The Well of the Worlds by Henry Kuttner

Author:Henry Kuttner [Kuttner, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

BEFORE she could answer, a new sound began to shake the air and both looked up quickly. The deep, heavy clangor of a great bell from somewhere above began to beat wildly through the abyss. Some resonance in its pitch made the island shiver slightly at every peal.

“They’ve seen the islands rising,” Nethe said, her face turned upward and away and her mask seeming to regard Sawyer with a disinterested stare. “It’s the Khom alarm-bell.”

While the echoes still rang, a second bell, farther off, took up the signal, and far away, at the very verge of hearing, a third began heavily to toll. Sawyer imagined the mobilization at the city gates, and he hoped the tuba-shaped weapons were better fit to deal with the savages than a knife through the chest had been.

“Are they really invulnerable?” he asked Nethe. “The savages, I mean?”

“The Sselli? To most things, yes. Like us.”

“Then you are vulnerable too?”

“Not to you, Khom.” She laughed and turned back to him, her eyes baleful. “All living things are vulnerable—to something. Only the Goddess can unleash the weapon that could destroy an Isier. Don’t worry. The Sselli won’t get far. Do you think a little band that size could stand against the Isier?”

Sawyer looked down at the circling swarm of islands upon which he had thought he saw the motion of living things, perhaps a small band could be driven back, then, but not a large one? He strained his eyes through the dimness, which was beginning now to brighten with reflections from the upper world, long shafts of red and crimson streaming downward past this island and touching with a sort of false sunrise color the rising lands below.

The rock shivered under him in answer to the wild timbre of alarm-bells in the city. He thought of Jericho and the shivering walls. It might have been coincidence, or it might have been a faint premonitory tremor that made him think “Jericho!” for in the next instant a still, small, far-off quiver, terribly familiar, moved between his brain and his skull . . .

“Alper!” he thought. “Awake. The bells—did they rouse him? Now he’s sitting up, looking around the cell, trying to remember.” He could picture it very clearly. “Now he’s thought of me. Now he has his hand in his pocket, feeling for the transceiver control. Now he’s found the note . . .”

He could imagine Alper struggling up in the glass cell, his face dark with anger, hand in pocket, finding there the unexpected crackle of paper. In a moment Sawyer would know if his note was going to save him. His life was in Alper’s pocket. Alper could kill him with the motion of one finger as dead as if they stood in the same room with a loaded gun between them. If anger made Alper’s hand clench before he fully took in the import of the note—

“Alper!” Sawyer said sharply. “Do you hear me? Listen!”

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