For several moments, I simply stood there, breathing heavily. As I watched, the bodies of both panthans crumbled into dust before my eyes, leaving behind only their harnesses, daggers, and blades. Then the green luminescence also vanished, leaving me in pitch darkness.
I quickly uncapped the torch and stepped toward the green metal hexagonal door. It had no lever, only another depiction of a Jetan board, this one with the pieces displayed in red and green.
The puzzle was one with which I was unfamiliar. So I had to work through the possibilities, visualizing each potential move . . . and where each would lead. Finally, I touched the red odwar and the square to which I would move him . . . unsure if the move I was making was the correct one, for the move was actually a sacrifice.
The stone trembled beneath my feet before the door split and each half recessed into the wall. So perfect had the seam been between the two halves that I’d had no inkling that the door had been in two sections. Beyond the green metal door was a far smaller chamber, with yet another chest in the center, one of gleaming bronze resting flat on a low pedestal made of the same green metal as the door. A shimmering gold and black cable ran from one end of the chest into a green metal pedestal and through a bronze fitting.
I stepped forward to the chest. There were three Jetan boards inlaid in the metal on the top of the chest. Below the center of each board was a jet-black square, and a different piece was circled by a gold ring on each board. It took but a tal for me to grasp that the puzzle posed was to determine which move on which board represented the correct one.
A faint grinding sound began to build. I glanced around. The green metal door had closed behind me! No sooner did I realize this than a faint shower of dust drifted down past me, and I looked up to see the ceiling descending! There appeared to be a recess in that solid slab of stone that matched the chest and pedestal. Clearly if I didn’t solve the puzzle—and soon—I would be flattened by the inexorably descending stone.
I examined the first Jetan board, but the move shown would lead to defeat by the jet pieces. The same was true for the second board—and the third!
What was I missing?
The stone ceiling was pressing down now, less than an od above my head.
I decided . . . and pressed black squares on all three of the boards, one after the other, as quickly as I could, in the order in which the games would end, beginning with the one that had the shortest number of moves remaining.
The grinding stopped, and the ceiling halted its progress toward me, but did not return to its former position.
The top of the chest before me suddenly swung back, revealing a young woman whose skin was the same gold as that of the Jetan pieces, and whose hair was as black as jet. Her eyes were closed, but I could see her breathing . . . or had she just begun to breathe? And was there the faintest tinge of green on that perfect skin? It had been her likeness, I realized, on the princess piece on the first Jetan board! Lying beside her in the chest was a sword, shorter than mine, made entirely of black metal, except for gold traceries on the hilt. The same was true of her harness: black with traceries of gold.
Her eyes flicked open.
For long moments, we looked at each other. Her forehead wrinkled, but the frown vanished after a moment, and she sat up in the chest, that single movement creating a shower of greenish dust, leaving her bare skin unblemished gold.
“What manner of man are you?” Her words were clear, although it took me a moment to understand, for the way in which she spoke was somehow . . . different.
“I am Dan Lan Chee of Gathol. And you?”
“Gathol? I have never heard of it, and I have heard of all the cities of Barsoom. Are all who live there bronze?” She frowned.
“No. Most are red.” I waited.
She continued to study me. Finally, she said, “ I am . . . Cynthara Dulchis . . . of high Horz, of course, but you should know that.”
“Perhaps I should, but high Horz has vanished. All but a tiny part of the city is abandoned, and the once mighty ocean Throxeus is no more.” Even as I said those words, I wondered if she would protest, as my father had said the fading survivors of Lum Tar O did before they had turned to dust. Would Cynthara do the same?
“I might doubt your words, but let us go see.” With that she stepped from the chest, retrieving her black blade and sliding it into the scabbard on her harness.
“Before we go,” I said quickly, “is there anything that will reveal the secrets of this chamber and the devices that have kept you alive for all these eons?”
Another frown followed my question. “I can only have been here a few years, a few hundred at most, while my family’s enemies were vanquished.”
“I fear they were not, Princess Cynthara.”
“Princess? I am . . .” She broke off and laughed, softly and bitterly. “I suppose that title is as good as any other. Your very presence indicates an unpleasant truth. How unpleasant . . . well, let us see.”
I looked at the platform below the chest. “How did this all come to be?”
“From my father, Emperor of Jeddaks, and his workshops adjacent to this chamber.”
“And how might we enter them?”
“In the same fashion as you entered this one,” replied Cynthara.
Rather than argue that point, I gestured toward the closed green metal doorway. “Shall we?”
For the first time since she awakened, Cynthara looked puzzled.
I found that momentary lapse of attention most attractive, though I must admit that she was already the most beautiful woman I’d ever beheld.
“That door . . . it wasn’t there before. You came through it?”
“I had to solve two Jetan puzzles and evade a few traps to get through it.”
The side of the door facing us remained featureless as we neared it. There were no Jetan boards, just a black and a gold square at shoulder height.
“Touch the gold one,” I suggested, because she represented the gold princess on the Jetan boards.
She did, and the door split and slid back into the recesses, revealing the chamber that held the two empty chests and the weapons and harnesses of the two panthans.
“My guardians . . .” Her eyes took in the dust and harnesses left behind.
“They tried to kill me.”
“And you vanquished them?”
“I had little choice.”
She walked through the square arch and studied the levered door, her eyes drawn to the inlaid Jetan board. “This was not here when I last stood in this room, but the work has the mark of my father.”
She glanced around, as if searching for something, before walking to the wall and, using a small knife—jet-black—that she pulled from her harness, she scraped away a small section of the wall’s surface. After several tals, her scraping cleared away the surface to reveal a golden square edged in black.
She pressed it. The wall began to shake. I pulled Cynthara back as the very stones of the wall collapsed away with a roar. We waited until the dust of ages and sundered stone dissipated. Beyond the irregular gap in the wall were the remains of machines of black and jet. The curves and swirled tubes of those strange devices threatened to twist my eyes and mind—even though they had already been wrecked and smashed in places.
“No . . . it cannot be . . .” Cynthara’s words were barely above a whisper. She turned to me. “How long has it been . . . ?”
“So many years that no one knows how long.”
From out of the mass of half-untouched, half-wrecked machinery emerged a huge silver-skinned calot—more than twice the size of any I’d ever seen, larger and more fearsome than even the largest of banths, with shining silver teeth and eyes like red coals. How had it survived in a place where there was so little food? For that matter, how had the ulsios that had attacked me earlier?