In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  They hadn’t seen anything much bigger than the ubiquitous little kangaroo-ratlike things for hours, though just after dawn they’d passed a herd—or flock—of four-footed flightless humpbacked birds that scampered off with black-and-white tails spread, caroling fright with a sound like a mob of terrified bassoons.

  “What are those?” he’d asked.

  “Wild zharba,” Sally had said. “They live off atmosphere plant and anything else that comes along and they manufacture their own water from their food—in fact, they store a couple of gallons in that sack on their backs, and you can tap it without hurting them if you know how and don’t mind the taste: Sort of a cross between cold, salty chicken soup and bird pee; it’s actually a fairly complete diet. The tame variety of zharba is what the nomads live off, mainly.”

  “Tembst?” Jeremy had asked.

  “Tembst,” she’d replied. “Very, very old tembst.”

  Tembst meant something like “technology,” but not quite. Perhaps “matter shaped by intent for utility,” Jeremy thought. They use the word for a knife or for something living like these . . . well, you expect another planet to be alien.

  The Intrepid Traveler was following the line of the abandoned waterway. The section beyond Zar-tu-Kan was lined with fortified farmhouses and an occasional small town built around a tower for airships, but those had long since dwindled to ruins.

  I need to examine the dead canal here as a base for comparison, Jeremy thought. The way to Rema-Dza probably wasn’t abandoned all at the same time.

  “Let’s take a look at it,” he said aloud.

  “Okay, might as well. It’s not as if we’re in a hurry,” Sally said.

  She walked forward to where Teyud stood near the wheel; a landship was steered from on top of the forecastle. The Martian was standing motionless except for an automatic flexing that kept her upright despite the motion of the Traveler. Unlike most of the crew she had pulled back the headdress of her robe. She nodded at Yamashita’s order and called in a voice that cut through the soughing blur of wind in the rigging and the creaking and groaning of the ship’s fabric:

  “Strike sail, full rolling stop!”

  The huge lugsail came down with a rush and a whine of gearing as the lower yard rolled it up like a sliding blind; the wheel-crews tapped at controls built into the base of each outrigger and great skeins of muscle flexed to close the brake-drums in a gradual surge of power.

  Jeremy grabbed a line against the forward pressure as the land-ship glided to a halt with a whine and pant of brakes. It bobbed back and forth with a rolling, sideways motion for a moment, and the top of the yard and mast flexed like bows. Sally swallowed again, then sighed with relief as the motion steadied, though there was still a little, from the wind and from the crew shifting position, but not nearly as much as before.

  Like most landships, Traveler had a ramp that let down at the bows, leading from the interior of the hull to the surface. Jeremy didn’t bother with it; he sprang from the deck and landed with flexed knees on the ground below. To his surprise, Teyud vaulted over the rail and landed likewise; it was an athletic feat equivalent to a Terran jumping out of a second-story window but she didn’t even grunt as her feet struck the soil of Mars.

  Sally and the four crewfolk followed more sedately, down ropes; it wasn’t necessary for the Terran, but she’d told Jeremy she’d never been able to make her gut believe it was safe to drop distances like that.

  “Maintain vigilance for dharz,” Teyud said to her crew.

  The word meant “predators” and usually referred to the huge hunting birds that stood at the top of the food chain here; some of them were flightless, half the size of a cow, and bad.

  The flying ones ranged up to twice that size and were much worse.

  Several of the Martians set up a watch, standing in a triangle with their backs to each other and their rifles cradled in their arms, scanning the skies. That left the Terrans free to focus on their work; Jeremy’s minicam whirred as they approached the ancient canal.

  Ancient even by Martian standards, he thought.

  The glyphs were slightly different from those on the sections nearer Zar-tu-Kan, less sinuous and more blocky. And worn, worn until sections were smoothed to blank obscurity and he had to use the thermal imaging to trace where they’d been.

  His lips moved as he translated the stiff archaic dialect of the repeated message:

  “Tollamune Shel-tor-vu, ’am Zho’da nekka mar ha, tol—”

  Another voice spoke, reading the glyphs more fluently than he could despite his years of study. Teyud’s voice. “The Emperor Shel-tor-vu, fifty-second of the Tollamune line and the eighth of that name to sit the Ruby Throne, ordered the reconstruction of this canal in the four-thousandth year of the Crimson Dynasty. Look upon my works, all ye who pass by, and know that the Kings Beneath the Mountain shall hold the Real World fast while the Mountain stands. Sh’u Maz—Sustained Harmony!”

  Astonished, Jeremy looked at Teyud. Her face had the usual hieratic Martian calm, but something flickered in the lion-yellow eyes as she read. The accent he’d noted in her voice grew stronger as well, staccato and clipped, with a harsh tone that made the little hairs along his neck stir and a sound-shift that turned the usual Demotic z into an s.

  “But they did not sustain Harmony,” she went on, almost in a whisper, her voice soft once more. “Though for long and long it seemed to be so. Cycle upon cycle of years passed, and with each, the Deep Beyond grew more and water and life grew less, little by little but steady and very sure. Sibling fought sibling for the Ruby Throne, and canals died, and cities fell, and generals rebelled, and the nomads pressed inward from the deserts and down from the heights, until nothing was left but the shards of a broken world. A world where winter comes, and will not yield again to spring.”

  She shook herself very slightly, and resumed that feline alertness; the nicating membranes swept sideways across her lion eyes for an instant.

  “You wished to examine?” she asked calmly.

  Jeremy looked at Sally. She looked surprised as well, and the crewfolk were exchanging glances, too. He cleared his throat.

  “Yes,” he said.

  It would be easy to jump up onto the top of the canal’s covering, only twenty feet from the surface; easy and dangerous, since glassine was near frictionless as no matter. Instead, he walked until there was a drift of sand up the side, and then went up that with infinite caution.

  “Or is it frictionless?” he said aloud, kneeling and touching the surface of the glassine.

  Normally it would be so clear you could only see it by the way it refracted light a little more than air did. This was like very fine glass instead, and the surface . . .

  He stripped off a glove and felt it. Cold and very, very slightly granular.

  “I’ve never seen glassine do that,” Sally said when she’d joined him. “Show abrasion like this. What could have done it?”

  “Time,” Teyud said.

  This time they both looked up, startled. They’d been speaking English.

  I suspected she understood more of it than she let on, Jeremy thought. Very bright lady.

  “Enough time,” she amplified. “A very, very long time. The—”

  She used a couple of Martian words he didn’t know. Sally whispered: “That means ‘molecular bonds,’ I think.”

  “They cannot resist the entropy embodied in sand and wind forever if they are not renewed. When this happens, be cautious. Loss of structural strength follows, to degrees unpredictable and which can be ascertained only by experiment.”

  She drew her pistol and fired northward; the sound was a sharp fffftht as methane mixed with air and exploded. Fifty yards in that direction, a spot of canal covering gave a musical ting with a shattering undertone, and then a ragged section fell into the emptiness below. Sand poured downward for a while.

  “I express enthusiastic appreciation,” Sally said. “The information is of substantial use.”


  She was making notes with a little pod recorder hitched to her belt. Then she bent and flipped up a big hemispherical shell, like a perfectly symmetrical turtle the size of a small car. The underside was empty, save for parts of a skeleton attached to the inside; the foot that had secreted fresh glassine was long gone.

  “Canal roof repair bug,” she said to Jeremy. “It’s a variant of the standard construction type. Must have died when this section was abandoned.”

  He nodded. The bottom of the canal lay about twenty feet below his perch. This section had only a foot or so of sand on the floor, and he could see the skeletons of endless rows of canal shrimp—the human-sized adult phase, when they attached themselves to the bottom like barnacles and waved their tails in unison to create a current and drive the water where the builders wanted it. The canals had their own ecology, and he was looking at the ruins of it.

  There was something scratched on the opposite wall of the canal, on the inside just above where the old water level would have been. He knelt, feeling the gritty sand moving beneath his knees through the robe and pants, and aimed the minicam, his thumb dialing up more magnification. The glyphs were a bit irregular, as if someone had scratched them into the hard quasiorganic concrete in a hurry. Jeremy spoke into the microphone as he read:

  “I told the fools this section couldn’t maintain flow if they didn’t extend the catchments!” He almost laughed. But the laughter died. That was a cry of despair across millennia, and one that presaged the death of cities, migration and flight and death.

  He seemed to hear the keening. Then he did hear something, and whirled awkwardly at Teyud’s shout of warning.

  That saved his life. His feet shot out from beneath him as the sand moved on the glassine, and talons flashed through the space he’d toppled through rather than into his throat. A fluting scream followed, bloodlust and frustration set to music but loud enough to nearly deafen him, and there was a dry carrion stink.

  The hilt of the still unfamiliar sword thumped him under the ribs as he fell, leaving him wheezing with pain. A snake-slim figure poised over him; he had a confused impression of gaping jaws edged with sawlike points, a long, whipping tail, and a flaring mane of red-bronze feathers—and long arms tipped with claws reaching for him.

  Then there was a sharp wet smack and one of the slit-pupil eyes gushed out in a miniature volcano of matter and blood. The creature pitched backward, convulsing as the neurotoxin in the needle sent every muscle into spasm, head arching back to its heels with a crackle of snapping spine.

  Jeremy forced himself to breathe, and his mind to function. Back on his feet, he saw a wave of the things swarming around the Traveler’s crew in a maelstrom of flashing blades, warbling jaws where purple tongues showed, and snapping dart pistols. One Martian had gone down and three of the things savaged the body. Some of the attackers had sticks or crudely formed stone hand axes in their clawed hands. Their motions had the darting quickness of snakes, or great predatory birds, which they resembled even more.

  Teyud tossed her dart pistol to her left hand to let it recover and drew her sword, lunging with blurring swiftness; a narrow body tried to dance aside and instead took the point through its torso, collapsing limply as she withdrew the blade. Without pause, she reversed her grip and thrust backward into another that was raising a rock over her head. Then the pistol gave the pip sound that meant there was enough methane for another shot.

  Baid tu-Or was holding off a pair, their heads lunging out in snaps that ended in clomp sounds as she swept her sword back and forth; Teyud shot one of them in the base of the skull, and the engineer cut the other’s legs out from under it as it turned. Sally was backed up against the canal’s wall, her Terran automatic pistol in her hand, trying to get a clear sight at one of the darting, quicksilver shapes without shooting a Martian by mistake.

  Time to get involved, Jeremy thought.

  He jumped. A dozen saw-beaked faces and twelve pairs of crimson eyes pivoted upward as he soared and then fell, his robe billowing against the restraint of his harness. His pistol was in his hand as he touched down on the sparsely vegetated surface—and his was no Martian dart gun, but a good alloy-steel .40 Colt Magnum shipped from Earth by solar-sail cargo pod.

  One of the things had a fire-hardened spear, and it ran past him at Teyud’s flank. He fired at point-blank range and the thing’s head broke apart in a spray of bone fragments, feathers, and blood. Sally shot a moment later. The bullet punched into a snaky torso and knocked the beast down; it beat its head and tail on the ground in blind agony, screaming like a laserdisc of a Wagnerian soprano turned to maximum volume, then went limp.

  Then Teyud’s pistol was pointing straight at him. He threw himself down and rolled as it snapped, just in time to see an attacker behind him spasm backward with a dart in the paler short fuzz of its throat. He shot the one following it from the ground, holding the pistol two-handed.

  The smashing roars of the Terran weapons broke the attack where more familiar dangers hadn’t. Suddenly all the creatures were fleeing in a mob, scattering northeastward, crying out in oddly melodious fluting voices that sounded like short, sad tunes played on a saxophone. Teyud called sharply to one of her subordinates, and the man tossed her a dart rifle. She went down on one knee, brought the long slim barrel up and aimed carefully, firing as quickly as the chamber could regenerate and the beasts were in range.

  Phhttt. Phhttt. Phhttt. Phhttt.

  Four of the . . . mob or pack or flock . . . went down. Then she handed the weapon back to the crewman.

  “Everyone feed your guns!” she called. “Dharz are prone to unanticipated actions and they may return.”

  Feeding the gun meant pushing a syringe of sludge into a port on the weapon’s top, as well as reloading the ammunition.

  At least my Colt doesn’t wheeze or smack its lips, Jeremy thought as he snapped in a new magazine.

  And it didn’t depend on igniting organic methane to push its projectiles out. The sharp scent of nitro powder mingled with the faint sulfurous burnt swamp-gas reek of the Martian weapons in the thin, cold dry air; beneath it ran the smell of Martian blood, saltier and more metallic than that of the creatures Earth bred. Teyud watched Jeremy’s hands as he reloaded and holstered the automatic.

  “Interesting,” she said. “How does it operate?”

  “Explosive combustion of nitrogenous compounds driving a heavy metal slug through spiral stabilizing grooves on the inside of the barrel,” he said, which took five words in Demotic.

  Her brows went up. “Extravagant, but effective. Could I use one?”

  He shook his head. “The recoil would break your wrists, I’m afraid,” he said.

  Which was true enough, at least for standard-breed Martians, although he didn’t know about Thoughtful Grace, who were a lot stronger. But it was also policy not to let the locals have Terran weapons.

  Though theirs are nearly as effective, he thought. Unless the gas generator part dies of old age or gets indigestion. And they’re difficult to replace.

  “What are these creatures?” he asked, turning one over with his toe.

  It still looked like an eight-foot feathered snake with long legs and arms. The head had a scaly flesh-covered beak that came to a point, but formed interlocking saw-edged blades behind. The skulls were narrow too, but long, and must hold a fair-sized brain. His toe moved on and forced a hand axe out of a grip that clenched in death.

  “Dharz,” Teyud said. “In origin, small, social carnivores of the Deep Beyond, tembst-modified for the hunt in ancient times.”

  “Modified for the hunt? It was far too much as if they were hunting us.”

  “Feral now.” Her mouth quirked very slightly. “Perhaps my . . . our ancestors should not have made them so clever, or so large, or so indiscriminate in their search for edible protein.”

  A slight inclination of the head and a spare gesture of one blood-spattered hand; it meant, more or less, insincere apologies are tendered for the sake of
form, and in this context it was an ironic joke.

  Another Martian came up, the ship’s engineer; she had a bleeding wound down one cheek, clotting with an alien swiftness as he watched.

  “They were not so many, or so bold, in the Conqueror’s day,” she said. “Nor did they come so far out of the Deep Beyond. We have one dead, Expeditionary Supervisor Teyud; and three wounded, one seriously. All will recover but the worst will not be fit for duty for a twentieth of a year.”

  “The Beyond is dangerous,” Teyud said, as she carefully wiped her sword clean and sheathed it. “And the casualty was a tokmar sniffer. That is a seriously self-destructive habit.”

  As she spoke, the crew bandaged injuries, carried the wounded—which by local notions included only those too badly hurt to walk or work—back to the Traveler. Several returned with a rack of poles that they erected, snapping the members together; the rest had gathered the bodies of the dharz and were preparing what looked unpleasantly like butchering tools. Sally Yamashita had gathered the crudely shaped weapons the beasts had used and was examining them thoughtfully.

  “Ah . . . those things are a bit too intelligent for me to feel comfortable eating them,” Jeremy said, as the crew drained the beasts’ blood into containers.

  Teyud and the engineer looked at him in puzzlement; their nicating membranes swept over their eyes and they blinked, a disconcerting double sideways-and-vertical gesture.

  “Dharz are not humans,” said the engineer. He remembered her name was Baid tu-Or.

  The phrase she used meant specifically “not of the lineages of those present” and implied the capacity to interbreed.

  As far as he knew, Terrans and Martians couldn’t interbreed, being nearly as different from each other genetically as humans and chimps, but evidently Baid was being generous.

  “And we are preparing them to feed to the engine,” Teyud reassured him. “Higher-quality feed will increase its range and intensity of effort. Our own supplies are ample at present and dharz are reputed to be very rank in taste. Note that we intend to dedicate the remains of our dead fellow employee to the same function.”