Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

The transparent platform that held up the thrones was not a solid floor across the abyss. It was a circle floating in haze, held to the golden walls by an intricate pattern of glass bridges that left room for the circling electrons to wheel unhindered over and around and down under the bubbling Well.

Over the edge the Sselli and his Isier enemy toppled, still locked in an embrace of mutual hatred and revulsion. The mask fell with them, raking the misty heavens of the chamber with its pale death-stare of green rays.

As if their fall had broken a spell that held him fascinated, Sawyer came back to life and his own danger. Fiercely he wrenched at the paralysis that held him motionless, for he realized that in another moment or two a burden would be levied upon the Well that not all the sacrifices spinning in their orbits might suffice to bear. This unleashing of every mask at once would demand energy such as the Well might never have been called upon to supply before in all its thousand years.

He focused with desperate intensity upon the sounds of his own private thunder in the cavities of the brain, focused blindly and strove with all his power to break the paralysis… And very slightly he moved one hand. Very slightly.

The floating shell under him jolted hard. He opened his eyes and saw in one all-comprehensive flash the battlefield in midair, reeling and staggering with godlike figures and serpentine Sselli gushing golden blood, the two races so like in so many ways that they might almost be the same race seen through distorting lenses in two differing forms—

That thought rang a bell in his memory he had no time to follow. For his cell jolted downward again, and he saw that the drain upon the Well had begun already. The tumble of bright motion below filmed over mistily as every mask drew deep upon the source of all Isier power.

Instantly past Sawyer fell a rain of spinning hexagon-cells, each carrying downward a victim to swell the energy of the Well. Swiftly they dropped, and with each immolation fire seemed to blaze upward from the bubbling ring below. Sawyer set his teeth, called “Alper! More!” and steeled himself to keep his mind awake in the stunning impact of the thunder that followed.

For this last act of immolation, it seemed, must be a voluntary plunge into the Well. The nucleus draws the electron with a summons of mutual irresistible attraction. And if the victim resisted, he could save himself—for awhile. It was why hypnosis had to be part of the initial ceremony. It was why Sawyer could resist, keep his cell suspended against the strong downward pull, so long as his mind kept free. But the irresistible sparkling dance of the patterns below was too powerful to resist forever…

He strained to move his right arm such a little distance, such an impossible distance toward the pocket where the Firebird lay. Was it moving? He could not be sure. He looked down at the terrible panorama below him, seeing the Sselli mowed like serpentine grain before the long green scythes of the Isier, but a grain that would not fall when it was severed. Great pools of shining blood lay suspended as if in empty air on the glass floor, and over the edges of the platform by twos and threes Isier and Sselli pitched screaming, the savages coiling about the bodies of their reapers and dragging them down like dead men still fighting the angels who destroyed them.

It came to Sawyer suddenly why this place of ceremony was called the Hall of the Worlds. That ring of thrones encircling the fiery Well was the symbol in two dimensions of the world of Khom’ad encircling the Under-Shell.

Violently he wrenched at his right arm and felt it move, wrenched again and touched his pocket with the tips of his fingers. He could not be sure that the Firebird would save him. But he was wholly lost if he did nothing, for the pull of the Well was growing stronger. He would not look at it. He would not think of it. But through the bones and the nerves it called him, and in the center of his brain it spun its compelling patterns, until the atoms of his own body felt the summons and grew restless in their paths.

Down about him snowed the summoned sacrifices to feed the Well and keep the green swords flashing. Directly below him he saw Nethe, ignoring the battleground beyond her, stoop and sweep a long sudden slash across the relaxed guard the Goddess had let down to watch her people fighting…

It raked the single hand in which the Goddess held her weapon. The other arm hung limp, and blood dripped down her fingertips and sparkled on the glassy floor. Nethe’s one-eyed weapon seared across her knuckles. She whirled and swung her mask up in defense, but slowly, too slowly—

Sawyer’s cell jolted once more and hung just above the bubbling Well. The concentrated thunder in his brain was already as strong as he could endure without the danger of blacking out entirely. He could not call on Alper to increase it. He could feel in his own body the treachery of his atomic structure answering the lovely and terrible call of the Well, his nerves accepting what his mind rejected, flesh and bone responding while the will that should control them still said, “Live!” though flesh and bone cried ecstatically, “Die! Die!”

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…

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.