Lin Carter - The City Outside the World Page 3

  It was bad, and it’s getting even worse, he thought to himself bitterly. Bad enough to be caught following a native woman through the streets at night—for that, the People had been known merely to castrate F’yagha. And to come between a native mob and its prey—to beam a dozen down—that was death. And not a swift or easy death, either. But to kill a priest …

  Ryker shuddered. The penalty for that he did not even know. Nor did he want to.

  But he had gained a pieCe of information. It was the priests who had driven the mob against these three. They must be heretics of some kind, defilers of shrines, perhaps tomb robbers. And if the hualatha knew where they were,

  the girl was right. There was no hiding place anywhere in the Old City that was safe for them. And no place for Ryker to hide either. For there could not be so many Outworlders in Yeolarn that Ryker’s identity would not swiftly be learned by those who had hunted the girl.

  The only safety lay in flight. But flight to where? And how?

  The New City across the canal might afford a safe enough haven for the dancing girl and her party, but not for Ryker. They had hounded him out of the New City, and by this time the way back was surely closed to him. His only chance of seeing the sun rise tomorrow lay in getting out of Yeolarn entirely. And, perhaps, their only chance as well. For native priests can come and go in the New City pretty much as they please.

  Ryker began to sweat again. He could feel the perspiration trickle down his ribs under his thermals. He leaned against the stone wall and tried desperately to think. The smooth stone was cold and slick against his brow.

  “Do you have any idea just where we are now?” he asked.

  The girl put her hand to her mouth tentatively. She tilted her head on one side as if listening to some faint sound to which his ears were deaf.

  “Near the Processional Way, I think,” she said thoughtfully. “It should be through the next alley. We are a square or two from the Bazaar—the Lesser, not the Great. That means the quickest way out of the city would be the Gate of the Dragons—”

  Ryker felt his heart quicken. The Gate of the Dragons! Very near that gate was the house of Yammak, a dealer in riding beasts he knew from the old days. And Yammak owed him a favor or two. If they could reach the house of

  Yammak without being discovered, and if Yammak was there, and could procure slidars for the four of them, and provisions, too, then there was a chance they might get out of Yeolarn alive.

  It wasn’t much of a chance, Ryker knew. A slim chance, at best. But slim or not, it was a whole lot better than no chance at all!

  The boy had been shifting his weight from one foot to the other, restlessly. Now he tugged on the hem of the girl’s scarf for her attention. She turned her masked head towards him.

  “Men are coming, Valarda!” the boy chirped. “Many men. Down the street, there—”

  Valarda … so that was her name? It suited her well, that name. In the High Tongue it meant “Golden

  Bells.”…

  Ryker shook his head as if to clear his mind of distracting thoughts. It was time to think swiftly, and to act even more swiftly.

  ‘ ‘They will have crept back to see if we are still in the square,” he said. “Probably by going over the rooftops. At any rate, they will have seen the broken screen by now. They will know that we got away through the balcony. They may even be in the house by this time. We must—”

  “The cellar!” the girl said, sharply, in the manner of one who has just remembered something.

  “Eh?”

  “The crypts,” she said impatiently. “There will be a grating beneath the house leading into the old sewer tunnels! The houses in this quarter are old enough to have been built over the sewers which once drained into the ancient seas. We can follow the tunnels beneath the bazaar, and reach the Gate of the Dragons that way!”

  “But how will we know which way to—” Ryker started to ask bewilderedly, then closed his lips to the unspoken question. He had forgotten that he was in the company, not of men like himself, but of three of the People. And the People have from of old an uncanny sense of direction that never falters or betrays them.

  The girl now took the lead in some unspoken way that even Ryker did not pause to question. She whipped off her black silk mask impatiently, as if it were no longer needed. Then, followed by the boy and the old man, with Ryker blundering along in the rear, she searched until she found a low door which led down beneath the street level into the crypts and vaults which were commonly built under native houses as ancient as this one.

  Ryker followed, but without enthusiasm. They told unpleasant tales of the old crypts beneath the houses in this ancient quarter, and of unwholesome things that squirmed and slithered through the black, foul darkness of the tunnels below this part of the city. They were unhealthy, those black tunnels that had been burrowed underneath the cities of Mars before his Earthling ancestors had entered into the Stone Age.

  But he had little choice but to follow after Valarda and her companions, if he wanted to live out this night.

  For the priests had aroused the mob again, it seemed, and had fanned back into fierce existence that hot red thirst to kill. As he went stumbling down the worn stone steps that led down and down into the black depths beneath the house, he could hear them howling down the hollow canyon of the street, and the thud of the first blows against the tall and narrow door of ancient metal echoed and reechoed after them.

  He had stifled the mob’s thirst for murder once that night, with the bright fury of his guns. But the trick would

  not work a second time, he knew. For now the faceless shadows that howled down the night-dark streets and hunted them would be armed with swords and knives, and with those tubelike dart guns with which the People were Mich deadly and unerring marksmen.

  4. Beyond the Dragon Gate

  Of their nightmarish journey through the foul and low-roofed tunnels, Ryker could remember but little in the aftertimes. The stone floor underfoot was slick, worn smooth by the passage of waters which had rushed down the black throat of these sewers on their way to join oceans that were legends a million years before Egypt.

  No waters rushed here now, but there was moisture, of a sort, enough to sustain mould and lichen and sprouting, tubular fungus. These flaccid growths squelched unpleasantly underfoot, and his boots crushed them to a vile stinking slime as he blundered down the black passages, half-bent to avoid scraping his head against the low curve of the roof.

  It had not been hard to locate the entrance to the labyrinth of underground tunnels. The door to the crypts they barred with a massive length of heavy iron which leaned against a wall at the head of the stairway, conveniently at hand for that very purpose, perhaps.

  The boy had found the barred grating in a corner of the crypts. It had rusted into place over the ages, and it required a bolt from Ryker’s guns—the focus narrowed to needle-beam width—to loosen it. The boy’s name was Kiki, it seemed. The old man’s name was Melandron or so the girl called him.

  Once they had lowered themselves down through the floor grating and dropped to the floor of the tunnelways below, they found themselves in an unlighted gloom so completely impenetrable that, to Ryker, it was like being struck totally blind.

  Luckily, the natives of Mars, who trace the descent of i heir race from a quadrupedal feline shaped by the Gods into manlike form and by Them ensouled, inherit from this legendary First Ancestor the very catlike ability to see in the dark. Ryker could not have traversed the black labyrinth with any speed at all, alone. The boy, Kiki, shrilling an impolite word of abuse, impatiently came scrambling back for the Earthling, seized him by the hand, and led him into the black gloom at a breakneck pace.

  The hand was small and strong and calloused and very dirty. But without it, Ryker could not have moved afoot through the darkness without feeling every inch of the way.

  He was very grateful they were taking him with them, instead of abandoning him and leaving him behind to his own
fate.

  It did not occur to Ryker, until very long after, to wonder why they bothered to bring him along at all… .

  After what seemed to Ryker like interminable hours of crawling through the pitch-black tunnels, but which was more likely well under an hour’s time, the girl imperiously called a halt.

  At intervals, the low tunnel roof was broken by a circular opening which gave upon a vertical shaft. These shafts were like the one through which they had entered the underground tunnel system in the first place. They gave forth upon the cryptlike spaces beneath the houses, and sometimes they led to the surface of the street itself, where thin plates of metal covered them, like manhole covers in the streets of Earth.

  To ascend the vertical shaft was harder than going down

  into one, as Ryker found when Valarda halted their progress. You had to brace your feet against one side of the shaft and press your back and shoulders against the opposite side, then inch your way up. There was no other way to do it, because there were neither handholds nor footholds.

  Ryker inched his way up the shaft first, and broke the seal which held the plate in place with one heave of his burly shoulders. Climbing out, he discovered himself to. be just within the, black mouth of a narrow and high-walled alley, very near the house of Yammak. He stretched out flat on his belly and reached down with one arm to clasp the boy’s hand. Kiki came scrambling up like a monkey to squat on his little bottom, watching Ryker with bright, amused, malicious eyes as he helped the old man, Melandron, to the street.

  As for Valarda, she again ignored the assistance of his hand, and climbed the shaft swiftly and easily, her fingers and bare, wriggling toes finding holds he could have sworn were not there.

  They made their way to the house of Yammak without encountering anyone. The night was dark and clear, the stars blazing like an emperor’s ransom in diamonds flung out upon black velvet. The twin moons of Mars were both aloft by this hour, which was near to dawn, but were virtually invisible in the sky. Even under the best of conditions, it was difficult to find the two moons with the unaided eye, due to their small size and low albedo.

  Yammak was at home, and in his present mood Ryker found it easy to gain his cooperation. Whether it was his memory of old favors still unrepaid, or the cold glint in Ryker’s eyes and the way his hard fingers brushed his gun butts, Yammak proved eager to help them on their way. While his woman gathered food and drink and found

  sleeping furs and other necessities for them, Yammak escorted Ryker and Valarda to the slidar pens in the back, where they selected steeds. It was decided that Ryker and Valarda would ride separately mounted, while old Melandron and the boy shared a third beast, with a fourth to serve as pack animal.

  Well before moonset the four brutes were saddled and provisioned, and the little party slunk out through the open and unguarded gate between the two stone dragons which so markedly resembled the great saurians that had prowled the murky, steaming fens of Earth’s forgotten Mesozoic.

  A purse of gold had changed hands, but Ryker depended on more than gold to seal the lips of Yammak. For the fat, beardless, voluble little man had recognized the three who accompanied the Earthling. He had sucked in his breath between discolored teeth at his first good look at them, and his eyes had gone round and frightened.

  Oh, he would keep his mouth shut, would Yammak the slidar trader! For if he dared so much as to hint that it had been he who had helped the three zhaggua to elude their hunters and to escape into the Dustlands, those who hunted them would close the mouth of Yammak forever.

  Among the many things he hated about Mars, Ryker most of all hated slidars.

  The rangy, splayfooted, ungainly beasts were four footed, but there all resemblance to horses ended. They were reptilian, of course—Mars has hardly any mammals and no birds or insects, other than lice—and the crimson, snake-tailed creatures move with a shambling, splayfooted, loose-jointed stride that is peculiarly uncomfortable.

  It is not for nothing that the gaunt, big-shouldered, ill-tempered brutes are named slidars. The word means

  “lopers” in the Tongue; and lope they do, with an ambling, jolting rhythm more like that of a fat, stumbling hound dog than anything else on four feet.

  Ryker, however, gritted his teeth and clung to the saddle horn and gave the brute its head, allowing it to make all possible speed. He did not begin to breathe easily, or rein the beast in to a more comfortable trot until the last lights of Yeolarn had died behind them in the dark.

  Then, and only then, did he slow their advance and begin to consider where they might go.

  Yeolarn is the northernmost of the Earth colonies, and sits smack on the 250th Meridian in the center of the Thoana Palus. It is at least eleven hundred miles from Syrtis Port, which is the nearest colony to it, and to the north illimitable empty wastes of Dustland and dead rocky plateaux stretch to the Pole itself.

  When they rode out of the Dragon Gate, they had headed due north, Ryker knew. They were now in one of the talcum-soft desert regions called “Dustlands,” an empty space on the map which the old Earth astronomers had filled in with the name Aetheria. Due east was an even broader expanse of powdery desert called Cebrenia, which stretched on for twelve hundred miles or so before the mesalike bulk of Propontis rose to block the way.

  West, however, they would only have to ride three hundred miles or less to reach the low, rocky hills of Alcyonius Nodus. There, at least, they could find shelter in the caves which the tides of ancient oceans had cut into the cliffs which had once been the coastline of an old continent. And, perhaps, they could find food as well.

  He turned to his companions to suggest this, but decided to delay the question until morning, now not long away. For the night had been long and busy. None of them

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  had enjoyed any sleep, and precious little rest, and they were all wearied from their exertions. Indeed, the old man swayed weakly in the saddle, and the girl sat her mount with head low, shoulders bent, slumped dispiritedly.

  “Let’s dismount here, have something to eat, and snatch a few hours sleep,” he suggested.

  The girl looked up quickly, her golden eyes filled with fear.

  “Is it safe? Perhaps we are pursued—”

  Ryker shook his head.

  “They’ll have found where we entered the sewers, having broken down the cellar door by now, surely,” he grunted. “But there’s no way they can tell which way we went, or where we came up to the street. Those sewers run for miles and miles, and I replaced the plate that sealed the street exit. And Yammak will not talk.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  He grinned, wolfishly, and explained. The girl nodded wearily, satisfied, and got down from her slidar.

  Wrapped in the warm cloaks supplied by Yammak’s woman, they hungrily devoured cold sliced meat, dry bread and preserved jellies, washed down by a frugal swallow of red wine.

  They slept that night like the dead, huddled together for warmth.

  The air of Mars is thin, and cold, and dry. So dry that it sucks the moisture from your tissues, and so cold that it makes the air atop Everest humid by comparison. And so thin, so oxygen starved, that it is-hardly enough to sustain life.

  Indeed, when the first Earthsider colonists and explorers came they muffled themselves within airsuits and wore

  pressure masks, and domed their towns with plastic bubbles. But soon the men of science set to work upon the problem. Earthsiders would never have more than a toehold on this world if they must wear suits and masks in order to live. Since Mars was too vast by far to be terraformed, men themselves were forced to become acclimated.

  The first clue came from the Martians themselves. They were warm-blooded hominids of obvious mammalian descent—human to a dozen decimal places—and, somehow or other, they managed to survive.

  Biochemists, studying the natives, found out how nature had adapted them to survival under these conditions, and, in time, learned how to modify the body chemistry of
the colonists to conform to this harsh environment. The series of operations was expensive, and permanent, but Ryker was damn glad he had bought them. Otherwise, he could not have lasted long in the Dustlands, away from the domed cities of his kind.

  But even with his body chemistry adapted to Mars, some precautions were necessary. The thermals he wore were of tough, wear-resistant synthetic, and helped retain his body heat. The pressure still he should have brought with him, and would have, had he known in advance he was in for some overland travel, would have squeezed enough moisture from the rubbery plants that carpeted the so-called “canals” to sustain him without dangerous dehydration.

  Lacking it, he was in trouble.

  This did not become evident until morning, when he woke to find his throat and the inside of his mouth as dry as blotting paper, and an ache in his sinuses that presaged difficulties to come. A swig or two from his canteen helped, but the water it held would not last for long.

  They mounted and rode out.

  Valarda and her companions, being natives, did not feel the lack of water as badly as Ryker did. Over the millions of years since Mars first lost her oceans and began to dry up, evolution had adapted the Martians to a lesser need for moisture and an ability to retain moisture superior to that of Earthsider bodies. For instance, Martians do not perspire Also, their glands produce epidermal oils which tend to seal body moisture within, preventing its evaporation.

  Still, in time they would all need fresh water, or they would begin to die that most horrible of all deaths—death through dehydration.

  All that day they rode on, heading almost due northwest, for in the Dustlands it is usually possible to travel in straight lines—“as the crow flies,” an Earthsider might have put it—but the People have another expression which states the identical notion.

  Alcyonius Nodus would afford them shelter and, probably, food, as the crumbling ancient cliffs of the mesa provide shelter for other life forms beside man.