2 - Blades of Mars (7 page)

 
          
 
'What is it, do you know?' I said, passing the
spear to Hool Haji.

 
          
 
He pursed his lips. 'I have seen something
like it in my wanderings. It is like that of the Sheev, but not quite.' His
hand was not completely steady as he handed the spear back to me.

 
          
 
'Then what is it?' I asked, somewhat impatiently.

 
          
 
'It is -'

 
          
 
Then there came a chilling sound. It was high
and preternatural - a kind of whisper which echoed through the chambers. It
came from beyond the chamber in which we stood - from deep within the
underground complex.

 
          
 
It was one of the vilest sounds I have heard
in my life. It seemed to confirm
Bac
Puri's
half-insane speculation of some supernatural residents of the place. Suddenly,
from being a refuge, the underground chamber became a place full of fear - and
a terror which was hard to control.

 
          
 
My first impulse was to fleet - and, indeed,
Bac
Puri was already inching towards the door through which
we'd come. The others were less decisive but evidently they shared my feelings.

 
          
 
I laughed - or attempted to, the result being
a kind of mirthless croak - and said: 'Come now - this is an ancient place. The
sound could be made by some animal that inhabits the ruins; it could have its
cause in machinery, or even the wind passing through the
chambers
..
.'

 
          
 
I did not believe a word I said and neither
did they.

 
          
 
I changed my approach. 'Well,' I said with a
shrug, 'what shall we do? Risk a danger that my be no danger at all, or go to
certain death in the desert? It will be a slow death.'

 
          
 
Bac Puri paused. Some remnant of his earlier
strength of character must have come to his assistance. He squared his
shoulders and rejoined us.

 
          
 
I strode past the skeleton and pressed the
stud to open the next door.

 
          
 
The door opened smoothly this time and I
quickly found the next stud to illuminate the third chamber. This one was
bigger.

 
          
 
In a sense it comforted me, for it was full of
machinery. Of course, I did not recognise the function of the machines, but the
thought that some high intelligence must have created them was comforting in
itself. As a scientist, I could appreciate the workmanship alone. This was the
work of ordinary, intelligent men - it had not been created by any supernatural
being.

 
          
 
If inhabitants still lived in this honeycombe
of chambers then they would be folk to whom logic would appeal. Perhaps they
would bear us some animosity, perhaps they would possess superior weapons - but
at least they would be a tangible foe.

 
          
 
So I thought.

 
          
 
I should have realised that there was a flaw
in the argument which I so rationally gave to myself to quiet my feelings of
disturbance.

 
          
 
I should have realised that the sound I had
heard was animal in origin and malevolent in content. There had been no spark
of true intelligence in it.

 
          
 
We moved on, chamber by chamber, discovering
more machines and great lockers of materials; cloth not unlike parachute silk;
containers of gas and chemicals; strong reels of cord similar to nylon cord but
even stronger, laboratory equipment used in experiments with chemicals,
electronics and the like; parts of machines, things that were obviously power
units of some kind.

 
          
 
The further in to the great complex of
chambers we moved, the less ordered were the things we found. They were neatly
stacked and positioned in the earlier chambers, but in the later ones containers
had been overturned, lockers opened and their contents strewn about. Had the
place been visited by looters, represented by the dead man in the second
chamber?

 
          
 
I don't know which chamber it was - perhaps
the thirtieth - which I opened in the usual way. I reached in my hand to press
the light stud - and felt something soft and damp touch my skin. It was a
horrible touch. With a gasp I withdrew my hand and turned to tell my companions
of what had happened.

 
          
 
The first thing I saw was
Bac
Puri's face, eyes wide and full of terror.

 
          
 
He was pointing into the chamber. A strangled
sound escaped his throat. He dropped his hand and fumbled for his sword.

 
          
 
The others' hands also went to their swords.

 
          
 
I turned back - and saw them.

 
          
 
White shapes.

 
          
 
Perhaps they had once been human.

 
          
 
They were human no longer.

 
          
 
With a feeling of mingled horror and
desperation, I too drew my sword, feeling that no ordinary weapon could
possibly defend me against the apparitions that moved towards us out of the
darkness.

The Once-were-men

 
          
 
Bac PuRi did not flee this time.

 
          
 
His face worked in a peculiar contortion. He
took half a step backwards and then, before we could stop him, flung himself
into the darkened chamber, straight at the corpse-white creatures!

 
          
 
They gibbered and fell back for a moment, a
terrible twittering noise, like that of thousands of bats, filling the air and
echoing on and on through the complex of chambers.

 
          
 
Bac Puri's sword swung to left and right, up
and down, slicing off limbs, stabbing vitals, piercing the unnaturally soft,
clammy bodies.

 
          
 
And then he was, as if by magic, a mass of
spears. He howled in his pain and madness as javelins like the one we had seen
earlier appeared in every part of his body until it was almost impossible to
distinguish the man beneath.

 
          
 
He fell with a crash.

 
          
 
Seeing the creatures were at least mortal, I
decided we should take advantage of
Bac
Puri's mad
attack and, waving my sword, I leapt through the entrance, shouting:

 
          
 
'Come - they can be slain!'

 
          
 
They could be slain, but they were elusive
creatures and sight and feel of them brought physical revulsion. With the
others behind me, I carried the attack to them and soon found myself in a
tangle of soft, yielding flesh that seemed boneless.

 
          
 
And the faces! They were vile parodies of
human faces and again resembled nothing quite so much as the ugly little
vampire bat of Earth. Flat faces with huge nostrils let into the head, gashes
of mouths full of sharp little fangs, half-blind eyes, dark and wicked - and
insensate.

 
          
 
As I fought their claws, their sharp teeth and
their spears, they slithered about, gibbering and twittering.

 
          
 
I had been wrong about them. There was not a
trace of intelligence in their faces - just a demoniac blood-hunger, a dark
malevolence that hated, hated, hated - but never reasoned.

 
          
 
My companions and I stood shoulder to
shoulder, back to back, as the things tore at us.

 
          
 
When we saw that our heavy swords could affect
them -and had in fact already despatched dozens of them - our spirits rose.

 
          
 
At length the ghouls turned and fled, leaving
only the wounded flopping on the floor. We slew these. There was nothing else
we could do.

 
          
 
We attempted to follow them through the far
door, but it closed swiftly and, when we opened it, the creatures had passed on
through the complex.

 
          
 
The light stud worked and showed us the dead
creatures better.

 
          
 
Bac Puri, in his madness, had undoubtedly
helped save our lives. In attacking the creatures he had taken most of their
javelins into his body.

 
          
 
These inhabitants of the underground complex
were slightly smaller than me and seemed, though this was incredible, to
possess hardly any skeleton at all. Our weapons had sliced through flesh and
muscle, had drawn blood - if the thin yellow stuff that stained our blades could
be called blood - but had met no resistance from bone.

 
          
 
Steeling myself to inspect the corpses closer,
I saw that there was a skeleton of sorts but the bones were so thin and brittle
that they resembled fine, ivory wires.

 
          
 
What strange, aberrant branch of the
evolutionary tree did these creatures spring from?

 
          
 
I turned to Hool Haji.

 
          
 
'What race is this?' I asked. ‘I think you had
guessed earlier.'

 
          
 
'Not the Sheev,' he said with a faint, ironic
grimace. 'Nor the Yaksha, either - and I suspected that it was the Yaksha
before I saw them. These pitiful things are no real threat, unless it
be
to the mind!'

 
          
 
'So you thought they were a race called the
Yaksha -why?'

 
          
 
'Because the language on
their spears and on their instruments and cabinets is the written language of
the Yaksha.'

 
          
 
'Who are the Yaksha? I seem to remember you
mentioning them.'

 
          
 
‘Are? Perhaps
were is
a better word, for they still exist only in rumour and superstitious
speculation. They are cousins of the Sheev. Do you not remember me telling you
about them when we first met?'

 
          
 
Now it came back! Of course - the elder race
who had seduced the Argzoon away from Mendishar in the first place, during the
war the Martians called the Mightiest War.

 
          
 
‘I think these must be descendants of the
Yaksha, however,' Hool Haji continued, 'for they bear slight similarities to
that race, if I was told aright. They have probably existed down here for
countless centuries, somehow remembering - in ritual form, doubtless - to keep
the machinery running and defend the place against outsiders. Bit by bit they
lost all intelligence and - you will notice - seem to prefer darkness to fight,
although light is available to them. It is a fitting fate for the remnants of
an evil race.'

 
          
 
I shuddered. I could sympathise in my own way
with the creatures that had once been men.

 
          
 
Then another thought struck me.

 
          
 
'Well,' I said, somewhat more cheerfully,
'whatever they are biologically, they must have need of water. That means that
somewhere here we shall soon find what we need.'

 
          
 
Our need seemed to have diminished with the
finding of the underground chambers, but the fight had weakened us further and
water was our prime necessity.

 
          
 
Warily, but with more confidence that we could
meet and defeat any of the white creatures that attacked us, we moved on until
we entered a chamber larger than the rest through which a little natural light
filtered!

 
          
 
Looking up I saw that the fight seemed to come
through a domed roof, much higher than the roofs of most of the chambers we had
passed through. Sand had filtered in through some cracks in this roof, but the
floor was not deep in the stuff.

 
          
 
And then I heard it!

 
          
 
A tinkling sound, a
splashing sound.
At first I thought ^°^ that thirst had driven me mad
but then, as my eyes grew better accustomed to the gloom, I saw it - a fountain
in the centre of the chamber. A large pool of cool water!

 
          
 
We moved forward and tasted the stuff
cautiously before drinking. It was pure and fresh.

 
          
 
We drank sparingly, wetting our bodies all
over whilst we took turns to stand guard against any possible attack from the
local residents!

 
          
 
Refreshed and in good spirits, we filled our
belt canteens. The stopper of mine was stuck, clogged by the dust. I took the
little skinning knife from the right-hand side of my harness - a knife which
every blue Martian carries. It is half hidden in the decoration of the leather
so that, if captured by an enemy, that enemy might overlook the knife and give
the captured warrior a chance to escape. I worked the stopper loose,
then
returned the knife to its hidden sheath in my harness.

 
          
 
What now?

 
          
 
We had no inclination to explore the remaining
chambers. We had seen enough for the moment. We took the precaution, however,
of going to the far door through which the white things had doubtless fled, and
blocked it as best we could with sand and loose masonry.

 
          
 
I next discovered a ladder consisting of rungs
let into the wall and leading up towards the roof where a narrow gallery ran
around the chamber, at the point where the dome began. I climbed this ladder
and climbed on to the gallery. It was just large enough to take me and had
evidently been intended simply for the use of workmen either repairing or
decorating the dome.

 
          
 
The dome was not made of the same durable
synthetic material as the rest of the place. I put my eye to a crack and looked
out over a seemingly endless expanse of black desert, shining now, like
crystal, in the sun. The dome seemed half buried and was probably all but
invisible from outside.

 
          
 
A piece of the material came away in my hand.
It was in an advanced stage of corrosion and would soon collapse altogether. It
was transparent - evidently designed to admit light into the chamber of the
fountain. Probably the place had been the central hall for relaxing when the
Yaksha had been sane and human. The dome had not been planned for 182 any
purely functional purpose so much as for decoration. This must be why it would
soon collapse. When it did the sand would come in, the fountain would be
blocked, and I did not think the inhabitants of the underground city would have
the intelligence to clear the sand away - or, for that matter, repair the dome.

 
          
 
Repairs had been made earlier in the roof, but
I guessed by more intelligent ancestors of the present dwellers.

 
          
 
I returned to the ground, an idea slowly
taking shape in my mind.

 
          
 
At its base the dome was some thirty feet
across - ample space for a large object to pass through.

 
          
 
'Why are you looking so thoughtful, my
friend?' asked Hool Haji.

 
          
 
'I think I know a way of escape,' I said.

 
          
 
‘From this place?
We
need only retrace our steps.’

 
          
 
‘Or break through the roof, for that matter,'
I said, pointing upwards. 'It is very flimsy - eroded from the outside by the
sand. But I meant escape from our main predicament - escape from the desert.'

 
          
 
'Have you found a map somewhere?'

 
          
 
'No, but I have found many other things. All
the artifacts of a great scientific culture - strong, airtight fabric, cord - gas
containers. I hope they still contain gas and that it is the kind I need.'

 
          
 
Hool Haji was completely mystified.

 
          
 
I smiled. The others were now looking at me as
if I had followed
Bac
Pun's example and was losing
control of my mind.

 
          
 
'It was the dome gave me the idea, for some
reason,' I said. 'It struck me that if we had a - flying ship we could cross
the desert in no time.'