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green like ice. He was not alone, for Klai was at his side, her knees sagging
a little, and Alper stood three paces beyond, one hand against the ice-like
wall and the other still clenched tight around the precious thing he held.
These weren't important. The thing that riveted the eye was the scattered
throng of other figures, as far as Sawyer could see, gliding swiftly away from
them down the tunnel. All of them were tall
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UC.txt people, inhumanly willowy, and all of them seemed to be walking
backward. Blank, blind faces smiled palely behind 'them as they walked.
Sawyer glanced at Klai. Her eyes were round and dazed and questioning. He
looked at Alper, and met the same look of dazed bewilderment there.
Tentatively Sawyer spoke. "Alper," he said. "Can you hear me?" His voice
echoed hollowly down the hall. Alper tried twice before he could get the words
out. "Yes, I hear you. Where "
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"Where are we?" Sawyer asked in the same breath, echoing " same question.
the
The younger man grinned bleakly, and Alper seemed to pull himself together
with a strong effort, straightened, looked down at his own heavy body and
laughed suddenly, a sound thick with triumph. Moving with powerful ease, he
stepped away from the wall of green ice, solid and opaque behind them. On the
other side of it, did the mine and Fortuna lie?
"I don't know where we are," Alper said. "But I know how we got here. This."
He unclosed his hand and the golden bar caught the light of the tunnel and
gleamed softly. Alper's thick fingers pressed it. Flat gold wings opened in a
sparkling V and fringes of fire sprang out of them. Alper grinned and slapped
the gold-winged symbol flat against the ice. It rang faintly and sweetly.
Nothing else happened.
Alper grunted with dismay, drew his arm back and slapped the thing again upon
the ice. Still nothing, though a glow seemed to be growing in the air around
them.
"Close it! Alper, close it!"
All of them turned. And for the first time, clearly, without her veil of
shadow, they saw the woman called Nethe.
Among all those oblivious, drifting figures that receded from them down the
corridor of ice, one alone seemed really animate. The rest moved like people
in a trance. But one turned his head and looked at them blazingly over its
shoulder from thirty feet down the hall. The motion made suddenly clear the
mystery of all those blank, backward-staring faces.
The faces were masks. The real faces of the trance-gripped people fronted
forward. But Janus-like at the backs of their heads, the masks stared
blind-eyed and smiling. Only Nethe twisted frantically, as if in the grip of
some irresistible forward flow, trying to look back.
They saw her face. A strange, inhuman face, brilliant with more than human
vitality. It was narrow, pointed at the chin, widening toward enormous,
lustrous, snake-like eyes half-veiled under heavy lids. Her mouth was a thin
crimson crescent, curving upward like one of the half-mad smiles the early
Etruscans carved upon their marble statues.
Her body, like the bodies of the dreaming shapes she moved among, was no more
human than a figure by El Greco, and no less human. All of them had the
slender, oddly spiraling distortion of height which El Greco gave his people.
And like them, the elongated lines lent a curious grace and tightness to her
body which made humanity seem warped and wrong by contrast.
She too wore one of the pale, smiling masks upon the back of her head, turned
in profile as she twisted to look back. If she had hair you could not see it.
Across the crown of her head, dividing mask and face, a glass crown ran in
undulant loops. At her ears hung earrings like tiny perforated spheres inside
which a gentle light glowed softly. Every motion sent points of patterned
glitter moving across her cheeks as the earrings swung.
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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]