“Don’t think you’ve won!” she spat at him, her great eyes luminous with rage. “I’ve told you things too dangerous for you to know. You won’t get away! I’ll—” She bit off the rest of the words, smiled at him fiercely, and then with one ripple of sinuous motion hurled herself sidewise off the rock and vanished between two low hills away from the direction of the fighting.
He strained his eyes among the shadows, seeing nothing. Perhaps she had really gone. And, of course, perhaps not. He took a few cautious steps inland, watching the battle.
The first ranks of the human waterfall poured forward. In a long, sinuous wave the Sselli leaped to meet them, and the shock of their impact made the island stagger.
The Isier were wading through the turmoil, their whips of fire crackling and coiling brilliantly in the air before them. Their great voices rang above the deep-throated roars of the Sselli and the wild human shouts and cries. Above it all the iron alarm-bells still rolled forth their clangor on the reverberating air. The half-smothered light of the blazing cloak shot low shafts of light between upper world and island to illuminate the battle from below. It was like the light of hell-fire glowing up from the nether pit.
Sawyer saw the foremost Isier and a Sselli come face to face in the wild, tossing turmoil of the battle. A spark of hatred seemed to leap out between them. The eyes of the savage blazed and upon the Isier’s godlike face a fury of disdain burned incandescently. He swung his fiery whip high, brought it curling down to wrap the monstrous, reptilian being in a coil of lightning.
The Sselli howled, reeled, fell… but it did not die. Sawyer watched eagerly. He saw the creature sink, hesitate, then shake its flat head and struggle up again, sluggish and dazed but still fighting.
There was a rattle and scuffling among the stones between two hills, and a human head wearing a pointed cap came into silhouette, paused, shouted something and came pelting full-tilt down the little ravine toward Sawyer, waving eagerly. Sawyer jumped back to his tree, ready to immolate himself if this were a trick.
The running Khom burst out into the reflecting light of the fire and dashed panting toward Sawyer, still waving. He was gasping out a single syllable, over and over, but too indistinctly to mean anything. Sawyer hesitated.
Then dimly recognition began to dawn. That pointed cap. That dark face. He had last seen them receding with frightful speed down the wrong end of a telescope as he fell through the air-well—
The man pulled up sharply when he saw the sheer drop of the cliff beside which Sawyer stood. He got his breath, nodded rapidly, and said, “Klai! Klai!” For one wild moment the word meant nothing. Then Sawyer sprang forward, shook the man by the shoulders and echoed, “Klai? Klai?” in senseless repetition.
The man grinned broadly, nodded many times and seized Sawyer by the arm, urging him away from the edge. Sawyer allowed himself to be pulled toward the fighting, though he kept a wary lookout all around him. His mind was clicking bits of logic into place. Uselessly he spoke in English to his excited guide.
“You followed me from the prison,” he said. “You saw me fall and the islands rise, with the savages on them. Was it you who sounded the alarm? Are you taking me to Klai now?”
The little man said, “Klai,” many times over, nodded, urged Sawyer to greater speed. He paused on the height of a low hill above the battle. Clearly he had hoped to make his way across that struggling turmoil and up through the city gates. Equally clearly, no such thing was possible now, with the fight spread so widely.
Sawyer glanced speculatively toward the dark overhang of the great looming continent that floated above them. The island had pressed itself up close beneath the shell of the upper world. Perhaps two-thirds of it thrust out free and clear into the space before the city gates, like a gigantic doorstep leading into infinity.
In the upper world, rain still fell. The part of the island which had undershot the upper world was sheltered, but through that roof, not far away, a shaft of rain drove downward slantingly in intermittent gusts. There was an opening there, in the crust of the upper world. Sawyer thought he knew that opening.
He said, “Come on,” and seized his companion by the arm. The little man resisted unexpectedly, plucked Sawyer’s sleeve and pointed. Sawyer turned to look.
They stood just below the crest of the hill. Below them, across the broad, broken pavement, the fighting raged under gusts of fitful rain. On the far side Sawyer saw Nethe swaying between the trees, peering out at them and up, her face white with excitement and rage. The earrings glinted across her cheeks. She kept the trees between herself and the striding Isier, and her eyes burned upon the hilltop that hid Sawyer.
“She knows we’re here,” Sawyer said uselessly, in English. “We’ve got to get away before she can work around toward us. Come on!” But he did not move. Something very curious about Nethe’s eyes had struck him suddenly. He stood for an instant staring down in fascination, and a strange new idea began to stir formlessly in his mind.
For by sheer chance one of the savages had glanced blindly up toward Sawyer in the instant that Nethe lifted her own face. And Sawyer saw its eyes…
They were the same eyes. Large, oval, lucent as jewels, the same shape, the same set and angle in the head. The Sselli’s were blank as two clear gems. But except for the fiery mind behind one pair of eyes and the total mindlessness behind the other, they might have been the same eyes reflected in two differing faces.
Sawyer’s guide tugged at him again. Reluctantly, dazed with the strange idea that seemed to mean nothing, he turned away. And once more something stopped him. Something else spectacular was happening down below.
An Isier, wading forward like an angel scourging demons before him, came stalking through the tides of human allies, swinging his whip of flame. A flung knife shot from the hand of a Sselli and flashed toward him. The Isier smiled with godlike scorn. The knife rang upon his ice-robed chest as if upon a wall of steel. A flash of pure energy seemed to gleam between the blade and the Isier. The knife fell harmlessly away—
But the Isier stood as if frozen. For a long, immobile second he stood there, his face suddenly blank, his eyes glazing. Then a burst of shimmering heat sprang out around him in a halo that made the battle-scenes behind him quiver when glimpsed through that haze.
The next instant he was gone.
Sselli and Khom alike leaped back as if scorched from that fading bright spot where he had stood. They looked blankly at each other, shook their heads dazedly, and then the battle swept forward and closed like water over the spot where the Isier had been.
When an Isier uses up more energy than he possesses, he seems to—to vaporize… So Nethe had said in her long, reluctant talk beside the brink of the island.
Shaking his own head, bewildered by the ideas that were beginning to take shape in his mind about the Isier, Sawyer turned away. He had one small errand to perform before he returned to the city. And it would have to be a secret errand, even from his guide.
“Come along,” he said, leading the little man firmly away from the battle-ground. “We’re going upstairs by the trapdoor.”
Rain still fell through the familiar air-well down which Sawyer had fallen. The hole floated in the world’s overhang, ten feet above the island. The well-remembered tap-root trailed downward upon the ground, dragging its broken end.
“You first,” Sawyer said, making appropriate gestures. The little man leaped for the root, shinnied rapidly upward and scrambled out of sight over the edge.