For something told him these were no folk of the Low Clans.
He said, “They will not have gone far. I think they will be waiting for us back at the place where many black alleys open on the way we came. So we must be gone from here, and quickly, and that by another way.”
For the first time the masked girl spoke, and her voice was like the music made by the chiming of many little silver bells. Clear and sweet was the music of that voice, but cold as metal.
“And how would you have us go from here, Out-worlder? Through the very walls themselves? For there are neither doors nor windows.”
Ryker indicated the balcony at the far end of the plaza, in whose shadow he had stood when the mob first charged. The girl nodded without words. He made as if to help her ascend the wall, but she ignored the hand he proffered. With the kick of her long dancer’s legs she sprang into the air, caught ahold of the bottom ledge, and swung herself nimbly up and upon the carven stone balustrade.
Ryker lifted the old man up to her and between them they got him over the rail. He was very light, his arms and legs as thin as sticks. He said nothing.
The naked boy gave Ryker one bright glance of pure mockery and mischief, then sprang as lightly as an acrobat upon the Earthling’s shoulders and gained the balcony. Ryker jumped up and caught the carved rail and heaved himself up and over it. Despite the lower gravity of Mars, the exertion left him red faced and puffing. He was unaccustomed to such acrobatics. The boy giggled, but the old man and the girl said nothing.
The small, roofed balcony gave way to a second-floor room, but the way was barred by shutters, tightly closed and locked from within. On Earth the shutters would have been of wood, but here on the desert world where wood was almost as rare as water, they were of thin, fretted and carven stone which resembled lucent alabaster. The stone was thin and fragile. Ryker kicked the shutters in with one thrust of his booted feet.
They crawled through the opening he had made, and found themselves in a long-unused room, thick with soft dust, the air of which was sour from old cooking smells. A few pieces of ancient furniture stood along the walls, covered with cloths. A tall door of worn metal, also locked, gave way to a narrow landing and a flight of steps leading down to the street level.
There were no windows which gave forth upon the next street, but eye-chinks were cut into the stone walls to either side of the main door in the Martian manner. The view through these peepholes suggested that the street beyond was empty of men. But Ryker had learned caution in a hard school, and felt uncertain that the way to freedom was quite as clear as it seemed to be.
“Do you and your friends have a place of refuge where you will be safe?” he asked. The girl shrugged slim shoulders under her silken shawl.
“A purchased room in the House of the Three Djinns, near the Caravan Gate,” she murmurred listlessly. Ryker thought quickly. He knew the place she meant, an old hostelry whose courtyard was guarded by three stone colossi called Ushongti—djinn like giants out of Martian legend. The Caravan Gate was to the north of the Old City. The twistings and turnings of the winding alleys had confused him, and he could not say for certain how much of the city they must traverse to reach the caravanserai.
“But it will be no longer safe for us,” the girl added in her sing-song voice, cool and sad as faint chimes heard at twilight.
“Why so?”
She shrugged again.
“Now that the hualatha have found us,” she murmurred, “there is no safe refuge for such as we in all of Yeolarn.”
By hualatha, she meant “holy ones,” or priests. A cold wind was blowing up Ryker’s spine, and, again, he wished he had never obeyed that whim of curiosity that had led him to follow the girl and her companions out into the night.
“Was it the hualatha who set the mob on you?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Did you not notice the hua among the fallen?”
Ryker thought back to the litter of the dead they had left in the little square behind this house. He had noticed that one of the men he had gunned down wore black, cowled robes. Now that he thought about it, the corpse had been of a man with a shaven pate, like a priest. He almost remembered the silver sigils clipped to the man’s earlobes in the priestly manner.
It was bad, and it’s getting even worse, he thought to himself bitterly. Bad enough to be caught following a native woman through the streets at night—for that, the People had been known merely to castrate F’yagha. And to come between a native mob and its prey—to beam a dozen down—that was death. And not a swift or easy death, either. But to kill a priest …
Ryker shuddered. The penalty for that he did not even know. Nor did he want to.
But he had gained a piece of information. It was the priests who had driven the mob against these three. They must be heretics of some kind, defilers of shrines, perhaps tomb robbers. And if the hualatha knew where they were, the girl was right. There was no hiding place anywhere in the Old City that was safe for them. And no place for Ryker to hide either. For there could not be so many Outworlders in Yeolarn that Ryker’s identity would not swiftly be learned by those who had hunted the girl.
The only safety lay in flight. But flight to where? And how?
The New City across the canal might afford a safe enough haven for the dancing girl and her party, but not for Ryker. They had hounded him out of the New City, and by this time the way back was surely closed to him. His only chance of seeing the sun rise tomorrow lay in getting out of Yeolarn entirely. And, perhaps, their only chance as well. For native priests can come and go in the New City pretty much as they please.
Ryker began to sweat again. He could feel the perspiration trickle down his ribs under his thermals. He leaned against the stone wall and tried desperately to think. The smooth stone was cold and slick against his brow.
“Do you have any idea just where we are now?” he asked.
The girl put her hand to her mouth tentatively. She tilted her head on one side as if listening to some faint sound to which his ears were deaf.
“Near the Processional Way, I think,” she said thoughtfully. “It should be through the next alley. We are a square or two from the Bazaar—the Lesser, not the Great. That means the quickest way out of the city would be the Gate of the Dragons—”
Ryker felt his heart quicken. The Gate of the Dragons! Very near that gate was the house of Yammak, a dealer in riding beasts he knew from the old days. And Yammak owed him a favor or two. If they could reach the house of Yammak without being discovered, and if Yammak was there, and could procure slidars for the four of them, and provisions, too, then there was a chance they might get out of Yeolarn alive.
It wasn’t much of a chance, Ryker knew. A slim chance, at best. But slim or not, it was a whole lot better than no chance at all!
The boy had been shifting his weight from one foot to the other, restlessly. Now he tugged on the hem of the girl’s scarf for her attention. She turned her masked head towards him.
“Men are coming, Valarda!” the boy chirped. “Many men. Down the street, there—”
Valarda … so that was her name? It suited her well, that name. In the High Tongue it meant “Golden Bells.”…
Ryker shook his head as if to clear his mind of distracting thoughts. It was time to think swiftly, and to act even more swiftly.
“They will have crept back to see if we are still in the square,” he said. “Probably by going over the rooftops. At any rate, they will have seen the broken screen by now. They will know that we got away through the balcony. They may even be in the house by this time. We must—”