by Lin Carter
“No reason why you should not know,” said Zarouk. ‘ ‘It is the name of their land. We neither know where it is, nor how it has been kept hidden all this while. But we shall find it.”
Ryker studied him curiously.
“Listen, Zarouk, there’s something about all this that doesn’t quite fit,” he said.
“Ask, then,” shrugged the desert prince.
“You don’t strike me as particularly devout,” said Ryker. “Why are you so interested in all of this? What’s in it for you? There’ s got to be something more than meets the eye in all this, something beyond just religion.”
Zarouk grinned, then threw back his head and laughed, he slapped Ryker’s shoulder, shaking his head.
“Earthling, may the Timeless Ones forgive me, but I like you—F’yagh or no F’yaghl We are alike, you and I, though we were born on different worlds. Of course, you know there is more here than just holy matters. Tell him, Houm.”
The merchant fingered his small beard, eyes clever and sly.
“Treasure, Ryker. And more than gold, much more: power. Power enough to break the hold of the accursed F’yagha on this world, and drive them hence. Power enough to topple the Nine Princes, and weld their hordes into one empire, under one throne—with a warlord to lead them such as this planet has not seen in thrice ten thousand years!”
Ryker grinned without humor. This was talk he could understand. These were motives he knew and believed in.
“And on that throne … Zarouk the Hawk?” he
guessed.
The eyes of the desert prince flashed proud fires. Then he smiled cunningly, yet approvingly.
‘ ‘I told you that this man was for us,” he said purringly. “I sensed it in my blood. In my bones! Yes, Ryker, power. Power enough to take this world apart, and put it back together again—for us. Houm is in it for the wealth, being Houm; and Dmu Dran is in it for the extermination of an ancient heresy, being what he is. And I mean to rule this world, someday … then, ah, then! Those who scorned me, and derided me, and named me outlaw and
renegade, and cast me out, and hunted me, and made war upon me: well, there will come a reckoning, Ryker. And it will be sweet, that reckoning!”
His purring voice was sleek as silk. But the rasp of steel was in the sound of it, and Ryker grinned a little, showing his teeth. It would not be comfortable to be Zarouk’s enemy, when the day of his power dawned.
“The power of their magic, aye, accursed and devil-bought though it may be,” the prince continued softly. “Once, with strange weapons of power, they broke the nations, though it was nine against one. They would have conquered, too, but something went wrong. We know not what, but they retreated into the north, into Zhiam. They still possess those weapons. And with them the Hawk of the Desert shall not spare the Nine Nations, as once the devil-people of Zhiam spared them! Oh, no! With that unholy magic I shall shatter the world to bits, and mold my empire from the fragments. And you, Ryker, there is a place in all of this for you. You can share in the glory of my triumph. Wealth, Ryker, and women! Everything you want, everything that you have ever desired. I will give it all to you, and a place near the throne, as well.”
“I thought we’d be getting around to me sooner or later,” Ryker grunted. “I knew you hadn’t kept me alive just because you like my face. Well, let’s get down to it. What use do you have for me?”
‘ ‘The stone, Ryker, the black seal. The Keystone. They will have used it to lock the Door to Zhiam behind them. We need you for that.”
Ryker stared at the hawk-faced prince.
“But … I don’t have it!” he burst out. “They took it j from me, there when we camped that night, when they took my guns!”
“I know,” smiled Zarouk. “But the secret of the Key
stone lies within your brain, Ryker. The mind never forgets, the priests tell us. Everything the eyes have seen, are preserved in the memories of the mind—flawless, perfect, to the last detail.”
‘ ‘The stone whereof the Key was fashioned is the same Mack crystal stuff whereof the zhaggua made Pteraton,” said Houm. “We believe the power of the Keystone resides in the substance of that stone, and in the exact proportions of the design and the inscription.”
“And we mean to have it from you, F’yagh,” said the gaunt priest. “Willingly, we hope, for that will make it easier. But willingly or not, we mean to have it. If we have to tear it from your mind with hot red pain, F’yagh—”
“But, surely, it will not come to that,” said Zarouk, soothingly. “Ryker is a man of sense: a man like unto us, my brothers! He wants from life the good things gold can buy, is it not so? And there will be much gold, Ryker, when the very world is ours … gold enough to drown a man in, Ryker … and women, Ryker, women like tawny cats … women as smooth as silk, as warm as satin. …”
Despite himself, the throb of desire stirred Ryker’s pulse, but he was thinking of only one woman. And Zarouk smiled, guessing the direction of his thoughts.
“Aye, Ryker, you can even have Valarda if you want her,” he smiled. “After I am done with her, of course.”
13. Into the Shadowed Land
With dawn the next day, Zarouk’s outlaws broke camp and continued across the isthmus to its northern edge. Here they were only a league or less from the maximum southernmost edge of the polar cap, and the cliff wall on this side of the plateau was deeply eroded by the extremes of heat and cold.
They descended the cliffs, and entered into the desert-land of Umbra.
In truth, this was the Shadowed Land. The dim, cool sun of Mars lay very low on the southern horizon, and the cliffs of the ancient plateau cast long shadows into the north, bathing the parched dust of the desert in purple gloom and filling the innumerable impact craters, large and small, with lakes of shadow.
Nowhere did they discern the slightest signs of life. Even the reptiles that make the Southlands dangerous could not exist here, within only a few degrees of the pole. Nor could the hardy lichens, the rubbery pod-vines, the weird blue vegetation of Mars that, by comparison, grew thick and lush in the southern latitudes, cling to life in this empty and desolate dry hell of burning cold.
How, then, could the devil worshippers of the Lost Nation live here? Even in the deepest crater, valley or ravine, the dry burning chill penetrated. It was a mystery.
But, then, the land of legend they called Zhiam had always been that—a mystery.
Ryker had been left alone to think things over. They let him ride alone, with desert hawks behind him, but his hands were not bound. It was safe enough: in this dry hell, there was no place to go.
He wanted revenge on Valarda for her treachery, her betrayal, yes. As for her people, he cared nothing. Why, after all, should he? For him it had always been a matter of taking care of himself first of all. It was simply a question of survival.
Besides, what did he owe to this unknown people he had never met, never seen? Let them fend for themselves, defend themselves, it was nothing to him what became of them.
The only members of their race he had ever known had lied to him, tricked him, robbed him, and left him bound and helpless, to die. Let Zarouk’s hawks swoop down upon them, to rend and slash and tear, to burn and rape and pillage! It was nothing to him.
Why, then, did he feel uneasy—obscurely troubled— unsatisfied at heart?
Well, for one thing, he knew he could not trust Zarouk to keep his bargain. Even if Ryker helped him recreate the lost Keystone, there would be no gold or women for Ryker, once Zarouk had from him the service he wanted. There would be a swift knife in the back, and a lonely grave under the shadowy skies.
But in the whirl of battle, the turmoil and confusion of the attack which Zarouk had planned against Black Zhiam, might there not be opportunities aplenty for Ryker to elude his watchers, and get away?
He hoped so. Because it was probably his only chance at living a while longer.
That night he agreed to cooperate with Zarouk in recreating the lo
st Keystone.
It was the hunched, gaunt priest, the fanatical Dmu Dran, who unlocked his memories, while Houm and Zarouk and burly Xinga watched with fascination.
A drug called phynol was used. This Zarouk’s raiders had thieved from a CA interrogation team. It was a derivative of nitrobarb, chemically allied to sodium pentothal, but very much more effective. All Ryker knew was that he became sleepier and sleepier, finally sinking into a trance state in which his volition was suspended and his unconscious rose to the fore. His conscious mind watched on while, at Dmu Dran’s bidding, Ryker’s hands took up a chunk of black crystal and began to carve.
It was an uncanny experience for Ryker, watching himself perform acts uncontrolled by his conscious will. It was weird, but it was not frightening. The drug induced in him a dreamy, languid euphoria in which no strong emotion was possible.
His hands worked machinelike for hours over the piece of hard crystal, shaping it to the precise dimensions his mind remembered with such photographic clarity. And all the while his mind looked on bemused, drifting in a rosy haze of dreams, uncaring.
A second and, later, a third injection of the drug were required. Ryker neither knew nor cared what they were doing to him. In the gentle euphoria of the drug he floated into improbably gorgeous dreams. These, then, were the phynol dreams he had heard of. Men became easily addicted to the stuff, he dimly knew, but he cared not at all, drifting through a fairyland of his own creation.
After five hours, the replica was completed. Ryker’s body had toiled without rest like a robot, and, if he had not
been insulated from reality by the phynol, he would have been fearfully aware that the muscles of his hands and wrists and arms were aching with an agonized exhaustion.
But he knew nothing, floating through sunset clouds.
“Sleep, now, F’yagh,” crooned Dmu Dran.
Obediently, Ryker’s mind submerged in waves of darkness which lapped up about him, soothing his weary hands. Every muscle relaxed utterly. He would sleep for hours now, and awaken weary and stiff, but unharmed.
‘ ‘We could kill him now, lord,” suggested Houm. ‘ ‘He is a burden to us, and so long as he is alive, a danger to our plans.”
“We could indeed, fat one,” murmured the desert prince negligently. “What think you, priest?”
Dmu Dran sat hunched on a stool, cradling the precious oval talisman in his lap, fondling it with trembling hands like fleshless claws. He lifted dull eyes to his master at this query.
“Kill him for what purpose, lord?” whispered the priest in a dry croaking voice, for he too was weary, and for all the hours that the mindless hands of Ryker had toiled over the stone, Dmu Dran had not for one instant relaxed his vigilance.
“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.