Old Mars Page 23

  Believe it or not, he’s just standing there, reading.

  “Hey, Cutie Pie,” said Scorpio, getting to his feet. “Let’s get ready to go.”

  “No,” said the Martian.

  “Why not? You’ve got the book, we’ve killed the bad guys—if they were bad guys—and the rest of the place has been looted. It’s time to head home.”

  “This is more important,” insisted Quedipai, staring intently at the manuscript.

  “Read it when we get back to the city,” said Scorpio. “I’m sore and I’m tired and I want to lie down.”

  “No!” yelled the Martian. “I have found it!”

  “I know you found it. Now let’s take it with us.”

  “You don’t understand!” said Quedipai excitedly. “I have found the prayer for resurrecting the king!”

  “We just met his friends and relations,” said Scorpio. “Let’s let it go at that.”

  But Quedipai never looked up from the prayer, and finally he began reading it aloud.

  On your toes, came Merlin’s thought. We’re not alone anymore.

  And as Scorpion drew his burner and turned to see what the Venusian was referring to, a huge being, some twelve feet in height, resembling Quedipai but clearly not of the same race, clad in a jeweled military outfit, arose from where he had been lying.

  Quedipai took one look at him and dropped to his knees. Scorpio and Merlin stood side by side in the mausoleum’s entrance, the Earthman’s burner aimed directly at the newcomer.

  “I live again!” announced Xabo in a rich, deep voice, and although it was in a language neither Scorpio nor Merlin had ever heard before, they both understood it. Xabo’s gaze fell on the burner in Scorpio’s hand. “Put that away,” he said. “I will forgive you your transgression this one time only.”

  Scorpio stared at the huge king for another few seconds, then holstered his burner.

  “Who is this?” asked Xabo, indicating Quedipai, who had fainted dead away and lay sprawled on the floor, still clutching the manuscript.

  “The one who brought you back to life,” answered Scorpio.

  “There will be a place for him in my kingdom,” announced Xabo. He stretched his massive arms. “It is good to be alive again!” He turned back to Scorpio and Merlin. “And who are you, and this creature?”

  “We’re his protectors.”

  “Now I am his protector.”

  Scorpio shrugged. “He’s all yours—once he pays us what he owes us.” He paused for a moment, studying the massive king. “What are your plans, now that you live again?”

  “What they always were,” replied Xabo. “I will reestablish my kingdom and bring back the old ways and the old religion.”

  You know what I’m thinking. Are you game?

  Go ahead, replied Merlin. I’m with you.

  “You’ve been away a long time, Xabo,” began Scorpio. “You may not know it, but no other member of your race has survived, and there’s every likelihood that the current inhabitants of the planet may resent your giving them orders, resurrected king or not.”

  “What they want makes no difference,” replied Xabo. “It is my destiny to rule, and I will do so with more justice and wisdom than any king has displayed since I was sealed in this tomb.” Suddenly, he glared at the Earthman and the Venusian. “Or do you propose to stop me?”

  “Not at all,” replied Scorpio. “This isn’t our world. We don’t have a problem with you … but a lot of people will. People who know their way around today’s Mars and especially today’s weapons.” He paused again to give that time to register. “Like it or not, you’re going to need some help.”

  “Are you offering it?” asked Xabo.

  “That’s our business,” replied Scorpio. He stepped aside so that Xabo could see the bodies of his warriors strewn across the floor. “And those are our bona fides.” He pointed to Xabo’s neck. “That’s a very pretty gold necklace you’ve got there.”

  Xabo strode out of the mausoleum, stared at the bodies, and seated himself on his golden throne. “Let us talk,” he said.

  And while Mars slept, the ancient king, the Earthman, and the Venusian settled down for a long night of hard negotiations.

  LIZ WILLIAMS

  British writer Liz Williams has had work appear in Interzone, Asimov’s, Visionary Tongue, Subterranean, Terra Incognita, The New Jules Verne Adventures, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere, and her stories have been collected in The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories, and, most recently, A Glass of Shadow. She’s probably best-known for her Detective Inspector Chen series, detailing the exploits of a policeman in a demon-haunted world who literally has to go to Hell to solve some of his cases, which includes Snake Agent, The Demon and the City, Precious Dragon, The Shadow Pavilion, and The Iron Khan. Her other books include the novels The Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, The Poison Master, Nine Layers of Sky, Darkland, Bloodmind, Banner of Souls, and Winterstrike. Her most recent book is the start of the Worldsoul trilogy, Worldsoul. She lives in Brighton, England.

  Here she sweeps us along on a perilous hunt across the remotest and most dangerous parts of Mars, in a story where nothing and nobody are quite what they seem to be, and nobody’s motives are to be trusted, even for a minute.

  Out of Scarlight

  LIZ WILLIAMS

  THE TRIBES OF THE COLD DESERTS DON’T LIKE ANYONE WHO doesn’t come from their blood. So I knew that they would not care for me, and that was quite apart from who I really was, or what. I rode up out of Scarlight, taking the road that led to the Cold Deserts, on a frost-rimed morning in early winter with the wind they call the Jharain kicking up the dust. I’d kept myself to myself in Scarlight, where the long trail had led me: It’s that kind of a town. I’d taken care to stable my own tope, who didn’t like other people, or even me, much, and he seemed glad to be out of the place as well. I’d spent the previous night awaking intermittently, as an occasional great thump from the stable below alerted me to the fact that the tope was trying to break down the door. So our progress up the mountain trail was brisk until we reached the summit of a ridge and I turned to look back.

  Scarlight sits in a narrow valley, at a point where the Yss river is channeled between steps of stone, and cascades down to the canals of the plains in a series of dramatic chasms. At the top of Scarlight itself, an ancient arched bridge sits over one of these waterfalls, which then plummets several hundred feet to a dark pool, and on down through the town. Scarlight is one of those nexus places, where many roads meet, and they say that the pool is filled with the bones of those who have upset the lords of Scarlight.

  They’re probably right.

  We, however, were following the Yss, and as the tope paused to drink noisily from the tumbling white water, I dismounted via the saddle steps and stood for a moment on dry, golden grass, burned into straw over the summer. Red earth showed parched and cracked: the winter rains had not come into their own, and yet the river was full enough. I looked for tracks, but not much was visible: a mark that might have been half a footprint, some droppings that were clearly from the little verminous ulsas. There was a rank smell in the air, too, which I could not place, and it disturbed me. If I had not made a brief search of the area, I might have missed the tracks altogether, but they lay farther up over a patch of soil—a mount of some kind, traveling fast, and probably carrying more than one person. The footprints were reptilian, however, unlike the splayed feet of a tope. It had followed the river for a few paces, then bounded up over the rocks, and here the trail ended.

  Thoughtfully, I rounded up my own mount, climbed back into the saddle, and jogged on. It might complicate matters if anyone else was up here—and by anyone else, I meant Nightwall Dair. Whether he realized it or not, we’d crossed paths all that year, first over the face of the plains, then most recently in Cadrada, and I was getting sick of it. If he knew me at all, it was as a man called Thane, and that cover had seemed to hold. If he found out who I really was, and wh
at—a woman named Zuneida Peace—I was in deep trouble, and I didn’t want that. Zuneida was a former temple dancer, a seductress of princes (and princesses), a poet—a very different person to my taciturn alias Thane, who hid black hair beneath a hat, and drops of juice in his eyes to conceal the blue, who wore a half mask allegedly to hide the damage done by a scar, who spoke as little as possible, and in an accent that betrayed the north.

  Half a day later, and we were high up into the slopes of the Khor; another full day, and I estimated that we would reach the edge of the Cold Deserts themselves. I camped that night in the shelter of a high tor of rock, one of the inexplicable piles of stones left by a people long gone, and decorated with the stylized wings of birds. A ban-lion called once, a throaty gasp against the silence of the mountain wall, then the night birds sang. I lay in a fleece wrap and watched the stars wheel over me until I slept and dreamed of warm Cadrada and a night filled with jasmine and golden wine, and of someone, now gone, beside me in the dark.

  Next morning, the temperature had dropped another couple of degrees. I washed as best I could in the icy waters of the Yss and brewed tea on a makeshift fire. The tope yawned and snorted in the morning air. Later, high on the slope, I looked down across the plateau that was opening up ahead of me and saw the tiny figure of a rider on a black-furred mount, speeding over the tundra toward a stand of trees. There was something oddly familiar about the mount, and I wondered if I had seen it down in Scarlight. Then it disappeared into shadow and was gone. I skirted the cliff, keeping close to the anonymity of the rock wall, just in case. I knew that the Tribes did not come down this far, preferring the higher plateau of the Cold Deserts.

  At midday, I saw the first outpost of the Tribes: a squat tower made of blackened stone. This was not something that they had originally built but a remnant of some long-gone people that they had taken over, perhaps once a military fortification, perhaps a temple of some kind. It could have been either, and it was impossible to tell—whatever sense of the practical or the numinous that it had once possessed was also long gone, leaving it a gloomy shell. But there were signs of a recent fire scorching the stone of its floor and witch-marks daubed in soot around the walls. I smiled when I saw them, because I was one of the ones whom the marks were intended to deter, but they held no trace of power, not this far west. It was only when you reached the inner desert that the sand-singers knew what they were doing; these marks would have been made by a warrior, superstitious, and thus afraid. Something clattered high in the roof, and, outside, the mount gave a rumbling bellow. A bird, nothing more, one of the leather-winged shrikes that haunted the mountains. I went outside again and looked down the valley. There was the bird, a low shadow shooting over the grass.

  It was too early to camp in the tower, so I set off once more, heading through a stand of desert birch whose bare trunks arched out of the soil like golden bones. It was as the mount was traversing its thickest point that I heard a distant cry, borne on the wind. I steered the tope to the edge of the little wood and looked down. The wood stood high on a ridge of rock, looking out onto the plain, and, against the pale grass, I saw again the man on the black tope, but this time I could see that he wore the emblem of a tribe upon his hat and that he had a pursuer.

  The pursuer rode a green beast, one of the burrow-dwelling things that live in the hills of Ithness, and it was therefore a long way from home. Part reptile, part cat, it leaped along sinuously, and I could see its rider casting the malefic incantations that the sorcerers of Ithness are wont to employ, hurling poisons like bolts. I grinned. I should not get involved, and yet—well, I knew Ithness all too well, had danced for a time in their slave palaces, and for Cadrada itself I had a score to settle. Besides, bestowing an unlikely favor is never a bad thing. I kicked the mount forward and rode down onto the plain.

  As I neared the two figures, I could taste the incantations on the air. It is said that in Ithness, sorcerers imbibe magic with their poisons, so that they emit wrongness whenever they utter words, and the air was bitter in his wake. I recognized those incantations, and the man behind them. I notched a barb into the nozzle of the gun and took aim, firing through a lace of salt-alder on the banks of a brackish rivulet. I watched with satisfaction as the sorcerer threw up his arms and toppled sideways from his mount. The green beast shrieked and ran. The man on the black-furred tope reined it in and hailed me, but I was already turning my mount, fleeing back up the slope, and was gone.

  Cadrada, sometime before, and a girl was dancing. There was a blue-green fire in the center of the hall, and far below the city, the plains jackals were barking out their territorial boundaries. The girl danced to the beat of their song and her eyes caught the light like a forest fire. I watched her from the back of the hall and thought of the night before, when she had danced for me alone. Her name was Hafyre, and I was not the only one watching.

  The sorcerer sat on a dais, cross-legged beside our host, one of the lords of Cadrada, a man named Halse, who had a jackal as his totem. Appropriately. Occasionally, I saw the sorcerer lean over to whisper to him, and the lord’s cold, jaded face betrayed a flicker of interest. I noted that the sorcerer was typical of his kind: parchment skin and a yellowing rattail of hair, bound with a spiral of bone. The people of Ithness are always too pale, like mushrooms. His sleeves jingled with warding charms, and when he reached out a hand for his wineglass, I saw that it was tattooed with the sigil of his personal demon.

  Later, looking for Hafyre, I saw the sorcerer again in the maze of corridors that led from the hall. He snapped his fingers and a spark of a spell arced through the air. Hafyre came meekly out of the shadows, took his sigil-decked hand, and followed him into the night. I did not think that the spell had much to do with it, however I might have liked to believe otherwise. That was Hafyre: She liked to circle herself with power and was not choosy about how she achieved it.

  Then she had gone missing. No one knew where. Halse was predictably angry and had the slavemaster thrown off the battlements. He was not, it seemed, so jaded after all. He hired me to find her and bring her back. I did not know if he knew about Hafyre and myself, or if he would have cared. He knew me beneath the mask as Zuneida Peace, and men do not take women’s affairs seriously, or, if they do, are intrigued rather than angered. And I was little more than just another servant for hire, after all.

  Hafyre’s trail, such as it was, led to Scarlight, and thus had brought me north. Now the pallid sorcerer was here, as well. And so, it seemed, was Nightwall Dair.

  I left the plain far behind, and by dusk was deep into the mountains. The walls rose ahead of me, tower upon tower of shadow. When it grew too dark to see, I dismounted, lit a fire, and camped for the night. I slept, but with the strange dreams that I remembered from earlier times here, tormenting images of leatherblack wings and a girl’s face, seen through fire.

  When I woke, I lay blinking at the stars. I knew who that girl in the dream was, of course: Hafyre, my quarry. Her eyes glowed forest-green, her skin was golden, and her hair a brown-red, like soil. She smiled, turned her head, and beckoned, and, in imagination, I saw her move sinuously in the firelight. She wore the costume of a slave-girl, her bare torso striped with a hundred shifting bands of emeralds and her tunic trousers the color of leaves in spring. Desire flickered deep within me. She was all the shades of the world, but she was gone, fleeing with the morning, and soon I rode on.

  By now, I had expected to see signs of the Tribes, and that I had not done so concerned me. It was cold, but I would not yet have expected them to retreat into their mountain fastnesses, the secret places that made the more credulous folk claim that they were nothing more than ghosts. Toward the middle of the afternoon, however, I came across more tracks, then, in the distance, a cluster of the round grey tents that the Tribes use in summer, sprouting like toadstools on a plateau of dead grass. Their mounts grazed nearby, and I saw the red-and-azure banner of the Ynar flying on a pole. I released a breath of relief: These were the most civi
lized, if you like, of the Tribes—they do not, at least, shoot on first sight. And they were also the ones I was looking for. I approached warily all the same.

  When I was a short distance away, the priestess came out of a tent with a flail in her hand. She was not young, her skin scarred and splattered with indigo patterning. I saw the spike through her lower lip that told me she was a deathspeaker, and her headdress jingled with the beads of her wealth. She did not look pleased to see me.

  “Shan-hai,” I greeted her with her title, “I come with a message. From Cadrada.”

  “I know no one and nothing in the cities,” the priestess snapped. “Do not lie.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.” I dismounted and threw the scrap of fabric with the emblem of the Ynar upon it, above the personal totem. Her breath hissed in her throat as she saw it, and she snatched it from the ground as though I were going to steal it back.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Give me water and I’ll tell you. I cut it from no corpse, if that is what you’re asking.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, then shook the flail and spoke a word of Protection from the carrion gods of the Ynar … “You won’t need that for me,” I said. Her eyes widened: the dark green of winter forests. I remembered Hafyre and held my breath. The priestess was not as old as I’d first assumed. She did better than water, making me tea from the bittersweet verthane of the high slopes and keeping a polite silence until I’d drunk the first three mouthfuls. Then she said, “I ask you again. Where did you get this?”

  “From a slave palace.” She had not yet realized that I was not a man. If I had my way, she never would. “What I was doing there—that’s my business. But I met a girl, who told me that she was a princess of the Ynar. Her name was Hafyre. She gave me this.” I pointed to the emblem.

  “And you brought it back to us. Why?”

  “I’m traveling across the Cold Deserts to Coyine. I want safe passage.”