“The cellar!” the girl said, sharply, in the manner of one who has just remembered something.
“Eh?”
“The crypts,” she said impatiently. “There will be a grating beneath the house leading into the old sewer tunnels! The houses in this quarter are old enough to have been built over the sewers which once drained into the ancient seas. We can follow the tunnels beneath the bazaar, and reach the Gate of the Dragons that way!”
“But how will we know which way to—” Ryker started to ask bewilderedly, then closed his lips to the unspoken question. He had forgotten that he was in the company, not of men like himself, but of three of the People. And the People have from of old an uncanny sense of direction that never falters or betrays them.
The girl now took the lead in some unspoken way that even Ryker did not pause to question. She whipped off her black silk mask impatiently, as if it were no longer needed. Then, followed by the boy and the old man, with Ryker blundering along in the rear, she searched until she found a low door which led down beneath the street level into the crypts and vaults which were commonly built under native houses as ancient as this one.
Ryker followed, but without enthusiasm. They told unpleasant tales of the old crypts beneath the houses in this ancient quarter, and of unwholesome things that squirmed and slithered through the black, foul darkness of the tunnels below this part of the city. They were unhealthy, those black tunnels that had been burrowed underneath the cities of Mars before his Earthling ancestors had entered into the Stone Age.
But he had little choice but to follow after Valarda and her companions, if he wanted to live out this night.
For the priests had aroused the mob again, it seemed, and had fanned back into fierce existence that hot red thirst to kill. As he went stumbling down the worn stone steps that led down and down into the black depths beneath the house, he could hear them howling down the hollow canyon of the street, and the thud of the first blows against the tall and narrow door of ancient metal echoed and reechoed after them.
He had stifled the mob’s thirst for murder once that night, with the bright fury of his guns. But the trick would not work a second time, he knew. For now the faceless shadows that howled down the night-dark streets and hunted them would be armed with swords and knives, and with those tubelike dart guns with which the People were Mich deadly and unerring marksmen.
4. Beyond the Dragon Gate
Of their nightmarish journey through the foul and low-roofed tunnels, Ryker could remember but little in the aftertimes. The stone floor underfoot was slick, worn smooth by the passage of waters which had rushed down the black throat of these sewers on their way to join oceans that were legends a million years before Egypt.
No waters rushed here now, but there was moisture, of a sort, enough to sustain mould and lichen and sprouting, tubular fungus. These flaccid growths squelched unpleasantly underfoot, and his boots crushed them to a vile stinking slime as he blundered down the black passages, half-bent to avoid scraping his head against the low curve of the roof.
It had not been hard to locate the entrance to the labyrinth of underground tunnels. The door to the crypts they barred with a massive length of heavy iron which leaned against a wall at the head of the stairway, conveniently at hand for that very purpose, perhaps.
The boy had found the barred grating in a corner of the crypts. It had rusted into place over the ages, and it required a bolt from Ryker’s guns—the focus narrowed to needle-beam width—to loosen it. The boy’s name was Kiki, it seemed. The old man’s name was Melandron or so the girl called him.
Once they had lowered themselves down through the floor grating and dropped to the floor of the tunnelways below, they found themselves in an unlighted gloom so completely impenetrable that, to Ryker, it was like being struck totally blind.
Luckily, the natives of Mars, who trace the descent of i heir race from a quadrupedal feline shaped by the Gods into manlike form and by Them ensouled, inherit from this legendary First Ancestor the very catlike ability to see in the dark. Ryker could not have traversed the black labyrinth with any speed at all, alone. The boy, Kiki, shrilling an impolite word of abuse, impatiently came scrambling back for the Earthling, seized him by the hand, and led him into the black gloom at a breakneck pace.
The hand was small and strong and calloused and very dirty. But without it, Ryker could not have moved afoot through the darkness without feeling every inch of the way.
He was very grateful they were taking him with them, instead of abandoning him and leaving him behind to his own fate.
It did not occur to Ryker, until very long after, to wonder why they bothered to bring him along at all… .
After what seemed to Ryker like interminable hours of crawling through the pitch-black tunnels, but which was more likely well under an hour’s time, the girl imperiously called a halt.
At intervals, the low tunnel roof was broken by a circular opening which gave upon a vertical shaft. These shafts were like the one through which they had entered the underground tunnel system in the first place. They gave forth upon the cryptlike spaces beneath the houses, and sometimes they led to the surface of the street itself, where thin plates of metal covered them, like manhole covers in the streets of Earth.
To ascend the vertical shaft was harder than going down into one, as Ryker found when Valarda halted their progress. You had to brace your feet against one side of the shaft and press your back and shoulders against the opposite side, then inch your way up. There was no other way to do it, because there were neither handholds nor footholds.
Ryker inched his way up the shaft first, and broke the seal which held the plate in place with one heave of his burly shoulders. Climbing out, he discovered himself to. be just within the, black mouth of a narrow and high-walled alley, very near the house of Yammak. He stretched out flat on his belly and reached down with one arm to clasp the boy’s hand. Kiki came scrambling up like a monkey to squat on his little bottom, watching Ryker with bright, amused, malicious eyes as he helped the old man, Melandron, to the street.
As for Valarda, she again ignored the assistance of his hand, and climbed the shaft swiftly and easily, her fingers and bare, wriggling toes finding holds he could have sworn were not there.
They made their way to the house of Yammak without encountering anyone. The night was dark and clear, the stars blazing like an emperor’s ransom in diamonds flung out upon black velvet. The twin moons of Mars were both aloft by this hour, which was near to dawn, but were virtually invisible in the sky. Even under the best of conditions, it was difficult to find the two moons with the unaided eye, due to their small size and low albedo.
Yammak was at home, and in his present mood Ryker found it easy to gain his cooperation. Whether it was his memory of old favors still unrepaid, or the cold glint in Ryker’s eyes and the way his hard fingers brushed his gun butts, Yammak proved eager to help them on their way. While his woman gathered food and drink and found
sleeping furs and other necessities for them, Yammak escorted Ryker and Valarda to the slidar pens in the back, where they selected steeds. It was decided that Ryker and Valarda would ride separately mounted, while old Melandron and the boy shared a third beast, with a fourth to serve as pack animal.
Well before moonset the four brutes were saddled and provisioned, and the little party slunk out through the open and unguarded gate between the two stone dragons which so markedly resembled the great saurians that had prowled the murky, steaming fens of Earth’s forgotten Mesozoic.