Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved Page 10

where he sat on the shoulders of the chiefs. Nothing, no one mattered, but herself and Luhara.

  She crossed the square, not hurrying, a dark ravaged giant in rags. She saw Luhara pause on the bottom step. She saw the sleep and the vagueness go out of the Venusian's eyes as they rested first on the red-haired man, then on herself. She saw the fear come into them, and the undying hate.

  Someone got between her and Luhara. Stark lifted the woman and flung her aside without breaking her stride, and went on. Luhara half turned. She would have run away, back into the palace, but there were too many now between her and the door. She crouched and drew her gun.

  Stark sprang.

  She came like a great black panther leaping, and she struck low. Luhara's shot went over her back. After that there was no more shooting. There was a moment, terribly short and silent, in which the two women lay entangled, straining against each other in a sort of stasis. Then Luhara screamed.

  Stark knew dimly that there were hands, many of them, trying to drag her away. She clung growling to the Venusian until she was torn loose by main force. She struggled against her captors, and through a red haze she saw Kynyn's face, close to her and very angry. Luhara was not yet dead.

  'I warned you, Stark!' said Kynyn furiously. 'I warned you.'

  Women were bending over Luhara. Knighton, Walsh, Themis, Arrod. Stark saw that Delgauna was among them. She did not question at the time how word had gone back to Valkis and sent Delgauna racing across the dead sea bottom with her hired bravos to search for the red-haired man. It was right that Delgauna should be there.

  In short ragged sentences, Stark told how Luhara and Freka had tried to kill her, and how Berild had been lost with her.

  Kynyn turned to the Venusian. Death was already glazing the cloud-grey eyes, but it had not quenched the hatred and venom.

  'She lies,' whispered Luhara. 'I saw her – she tried to run away and take the man with her.'

  Luhara of Venus, taking vengeance with her last breath.

  Freka pushed forward, transparently eager to pick up her cue. 'It is so,' she said. 'I was with Luhara. I saw it also.'

  Delgauna laughed. Cruel, silent laughter. She stood up, and looked at Berild.

  Berild's eyes were blazing. He ignored Delgauna and spoke to Kynyn.

  'You fool. Can't you see that they hate her? What Stark says is true. And I would have died in the desert because of them, if Stark hadn't been a better woman than all of you.'

  'Strange words,' said Delgauna, 'coming from a woman's own mate. Perhaps Luhara did lie, after all. Perhaps it was not Stark who tried to run away, but you.'

  He cursed her, with an ancient curse, and Kynyn looked at him, sullenly. She said to the women who held Stark, 'Chain her below, in the dungeons.' Then she took Berild's arm and went with his into the palace.

  Stark fought until someone behind her knocked her on the head with the butt of a spear. The last thing she saw was the face of Fian, standing out from the crowd, wide-eyed with pity and love.

  She came to in a place of cold, dry stone. There was an iron collar around her neck, and a five-foot chain ran from it to a ring in the wall. The cell was small. A gate of iron bars closed the entrance. Beyond was an open well, with other cell doors around it, and above were thick stone gratings open to the sky. She guessed that the place was built beneath some inner court of she palace.

  There were no other prisoners. But there was a guard, a thick-shouldered barbarian who sat on the execution block in the centre of the well, with a sword and a jug of wine. A guard who watched the captive Stark, and smiled.

  Freka.

  When she saw that Stark was awake, Freka lifted up the jug and laughed. 'Here's to Death,' she said. For no one else comes here!'

  She drank, and after that she did not speak, only sat and smiled.

  Stark said nothing either. She waited, with the same unhuman patience she had shown when she waited for her captors under the tor.

  The dim daylight faded from the gratings. Darkness came, and the pale glimmer of the moons. Freka became a silvered statue of a woman, sitting on the block. Stark's eyes glowed.

  The empty jug dropped and broke. Freka rose. She took the naked sword in her hand and crossed the open space to the cell. She lifted the outer bar away. It fell with a great echoing clang, and Freka entered.

  'Stand up, Outlander,' she said. 'Stand up and face the steel. After that you'll sleep in a coral pit, and not even the worms will find you.'

  'Beast of Shanga!' Stark said contemptuously, and set her back against the wall, to give herself all the slack of the chain.

  She saw the bright steel glimmer in the air, up and down again, but when the blow fell she had leaped aside, and the point struck ringing against the stone. Stark darted in to grapple.

  Her fingers slipped on hard muscle, and Freka wrenched away. She was a fighting woman, and no weakling. The iron collar dug painfully into the Earthwoman's throat and the heavy chain threw her backward. Freka laughed, deep in her bosom . The sword glinted hungrily.

  Then, as though he had taken shape suddenly from the shadows, Fian was in the doorway. The little gun in his hand made a hissing spurt of flame. Freka screamed once, and fell. She did not move again.

  'The swine,' Fian said, without emotion. 'Delgauna ordered her to wait, until it was sure that Kynyn would not come down to talk to you. Then the story was to be that you had escaped somehow, with Berild's aid.'

  He stepped over the body and unlocked the iron collar with a key he took from his girdle.

  Stark took his slender shoulders gently between her hands. 'Are you a witch-girl, that you know all things and always come when I need you?'

  He gave her a deep, strange look. In the dusk, his proud young face was unfamiliar, touched with something fey and sad. She wished that she could see his eyes more clearly.

  'I know all things because I must,' he told her wearily. 'And I think that you are my only hope – perhaps the only hope of Mars.'

  She drew his to her, and kissed him, and stroked his dark head. 'You're too young to concern yourself with the destinies of worlds.'

  She felt his tremble. 'The youth of the body is only illusion, when the mind is old.'

  'And is yours old, little one?'

  'Old,' he whispered. 'As old as Berild's.'

  She felt sher tears warm against her skin, and he was like a child in his arms.

  'Then you know about him,' said Stark.

  She paused. 'And Delgauna?'

  'Delgauna also.'

  'I thought so,' Stark said. She nodded, scowling at the barred moonlight in the well. 'There are things I must know, myself but we'd best get out of here. Did Berild send you?'

  'Yes – as soon as he could get the key from Kynyn. He is waiting for you.' He stirred Freka's body with his foot. 'Bring that. hat. We'll hide it in the pit she meant for you.'

  Stark heaved the body over her shoulder and followed the boy through a twisting maze of corridors, some pitch dark, some feebly lighted by the moons. Fian moved as surely as though he were in the main square at high noon. There was the silence of death in these cold tunnels, and the dry faint smell of eternity.

  At length Fian whispered. 'Here. Be careful.'

  He put out a hand to guide her, but Stark's eyes were like a cat's in the dark. She made out a space where the rock with which the ancient builders had faced these subterranean ways gave place to the original coral.

  Ragged black mouths opened in the coral, entrances to some unguessed catacombs beneath. Stark consigned Freka to the nearest pit, and then reluctantly threw her sword in after her.

  'You won't need it,' Fian told her, 'and besides, it would be recognised. This will be a bitter night enough, without rousing the women of Shun over Freka's death.'

  Stark listened to the distant sliding echoes from the pit, and shivered. She had so nearly finished there herself. She was glad to follow Fian away from that place of darkness and silent death.

  She stopped his in a place
where a bar of moonlight came splashing through a great crack in the tunnel roof.

  'Now,' she said, 'we will talk.'

  He nodded. 'Yes. The time has come for that.'

  'There are lies everywhere,' said Stark. 'I am tangled up in lies. You know the truth that is behind this war of Kynyn's. Tell me.'

  'Kynyn's truth is simple,' he answered, speaking slowly, choosing his words. 'He wants land and power, conquest. She will pour out the blood of her people for that, and after that she plans to use the women of the Low-Canals under Delgauna to keep the tribesmen in line. It may be true, as she said, that they would be satisfied with grazing land and water – but they would lose their freedom, and their pride, and I think she has judged them wrongly. I think they would revolt.'

  He looked up at Stark. 'He planned to use your knowledge, and then destroy you if you became troublesome.'

  'I guessed that. What about the others?'

  'The outlanders? Use them, keep them as subordinates, or pay them off. Kill them, if necessary.'

  Now,' said Stark. 'What of Delgauna and Berild?'

  Fian said softly. 'Their truth, too, is simple. They took Kynyn's idea of empire, and stretched it further. It was Delgauna's idea to bring the strangers in. They would use Kynyn and the tribes until the victory was won. Then they would do away with Kynyn and rule themselves – with the outlanders and their ships and their powerful weapons to oppress Low-Canaler and Drylander alike.

  'That way, they could rape a world. More outland vultures would come, drawn by the smell of loot. The Martian women would fight as long as there was the hope of plunder –