Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

“Is it safe?” he asked nervously. “What holds it up?”

“What holds the sun up?” Nethe asked with exasperation, “How do I know? Where is the Firebird? Answer me quickly, before I kill you!”

It occurred to Sawyer belatedly that if she thought it gone forever, she would probably carry out her threat. “Treat me well and I’ll tell you,” he said rapidly. “I dropped it when we fell. I saw where it landed. You’ll never find it without—”

She cast a quick glance around her in the dimness.

“Where did it fall?” she demanded. “Quick!”

“I won’t tell you,” he said.

Nethe’s serpentine arm shot out and her hard hand cuffed him viciously across the side of the head. Her strength was tremendous. With the other hand she caught him as he fell, locked an iron grip on his forearm and twisted hard.

Between her shining teeth she said, “Answer me, Khom!”

The energy the Firebird had poured through him gave Sawyer strength to struggle. He shook his ringing head and lurched heavily away, putting his full weight on her grip to block her and swinging an edge-of-the-palm blow straight for the side of her neck, under the luminous earring.

Her flesh was inhuman, cool and hard. The blow jolted her a little, and she hissed in fury, twisting his arm up still farther so that the muscles creaked and he felt the joint give dangerously. The sweat sprang out on his forehead. He set his teeth and said in a thin, tight voice:

“Go on. Break it.”

She glanced at him in surprise.

“I’m not a Khom,” he said in a grating voice. “Break it. I won’t talk. You can bargain all you like or you can kill me, but—”

She twisted harder. He caught his breath and struck futilely at her again, trying stubbornly to give with the twist to save his arm as long as he could. She would certainly have broken it, he thought in the next few seconds if a new element had not entered into their conflict.

A jagged stone sang through the air between them, flying out of nowhere, and struck Nethe across the forehead, sending her reeling.

Sawyer prudently dropped flat, massaging his freed arm and searching the shadows with useless wariness. At the back of his mind was the knowledge that a stone that size should have knocked Nethe’s brains out. He was quite certain, though it had happened almost too quickly to be sure, that at the instant of contact between missile and Isier head, a flash of brilliance had sprung out as though to cushion the impact. Presumably it had sprung from the Isier skull. So they really were invulnerable? That showed clearly why Nethe had been willing to risk the long drop through empty space to this floating islet. The fall that might have killed Sawyer had it not been for cushioning trees would have left the Isier woman unharmed.

There was no time to reflect about this, for Nethe had not touched the ground before tumult burst noisily from the trees. In the wake of the thrown rock a dark, indistinguishable horde of bodies hurtled upon them through the silver gloom.

Sawyer could not see them very clearly. He did not want to. There was a singular repulsiveness about their gait and the set of their heads on their squat shoulders. They were certainly not human. Even the Isier race seemed the very prototype of humanity by contrast. Yet they walked on two legs, and they could throw stones, and use artifacts. At least, Sawyer caught glints of long steely blades flashing among the mob that was overwhelming the pavement and surrounding him.

They moved with such preternatural speed that the musk-smelling creatures were all around Sawyer while he was still futilely gathering his wits and Nethe was picking herself up dizzily from the pavement. Sawyer felt strong, hard hands close on all his limbs at once. Struggling in vain, he was hauled upright with bonebreaking ease. They handled him as if he weighed no more than a straw man, and were no more breakable. It seemed sheer good luck that they did not bend his limbs backward, snapping every joint, as they put him on his feet.

He peered around him in the gloom. Were they tall or not tall? Their height seemed to keep changing, and in a moment he realized why. They had heads like turtles, shallow-skulled on thick, retractable necks that could squat down into their heavy shoulders or stretch high. It seemed to him that their long, terribly powerful limbs were boneless, for they moved with an incongruous grace.

They breathed a hot, musky breath in his face, pulling him from one to another, exchanging strangely musical grunts and trills in which pitch rather than words seemed to convey what little meaning moved through their shallow heads. In the dark their great pale eyes were like luminous jewels, perfectly empty, ringing him in.

One of them boomed resonantly in its throat, with a noise like drums echoing in a vault, and reached casually for Sawyer’s head with both hands. Large, cold, musk-smelling, they closed around his face and ears, twisting. In a matter of seconds, he knew quite well, his head would part from his shoulders.

Between thumb and spread fingers of the great hand across his face, he saw Nethe, resisting capture with far more success than Sawyer, stemming as she did from a far stronger race.

He shouted to her, his voice muffled against the musky palm of the savage: “Nethe—Nethe!”

An explosion of sound and fury seemed to burst out among the knot of savages ringing Nethe in. He saw it only dimly, filtered between great spread fingers and blurred by his own swimming senses, but it looked as if Nethe had called upon some unfathomable source of incandescent power, for she whirled suddenly among her captors with a violence that sent them spinning. Her face lighted up with a blaze from within. Her eyes burned like lamps and she moved so fast she seemed to leave streaks of luminescence in the air around her.

At the same instant she lifted her voice in a cry like a struck gong. No human throat could have uttered a sound so resonant, so sustained, so clear. Sawyer had a mad notion that he could see the separate sound-waves of it spreading outward in luminous rings.

The savages responded surprisingly. Their hands fell free and Sawyer, wrenching his arms from the loosening grips that held them, massaged his aching neck with both hands and stared in bewilderment around the clearing. Every reptilian head was turned to Nethe, every pair of bright, empty, jewel-like eyes was fixed on her.

With great presence of mind Sawyer snatched a long knife from the nearest slack hand and plunged it up to the hilt in the deep chest of the savage before him.

“No!” Nethe called, from the other side of the group. “Don’t waste your time—listen! Strip off that cloak. Throw it away. Quick, before it destroys you!”

Fumbling in dazed obedience at the fabric, Sawyer had one incredulous glimpse of the savage he had stabbed. The creature was watching Nethe in blurred fascination. It did not even look down when the blade entered its chest. One large paw came up and plucked the dagger out as if it had been a pin thrust through clothing. The savage chest showed no wound. The dark, reptilian flesh healed itself as the blade withdrew and there might never have been a stabbing at all, except that from the point of the blade two or three drops of golden, luminous blood dripped and vanished.

“Invulnerable!” Sawyer thought, a vague resentment stirring in him. “Everyone’s invulnerable but me.” And then he thought no more, for the cloak had begun to smoulder under his hands.

He got it off just in time. Like a Nessus-shirt it was turning to pure fire even as he tossed it, and the billowing folds settled down upon the pavement in a heap of flame, white-hot from hem to hood before it struck the ground.

The oval jewel-eyes of the savages followed its motion as if in hypnosis, every flattened head swinging round, every eye giving back a white flame of reflection. Nethe was forgotten. Sawyer was forgotten. They were moths around a flame, and it drew them irresistibly until their dark backs closing around the fire all but shut out its glow.