by Lin Carter
Tears glittered in her thick lashes and her voice broke.
“Do you believe, Ryker, that your death is a small matter to me? Has there been naught between us that would suggest otherwise?”
His eyes fell and he grunted something she could not hear. Her eyes were fixed on his half-averted face, pleadingly.
“I have given you my lips, is that nothing? Do you believe that one of my lineage gives of herself lightly? I, who have never loved before—do you believe me to be incapable of love—even for a stranger from another world?”
Something rose within him then, within his heart. Something perilously near to … hope.
He looked at her somberly. “Love? We never spoke of it. You left me alone and among enemies, to die. Do you call that love?”
She nodded bravely. “Yes—love! The love of my people let me overrule the dictates of my heart, there on
the isthmus. But you did not die, Ryker. Nor need you die now.”
“Keep talking,” he muttered.
“Listen closely, then. You will be given to the God tomorrow. You and the old man. You will descend into the Holy-of-Holies to stand before the Presence. Whether you live or die depends upon you—upon that which is in your heart. This much I have managed to wring from Lord Thoh and his followers—that we do not ourselves violate the ancient Vow our ancestors took before the God. It is the God alone who will be the cause of your death, if He so chooses!”
Ryker looked at her, thoughtfully. It was difficult to make out whether her god was real or whether she only believed him to be real. He knew so little about this Fire Devil the Lost Nation worshipped. There were so many questions, and so little time!
“We have a chance, then, to come through the ordeal alive?” he asked.
“Yes. Exactly that—a chance, nothing more. Others before you have gone down into the abyss, for one sin or another. Never were they seen alive again, for such was the Judgment of the God. But when you stand before Him, and He reads your heart, it is within His power to let you live. I pray with all of my own heart that it be so …oh, Ryker, Ryker … why did you ever come into my life to trouble me?”
She sagged against the bars, faint with weakness, and his strong arms went about her gently, and there, for the second time, he kissed her warm lips and felt the fragrance of her breath against his face.
‘ ‘I have asked myself a thousand times how I could give my heart to a man of another race, another world, and I have found no answer for it,” she breathed under his
kisses. “Save that you are strong and whole and clean, with a strength the men of my people no longer possess. Oh, Ryker!—my beloved!—when you stand before the God tomorrow—hold my image in your heart!”
‘ ‘My Lady, it is time for the changing of the guard, and we must be gone,” murmured the other robed figure. And only now did Ryker notice that it was Melandron. She nodded, and stepped back reluctantly from his embrace. Brushing the tears from her face she smiled at him, one small, brave smile.
Then they were gone.
Ryker went slowly back to his pallet and lay there, staring up at the roof of the cell.
Whether he lived or died tomorrow, he had won the love of the most beautiful woman of two worlds. Maybe that meant that dying for her was worthwhile, after all.
Beneath the Temple where Valarda reigned, a great stone stair wound down into the bowels of Mars, And by that mighty stair, Ryker and Herzog descended the following day.
With them went Valarda and Melandron and many others, among these the smiling Lord Thoh and even little Kiki, whom Ryker had not seen before during his brief visit to the City.
The faces of those who escorted the two Earthlings were solemn and they wore the shadow of fear. There was little conversation between the lords. For the most part, they maintained a hushed and reverent silence. Ryker got the feeling that they would all be glad to leave this immense, cavernous space where dwelt eternally the strange and awesome divinity they worshipped.
Only Lord Thoh seemed jubilant and merry.
Ryker himself felt nothing at all. There was nothing in
this Abyss, he knew, for he had long ago given up childish beliefs in gods and devils. He had an inkling of what he was about to face, and when they reached at length the bottom of the stair, he grinned bleakly to find his guess correct.
A vast open space lay hidden here far below the crust of Mars, the arched roof far overhead supported by columns of massive stone, like the pillars of some tremendous cathedral.
Roof and walls and columns were alike encrusted with some glittering crystalline, deposit. A dim, sourceless phosphorescence glimmered here in the depths, and this pale, wan luminescence was reflected in the glassy stuff of the mineral encrustation as from a million mirrors, until all of the vast and shadowy emptiness was made ghostly with wandering lights. Like will-o’-the-wisps, vague centers of radiance drifted to and fro between the huge columns, and twinkled in the facets of dangling stalactites, as in the glassy pendants of so many crystal chandeliers.
The floor of the vast, echoing cavern was smooth and regular, no doubt so shaped by the toil of men.
He looked around, admiring the fantastic scene. But there was nothing here to feel afraid of, for nothing lived in this Aladdin’s cave of glittering crystal and twinkling lights.
In the center of the floor was a vast pit whose sides were unnaturally smooth and regular and whose shaft went down to an unguessable depth.
Before this pit three stone spears had been left standing by the workmen who had cleared the cavern floor down to the primal bedrock. Fastened to these stalagmites were bronze shackles and chains.
They had been there a very long time, for they were old and deeply bitten by the teeth of time, green and scaly with
verdigris.
Within them hung three skeletons—grisly, gaunt things of dead bone, staring at the pit with sightless, gaping sockets, grinning with mirthless, bony jaws.
These the guards unlocked from their chains, and cast them clattering away.
They chained Ryker and Herzog to the stony spears.
The spears rose from the cavern’s floor on the very brink of the enormous, circular pit. The two Earthlings were bound in such a way that they must face that yawning pit forever … until death came to claim then … or the God to judge them.
Only two they were, and the third stalagmite remained untenanted, its chains hanging loose and empty. Ryker grinned. It was like him to grin in the face of death, and a bit of gallows humor couldn’t hurt.
There were three thieves at Golgotha, he thought to himself with grim irreverence. Of course, one of them was no thief… .
The shackles were locked, and it was all over but the dying. That would be a slow, tedious business, but thirst and hunger would do the trick in time. There would be a lot of time, thought Ryker. All the time in the world.
He wondered vaguely how long their bones would hang in these chains, until tossed aside to make room for the next condemned men. Not that it mattered much.
The Martians are much given to ritual, but in this case there was none at all. Once they had seen the two men chained to the stone spears on the brink of the pit, they turned about and went back by the way they had come. It was as if they were, all of them, anxious to leave this dreadful place of wandering lights and faint echoes and crawling shadows.
Valarda looked one last time into Ryker’ s grim, glowering eyes. Her face was pale and pinched, her warm lips
colorless, but hope glowed in her eyes. Then she dropped thick lashes to hide the naked candor of her gaze, and vanished from Ryker’s line of sight.
The others filed past, some glancing at him curiously, others averting their eyes as if ashamed of what had been done here.
Thoh gave his victim one bright glance of cold mockery, and an ironic wave of his hand as if to say goodbye, before he, too, began to ascend the stair.
Ryker and Doc stood there in the chains for a long time without speaking, until t
he last far, faint echo of shuffling feet died into silence far above them.
And they were left alone with only their thoughts to keep them company.
And shadows, and echoes, and vague, wandering lights.
Forever …
Forever is a long time. And here there was no way of measuring time.
After a while their arms and the muscles of back and shoulders began to ache from the strain of the awkward position in which the two men were chained.
After a while the torment ebbed, as if flesh had endured all it could, and numbness crept in, dulling the agony.
After a time the numbness, too, faded, and they could feel nothing at all in their arms. It was as if they were being slowly turned into men of stone, like the faceless Giants who had warded and watched the walls of Zhiam.
Thirst, too, became a torment. But hours—or days— later, they became unaware of thirst.
They were bound in too uncomfortable a position to be able to sleep. Every time their consciousness faded, and they sagged forward in the chains, the sharp bite of the
scale bronze shackles knifing into the flesh of their wrists roused them.
They found their minds wandering. Ryker thought of soft beds and cool gardens and dewy goblets of wine and splashing fountains for a while. Then his mind seemed to drift away into waking dreams. Faces rose into his memory that he had long forgotten, the faces of friends and of foes. For a time he played in the summery garden of that white frame house, in the shadows of tall trees, with the small black and white dog. Even that dream faded and fled away at length, and his mind became blank and gray and empty… .
Suddenly a faint sound broke the trance that gripped Ryker’s dreaming mind. Something broke his vague reverie.
He turned his head to the right, ignoring the sting of pain in stiff muscles. Doc hung in the chains, his face pale and empty, his head sagging upon his bony breast, silvery wisps of hair disordered. He was unconscious, or dead. Either way, it was better so.
But the sound which had disturbed Ryker had not come from that source.
There it was again! A faint scuffle, the clatter of stone against stone.
From behind him …
And sweat came popping out all over Ryker’s nearly-naked body, as a thought of pure horror crashed into his numb brain.
What if there were rats down here ?
From dim, half-conscious dreaming, he came suddenly, terribly awake. Fully conscious how, his mind ablaze with merciless clarity, he remembered that the subterranean caverns of the Southlands were tunneled and teeming
with the huge carnivorous rodents the Martians hunted for orthavva furs … rats the size of small dogs, they were, he knew.
And the blood congealed in his veins as the sheer, hopeless horror of his predicament burst upon his mind in all its implications.
Surely, in all the annals of human experience, there was no more ghastly way of dying than being devoured alive by rats.
That faint scuffle sounded again behind him.
Then something touched the back of his leg and Ryker almost fainted.
In the next split-second he nearly fainted again, but this time from a different emotion. For he felt like one snatched from the burning floor of Hell and set down amidst the gardens of Paradise.
For, just behind him, Kiki said, “Do you yet live, man?”
23. The Sacrifice
The boy was weary and bedraggled and travel stained, and he had been weeping, for tears tains were visible beneath his green eyes where they had cut through the coating of dust.
He was entirely naked, gray with dust from head to foot, with a smudge on his cheek, or possibly a bruise. His feet were dirty with stains of crushed mold or lichen, and rough, sharp stones had cut those little feet until they bled.
He left wet red marks on the stone floor as he limped to where Ryker hung in the chains.
Ryker stared down at the dusty, bedraggled lad, eyes wide with unbelief and filled with the dawning of hope. He had never been fond of the mischievous imp. Now he felt that he had never been so glad to see anyone in his entire life.
The boy wound his arms around Ryker’s waist and buried his dusty head against Ryker, and made strange, hoarse, coughing sounds. At first he could not identify these noises. Then it came to him that the boy was trying to sob, but that his throat was dry with dust, as dry as Ryker’s own.
“Kiki … why are you here?” he croaked through dry lips. The boy lifted his head to peer into Ryker’s face with eyes wild, yet curiously dull.
“They have come into the City,” he said tonelessly. “The Outlanders. My Lady has fallen from power. Prince
Thoh leads the men, now, and he has condemned My Lady to face the God.”
“Prince Thoh it is now, is it?” rasped the big man heavily, twitching his cracked lips into a ghastly caricature of a smile.
Then the meaning of Kiki’s words hit him, and he stiffened.
They meant to hang Valarda in the chains on the third stone spear.
They meant her to die the slow, awful death to which he and Doc were condemned.
Ryker growled, deep in his chest, like an animal. Through the dusty tangle of his disordered locks, his eyes glared like the eyes of a lion. Suddenly, weariness and stiffness and pain left him. He felt filled with a terrible strength, a strength of fury and desperation.
“The chains, boy,” he gasped. “Get them off me … break them, cut them … get me loose!”
After a time, Kiki gave up the futile attempt to free Ryker from his chains, and collapsed in a sobbing heap at the feet of the Earthling.
Even though corrosion had eaten deeply into the hard bronze of the shackles, neither Ryker’s strength nor Kiki’s cunning and agile fingers could free the tall man of his bonds.
The Earthling looked down at the boy huddled at his feet, his hard face gentle.
“It’s all right, Kiki. Don’t cry. You did the best you could.”
“It wasn’t good enough,” the boy said in a choked voice.
“Maybe not. But you did the very best you could, and that’s all anybody can do—their best.”
Doc, who had recovered consciousness during the past half an hour, and who had watched the boy’s labor with sympathetic eyes, uttering encouraging noises from time to time, now lifted his head and stared up. Distant echoes sounded above them, coming from the shaft over their heads, and the stair. The echoes of footsteps descending.
“They’re coming already,” the old man observed.
‘ ‘I guess so,” muttered Ryker somberly. ‘ ‘You go hide yourself now, Kiki. No, not back there—among those stalagmites on the opposite side of the pit. Hurry, now, before they see you.”
The boy scampered off, and Ryker and the Israeli were alone again. But not for very long.
The party that entered the cavern was largely the same as had brought Ryker and Doc Herzog to be chained to the stone spears. Missing were a few of Valarda’s supporters; present were very many more of Thoh’s faction.
Thoh himself now walked proudly, features molded in an expression of haughty disdain. Only the eager, febrile glitter in his eyes revealed how deliciously Lord Thoh— Prince Thoh—revelled in his newly acquired power. It was obviously the culmination of a dream he had long nurtured in secret.
And now it was Valarda’s turn to play the humble captive, bound and helpless, soon to face the judgment of her god. The Priestess held her head high, and her expression was proud and unafraid, but she was pale as death and the shadow of dread haunted her golden eyes.
The guards were uneasy and looked harried and crestfallen. Their captin, a man called Hartha, no longer led them. Apparently, he had remained loyal to his Priestess, or Prince Thoh considered him likely to prove disloyal to the new regime. Taking his place at the head of the guards was a grinning rascal named Sastro whom
Ryker remembered having seen in Thoh’s retinue on an earlier occasion.
Valarda had been stripped of her plumed coronal and
most of her gems, but she did not seem to have been used by rough hands nor offered any indignities, insofar as was apparent from her appearance or demeanor.
They chained her to the third spear, tugging the chains taut so that her arms were forced above her head. She endured this without a word of complaint, without permitting a sound to escape her lips. Ryker growled and glowered. If looks could kill, the smirking prince would have been struck dead on the spot.
‘ ‘We have brought you some feminine companionship to lighten the boredom of your wait, Outworlder,” Thoh smiled. He was well aware of Ryker’s smoldering rage, and it amused him. A chained lion, however ferocious, can be safely taunted. And Ryker was still chained.
“You may face the judgment of your god before we do,” remarked the old Israeli with tranquil relish. The prince glanced at him, surprised. Doc Herzog grinned, and added, “The enemy is at your gates, already. Or maybe even inside the City by this time. Your reign is likely to be a short one, so enjoy it while it lasts!”
Thoh paled to the lips at this impertinence from so unexpected a source, and half raised his hand as if to strike the old man in the face. Then he thought better of it, and turned a glance of pure venom upon the proud, silent figure of Valarda.
“It was this witch’s doing,” he snarled. And his features, distorted by the intensity of his rage, lost for a moment their smooth, effeminate prettiness, and became vicious. “If she had given me the men I wanted, and let me ride forth against the invaders, to use against them the
weaponry our ancestors used once, long ago, against their ancestors—”
“Probably wouldn’t have done you much good,” growled Ryker. “Your folks lost that war too, I understand.”
Thoh looked him up and down, his face cold and heavy. Then he spat deliberately between Ryker’s feet. Ryker looked him straight in the eye and grinned. There was no humor in it but a baring of white teeth, as a wolf grins before it bites. Thoh took an involuntary step backwards, then bit his lip, hating himself for momentarily letting his weakness show.
He stepped forward and struck Ryker across the face— once—twice—three times—slapping Ryker’s head back against the stone of the spear to which he was chained. Ryker held the grin steady, although a trickle of red blood ran down his chin from a cut on his mouth. Thoh flushed and stepped back, panting.
