The City Outside the World

1. The Girl with the Golden Eyes

They were hunting him.

You can’t stay alive on Mars for very long without developing a sixth sense for such things. And Ryker had stayed alive.

It was nothing obvious or overt the hunters did which caught his attention. They were too wise in the art of manhunting to blunder or expose themselves; no, it was nothing like that.

It was a matter of many small, trifling things. The sound of a footstep in an alley he had believed empty. A shadow against the wall, gone when he glanced at it. A tingle at the back of his neck that told him unseen eyes were watching.

They had been hunting him for a long time, he knew.

And now they were closing in… .

Ryker growled a curse under his breath: he had been hunted before, and knew the feeling well. Not that he liked it much.

The worse thing was not that men were after him. That much he could handle, he thought, balling his heavy hands into scarred fists and hunching his broad shoulders so that the great ropes of muscles stood out on his bronzed bare forearms like cables of woven copper wire. No, being hunted did not worry him.

The thing was, he didn’t know why.

Whenever Ryker came in from the Dustlands to the city, he usually holed up in the native quarter across the old canal. You could live cheap there, if you could stay alive, and one thing was sure: the CA cops couldn’t find you, even if they tried.

Cops never go into the Old City of Yeolarn if they can help it. And when they can’t help it, well, they don’t live long once the narrow walls and shadowy alleyways of the ancient town have closed about them, cutting them off from the bright steel-and-plastic sprawl of the New City across the waterway.

Ryker grinned briefly, baring white teeth in a dark, scarred face. He hated the cops, hated them more than the natives did, he often thought. And that was a lot of hate.

Yeolarn is built like this: on one side of the canal the old-time astronomers back Earthside had named Hydraotes, the New City rises, all chrome and neon and multicolored plastic. It is by way of being the capital of Mars; at least that’s where the Colonial Administration has its central offices. In the New City live the men and women from Earth—bankers,clerks, accountants, civil and military personnel, doctors, nurses, bureaucrats. In neat rows of prefab, airsealed bungalows, sanitized and sterilized and pressurized, holding the thin, bitter air and the soft, cold dust of old Mars at arm’s length.

On the further side of the canal, the Old City rises. It was already old when they laid the cornerstone of Babylon, old when Pharoah’s engineers cleared away the sand to start building the Great Pyramid, old before the ice came down over Europe. When Yeolarn was young the British Isles were still attached to the continent, and our ancestors wore furs, wandered the world-wide forests, had yet to domesticate the dog or invent fire.

Old—that was Yeolarn. Old beyond our thoughts or dreams. Older by a million years and more than Mohenjo-dara, Ur of the Chaldees, or Jericho. The ages had marched over its squat, nine-sided towers and flattened domes and sleek walls of terracotta-colored native marble, smoothing the sharp edges, wearing the newness away. As house or shrine, temple or palace, slumped into decay under the slow march of the millenia, they were tamped down, and new structures were raised above their dead ruins like tombstones. Yeolarn had been built and rebuilt so many times that it was by now a trackless maze of zigzag alleys, a warren of windowless blind walls, a labyrinth in which a man could hide forever.

When Ryker first stumbled on the fact that he was being watched and followed, he assumed it was the CA cops. It was only a logical assumption, given his record. Gun-running, smuggling, aircar-theft, these were only the more innocuous of the crimes listed in his dossier. So it was natural that his first thought was that the cops were dogging his steps.

That was his first mistake.

So he doubled his tracks, left a few scraps of gear and clothing in the cheap dockside room he had rented, and slunk by furtive, secret ways into the Old City.

That was his second mistake.

Once he had doubled back and forth through the maze of dark, crooked alleys and put himself beyond the ability of the most sharp-nosed of cops to find, he headed across the city towards the old Bazaar of the Lions, bound for the wineshop of Kammu Jha, his favorite joy-house.

That was his third mistake, and it was very nearly fatal.

The public room of the wineshop was long and low ceilinged and roofed with slabs of stone. At one end of the hall gaped the yawning mouth of a huge fireplace, carved out of worn gray stone into the likeness of a dragon’s fanged and grinning jaws. Along one wall ran benches.

Small tables stood scattered about in helter-skelter fashion. There was no bar: serving boys fetched orders of wine or ale or the Martian equivalent of brandy from kegs hung on the walls of a back room.

In the stone fireplace, coiled on the flat of the dragon’s granite tongue, danced flame. Flame sprung from no ordinary fuel, for coal and wood were rare and precious beyond the dreams of avarice here on this cooling desert world. No, this flame leaped from a flat metal dish like an ewer. Therein lay pooled the ice-green fluid the Martian people call hiyawa ziu: “mother of fire.” This strange chemical burns like thermite or phosphorus, but slowly, yielding a tremendous store of heat. The People distill it from a porous mineral called ziuaht, “firestone.”

The room was full of men.

A score or more crouched on the long benches, or sat, hunched with tension, motionless at the tables. They were natives one and all, with the red-copper hide and oblique amber-green eyes of their kind. Under shaven brows, their faces were lean and hard and wolfish. Rings of tooled bronze or beaten copper clasped throat, wrist, biceps. Kiltlike skirts of faded leather shielded belly and thighs; some of these were worked with tartanlike patterns of cross-hatched lines which were the tribal bearings of their nations. Others, however, wore their leather plain, which denoted them as aoudhha: “the clanless,” men without kin—outlaws, or outcasts, or both.

They paid no attention to Ryker as he came into the wineshop. That was because their attention was rivetted upon the girl who danced before them in an open space. The girl who coiled and glided like the flame that danced upon the stony dragon’s tongue that was the hearth.

When Ryker saw her, his attention was seized, too.

She was naked, except for a single strap of gilded leather that hung down before her loins. Her body was slim and lean and tawny, sinuous as a panther’s, and as golden. That rare, pale gold that denotes on Mars the pure breeding of the princely houses of the High Clans.

Her hair was a banner of black silk, floating on the spicy, hot breath of the fire. Her breasts were shallow, rounded, firm, like lustrous, pale fruit. As she danced, moving her loins and torso alone, her feet all but motionless on the pave, her arms were thrust skyward and slightly back, curved at the wrists, held moveless.

She danced—if the writhing undulation could be named with so mundane a verb—with her belly and her breasts and her buttocks.

Ryker sucked in one long breath, and held it until the blood drummed in his temples. His pale and colorless eyes burned coldly from the dark leathern mask of his face. Never had he seen or imagined a dance so rawly savage, yet so exquisitely sensual.

She danced like ripples of moonfire riding the black waters of the old canals; like pattering leaves driven by a moaning and restless wind aprowl through an abandoned courtyard. Her flesh—crawled. Her bare breasts panted. Her belly and loins swung in a slow, undulating spiral that was naked invitation.

Her tawny limbs had been rubbed with scented oil until they glowed like amber silks. Then a sparkling dust, like that of crushed mirrors, had been sprinkled across her body. Firelight glittered like powdered gems from every sinuous twist and undulation.

Reluctantly lifting his eyes from the allure of her breasts, Ryker saw that her face was catlike, wide cheeked, elfin, with a small chin and a full-lipped mouth. Her nose was pert, a mere nubbin. Her eyes—

He frowned, then. For she went masked and he could not see her eyes. The visor was of black satin, molded to fit the contours of her face, and it had no eyeholes. Which was strange, he thought, but not very important. With all that sleek, glowing flesh to drink in, he did not have to see her eyes.

And that was his last mistake.

She danced to the pittering of drums and the wail of a small pipe. An old, bony man clenched the drums between gaunt knees, where he squatted to one side of the dragon’s-mouth fireplace. His gnarled, knobbed hands made dry, erratic music.

The pipe was held by a naked boy of perhaps twelve, who leaned with gamine grace against a pillar. The thin, wailing cry of his pipe was like a lost soul in torment, sobbing from the throat of hell. The shrill, raw pain of the sound, and the sadness in it, raised the nape hairs on Ryker’s neck and made the skin on his bare arms creep.

And then, suddenly—quite suddenly—the dance was done.

The girl froze in her last position, then turned and glided away, shrugging through bead curtains that tinkled across a narrow stone doorway. The old man ceased his pattering and climbed stiffly to his feet and hobbled out after the girl. The naked boy took the pipe away from his mouth, grinned impishly, and picked up a copper bowl from a low table and went around the room from man to man.

The men stood or sat, breathing heavily, still staring with hot eyes at the empty space where the girl had writhed. They barely noticed the boy, merely plucking a coin from their belt pouch as he paused in front of each, clinking his bowl remindingly.

When the boy stopped in front of Ryker, the Earthman looked him over slowly, with bemused eyes, coming out of his trance painfully. As he dropped a coin in the bowl his eyes caught sight of something on the boy’s naked chest. Just above the heart and just below the nipple an emblem had once been tattooed. Efforts had been made to erase that which had been needled there, but the smooth, sleek flesh caught the gleam of the firelight in such a way that Ryker could see marks of the needles, even though the pigment had been erased.

It was an odd sign, vaguely familiar: a crouching, many-legged creature, vaguely like an insect. And winged, the many wings folded against its slope of thorax and pod. Weird and strange, and curious.

Mischief gleamed in the boy’s eyes, and a trace of contempt, as he looked at the Earthman and knew him for what he was, a hated F’yagha, an Outworlder. But he did not reject the coin. Turning on his heels, his round little bottom cocked impudently, he swaggered from the room. Shouldering through the tinkling bead curtains, he vanished after the old man and the naked dancer, and was gone.

Now the serving boys came out from wherever they had been hiding, with ceramic pitchers full of wine. Gradually, the numb trance faded and men began to shuffle, grunt, move again.

Ryker accepted a bowl of sharp red wine and drank it thirstily.

His mind was busy with something that bothered him.

It was the girl, or, rather, her eyes.

As she had glided past him through the bead curtains, one strand had caught upon the corner of her visor and stripped it from her face. And he had gotten one swift, transient glimpse of her eyes.

They were huge and thick lashed, those eyes, tip-tilted and inexpressibly lovely.

And they were golden. Golden as puddles of hot metal poured by the jeweler for the making of a precious brooch.

And that was strange. For the People (as the Martian natives call their race) have, most commonly, eyes of amber, sometimes of liquid brown, and even occasionally of emerald. But never of gold. Or never that Ryker knew or had ever seen.

She could not have been an Earthsider, not with that tawny skin and blacksilk hair and snub-nosed cat’s face. Nor a Martian, not with those eyes of molten gold.

Which meant she was of an unknown race… .

Or from an unknown world!

2. Whispering Shadows

He had been on Mars a dozen years, had Ryker, but he was no Colonist.

In the early days, Earthside governments had found few of their people willing to emigrate to the distant, dry, hostile planet. So they had forced emigration by making it legal punishment for certain crimes. In the same manner, and for much the same reason, Britain had once dumped it’s unwanted and condemned on the shores of Australia, dooming these unfortunates to a lifetime of penal servitude in a prison the size of a continent, whose walls were oceans, with storms for guards.

What Ryker had done back on Earth to merit deportation does not concern us here. But he had not been a criminal, exactly, unless adherence to unpopular political philosophies be deemed a crime. Once he had been, in his way, something of a patriot. Once he had placed the common good above his own comfort and security. But no longer.

Here, on this ancient desert world, merely to survive is difficult enough. To live is something else again. And Ryker had lived, which is to say, he had been made to do things he would not have chosen to do, had conditions been otherwise.

But here, at least, he was free. If Mars, in the beginning, had been a prison, it was a prison without walls, where the condemned could freely come and go as they willed. The only thing they could not do was return to

Earth again. Only the most serious crimes merited real imprisonment. Those who, back on Earth, had been judged homicidal murderers, political assassins, terrorists, or dedicated revolutionaries, were sent here to sweat and scrabble in the barium mines until death released them from their chains.

Men such as Ryker were not thought dangerous enough to be locked away in that living hell. There was no need for Earthmen to toil like animals in the black, bottomless mines. For that, the Colonial Administration had the natives. True, they were human enough, the People— although, perhaps, their remotest racial ancestor, in the dim beginnings of time, had been feline whereas ours was simian. Once they had been a mighty race, the builders of a high civilization, the proud inheritors of a noble tradition of art, literature and philosophy. But that great heritage had dwindled and perished during the early Pleistocene.

Mars was old—old. As her green oceans dried and shrank, as her rich atmosphere thinned, as her internal fires cooled, that which had been lush meadow and forest-land once, became dry, powdery desert. No longer could the red world support her teeming life, so that life … died.

What was left was in time reduced to savagery, to barbarism. The few remnants of her proud empires inexorably dwindled to ragged, starveling outlaw bands, who huddled for warmth in the ruined shells of what once had been brilliant and populous cities, and thus Mars broke and humbled the last of her children. The People had lost the dice-roll of destiny; and Earthlings had never liked losers. So, while a few scientists studied their dying traditions and strove to rescue from oblivion their half-forgotten sciences, the more brutal—or more practical— of the uninvited visitors from the green world nearer to the sun regarded them as ignorant savages to be ruthlessly exterminated, cruelly exploited, casually enslaved.

It was an old, old story back on Earth. But history tends to repeat itself, and while glittering socialites in sophisticated capitals glibly murmur of basic rights and freedoms, things are done on far frontiers that would shock them into unbelieving, bewildered horror.

Frontier garrisons are frontier garrisons. Life is hard and survival is chancy. And dead natives tell no tales.

Thus the People, by now, had good reason to hate and distrust the Outworlder colonists and to avoid commerce with them. Luckily, Mars is wide and most of it is uninhabited and hostile wilderness. So, while the Colonists clung together, holding the thin cold air and the dry sterile deserts at bay behind their plastic inflatable domes and pressure pumps, the Martian natives had all their world to roam free, and only a few of the hardiest among the Colonials risked leaving the snug security of their plastic warrens for the hazards which await the unwary beyond the half-dozen colonies.

Ryker knew there was no going back, and had determined to survive in any way he could. The air of Mars is thin and starved for oxygen as it is for moisture, but there was a way Earthsider lungs and blood chemistry could be subtly modified to endure it without cumbersome thermal suits and respirators. This method, the Mishubi-Yakamoto regimen, cost money. But with it, Ryker would be free to wander the surface of Mars for as long as he could stay alive.

So he got the money. Never mind how. If, in getting it, he bent a few laws to the breaking point, and filled a fat dossier in the Criminal Files of the Colonial Administration, the getting made him freer than before. The paradox is but one of those Mars affords its visitors.

The People themselves are by way of being rebels against CA law, which makes them outcasts and criminals, fair game for any cop with a grudge. The only F’yagha they permit a wary sort of welcome into their towns or encampments are, similarly, criminals and outcasts. Ryker had, early on, won the friendship of the native clans, or as much friendship as any Earthsider can win, which isn’t much. Call it toleration if you will, and not friendship. At least he was free to come and go among the People with no questions asked, so long as he kept to himself, left their women alone, kept away from their holy places, and did not meddle in their affairs.

What he did upon leaving the joy-house was dangerous, very dangerous. For he was breaking those unwritten laws he had so scrupulously observed all these years.

And the penalty was death.

Keeping well to the shadows, he was following the dancing girl, the old man and the boy.

Why he was doing this he could not have explained even to himself. Call it curiosity, if you like, or a hunch. But outcasts like Ryker do not live very long on Mars unless they develop that sixth or seventh sense that permits them to smell out danger before it strikes, and profit before the money is laid out on the table.

It was that glimpse of the girl’s golden eyes, coupled with that half-erased tattoo on the boy’s smooth breast that made Ryker’s extra sense tingle. For he knew enough of Martian traditions and history to know that in the old time, when the great Martian civilization still basked in its golden twilight and ages before the High Clans and princely bloodlines had mixed and become mongrelized, the lords and nobles of the pure blood had looked forth from golden eyes such as those which transformed the girl’s heart-shaped face into a marvel.

And he had seen that insect sign before.

Once, years before, in the Eastern Dustlands, he had found and rifled an age-old tomb. Time had buried it deep beneath bone-dry, talcum-fine sand; a chance windstorm -rare on the desert world, though not entirely unheard of—had laid bare the black marble door to the hillside tomb.

Within had been few pieces of gold and fewer gems, but many artifacts of interest to the scientists. And in those days, before the police dossier which carried Ryker’s name had become quite so fat, he could still come and go in Syrtis Port or Sun Lake City without suspicion or harrassment. So he had sold the tomb artifacts one by one to the historians and the professors interested enough in XT archaeology to ignore the fact that they were purchasing stolen goods. One by one he had sold the little ceramic jars and figurines and symbolic tools and weapons. All but one piece were gone. That one he had kept for himself, for some reason he could not quite put a name to.

Perhaps it was just a whim. Or perhaps he took a fancy to the thing he had found clasped tight to the bony breast of the Martian mummy, folded tight in withered arms. Or maybe he thought of it as a souvenir, or a good-luck piece. Whatever the reason, it had slept above his heart, suspended on a thong around his neck, all these years, in a little leathern bag.

It was a seal of slick, glassy black stone, sleek and glistening as obsidian, but heavier than marble. It was a small thing—the palm of one hand could cover it. Small or not, it was a mystery. For no jeweler or geologist to whom he had given shavings from it could name the dense, ebon crystal from which it was made. And none of the experts to whom he lent a rubbing copy could read the characters in the unknown and unclassified language which ran around the edge of one side of the seal.

On the reverse of that seal, deeply embossed in high relief, was a figure, a figure like a fantastic, crouching insect—but such an insect as our fields and forests had never housed. Such an insect as Mars itself was never home to, even in its greener ages.

But by the shreds and scraps salvaged from the old traditions and sagas and mythologies he knew that strange, crouching insect. In the nearly forgotten lore of the People the creature was known as The Pteraton. The name means “The Guardian of the Gateway”; but it should have been named The Enigma.

Two thousand miles from the dark, narrow alleys of Yeolarn, its huge stony likeness crouched amid the waste, like some gigantic and mythological Sphinx. A full hundred yards it measured from beaked, antenna-crowned face to tapering, cylindrical thorax-tip. And no man— Martian or Earthsider scientist alike—could say who built it, or when, or why. Or what it signified.

The Sphinx of Mars the Earthside newscasters called it. And like that other vast Enigma that has crouched for ages in the deserts beyond Gizeh, while empires waxed and waned, its mystery has never been solved.

Now why, wondered Ryker to himself, was the likeness of the Stone Enigma he had found graven on a black seal from an ancient tomb, why had it once been tattooed upon the naked breast of a nameless, homeless, clanless guttersnipe of a native Martian boy?

The shadows grew thicker in the maze of alleys that was the Old City.

As the three glided purposefully on before him, Ryker noticed with distress that they were no longer alone in these narrow ways, save for the shadows.

For he heard the faint shuffle of sandal leather in the black, yawning mouths of alleys as they went past them—the scrape of boot soles, the faint tread of furtive footsteps.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a movement among the shadows, as of men gathering for some unknown purpose.

They were silent and grimly purposeful. They kept a good distance between themselves and the three they followed, but they kept up with them. They neither let them get too far ahead, nor too far behind.

And now the dancing girl, the old man and the naked boy could be seen to hesitate at the entrance to alleys, to turn aside, to falter. And it slowly dawned upon Ryker that the three he followed were being … herded.

He looked back over his shoulder at their pursuers. There were very many of them and they were curiously unspeaking.

They looked to him like a mob. And mobs are as unpredictable, as potentially dangerous, as unruly and as given to sudden whims of violence on Mars as back on Earth.

Despite the cold, dry air of the evening, sweat broke out upon Ryker’s brow and the skin crawled horribly on the nape of his neck.

He began to wish, and that most fervently, that he had never let that idle curiosity, that vagrant impulse, lead him out of the tavern to follow the girl with the golden eyes and the boy whose breast bore the Mark of Mystery into the furtive, meandering, shadow-steeped back alleys of old Yeolarn.

But he had, and there was no turning back now. He sensed the mood of the mob behind him. They were after the girl and her companions, not after him. But they would not permit him to escape, either. Whatever lay ahead—towards whatever trap or cul-de-sac they were herding the three fugitives—no witness would be permitted to get away unmolested.

Especially, no F’yagha witness.

Ryker growled a bitter curse deep in his throat, and his fingers curled about his gun butt. His hard face grew bleak. His lips thinned, and his cold, pale eyes went hunting restlessly from side to side, for a doorway, an open arcade, a flight of worn steps. But no avenue of escape was left open, he knew within his heart. Silent men stood deep in the shadows, blocking every way out of the maze.

They came at last into an open square which was walled on three sides by sheer stone surfaces, unbroken by gate or archway.

At the entrance to this cul-de-sac, Ryker halted and stood aside against the nearer wall in the black shadow of an overhanging second-story balcony, hoping not to be seen.

The girl, the old man, and the boy, stopped, too, realizing they were trapped and could go no further.

The silent mob halted at the entrance to the little courtyard, and stood motionless, blacker shadows amid the darkness of the alley. Ryker drew his gun and hid it in a fold of his cloak and stood there sweating, wishing himself a thousand miles away. He smelled an execution in the air, and the stench of it was fearsome and ugly.

And then the shadows, which stood ranked motionless, began to … whisper. Ryker cocked his ears to catch the unfamiliar word. It was rarely heard, even in the vilest dens of Mars, but it was not unknown to him.

“Zhaggua!” the shadows were whispering.

The word was blunt and unlovely, and they spat it like a curse.

“Zhaggua! Zhaggua!—Zhaggua!”

The girl stood, naked under her fringed long-shawl, facing the faceless shadow-throng proudly, masked face lifted fearlessly, and took the ugly word full in the face like a glob of spittle. She took it unflinchingly, Ryker noticed. And even here, with death inches away and only moments in the future, he felt the pure, sweet, singing spirit of her, and he marveled at it. The manhood within him responded to the unconscious grace of her slim, poised body, her thrusting breasts outlined under the thin silken stuff of the shawl, and the pride and scorn eloquent in the fearless lift of that masked face.

“Zhaggua!”

The shadows were inching closer now, the glitter of catlike eyes intent on their prey. And the whispering rose to a chant as the ugly strange name, the ugly word, was spat forth. The smell of the mob was rank and vile in Ryker’s nostrils, and the name of that smell was hate. But the reek of fear was in that sharp stench, too. And that was strange.

For why should the mob, many men strong, fear a slim girl, an old man, and a child?

But yet another question seethed through the turmoil of Ryker’s thoughts. And it was the strangest mystery of all.

For the vile, guttural word—Zhaggua—had a meaning. A meaning lost in the dim vistas of the past, shrouded behind old mysteries and forgotten legends, veiled in the obscurity of remote and unremembered aeons.

It was a dirty word, that ugly grunt of sound. It was a curse, an obscenity, like “nigger” or “wop” or “Commie.”

It was a word which had once been applied to a people lost in time’s far, forgotten dawn.

It was a name that had not been used against a living man in millions of years.

It meant … Devil!

“Zhaggua—Zhaggua—Zhaggua!” the mob chanted, and now Ryker saw they held stones and bricks cupped in eager, trembling hands. Stones, heavy stones, to beat down that slim, proud, fearless, warm gold body. To beat and break and pulp that sleek, perfumed flesh.

But why?

Devil—Devil—Devil! The mob growled as it surged forward, stones lifted, to kill.

3. Red Thirst

Ryker cursed, shrugged his cloak back over his shoulders, and stepped forward. Knowing himself for a fool, he lifted his heavy guns. There was nothing else that he could do, after all. He had been many things in his time, and had done those things that tarnish the soul and harden the heart. He had lied, cheated, thieved, and he had killed for hire. But one thing he had never done, and could never do, and live at peace with himself thereafter.

He had never stood idly by and watched a woman be torn apart by a mob.

The shrill yammer of his power guns shrieked as they cut through the growling of the mob.

The thick shadows were split asunder, quite suddenly, by a cold, unearthly light. It was blue-white, that glare of fierce electric fire. And men fell before the blaze of those twin guns as wheat stalks fall before the keen-bladed scythe.

The mob was as brave as mobs usually are. That is to say, each man lost his own fear in the lust for violence which gripped them all, even as each felt his individuality submerged in the oneness that was the mob.

Therefore, each man was only as brave as those around him.

The mob was one animal by now, one huge animal with many parts and one desire in its hot heart—the red thirst for blood. But before the yammering shriek of those guns the mob dissolved into its component units. Those units were only men—alone, individual now, isolated from the mob mentality, and terribly vulnerable to the cold fire that spat from the grim muzzles of Ryker’s guns. The men had only bricks and stones and broken bottles in their hands, for power guns were forbidden to the People and were hard to come by in the Old City.

And bricks and stones and bottles weighed little in the balance against the sizzling death vomited forth by the twin guns held rock-steady in Ryker’s hard, scarred fists.

A dozen men, maybe more, lay dead on the dusty cobblestones that paved the plaza. And the evil smell of burnt flesh was thick in the nostrils of those who lived.

The red thirst faded in their hearts, and in its place came fear. They licked their lips. They hesitated. They gave little, quick sideways glances at each other. And they hesitated. Had the mob been goaded on by a leader, it might still have been rallied. But there was no leader to stand forth and confront the bright death held now in check by a finger’s pressure.

The mob began to crumble, peeling away in scuttling, shadowy figures. First, the rear ranks melted away as if by sorcery. Then from the sides, and men turned away and slunk off into the black ways of the little, crooked alley.

Finally there were none in all the little plaza, save for Ryker, the girl, her two companions, and the dead.

Ryker drew a long, ragged breath, and put his guns back in their worn leather holsters, and his heart began to beat again.

He turned to face the girl, who still stood proudly before her companions, and who had not moved or spoken.

He cleared his throat and spoke. Some whim made him speak not in the harsh sibilants of the gutter lingo he would have used, but in that old and finer variant of the Tongue spoken only by the warrior princelings of the High Blood.

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—”

“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.

A purse of gold had changed hands, but Ryker depended on more than gold to seal the lips of Yammak. For the fat, beardless, voluble little man had recognized the three who accompanied the Earthling. He had sucked in his breath between discolored teeth at his first good look at them, and his eyes had gone round and frightened.

Oh, he would keep his mouth shut, would Yammak the slidar trader! For if he dared so much as to hint that it had been he who had helped the three zhaggua to elude their hunters and to escape into the Dustlands, those who hunted them would close the mouth of Yammak forever.

Among the many things he hated about Mars, Ryker most of all hated slidars.

The rangy, splay-footed, ungainly beasts were four footed, but there all resemblance to horses ended. They were reptilian, of course—Mars has hardly any mammals and no birds or insects, other than lice—and the crimson, snake-tailed creatures move with a shambling, splayfooted, loose-jointed stride that is peculiarly uncomfortable.

It is not for nothing that the gaunt, big-shouldered, ill-tempered brutes are named slidars. The word means “lopers” in the Tongue; and lope they do, with an ambling, jolting rhythm more like that of a fat, stumbling hound dog than anything else on four feet.

Ryker, however, gritted his teeth and clung to the saddle horn and gave the brute its head, allowing it to make all possible speed. He did not begin to breathe easily, or rein the beast in to a more comfortable trot until the last lights of Yeolarn had died behind them in the dark.

Then, and only then, did he slow their advance and begin to consider where they might go.

Yeolarn is the northernmost of the Earth colonies, and sits smack on the 250th Meridian in the center of the Thoana Palus. It is at least eleven hundred miles from Syrtis Port, which is the nearest colony to it, and to the north illimitable empty wastes of Dustland and dead rocky plateaux stretch to the Pole itself.

When they rode out of the Dragon Gate, they had headed due north, Ryker knew. They were now in one of the talcum-soft desert regions called “Dustlands,” an empty space on the map which the old Earth astronomers had filled in with the name Aetheria. Due east was an even broader expanse of powdery desert called Cebrenia, which stretched on for twelve hundred miles or so before the mesalike bulk of Propontis rose to block the way.

West, however, they would only have to ride three hundred miles or less to reach the low, rocky hills of Alcyonius Nodus. There, at least, they could find shelter in the caves which the tides of ancient oceans had cut into the cliffs which had once been the coastline of an old continent. And, perhaps, they could find food as well.

He turned to his companions to suggest this, but decided to delay the question until morning, now not long away. For the night had been long and busy. None of them had enjoyed any sleep, and precious little rest, and they were all wearied from their exertions. Indeed, the old man swayed weakly in the saddle, and the girl sat her mount with head low, shoulders bent, slumped dispiritedly.

“Let’s dismount here, have something to eat, and snatch a few hours sleep,” he suggested.

The girl looked up quickly, her golden eyes filled with fear.

“Is it safe? Perhaps we are pursued—”

Ryker shook his head.

“They’ll have found where we entered the sewers, having broken down the cellar door by now, surely,” he grunted. “But there’s no way they can tell which way we went, or where we came up to the street. Those sewers run for miles and miles, and I replaced the plate that sealed the street exit. And Yammak will not talk.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

He grinned, wolfishly, and explained. The girl nodded wearily, satisfied, and got down from her slidar.

Wrapped in the warm cloaks supplied by Yammak’s woman, they hungrily devoured cold sliced meat, dry bread and preserved jellies, washed down by a frugal swallow of red wine.

They slept that night like the dead, huddled together for warmth.

The air of Mars is thin, and cold, and dry. So dry that it sucks the moisture from your tissues, and so cold that it makes the air atop Everest humid by comparison. And so thin, so oxygen starved, that it is—hardly enough to sustain life.

Indeed, when the first Earthsider colonists and explorers came they muffled themselves within airsuits and wore pressure masks, and domed their towns with plastic bubbles. But soon the men of science set to work upon the problem. Earthsiders would never have more than a toehold on this world if they must wear suits and masks in order to live. Since Mars was too vast by far to be terraformed, men themselves were forced to become acclimated.

The first clue came from the Martians themselves. They were warm-blooded hominids of obvious mammalian descent—human to a dozen decimal places—and, somehow or other, they managed to survive.

Biochemists, studying the natives, found out how nature had adapted them to survival under these conditions, and, in time, learned how to modify the body chemistry of the colonists to conform to this harsh environment. The series of operations was expensive, and permanent, but Ryker was damn glad he had bought them. Otherwise, he could not have lasted long in the Dustlands, away from the domed cities of his kind.

But even with his body chemistry adapted to Mars, some precautions were necessary. The thermals he wore were of tough, wear-resistant synthetic, and helped retain his body heat. The pressure still he should have brought with him, and would have, had he known in advance he was in for some overland travel, would have squeezed enough moisture from the rubbery plants that carpeted the so-called “canals” to sustain him without dangerous dehydration.

Lacking it, he was in trouble.

This did not become evident until morning, when he woke to find his throat and the inside of his mouth as dry as blotting paper, and an ache in his sinuses that presaged difficulties to come. A swig or two from his canteen helped, but the water it held would not last for long.

They mounted and rode out.

Valarda and her companions, being natives, did not feel the lack of water as badly as Ryker did. Over the millions of years since Mars first lost her oceans and began to dry up, evolution had adapted the Martians to a lesser need for moisture and an ability to retain moisture superior to that of Earthsider bodies. For instance, Martians do not perspire Also, their glands produce epidermal oils which tend to seal body moisture within, preventing its evaporation.

Still, in time they would all need fresh water, or they would begin to die that most horrible of all deaths—death through dehydration.

All that day they rode on, heading almost due northwest, for in the Dustlands it is usually possible to travel in straight lines—“as the crow flies,” an Earthsider might have put it—but the People have another expression which states the identical notion.

Alcyonius Nodus would afford them shelter and, probably, food, as the crumbling ancient cliffs of the mesa provide shelter for other life forms beside man.

Whether they could find water there, though, that was another question.

Had they dared ride due south, they could have found water at Nodus Laocontis, the old canal which once served to irrigate the gardens of Yeolarn.

Or they could have ridden southwest, into Nilosyrtis, an even greater canal which had similarly served the old, abandoned city near whose ruins the modern colony of Syrtis Port was built.

But these routes were too dangerous, as either would bring them within dangerous proximity to Yeolarn. And the two canals were more than twice as far away as Alcyonius.

So they rode on towards the Pole and the barren lands in the west.

Whether they would ever get there was another question and one which only time could answer.

5. The Cliff Dragon

Ryker had known from the first that there was something unusual about his three companions.

Their strangeness did not lie entirely in Valarda’s uncanny golden eyes. Neither did it reside in the half-erased Clan tatoo on the boy’s breast.

During the two days it took them to reach the mesa, he pieced the parts of the puzzle together and was able to put it into words.

They did not act like Martians.

The difference was subtle, not blatant. It took intuition to notice it. But Ryker noticed it.

In the first place, why were they willing to let him go with them? The People hate Earthsiders with a virulent intensity hard to describe, but it was more than than just the xenophobia most provincials feel for outsiders. The F’yagha had raped their world from them, and left them homeless vagabonds wandering amid the wreckage of their own empire. By contrast, the Apaches and Cherokees and other subjugated aborigines of the Americas had been treated with courteous and chivalric generosity. The Conquistadores had left Montezuma with more dignity and power than the Earthsiders had left the Martians.

True, he had intervened to save them from the mob. But an ordinary native woman and her retinue, under the same circumstances, would have thanked him frostily, and left him to his own devices.

Valarda was no ordinary woman. This he knew by sheer gut-level instinct.

Nor was she a dancing girl. Ryker had mingled much with the People, an outcast from his own kind, and there were Low Clan women who danced naked before men. Whereas she had the daintiness and reserve of a princess.

Of course, even a princess can be left destitute, homeless and starving by whims of fortune. The difference is that a princess would rather starve than show her nakedness before men. And he would have staked his life on the fact that Valarda was highborn.

As for the old man, he too displayed marks of breeding and elegance. His features were delicately carved, and there was nobility in his high brow. When he spoke, which was seldom, his accent and vocabulary were those of a learned man, a priest or a scholar. And no itinerant musician for a dancing girl ever bore a name like his. “Melandron” was a High Clan name, and a very ancient sort of name, at that. The sort of name the Old Kings had in the hero legends and epics of the past.

As for the boy, he was just a boy. Nothing was mysterious about him, save for the marking above his heart.

Ryker was two days with them before he discovered they had a secret language.

He spoke the Tongue as well, he supposed, as any F’yagha. Which is to say, he could make himself understood in it, and could interpret what was said to him pretty well. But the language of Mars is old beyond telling, rich in allusions to literature and folklore and legendry, with whole vocabularies of rare or obsolete words. There was much of the Tongue he could not and did not know. But he could recognize the main regional accents used by the major Clans, and these three spoke with an accent he had never before heard.

When, towards evening on the second day out of Yeolarn, they came within sight of Alcyonius Nodus, Valarda and the old man halted their steeds and sat there in ihe saddle for a time, staring at the mesa with an emotion in their eyes he could not name.

And when they spoke softly to each other, it was in a language he did not understand.

And this was very strange.

The Martians have been civilized for so many ages, they long ago lost national divisions. For millions of years they have been one nation, and the one Tongue is spoken universally from pole to pole. If once upon a time they spoke several different national languages, it was so very long ago they have forgotten it, even in their myths.

And the language in which Melandron and the girl conversed was not the Tongue. Or if it was, it was a dialect so ancient, or so rare, or so sacred, he did not recognize it.

He filed the fact away for later thought.

But he was beginning to wonder to himself, and strongly, where these three had come from.

It was like they were from another world.

Or another age.

That night they slept in a cave in the mesa wall. The boy Kiki had gone dart hunting, and had brought back fat scarlet lizards whereon that night they feasted.

Ryker had gone out to help, but when he saw the boy clambering over the cliff face as agile as any monkey, he knew there was nothing he could do.

And dart hunting is a Martian sport at which Ryker’s sort are hopelessly clumsy. The slim metal shafts, like miniature javelins, were too light for his musculature, and Ryker knew it. Earthlings are built by evolution to stand erect under the crushing gravity of their heavy planet; they have more strength than is required on Mars, where a man who would weigh one hundred fifty pounds back on Earth here weighs only fifty-seven.

So he watched with helpless admiration as the boy cast his slim glinting darts at the rock lizards. They flickered through the air like weightless beams of light, transfixed the wriggling scarlet reptiles with unerring accuracy; and that night they feasted on ongga-steak broiled over chemical fire in spice leaves.

And they drank deep, having found in the deep crevices of the cliff rich growth of pod lichen the Martians crush and drain for precious water.

Here they were safe, with food, shelter and even water for their needs. By now Ryker was certain they were not being followed. The shambling gait of a loper’s splayfooted stride raises a plume of the talcum-fine sands of the Dustlands you can see for many miles. And there were no far, dusty plumes behind them on the dark skies.

Ryker had tried a few casual questions, had been answered by silence, and gave it up. You do not intrude upon the privacy of this fierce, proud, wary people with blundering queries. What they wish you to know, they impart unasked.

But why wouldn’t Valarda or the old man or the boy tell him where they were from, or the name of their tribe?

Actually, there could be many reasons. They could easily be outlaws, fleeing from tribe justice, or exiles, cast out by their chief.

Or the last remnants of a dying people.

Odd how that thought popped into his head.

Odder still how his skin crept and his nape hairs tingled at the thought. It was as if his body recognized the truth before his mind had reason to believe it.

Still, there was no evidence.

He set it aside to think about later.

That night, very late—near dawn, it was—Ryker came lully awake all of a sudden, as if some sixth sense warned him of danger.

Without the twitching of a single muscle, without changing the slow, deep rhythm of his breathing, did he give notice of his awakening. But with slitted eyes he searched the black gloom for a sign of difference.

A faint green glow from the residue in the fire pan was the only illumination that pierced the inky darkness of the cave. That, and a dim, blue-white glimmer from the thronging stars.

Nothing moved in the darkness, and no sound broke the stillness. He levered himself up on one arm, his other hand brushing his gun butt. There lay his companions bundled m their cloaks, spaced around the fire. Nor was there anything in the cave.

But something was wrong, he knew. He searched the green-lit gloom again—and then he saw it.

The girl was not there.

Her cloak and furs lay neatly arranged in the place she had selected for herself, but the place was empty.

Soundlessly as a cat, Ryker rose to his feet and padded to the mouth of the cave. Peering out, he saw her crouched in a huddle on the stone ledge. Cold blue starfire shone from her naked shoulders, caught and dazzled in her silken hair, and glowed upon the soft rondures of her bare breasts.

Ryker caught his breath at the loveliness of Valarda, nude in the starlight.

He must have made some slight sound—perhaps the scuff of his boot leather rasping against dry stone—for she turned and saw him. And he saw that she had been weeping, for starfire glittered in her tear-wet lashes like tiny gems.

In the star sheen her perfect breasts were coppery silver above, polished ebony beneath. He had one swift, breathtaking look at her nakedness. Then she shook forward the black wings of her long hair, veiling from him the temptation of her tawny flesh.

And her face—open, vulnerable, soft lips atremble, some strange, heart-deep sorrow visible in her wet eyes—went hard and proud and cold. It was as if she had, in an instant, donned a lifeless mask; her eyes were frozen now, aloof, with the hauteur of a princess whose privacy a boor has blundered into.

He cursed himself for letting her discover him watching from the shadows like some panting voyeur. He opened his mouth to make some fumbling apology for intruding upon her privacy—and then, very suddenly, they were both of them too busy for words.

A terrible shape, black as night, edged with star jewels where the dim light caught its scales, clambered up over the brink of the ledge.

The slioth was a cliff scavenger, found commonly in these cliffs and mesas, which was accustomed to devouring the bodies of dead things. It did not usually prey upon the living, but—after all—meat is meat, and even the cliff dragon likes a hot, fresh meal at times.

For a split second it paused, clinging there by the suction pads on its six, hook-clawed feet. Then it slithered up and over the ledge and came at them, eyes burning like lamps of green phosphor, filled with a mindless, ravening hunger.

The girl sprang for the safety of the cave but Ryker was in her way. She stumbled against him and went down on her knees and he tried to interpose his body between the lizard and the girl. One hooked paw raked him from throat to navel and he staggered back, until he stood flat against the wall of the cliff.

Miraculously, he was unharmed. The tough, insulated synthetic of his thermal suit had been built to keep in his bodyheat. It had never been designed to resist the terrible, razory claws of the slioth or its distant cousin, the dreaded sandcat of the Dustlands. But it was strong enough to keep those steely hooks from his flesh, although the fabric was slit open from neck to waist.

The lizard reared up, hissed like a steam whistle, and reached for them with three of its mailed limbs. Blood thundering in his ears like pounding surf, Ryker fumbled with numb, clumsy fingers for the gun which lay holstered against his thigh.

He half-drew it, and then, suddenly, the girl was in his arms, all of her cool, sweetly-rounded nakedness pressed against his own bared torso, her slim arms locked around his neck, making his draw awkward.

He cursed in harsh, senseless gutturals, swivelled to one side, and fired as the huge reptile loomed up, casting its black shadow over them.

In the inky gloom, the bolt of electric flame was brighter than many suns.

The cliff dragon was armored in leathery hide, and mailed with tough overlapping plates of horny chitin, like a lobster’s shell. But the gun was set for a needle beam, and the sizzling ray lasered through the body of the beast and spurted from its back—bright, diffuse flame intermixed with gobbets of meat and thick, splattering gore.

The slioth squalled deafeningly. It fell backwards off the ledge and, a moment later, they heard it thud against the rock-strewn slopes below.

The blaze of afterimages wavered before his eyes, blotting out everything but the pale, wide-eyed face the girl lifted to his. Where-the soft roundness of her tender breast was pressed against his bare skin, he felt the thudding of her heart, and she felt his own heartbeat like an echo of hers.

She trembled in his arms, and he soothed her with strong, rough hands that were curiously gentle.

And then he kissed her, a tender probing kiss that went on and on as if their lips had grown together into one mouth. And she did not draw away until they both had to breathe.

She withdrew her body from his own then, and went into the cave, not looking at him, and left him there, stiffly leaning against the cliff, his chest and arms and mouth still tingling with the warmth of her and with the sweetness of her.

The boy and the old man stood, both naked, both saying nothing, both staring with wide, frightened eyes. The reek of burnt dragon meat was thick and sour on the dry, cold air.

He holstered his gun and stooped, entering the cave again. Valarda was curled up in her blankets, her back turned towards him so that he could not see her face.

No one said anything.

Ryker returned to his fur cloak and pretended to sleep.

But he lay awake for hours staring into the green-lit gloom, remembering the silken softness of her body against his own, and the honey sweetness of her mouth under his kiss.