “I remember—the Isier. When my grandfather was a temple slave, Nethe was already the Goddess-elect. The next priestess in line to wear the Double mask if the Goddess had to give it up. I’ve been away—” Here she touched her cheek wonderingly, as if her own body were as strange to her as these new-found memories.
“I’ve been away for two whole years, unless time runs differently on Earth. I had to leave. I can’t go back! I was a chosen sacrifice to feed the Firebirds! What shall I do?”
She flashed a wild, pale glance up at Sawyer.
“Wait,” he said. “Let’s get this clear. At the far end of this tunnel you think—there’s another world, is that it? Your world?”
“Think?” she echoed desperately. “I know! You saw Nethe. You see these others, these Isier. Do you imagine you’re still in your own world? Do they look like people from Earth? Of course I know!”
Sawyer looked down at her thoughtfully. He looked at the blank-faced, receding masks, the tall, distorted figures sweeping forward above their own reflections in the shining floor. With a great effort he turned his head to look back at the closed wall they had come through. He wondered if someone had struck him over the head in the mine, and left him lying there on the wet floor dreaming feverish dreams.
“Dream or not,” he said, “we’d better face it. Alper, you can move against this current. See if you can stop us.”
Ponderously Alper swung his huge body before them in a reluctant effort. The smooth air-pressure carried them on, and himself with them, as easily as if he had not tried at all. Stepping aside, he took Klai’s wrist in a firm grip and braced his heavy legs. Her forward motion carried him along without a pause, his feet sliding on the ice-like floor.
Sawyer sighed. “Well, it was worth trying. What comes next, Klai? What’s out there beyond those curtains?”
“The city,” she said impatiently, still making futile, scrambling tries to resist the forward flowing air. “Khom’ad, my world. Oh, there’s so much to remember! It’s all hazy, even now. I know this much—Nethe’s dangerous!”
“Tell us what you remember about her,” Sawyer said. “Quick! There may not be much time.”
“She’s an Isier, an immortal, one of the race of gods who rule Khom’ad.
“They never grow old. Nothing can hurt them. Even the Goddess would rule forever, unless trouble came and her people blamed her for it.”
“Goddess?” Sawyer asked.
“Not really. Just an Isier like Nethe, only with great powers, and wearing the Double Mask and the Dark Robe. As Nethe will in three days, if she wasn’t lying. I wonder! In the time I’ve been gone, the troubles must have got worse in Khom’ad or Nethe couldn’t hope for a change of Goddesses.”
“Troubles?” Sawyer prompted. “Anything that will affect us when we come out? Tell me what you remember.”
“Trouble among the gods,” Klai said uncertainly. “How could we Khom know the reasons? But the Isier had begun to—to vanish like mist sometimes, and nobody knew why. And there were strange, ugly, frightening people who came up from the world below, and not even the Isier could kill them. Mostly, for the Khom, the trouble meant sacrifices, though. Many sacrifices. Far more than the Isier ever used to need. They’ll take me for an accepted sacrifice when we come to the end of this place, and I’ll go to feed the Firebirds in the next ceremony—”