Lin Carter - The City Outside the World (13 page)

"He affords no threat to us," the priest said. "Surely, you have warriors enough to watch over him. And we may have need for the Accursed One later."

"What need is that?" asked Houm. "We have the stone. We have everything we require, with it."

Dmu Dran looked at him sleepily.

' 'And what if the stone does not work, when we employ it?" he asked tonelessly. "What if the hands of Ryker slipped—or wearied—or cut a shade too deep, or too shallow? If we slay the creature now, we cannot use his mind again, should we need it. Better to keep him alive for

the time, until the door is unlocked and Zhiam lies open ? before us."

Zarouk stood up. "I think the priest is right," he said curtly. "We may have to search the mind of Ryker again, j and deeper than before. Perhaps the stone does not quite| fit, and is not shaped quite properly. Then we can search his memories again—and many times, if needful. Let him live. Xinga, return this offal to its place."

The burly lieutenant touched his palm to the smooth flesh above his heart. Then, stooping, he picked up the unconscious Earthling and tossed him over one broad shoulder like a sack of meal and bore him from the tent.

It was daylight when Ryker awoke. He lay on the floor of one of the wains, which creaked along over the desert dunes. The old savant was there beside him, his fine brow furrowed with care, his gentle eyes worried.

"So, how are you feeling?"

"Like death warmed over, Doc," grunted Ryker, try- j ing to sit up. His tongue felt like burnt leather, and tasted like it, too. His brain was dull, his thoughts sluggish, and he had a headache of champion proportions. But that was as nothing compared to the stiff lameness of his hands and arms. He flexed his fingers, wincing.

"A little massage, maybe," the old man suggested. He began to rub the stiffness from Ryker's aching arms, > kneading the weary muscles with surprisingly strong fingers. Later, he gave the big man some powder in a drink of wine that relaxed him and soothed his headache.

After a time, Ryker dozed off. He had not been entirely certain he would ever awaken after cutting the replica of the Keystone for the conspirators. Since they
had
let him live afterwards, he assumed they still had some use for him. So he slept easy, without fears.

When he awoke again it was midday according to the ehrono on his wrist. But not like any Martian noon he had ever witnessed before, the dim, weak sun riding low on I he horizon to the south, the zenith of heaven black as midnight. They were a lot closer to the pole, he knew, and the wind was cold and dry with an edge that bit into his bones like the blade of a razor.

He shuddered, pulling his cloak of
orthava
furs about him more closely.

Herzog was huddled over his notebook,
scribbling,
scribbling, and peering nearsightedly at the page.

"Where are we, do you know, Doc?" he muttered.

The old man looked up, and grinned. He had a beautiful smile, despite his ugly face. It was the gentle, open, wondering smile of a little child, naive and vulnerable.

"Awake again, is it? Feeling better now, I hope?"

"Yeah. Where are we?"

"Smack in the middle of the Umbra, my boy. Exactly on the line—-north latitude fifty-five degrees, one minute, if I read the stars right, and I think I do. Those hills up ahead to the north are Copais Palus, the border of Ce-cropia. I never in all my days have been this close to the pole, how about you?"

Ryker shook his head, and it turned into a shiver that shook him from head to foot.

"Me, neither," he growled. "And any closer than this, I got a feeling I don't want to get. Say, is there anything to eat?"

They soon made camp for the night, the drovers maneuvering the beasts, drawing the wagons into a huge half circle. There was no particular reason for this, since no dangerous predators were believed to be able to survive this far into the frostlands. But Houm did not believe in

taking unnecessary chances, and since this was the way caravans were always arranged in formation for the night, save in a town, he saw no reason to change the customary way of doing things.

Besides, it was not entirely impossible that the Lost Nation had scouts or sentries watching the outskirts of Zhiam. Surely, if Valarda and her accomplices had reached Zhiam by now, as they undoubtedly had, the devil warriors would be warned of the possible approach of enemies. A night attack was far from impossible. So Zarouk bade Xinga post guards about the perimeter and commanded that they should be on the alert for anything.

They ate that night under the weird banner of the aurora. Flickering, wavering banners of ghostly fire glowed against the gloom of the north. The desert men mumbled half-forgotten prayers, signing themselves with holy signs that were supposed to keep the devils away, and that night each man had a pan of green fire near him as he slept.

Doc Herzog, however, was enthralled. He had known that Mars was presumed to have its own equivalent of Earth's famous "northern lights," but had never before seen them for himself, having only heard the tales the travelers told. Long after Ryker turned in, the old savant still sat up, staring at the sky and making notes.

14. The Sphinx of Mars

The next day
they came at last within sight of their goal. It was clearly visible a long way off, like a mountain. But this was no mountain. Perhaps, once, long ago, it had been an immense outcropping of pure mineral, thrust up from the bowels of the planet by the action of geological forces. Or—again, just possibly—it had been an enormous meteorite, or a small asteroid, drawn down to the surface of Mars by gravitational forces.

Whatever it once had been, it was now like nothing that any of them had ever seen.

The explorers and scientists who had come here after Christoffsen had seen it first from the air. Foil-winged skimmers, as the flimsy aircraft are called, are the only craft that can sustain themselves aloft in the thin atmosphere of Mars. With them, Exploration Teams One through Seven had circumnavigated Mars, photomapping the terrain with continuously operating cameras. Later, specialists had constructed a mosaic from these band segments. Then it had been discovered.

The Sphinx of Mars,
the stereovision newscasters had named it back Earthside. No other name was conceivable for the stone enigma. Like that other Sphinx—aeons younger, and not very much larger, and only a little less mysterious—the Sphinx of Mars, too, crouches amidst the waste, hewn anciently into the likeness of a gigantic beast.

But, where the Sphinx of Egypt resembles a human

headed lion, its elder sister near the north pole of Mars is shaped like a crouching insect-thing.

The Pteraton (as it is most accurately named) is a creature from the mythology of the Martians, and could never have been copied from life. The twelve-legged insect, with its four, folded dragonfly wings, fanged mandibles, pear-shaped casque of a head, and three domed compound eyes, is an impossible beast drawn from fancy. Flying insects, in any case, never existed on Mars, as the fossil record demonstrates, and no true insect ever had twelve legs and triplex eyes.

No, the stone enigma of the Pteraton is a beast of fable, even as the woman-headed Sphinx has its origins in fable. Outside of body lice, and the foot-long roachlike subterranean scavengers called
xunga,
who infest certain of the Southland caverns, insects are unknown on Mars. So any vague, distorted resemblance the stone monster bears to a cross between ant, dragonfly, spider and grasshopper— improbably and monstrously rolled into one—is a testimony to the inventive imagination of the mythographers of prehistoric Mars.

The thing cast an eerie pall upon their spirits, however.

The stone whereof it had been carved was a black crystalloid like jet, also in a way like quartz, and hard as basalt. It glittered weirdly in the dying light, and the geometrical facets of its three hemispheric eyes caught and held the sun-dazzle. It seemed to stare at them with fathomless eyes, its ugly, bony jaws fixed in a grin of menace.

It was uncanny. Ryker had seen depth photos of the Pteraton many times. But the reality was awesome, even intimidating, while the pictures had only been quaint and curious.

The beasts did not like it here, he noticed.

Generally,
slidars
are either restive and quarrelsome, or phlegmatic and stolid. Now, in the presence of that mountainous sculptured monster that loomed up before them like some black, alien god from the depths of time, they shied, clawed at the ground, uttering that ear-piercing squeal that is the loper's equivalent of a stallion's nervous whinny.

"Here we make camp," said Zarouk, swinging down from the saddle.

Their food supplies were running low, for the desert trip had been somewhat lengthier than they had presumed it might be. While some of the men put up tents and others drew the wains into position, Xinga dispatched certain of his warriors into the waste to scavenge.

Martian warriors live off the land, and a first-class scrounger is a prized member of any war party. Even a pack of desert marauders like Zarouk's band could not carry sufficient stores with them on their forays, and were forced to hunt for food.

But there was no food to be had here in the Umbra, where nothing lived or could live.

"We'd best be to it, then, and swiftly," muttered Raith, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the crouching stone beast. The whites of his eyes showed, and he licked bearded lips uneasily. Raith was as superstitious as any other ignorant barbarian, but braver and tougher than many. Even he, Ryker noticed, kept glancing quickly at the mountainous black crystal, as if at any moment he expected it to . . .
move.

"Yeah," Ryker nodded. "If we don't get to Zhiam soon, we'll starve here. Unless we run out of wine or water first, that is."

The warrior swore under his breath, and tugged the

thongs. Together, without speaking further, they raised the tent on its collapsable poles. Then Raith strode off, shoulders hunched against the cold, unwinking gaze of the crouching monster.

Ryker looked after him, thoughtfully. He knew Raith better than any of the other desert men, for a bond of unacknowledged comradeship had grown between them from the moment he had ended the hazing by knocking Raith down.

Like many another strong man, Raith admired a man stronger than he. Neither said anything much about it, but they were as close to being friends as a
F'yagh
and a warrior of the People can become.

And Ryker knew Raith well, liked him, trusted him in certain ways, and respected him more than a little. He was a good man, and better than most in Zarouk's band.

And if Raith—even Raith—was this jumpy, this edgy, so early on, then Zarouk was going to be in trouble before long, Ryker realized. At the thought he showed his white teeth in a hard grin that had little humor in it.

Zarouk had to find Zhiam soon. If he didn't pull off a miracle, his own men would mutiny on him.

The notion pleased Ryker. He chuckled over it all the way back to where his steed crouched restive and nervous, waiting to be unsaddled.

Zarouk and his men circled the stone monument, looking for an entrance of some sort. With spear butts they tested the sides of the statue, listening for the echo that would reveal that here, at least, the monument was hollow.

Cracks or pits in the surface, where regular or aligned, they tried to pry open with the points of their knife blades, searching for a secret door.

Here and there, at intervals around the circuit of the

stone monster, they dug pits, thinking that the entrance might be buried in the dust.

They found nothing at all.

Under the fires of sunset, and, later, under the incredibly lavish brilliance of the stars, and the uncanny witch-fires of the quivering aurora, they searched on.

Ryker and the scientist watched them for a while.

He had shared with Doc his idea that Zhiam might be situated in an enormous cavern under the Sphinx. Herzog did not seem to take his theory with any particular seriousness.

"Why under the Sphinx, of all places?"

"I dunno," Ryker muttered. "Cause that's where Zarouk's been heading, all this while. Seems he thinks the monument marks the entrance to Zhiam. Well, there's nothing around here for kilometers, except rock and dust. So it
must
be underground, if there's any such place as Zhiam."

Doc mused, tilting his head on one side, looking down at the ground. He kicked against a rock absently, then knelt and fingered a handful of soil. Then, shaking his head, he got to his feet again, dusting off his hands.

"Sandstone," he muttered to himself. "Shale. Not going to be finding any caves in this stuff, my boy! Down south, why, sure. Igneous rock, volcanic origin. Pocket of gas trapped when the liquid stuff began to cool—"

"Yeah? What about erosion—underground rivers— that sort of thing," argued Ryker.

"Don't know any underground rivers on Mars," said Herzog positively. "Erosion, is it? The kind of stuff this ground has under it, you could erode forever, my boy, and any cavern you made would just crumble and fall in. Forget about underground caverns! If Zhiam is supposed to be here, and isn't here, then it's—somewhere else."