She spoke in a tongue dead a thousand years,
and she had no memory for the man she faced.
Yet he had held her tightly but a few short
years before, had sworn eternal vengeance--when
she died in his arms from an assassin's wounds.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He had come back, though he knew what to expect. He had always come
back to Klanvahr, since he had been hunted out of that ancient Martian
fortress so many years ago. Not often, and always warily, for there
was a price on Dantan's head, and those who governed the Dry Provinces
would have been glad to pay it. Now there was an excellent chance that
they might pay, and soon, he thought, as he walked doggedly through the
baking stillness of the night, his ears attuned to any dangerous sound
in the thin, dry air.
Even after dark it was hot here. The dead ground, parched and arid,
retained the heat, releasing it slowly as the double moons--the Eyes of
Thar, in Klanvahr mythology--swung across the blazing immensity of the
sky. Yet Samuel Dantan came back to this desolate land as he had come
before, drawn by love and by hatred.
The love was lost forever, but the hate could still be satiated. He had
not yet glutted his blood-thirst. When Dantan came back to Klanvahr,
men died, though if all the men of the Redhelm Tribe were slain, even
that could not satisfy the dull ache in Dantan's heart.
Now they were hunting him.
The girl--he had not thought of her for years; he did not want to
remember. He had been young when it happened. Of Earth stock, he had
during a great Martian drought become godson to an old shaman of
Klanvahr, one of the priests who still hoarded scraps of the forgotten
knowledge of the past, glorious days of Martian destiny, when bright
towers had fingered up triumphantly toward the Eyes of Thar.
Memories ... the solemn, antique dignity of the Undercities, in ruins
now ... the wrinkled shaman, intoning his rituals ... very old books,
and older stories ... raids by the Redhelm Tribe ... and a girl Samuel
Dantan had known. There was a raid, and the girl had died. Such things
had happened many times before; they would happen again. But to Dantan
this one death mattered very much.
Afterward, Dantan killed, first in red fury, then with a cool, quiet,
passionless satisfaction. And, since the Redhelms were well represented
in the corrupt Martian government, he had become outlaw.
The girl would not have known him now. He had gone out into the
spaceways, and the years had changed him. He was still thin, his eyes
still dark and opaque as shadowed tarn-water, but he was dry and sinewy
and hard, moving with the trained, dangerous swiftness of the predator
he was--and, as to morals, Dantan had none worth mentioning. He had
broken more than ten commandments. Between the planets, and in the
far-flung worlds bordering the outer dark, there are more than ten. But
Dantan had smashed them all.
In the end there was still the dull, sickening hopelessness, part
loneliness, part something less definable. Hunted, he came back to
Klanvahr, and when he came, men of the Redhelms died. They did not die
easily.
But this time it was they who hunted, not he. They had cut him off
from the aircar and they followed now like hounds upon his track. He
had almost been disarmed in that last battle. And the Redhelms would
not lose the trail; they had followed signs for generations across the
dying tundras of Mars.
He paused, flattening himself against an outcrop of rock, and looked
back. It was dark; the Eyes of Thar had not yet risen, and the blaze of
starlight cast a ghastly, leprous shine over the chaotic slope behind
him, great riven boulders and jutting monoliths, canyon-like, running
jagged toward the horizon, a scene of cosmic ruin that every old and
shrinking world must show. He could see nothing of his pursuers, but
they were coming. They were still far behind. But that did not matter;
he must circle--circle--
And first, he must regain a little strength. There was no water in
his canteen. His throat was dust-dry, and his tongue felt swollen and
leathery. Moving his shoulders uneasily, his dark face impassive,
Dantan found a pebble and put it in his mouth, though he knew that
would not help much. He had not tasted water for--how long? Too long,
anyhow.
* * * * *
Staring around, he took stock of resources. He was alone--what was it
the old shaman had once told him? "You are never alone in Klanvahr. The
living shadows of the past are all around you. They cannot help, but
they watch, and their pride must not be humbled. You are never alone in
Klanvahr."
But nothing stirred. Only a whisper of the dry, hot wind murmuring up
from the distance, sighing and soughing like muted harps. Ghosts of
the past riding the night, Dantan thought. How did those ghosts see
Klanvahr? Not as this desolate wasteland, perhaps. They saw it with the
eyes of memory, as the Mother of Empires which Klanvahr had once been,
so long ago that only the tales persisted, garbled and unbelievable.
A sighing whisper ... he stopped living for a second, his breath
halted, his eyes turned to emptiness. That meant something. A thermal,
a river of wind--a downdraft, perhaps. Sometimes these eon-old canyons
held lost rivers, changing and shifting their courses as Mars crumbled,
and such watercourses might be traced by sound.
Well--he knew Klanvahr.
A half mile farther he found the arroyo, not too deep--fifty feet or
less, with jagged walls easy to descend. He could hear the trickle of
water, though he could not see it, and his thirst became overpowering.
But caution made him clamber down the precipice warily. He did not
drink till he had reconnoitered and made sure that it was safe.
And that made Dantan's thin lips curl. Safety for a man hunted by the
Redhelms? The thought was sufficiently absurd. He would die--he must
die; but he did not mean to die alone. This time perhaps they had him,
but the kill would not be easy nor without cost. If he could find some
weapon, some ambush--prepare some trap for the hunters--
There might be possibilities in this canyon. The stream had only
lately been diverted into this channel; the signs of that were clear.
Thoughtfully Dantan worked his way upstream. He did not try to mask his
trail by water-tricks; the Redhelms were too wise for that. No, there
must be some other answer.
A mile or so farther along he found the reason for the diverted stream.
Landslide. Where water had chuckled and rustled along the left-hand
branch before, now it took the other route. Dantan followed the dry
canyon, finding the going easier now, since Phobos had risen ... an Eye
of Thar. "The Eyes of the god miss nothing. They move across the world,
and nothing can hide from Thar, or from his destiny."
Then Dantan saw rounded metal. Washed clean by the water that had run
here lately, a corroded, curved surface rose dome-shaped from the
stream bed.
The presence of an artifact in this place was curious enough. The
people of Klanvahr--the old race--had builded with some substance that
had not survived; plastic or something else that was not metal. Yet
this dome had the unmistakable dull sheen of steel. It was an alloy,
unusually strong or it could never have lasted this long, even though
protected by its covering of rocks and earth. A little nerve began
jumping in Dantan's cheek. He had paused briefly, but now he came
forward and with his booted foot kicked away some of the dirt about the
cryptic metal.
A curving line broke it. Scraping vigorously, Dantan discovered that
this marked the outline of an oval door, horizontal, and with a handle
of some sort, though it was caked and fixed in its socket with dirt.
Dantan's lips were very thin now, and his eyes glittering and bright.
An ambush--a weapon against the Redhelms--whatever might exist behind
this lost door, it was worth investigating, especially for a condemned
man.
With water from the brook and a sliver of sharp stone, he pried and
chiseled until the handle was fairly free from its heavy crust. It was
a hook, like a shepherd's crook, protruding from a small bowl-shaped
depression in the door. Dantan tested it. It would not move in any
direction. He braced himself, legs straddled, body half doubled, and
strained at the hook.
Blood beat against the back of his eyes. He heard drumming in his
temples and straightened suddenly, thinking it the footsteps of
Redhelms. Then, grinning sardonically, he bent to his work again, and
this time the handle moved.
Beneath him the door slid down and swung aside, and the darkness
below gave place to soft light. He saw a long tube stretching down
vertically, with pegs protruding from the metal walls at regular
intervals. It made a ladder. The bottom of the shaft was thirty feet
below; its diameter was little more than the breadth of a big man's
shoulders.
* * * * *
He stood still for a moment, looking down, his mind almost swimming
with wonder and surmise. Old, very old it must be, for the stream
had cut its own bed out of the rock whose walls rose above him now.
Old--and yet these metal surfaces gleamed as brightly as they must have
gleamed on the day they were put together--for what purpose?
The wind sighed again down the canyon, and Dantan remembered the
Redhelms on his track. He looked around once more and then lowered
himself onto the ladder of metal pegs, testing them doubtfully before
he let his full weight come down. They held.
There might be danger down below; there might not. There was certain
danger coming after him among the twisting canyons. He reached up,
investigated briefly, and swung the door back into place. There was a
lock, he saw, and after a moment discovered how to manipulate it. So
far, the results were satisfactory. He was temporarily safe from the
Redhelms, provided he did not suffocate. There was no air intake here
that he could see, but he breathed easily enough so far. He would worry
about that when the need arose. There might be other things to worry
about before lack of air began to distress him.
He descended.
At the bottom of the shaft was another door. Its handle yielded with
no resistance this time, and Dantan stepped across the threshold into
a large, square underground chamber, lit with pale radiance that came
from the floor itself, as though light had been poured into the molten
metal when it had first been made.