“But they don’t look like the Isier,” Sawyer complained. “How could they evolve into—”
“I know,” Klai broke in. “It puzzles the Isier, too. And yet in many ways they are like. Remember this, too. The Firebirds began on Earth when the Sselli began here. And you never see the Firebirds in Khom’ad. They seem to exist only on Earth.”
“At the other end of the Well,” Sawyer said. “Now that’s very interesting. There must be some connection. The three forms of life must be three facets of a single problem. But—”
The belling cry of an Isier from close outside broke sharply into his words.
For an instant the deepest silence dwelt upon the stable, broken only by the crunching of the ponies in their stalls, and from far off a rising noise of battle. The Sselli had not been audible when Sawyer first got here. That must mean they had gained a foothold on the upper world and were carrying the battle straight into the heart of the Isier-ruled city. If the Isier have weapons, he thought grimly, they’d better start limbering them up.
The silence held for half a minute. Then there was a sudden outburst of scuffling, stamping, ringing cries from Isier throats, and above it a fierce, wild scream that Sawyer thought could come from one throat only.
“Nethe!” he said, and whirled toward the door.
Zatri, moving faster than seemed possible, was at his very elbow when he got the door open. The old man snapped an order and someone put out the lamp. Then there was a great surge toward the neck of the alley to see what the trouble was.
Nethe was the trouble. A little way off down the street Sawyer saw her familiar figure, the luminous earrings swinging wildly, struggling between two tall Isier who were carrying her serenely forward down the street toward the Temple. She writhed and fought and spat violent bursts of speech at them. They did not seem to hear. The backward-facing masks of all three turned a blank, uninterested stare at the little knot of humans who watched from the alley.
“She must have followed us after all,” Sawyer said. “Well, that takes care of Nethe. I wonder what the Goddess will do?”
“Force her into the Unsealing ceremony,” Klai said, from a prudent shelter behind him. “And that will be the end of one or the other of them. But whichever wins, the Isier rule will go on the way it always has, unless we find a way to fan this trouble higher. Come back. We’ve got a lot of planning to do.”
“All right,” Sawyer said. “But tell me one thing. What the devil are those masks for?”
A voice from the street corner just beyond their alley said calmly:
“That’s an interesting question, my boy. Look what I’ve brought you.”
Sawyer knew that voice. The thick organ-tones could belong to one man only. He turned and said, “Alper!”
The ponderous figure of Alper moved toward them. He was walking effortlessly still, so the power the Firebird gave him had not yet waned, but there was already a suggestion of a drag to his gait, and his heavy figure stooped a little.
In each hand he carried a pale, smiling, blind-eyed Isier mask.
X
Zatri sat down again upon his haybale throne. The watchful Khom lined the walls, patient and alert in the swinging shadows cast by the relit lamp. Alper stood under it, his heavy head sunk a little, his big legs braced, taking in the group with quick, cold, purposeful glances. Outside, in the night, the noises of battle were much louder. The dull booming of the Sselli, the Younger Brothers, echoed down the narrow streets of Khom’ad, and the shouts and screams of their human opponents, and the ringing calls of the Isier. Alper jerked his head toward the noise.
“They’ll have to speed up the Ceremony of the Unsealing,” he said to Sawyer. “I’ve talked to the Goddess. With these”—he shook the two smiling masks—“it was perfectly simple to communicate. Most of the time you and Nethe were having your little consultation on the island, I was relaying the story to the Goddess. Luckily, she couldn’t understand you. You weren’t wearing a mask, and it takes two of them to make the communication work. So I said nothing about the Firebird. She doesn’t know.” He paused, put one of the masks under his arm and slipped the freed hand into his pocket. His thick voice was grim.
“Where is it, Sawyer?” he asked. “What did you do with the Firebird?”
Rapidly Sawyer cast back over the immediate past. Whenever he had spoken aloud, so that Alper heard him, he had been denying he had the thing.
“I didn’t do anything with it,” he said. “I left it where it was.”
The slightest possible tremor shivered through his skull from the transceiver. Sawyer felt a sudden blaze of murderous rage ignite in him. He spun toward Alper, making no effort to control the fury, letting it show in his voice and his face.
“Stop that!” he commanded. “You know you can’t force me that way! Once more and I’ll make you kill me!”
The tremor ceased. Alper said, “All right, all right. Just a reminder. I know you aren’t lying. I know Nethe searched you once for the Firebird. I know all she told you, and it gave me some interesting ideas. I even traced you here by the transceiver. The strength of the signals was an accurate guide, once I’d escaped from the Goddess. This attack from the savages is going to be very useful to all of us. I got free, Klai got at least a reprive from capture, and you and I are going to the Temple right away, if the old man will guide us.”
He turned toward Zatri, started to speak, then shrugged and held out one of the masks. Zatri took it gingerly, looking at Alper with a searching gaze. Alper dipped his head a little and clapped the pale, smiling thing over his face. He spoke in a slightly muffled voice.
“I have a plan,” he said, “to save your granddaughter. And incidentally myself, of course. I need your help—”
Zatri held up a hand for patience, hesitated an instant longer, and then fitted his own mask over his face. It was curious to see the two blank, Isier-featured faces confronting each other, Zatri’s blue eyes and Alper’s small, cold grey ones blinking through the great ovals of the masks.
Alper repeated his proposal, in English. And Zatri, after an odd moment of complete immobility, as if the result of the mask-donning had startled him, appeared to answer in his own language, quite as if Alper’s words had made sense to him. The listening Khom glanced quickly from one to another and began to exchange uneasy murmurs.
“What’s happening?” Sawyer asked Klai.
She gave him a wondering look. “The masks are for communication,” she said. “Among other things I think Nethe learned English through the use of hers. The Isier, among themselves, have some amazing arts and sciences, so abstract it got to be a problem for a musician, say, to communicate his ideas to a chemist or a physicist. Remember, they’ve lived for a thousand years, and they’ve pursued their arts to tremendous heights. They developed this way of exchanging ideas without the need for learning one another’s abstract terms. I wonder how Alper managed to steal them.”
“So do I,” Sawyer said thoughtfully. “I don’t trust Alper very far. Listen—what’s your grandfather saying?”
“He wants to know Alper’s plan. He says he could guide him into the Temple—at any other time. Not now. The Ceremony of the Unsealing may have started already. And the streets aren’t safe any more.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I plan,” Alper said, muffled inside the mask. Its thin, pale smile gave him an unfortunate look of conspiratorial malice that might or might not be just. “Sawyer knows where the Firebird is. I must have it! Once I get it, I can force Nethe to open the door back to Earth—”