In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  “Tollamune! Tollamune!”

  “Perhaps, Faran sa-Yaji,” Teyud said, “Sh’u Maz shall become more than metaphorical once more.”

  The Thoughtful Grace mercenary went as rigid as Teyud, his face as blank despite the automatic skill that gentled his bird back into quivering stillness; the nomad chief’s rakza continued to prance for several moments, and the dust drifted towards them along with the hot, dry stink of disturbed bird and the dusty white droppings it shed in its agitation.

  “Ah,” Farad sa-Yaji said. “That is indeed remarkable.” A long pause. “It also increases the value of your head to a level metaphorically comparable to the top of the Mountain.”

  Teyud’s slight smile was cruel; when she spoke, it was to the silent nomad.

  “You saw, wasteland dweller.”

  “I saw,” he grunted, red-brown eyes wide. “We remember from the very long. We fear. We fear very much always.”

  “Then listen, and believe: If you attack me or mine here, your Lineage will die, to the seventh degree. So it is sworn by That Which Compels.”

  Faran sa-Yajir shot the nomad a quick glance, and his hand brushed his dart pistol. The inhuman visage of the chieftain wasn’t designed for showing emotion; Jeremy couldn’t tell if the tooth-baring grimace was anger or frustration or fear or amusement. The only question it definitely settled was that the nomads were designed to be meat eaters.

  “I hear,” he said, reaching out to touch the grounded lance. “We will attack neither you nor him who paid us. Not in this place, not this year.”

  Farad almost snarled with frustration; then his face smoothed, and he adopted a posture of rueful acknowledgment.

  “Atanj?” Teyud asked.

  “Excessively cerebral, in the present context,” Farad said. He gestured at the desolation that surrounded them. “I also confess to a degree of personal resentment.”

  “I concede there is neither soothing music, nor good incense or stimulating chilled essence to maximize the satisfaction of the Game of Life,” Teyud said. “Furthermore, the professional and the personal can never be entirely disassociated.”

  “Let death and the sword settle it, then.”

  Uh-oh, Jeremy thought, as Teyud slowly nodded.

  The nomad war party and the crew of the Traveler each formed a half of the circle around the flat patch of desert that had been agreed upon as the field of death. The four standard Martians who’d accompanied Faran sa-Yajir stood in a group around him; they looked ordinary enough, if you were referencing by a group who looked as though they’d started playing with knives at an unpleasantly early age and had been beaten up recently. He was giving them final instructions, speaking too quietly for observers to do more than watch his lips move.

  They don’t look happy. Well, if he loses, they’re alone with the nomads . . . that wouldn’t make me happy, either. I bleed for the bastards; I won’t say from where.

  It was an hour past noon, and the temperature was up to about fifty. Both the duellists had shed their outer robes to reveal loose, soft trousers and jackets of cloth colored a light-absorbing matte black; the coats lapped over like a karate gi, and were held closed by a sash, Teyud’s crimson, Faran’s dark blue. Both of them tucked their daggers into the backs of the sashes and took their sheathed swords in their left hands.

  “You’re going to beat this guy, correct?” Jeremy whispered, standing behind Teyud and to her right.

  He offered the canteen, and she took a slight sip and returned it. Without looking around, she replied:

  “That is, as you said, a toss-up. Faran sa-Yajir is slightly older than myself and probably equally skilled.”

  Then she turned her head, and met his eyes; hers held an odd warmth. “If I lose, shoot him.”

  “I would—but you’re not going to lose.”

  “This is an irrational statement implying an unlikely ability to anticipate event and randomness, but still oddly comforting,” she said.

  Then her head turned back, and he could see her body drop into complete focus; not tight or tense, but every nerve and tendon aware, the way a cat could see with its fur. She took three paces forward and went down on her right knee. Her hand went over and across, resting on the hilt of her sword beneath the elaborate guard. Faran sa-Yajir did the same, and his motions had an equal, daunting grace.

  There was a moment of thick silence, broken only by the low ghosting of the wind and the wistfully hopeful Eeeat? Killll? Eeeat? from a couple of the nomads’ mounts. Half a mile away, a dust devil towered into the sky like a bloodred tornado faded to ghost-thinness. The sky above was absolutely blue, looking as if it would bleed if you cut it, and the small sun was alone in it save for a few distant dots that were flying creatures; there was no sign of the airship they’d seen earlier. Pink dust drifted across the circle for a moment, outlining the two motionless figures.

  “Kill!” Baid tu-Or said.

  Ting!

  The swords touched, slithered, rasped apart before the flung scabbards struck the ground. Jeremy’s breath caught; Teyud was bleeding from a neat slice below one eye. The razor steel had kissed the skin just enough to part it, and a slow red trickle dripped down her cheek, like a tear. It stopped as they circled, eyes cool and intent.

  Ting! Clang-tang!

  Jeremy’s eyes went wide. Faran had tried envelopment in low line, usually suicide against a good opponent. He’d nearly brought it off, though; Teyud had saved herself only with a lightning whirl and disengage.

  Damn, he’s good. They both are. She’s doing better now than she ever did when we fenced, and it’s just barely enough.

  Their feet scrunched on the sand, and steel rang on steel; the deadly fascination of it gripped him, almost as strong as his fear—swordplay on this level was impossible to follow unless you were an initiate yourself. Faran made a double attack—stepping in with a feint, and then disengaging for the lunge. Jeremy would have tried for a stop-hit on the sword arm there, but that was a fencer’s reflex, not a duellist’s; Teyud had been right to use a simple parry. It was one of those things that was possible to see only in retrospect; he briefly wondered how she’d known it was a trap.

  He’d noticed how Teyud had an astonishing ability to sense where the points were by feel alone while they sparred. She did; unfortunately, it seemed that Faran did, too. Possibly it was a Thoughtful Grace thing.

  They were motionless again, nothing but the controlled rise and fall of their chests showing they were alive. Then Faran was moving, a running attack en flèche. Teyud parried and riposted in the same motion, the speed so great it wasn’t even a blur, looking like a short smooth tap-and-strike instead.

  Jeremy felt himself making a mooing sound of eagerness, willing the long blade into flesh, then groaned in disappointment as Faran parried in prime while still extended; almost impossible, but he did it, knocking her blade out of line, then lunged with a cutover.

  He went rigid; that was impossible, but now it was impossible to dodge or block. Yet the blade only scored across Teyud’s left shoulder, as she dove under the attack, throwing herself down and forward with one hand on the ground.

  Passata sotto! he thought exultantly. I showed her that!

  Faran’s sword froze. He looked down slowly, to where Teyud’s blade transfixed him from just above the navel to just below the ribs to the right of his spine. His face was gray with shock, but showed no pain as he crumpled back off the steel. The black jacket and the sash held back the gout of blood for an instant; then it came, and he crumpled, bleeding also from the corner of his mouth. The sword must have nicked his lung as well.

  He sank backward slowly as Teyud came back to her feet, blood running down her left arm. Then he rallied for an instant, and sank down on one knee.

  “Supremacy,” he gasped, bowing his head over a fist pressed into the sand. “Rule well. Give Sh’u Maz to the Real World once more.”

  Then he collapsed; the crew of the Traveler set up a cry of “Tollamune!”


  The nomads raised an odd hissing clatter through their nasal slits that seemed to be their equivalent of applause, and waved their arms in the air with the hands flopping limply. Faran’s ex-employees simply looked at each other, shrugged, slung their dart rifles over their shoulders, and headed for the lines where the rakza were picketed.

  Teyud swayed slightly; Jeremy started forward, as did Baid tu-Or with the medical kit.

  It was the nomads’ mounts that gave warning. They all looked up at once, crouching backward and whipping their heads from side to side with their crests erect in a spray of red-bronze feathers. Their fluting screeches were machine-loud, terror and rage combined.

  “Paiteng!” one of the nomads shouted, and drew his bow to shoot an arrow upward.

  A javelin punched into his chest and he flopped over backward, clawing at the ground and the shaft in his ribs. Teyud dove at Jeremy’s knees and he went over backward himself, landing on the sand with a thud that on Earth would have knocked him breathless; here it was just emphatic, but he grimaced as some of her blood spattered into his face. His eyes were blurred with shock as something huge flashed over them.

  Then he saw what it was. Paiteng—shaped like an osprey, but with a body the size of a lion, feathers lemon yellow save for the black crest along its skull and a blue breast and belly, wings broader than an executive jet’s, and a mad, lime green gaze. And strapped into a saddle between its wings, a man in tight-fitting black, a goggled mask across his face and a dart rifle in his hands.

  The paiteng’s feet had been extended to grab at Teyud. She’d dodged just in time, and one giant claw closed on Baid tu-Or’s head instead. Then the wings beat like a roc’s in some tale of the Arabian Nights, and it was lifting skyward in a cloud of dust.

  The little engineer’s body stood upright for an instant by some trick of forces, blood fountaining from the stump of her neck. Then it flopped forward; the bird released the head and it bounced a dozen paces. Another beat of the massive wings and the paiteng was soaring upward in a blast of wind. Jeremy felt himself frozen in disbelief; there were more than a dozen of the flying predators up there, wheeling—eleven of them with riders, and two with empty saddles. The nomads and the landship’s crew were scrambling for weapons, some already shooting upward. The four who’d come with Faran were already mounted, riding at full tilt.

  A pair of the birds swooped to attack. The dart rifles of their riders spat, and one by one the fleeing mercenaries toppled to the sand, bouncing and landing limp as sacks. The rakza continued in a head-out race, their great feet flashing, and the paiteng wheeled around again.

  Teyud hissed between her teeth, her right hand clutching at her slashed left shoulder. That broke Jeremy’s paralysis; he scrambled three paces, caught the discarded medicine chest and brought it back to her in a slithering rush.

  “Get my harness and robe,” she said, reaching inside.

  A bandage crawled across the wound and bonded to her skin, holding the lips of the cut closed; she swallowed three egglike things from another tray and cracked a fourth between her teeth, sucking at the liquid within. The gray of shock and blood loss retreated from her face. He handed her the equipment and she scrambled into it; he helped her tuck her left arm through the sleeve, and then she thrust it into her belt for want of a sling.

  The robe was armor as well as clothing; it would stop most dart pistol needles, as well as some from the heavier rifles. It wouldn’t do anything against a sword or spear or knife, though. He began to catch her up and lift her toward the Traveler, but she shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “They will—”

  Something fell upon the landship from one of the paiteng riders, tumbling as it did. When it hit the deck, fire burst forth, orange and red; it spread with unnatural speed, doubly unnatural in this thin low-oxygen atmosphere. A dozen more packets of the same flame-stuff struck, and in seconds the ship was ablaze from prow to stern.

  A bird screeched as a shot from one of the ship’s crew struck it, then fell from the sky, wings fluttering, landing upside down and crushing its rider beneath it as it thrashed briefly in the death-fit. More javelins and darts rained down in response, and only one attacker was struck. Terran guns would have had trouble with those fast-moving targets; most of them were out of range of the nomads’ bows, and hard targets for the low-velocity dart rifles. Teyud’s lion-colored eyes were darting back and forth, lucid despite the pain of her wound; she straightened as the stimulants took hold.

  “There is something wrong here,” she said. “They are using javelins only on the nomads. And the ones struck by their darts are not convulsing.”

  One of the crewfolk lay limp nearby. She ran over to him, put her pistol down and felt his neck.

  “Unconscious!” she said. “They are using stun darts, not lethals.”

  She repeated it in a great shout. The Traveler’s crew had been edging out into the open as they were forced away by the bellowing pyre of the landship. For a moment Jeremy’s archaeologist’s conscience was glad that the artifacts from Rema-Dza were packed in fireproof trunks; they might be buried but they wouldn’t be burned. The crewfolk stood more boldly and took careful aim; knowing that the enemy couldn’t or wouldn’t kill you, and that you could kill them, helped in the boldness department.

  The nomads had noticed that the airborne attackers were trying to kill them. The surviving ones very sensibly leapt into the saddles of their rakza and scattered like beads of water hitting a waxed floor. That left Teyud, Jeremy, and eight standing members of the Traveler’s crew stranded next to the burning landship.

  “This is not going well,” Teyud rasped.

  “Tell me,” Jeremy snarled.

  “I did.”

  He ignored the miscommunication and snatched up the dart rifle of an unconscious crewman. The simple post-and-aperture sight was easy to use, but it just didn’t have enough range.

  They’re going to dart us all asleep, then land and take Teyud with them. And since they’ll then be able to tell who is who, they’ll probably cut everyone else’s throats. Or just leave them for the scavengers.

  “These are the ones who want to capture you, right?” he said to Teyud.

  She was squinting skyward. “That is the highest probability,” she said. “But I do not know the intentions of the airship.”

  “Airship?” Jeremy said—his voice was almost a squeak.

  “The one we saw earlier. It has returned at very high altitude, and I think it is dropping parachutists.”

  He couldn’t see them, but he didn’t have her eagle sight; he also wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. Teyud had the same look of frowning concentration as before, and he knew she’d go down to death with exactly the same expression, still calculating the optimum course of action.

  The paiteng riders saw the airship as well. They reacted instantly. Most of them started circling upward, their mounts clawing for altitude. Three came swooping down in long, shallow dives. The lead bird headed straight for Teyud; Jeremy fired at it, but he wasn’t sure whether it was his dart or one from her pistol that struck. The savage glory of the paiteng turned in an instant to tumbling ruin, striking fifty yards away in a cloud of dust and a shower of great feathers and a crackling of bones.

  The next two came on regardless, looming suddenly out of the dust. They were flying wingtip to wingtip at a hundred feet, the slow vast pom-pom-pom beat of the giant wings driving them along very fast indeed. Something hung between them—a net slung below a cable, and one end of that clutched in each great set of claws. Things were sticking to the net, a yard-long feather . . .

  Jeremy’s eyes widened. He reacted without thought, and leapt. The jump put him twenty yards ahead of Teyud, and for a moment twenty feet up; the fine-mesh net came rushing at him like God’s flyswatter.

  Darkness.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  MARS: Dvor Il
-Adazar

  Olympus Mons is the largest known volcano in the solar system. The Italian astronomer Schiaparelli first identified it in 1879 as a probable mountain often surrounded by orthographically induced cloud cover. It is a perfect cone, like Mauna Loa or Fuji, but enormously larger; the base of the mountain is no less than 400 miles across, giving it a surface area similar to that of the American state of Missouri, and a length greater than the entire Himalayan range. A rampart of cliffs some three to four thousand feet high and impressively sheer surrounds the entire base of the mountain and marks it off from the Plains of Tharsis.

  No less impressive is the height that Mons Olympus reaches; nearly 64,000 feet above the northern-hemisphere sea level, and 60,000 above the surrounding Plain of Tharsis—approximately three times the height of Mt. Everest on Earth or two and a half times that of Ad’cha on Venus.

  Even on so dry a planet, a mountain of this bulk has profound climatic effects, enhanced by the presence of four other volcanoes of comparable if somewhat lesser size, located within a few hundred miles. Frequently wreathed in cloud or surrounded by ground fog, certain altitudes on Mons Olympus are the wettest areas on Mars, experiencing as much as thirty or forty inches of rainfall per annum—although one should bear in mind the length of the Martian year. The light, porous volcanic rock absorbs most of the rainfall, which in prehistoric times emerged as springs, seepage swamps, and rivers in the surrounding lowlands.

  The presence of water, timber, and relatively abundant animal life attracted early settlement after the introduction of hominids to Mars by the ancients in approximately 200,000 BCE; the area may in fact have been the site of the first introductions and the hub from which intelligent life spread over the planet. Mons Olympus and the surrounding plains were definitely the scene of the earliest plant and animal domestication on Mars, circa 40,000 BCE, and the location of the extremely obscure pre-Imperial Martian civilizations.