In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (34 page)

She prepared to dodge a strike by a
Paiteng
’s claws, but the pair of riders were too skilled, their birds too highly trained, for crude tactics like that. One of them unstrapped himself and launched his body into the air toward her, swimming in the swift-moving onrush with minimal flicks, like a fish in water. The other unslung his dart rifle and angled his mount in closer. The riderless bird spiraled below them, matching the speed of their fall and ready for the rider to steer her unconscious body to its saddle. It couldn’t support two for long, but landing wouldn’t be much of a problem.

They were halfway to the ground. Teyud pulled the oxygen mask from her face and tossed it aside to flail its tentacles as it vanished in the wind. The rifle spat, and the dart banged painfully into her gut—the rider was a
good
shot. Robe cloth wouldn’t always keep out a rifle dart, but this time it did. Teyud let herself go completely limp; even let the pistol whip away from her relaxing fingers. Now she fell instead of steering herself, limbs flailing akimbo, the world spinning around her once more.

The dismounted rider swooped in—he had only seconds to act, now—hands reaching out for her, ready to accept a bad thump to achieve his goal.

Thump
.

Teyud forced herself not to grunt; there was a sharp pain in her partially healed shoulder. Then they were spinning around the axis of their meeting, and the man was struggling with arms and legs to stabilize her. Teyud waited until he had. His mouth was a compressed line of fierce concentration; then her own left hand shot out and grabbed him by a chest-strap, and the other came up with the long curved knife.

He was very fast; she could
feel
his determination, somehow. He managed to get a wrist on hers; and then something made him let go, thrashing to escape. That killed him; the blade punched through his body suit and up into the heart and lungs. She released him to fall straight down and snatched at the toggle of her parachute. It would be extremely close . . .

Thump
.

The shock of the fabric scoop’s impact on the air made her teeth click together and her vertebrae gave a series of clicking sounds; some distant corner of her mind outside the diamond focus of concentration reflected that the orthopedic effect would be beneficial. The ground came up and hit the soles of her boots a bare minimum of time later; if she hadn’t had the strong bones and tendons of the Thoughtful Grace—and the Tollamunes—she would have been injured and rendered helpless, if not dead. As it was, the rolling impact left her breathless for an instant.

She hit the quick-release catch of the parachute and rolled erect. The cloth billowed out of the way, to reveal the dead rider’s
Paiteng
swooping toward her. She could
feel
it, too, with that same
massive certainty, feel the killing rage and grief in the small, fierce mind at the death of the one to whom it had bonded as a chick, like a raw wound rubbed with salt. It flipped out of its swoop and flared wings like the shadow of falling night, coming at her with huge claws outstretched in a trajectory that would scoop her up like a
vash
. . . and break half the bones in her body at the
massive
impact.

It was screaming as it came, its own hunting-shriek commingled with a half-intelligible wail of
dieeeee!

Her hand flashed to the hilt of her sword. But something else moved within her, too, a ferocity that matched the bird’s. It went
through
her, out into the bird’s body, like the point of her outstretched sword. She felt the
Paiteng
die, every nerve in its body flaring into overload and its mind flickering out like a pinched wick; the final stoop turned into a tumble that struck the soil of the dead garden and fountained it toward her like spray from a projectile weapon.

That Which Compels
, she thought; and then the weight struck her, and there was nothing.

Mars, City of Dvor Il-Adazar (Olympus Mons)
Pits beneath the Palace of Restful Contemplation
May 27, 2000 AD

“Don’t you have any lights?” Jeremy grumbled a day after his balustrade ride, tired of the green-glowing infrared view.

Everything was so uniformly cold down here that his viewers was less useful, too, barely giving an outline. He stumbled again on an irregularity in the tunnel floor and cursed.

He did that in English. “Consanguineously mated male offspring of a domestic canid” just wasn’t very satisfying when he stubbed his toe. Neither was “excrement!” or “feces!” And shouting “I feel extreme annoyance” didn’t do it for him at all, when you came right down to it. Swearing in a language without taboos was
hard
.

And she
did
have lights; he could see half a dozen glow-sticks clipped to her harness, and there were some in the equipment haversack on his.

“In fact, why don’t we
use
a light?”

Doctor Daiyar turned to look at him. “I do not wish to absolutely confirm that nourishment is available to the entire local ecology,” she said, which was savage sarcasm, in Demotic. The epithet “you unfit-to-survive individual of subnormal intellect” was unmistakably implied.

Stupid me
, Jeremy thought, forcing his teeth not to chatter.
I asked the same question in that tunnel back in Rema-Dza
.

The tunnel they were in was quite different from those on the higher levels, save for the roughly twenty-foot diameter that it shared with most of them. It was crooked, for one thing, wandering along like a natural fumarole, which it probably was. The walls were roughly shaped, either by chisel-like tools or chisel-like teeth. And for almost the first time since he’d left the shores of the Great Northern Sea where Kennedy Base sat, the air felt damp.

They’d gotten down to the edge of the great, lens-shaped aquifer that underlay Olympus Mons, or at least to one of the fracture zones that wicked down moisture from the upper slopes to feed it. This might have been a collection channel when the water table was higher.

The floor and walls glistened in spots with moisture or slush-crystals, and it was blotched by some pale, lichenous growth. Doctor Daiyar carefully avoided brushing against those, and so did he after her sharp warning, “
Infective!
”

The air had a dank, moldy smell as well. Doctor Daiyar seemed apprehensive.

No, she looks scared shitless
, Jeremy thought.
In an undemonstrative Martian way. I’m beginning to think Teyud is this planet’s equivalent of a passionate, emotional Sicilian
.

They both had sword and pistol in hand. Daiyar stopped and cocked one large, mobile ear. It was as silent as a tomb—Jeremy pushed away the image with an effort—or at least very quiet, except for the novelty of the sound of water dripping somewhere.

Daiyar stopped short. Jeremy felt a waft of warm—or warmer, at least—air on his face. It felt good, after having been cold for days. The last time he’d actually felt
warm
, he’d been in bed with Teyud, on board the
Intrepid Traveler
. And even she had cold feet. He remembered the way she’d twine them with his and compare him to a heating element with a longing that made his eyes prickle for a second.

When Daiyar resumed her steady pacing, he asked, “I take it that warmer air isn’t a good sign?”

“Geothermal heat,” she said. “It and the associated chemicals sustain fungi and algae which are at the base of subterranean food chains. Exercise extreme caution. Predatory fungi will be present, and perhaps rodents of unusual size. Use this on exposed flesh, and wear your mask.”

Errrkkk!
he thought.
Those rodents back in the cell were bad enough; I really don’t want to meet any that are bigger
.

He smeared on the ointment she offered; it was thin and had an astringent smell, and made his skin feel leathery somehow, as if all his pores had been filled with wax. The mask was a triangle of ceramic, like the bottom half of a hockey goalie’s. You breathed through its pores, and it made each breath a little harder—you had to suck—which he found made his heart pound harder, until he ran through a few Zen exercises. He’d never been zazen, exactly, but his home state was lousy with them, or at least the northern part was, and the techniques were helpful. The beating of blood in his temples receded.

Then her ears swiveled again; she turned and they pointed forward at full extension. “We are pursued,” she said. “That was the chase-call of a sniffer. We must move faster—yet still cautiously.
They
are moving very rapidly indeed.”

Between the devil and the deep blue sea
, he thought.

He remembered the thought an hour later, when they came into the chamber. It was huge; just how big he couldn’t tell, because the view through his goggles faded off into hints of twisting heat. Where the geology was suitable, Mars’ lower gravity meant it could have cavern complexes bigger than anything on Earth. The part nearest him had
puddles
. Shimmering mist covered them, turning into patches of low fog here and there; spires and stalagmites rose out of it in brutal inverted exclamation points.

“No, not puddles,” he said to himself, watching one patch of water a hundred feet or more across; there was a distinct smooth ripple for a moment, as if something long and sinuous was gliding beneath the surface. “It has pools. Deep, interconnected pools. Linked to very large underground lakes or rivers.”

Irregular pathways of comparatively dry ground twisted off into
the same indistinct distance, ridged and rough with irregularities and boulders. Luckily the surface was gritty beneath his boot-soles, a bit like strong pumice.

He thought that the goggles must be failing him and put up a hand to remove them until he realized what the headache-inducing shimmer was; many of the pools were hot, hot enough to send tendrils of mist up into the air. It had gotten much warmer, but this area was uncomfortably hot, especially as it was downright humid as well. Smooth, glittering discolorations near the water hinted at mineral rime, and
shapes
stood all about. Some looked like elongated versions of Terran mushrooms; others, growing on spires and outcroppings of rock, looked like shelf fungi. One type looked remarkably like a heap of cow intestines, which he recognized because he’d visited his mother’s brother’s ranch fairly often as a kid.

The goggles conveyed only hints of color; most appeared gray-white, but some had what he thought must be savage bands and whorls and spots of pink and dark purple. And some of them were—very slowly—turning in his direction. He heard the drip of water loudly now, and ripples and gurgles, and a dry, feathery, creaking sound. And, yes, very faintly a musical belling, echoing through endless spaces in the huge sponge of stone.

It sounded like a group of very hungry silver trumpets.

The horns of Elfland
, he thought, picturing again the starved, skeletal elegance of the Sniffer in Zar-tu-Kan.
But the Dogs of Fangs-In-Your-Ass, if they catch up to us
.

“Most of the fungi are not very motile,” Daiyar said tightly; he suspected that the words were as much for herself as for him. “Follow me closely. Do not stop if at all possible. A collective frenzy will result if we are immobile for any length of time. This is—metaphorical mode—very much like a game of
atanj
with time-limited moves.”

She started off at a brisk walk, turning and twisting to keep the two of them as far as possible from either the thicker growths or the edge of the pools. Jeremy followed precisely in her footsteps. A tall, bulbous, spotted thing about fifty yards away creaked alarmingly, then burst with a loud dry pop. A cloud of white mist drifted in his direction.

Daiyar whirled and took an aerosol-like container from her harness and twisted it. Another mist poured out from it, and intercepted
the cloud of spores—or at least all the ones he could see. Jeremy fought not to hold his breath as they walked on; more and more of the pods back there were bursting.

“You are perspiring. Cease at once,” Daiyar said, her voice muffled by the mask that covered nose and mouth. “The wild spores are most dangerous in mucus membranes but they can sometimes germinate on any damp surface and sweat tends to remove the protective ointment. Then the filaments of their roots can dig deeper into the pores and spread with explosive speed as they consume tissue.”

“Oh, I’ll do my level best not to perspire, despite the clammy heat and the terror,” Jeremy said hollowly, with a brief, horrific flash of the way Sally Yamashita had died. He fought down an insane urge to giggle—the doctor probably believed he
could
stop sweating on command. “You bet, no sweat.”

The Deep Beyond was looking more and more attractive. At least lethal fungi came there only if someone brought them in.

They walked on toward a clearer patch of flattish rock with only a single massive triangular piece of lava sticking out of it, like a deformed, acne-ridden troll’s nose twenty feet high that trickled smoke from cracks around its base. A shimmering greenish light seemed to hang over it, and Daiyar stopped, looking backward and forward. Her ears twitched.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The heat indicates high-metabolism life forms,” she said.

It did. The first few skittered out of the fissures in the base of the rock as he watched. One made a beeline for his boot, and he stamped in reflex. What he could see when he raised his foot was just like the zombie-rats that had plagued him in the prison cell, the ones he was beginning to remember with nostalgia.

Except that this one was about the size of his thumb, or a large cockroach.

“Rodents of unusual size!” Daiyar said, a frantic overtone in her voice. “Quickly! There will be thousands in a few moments!”

Unusual size?
Jeremy thought—or some part of his mind gibbered.
I thought that meant unusually
large
size! Damn Demotic and damn its precision!