In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (27 page)

Then he saw what it was.
Paiteng
—shaped like an osprey, but with a body the size of a lion, feathers lemon yellow save for the black crest along its skull and a blue breast and belly, wings broader than an executive jet’s, and a mad, lime green gaze. And strapped into a saddle between its wings, a man in tight-fitting black, a goggled mask across his face and a dart rifle in his hands.

The
paiteng
’s feet had been extended to grab at Teyud. She’d dodged just in time, and one giant claw closed on Baid tu-Or’s head instead. Then the wings beat like a roc’s in some tale of the Arabian Nights, and it was lifting skyward in a cloud of dust.

The little engineer’s body stood upright for an instant by some trick of forces, blood fountaining from the stump of her neck. Then it flopped forward; the bird released the head and it bounced a dozen paces. Another beat of the massive wings and the
paiteng
was soaring upward in a blast of wind. Jeremy felt himself frozen in disbelief; there were more than a dozen of the flying predators up there, wheeling—eleven of them with riders, and two with empty saddles. The nomads and the landship’s crew were scrambling for weapons, some already shooting upward. The four who’d come with Faran were already mounted, riding at full tilt.

A pair of the birds swooped to attack. The dart rifles of their riders spat, and one by one the fleeing mercenaries toppled to the sand, bouncing and landing limp as sacks. The
rakza
continued in a head-out race, their great feet flashing, and the
paiteng
wheeled around again.

Teyud hissed between her teeth, her right hand clutching at her slashed left shoulder. That broke Jeremy’s paralysis; he scrambled three paces, caught the discarded medicine chest and brought it back to her in a slithering rush.

“Get my harness and robe,” she said, reaching inside.

A bandage crawled across the wound and bonded to her skin, holding the lips of the cut closed; she swallowed three egglike things from another tray and cracked a fourth between her teeth, sucking at the liquid within. The gray of shock and blood loss
retreated from her face. He handed her the equipment and she scrambled into it; he helped her tuck her left arm through the sleeve, and then she thrust it into her belt for want of a sling.

The robe was armor as well as clothing; it would stop most dart pistol needles, as well as some from the heavier rifles. It wouldn’t do anything against a sword or spear or knife, though. He began to catch her up and lift her toward the
Traveler
, but she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “They will—”

Something fell upon the landship from one of the paiteng riders, tumbling as it did. When it hit the deck, fire burst forth, orange and red; it spread with unnatural speed, doubly unnatural in this thin low-oxygen atmosphere. A dozen more packets of the same flame-stuff struck, and in seconds the ship was ablaze from prow to stern.

A bird screeched as a shot from one of the ship’s crew struck it, then fell from the sky, wings fluttering, landing upside down and crushing its rider beneath it as it thrashed briefly in the death-fit. More javelins and darts rained down in response, and only one attacker was struck. Terran guns would have had trouble with those fast-moving targets; most of them were out of range of the nomads’ bows, and hard targets for the low-velocity dart rifles. Teyud’s lion-colored eyes were darting back and forth, lucid despite the pain of her wound; she straightened as the stimulants took hold.

“There is something wrong here,” she said. “They are using javelins only on the nomads. And the ones struck by their darts are not convulsing.”

One of the crewfolk lay limp nearby. She ran over to him, put her pistol down and felt his neck.

“Unconscious!” she said. “They are using stun darts, not lethals.”

She repeated it in a great shout. The
Traveler
’s crew had been edging out into the open as they were forced away by the bellowing pyre of the landship. For a moment Jeremy’s archaeologist’s conscience was glad that the artifacts from Rema-Dza were packed in fireproof trunks; they might be buried but they wouldn’t be burned. The crewfolk stood more boldly and took careful aim; knowing that the enemy couldn’t or wouldn’t kill you, and that you
could
kill them, helped in the boldness department.

The nomads had noticed that the airborne attackers
were
trying to kill them. The surviving ones very sensibly leapt into the saddles of their
rakza
and scattered like beads of water hitting a waxed floor. That left Teyud, Jeremy, and eight standing members of the
Traveler’s
crew stranded next to the burning landship.

“This is not going well,” Teyud rasped.

“
Tell
me,” Jeremy snarled.

“I did.”

He ignored the miscommunication and snatched up the dart rifle of an unconscious crewman. The simple post-and-aperture sight was easy to use, but it just didn’t have enough
range
.

They’re going to dart us all asleep, then land and take Teyud with them. And since they’ll then be able to tell who is who, they’ll probably cut everyone else’s throats. Or just leave them for the scavengers
.

“These are the ones who want to capture you, right?” he said to Teyud.

She was squinting skyward. “That is the highest probability,” she said. “But I do not know the intentions of the airship.”

“Airship?”
Jeremy said—his voice was almost a squeak.

“The one we saw earlier. It has returned at very high altitude, and I think it is dropping parachutists.”

He couldn’t see them, but he didn’t have her eagle sight; he also wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. Teyud had the same look of frowning concentration as before, and he knew she’d go down to death with exactly the same expression, still calculating the optimum course of action.

The
paiteng
riders saw the airship as well. They reacted instantly. Most of them started circling upward, their mounts clawing for altitude. Three came swooping down in long, shallow dives. The lead bird headed straight for Teyud; Jeremy fired at it, but he wasn’t sure whether it was his dart or one from her pistol that struck. The savage glory of the
paiteng
turned in an instant to tumbling ruin, striking fifty yards away in a cloud of dust and a shower of great feathers and a crackling of bones.

The next two came on regardless, looming suddenly out of the dust. They were flying wingtip to wingtip at a hundred feet, the slow vast
pom-pom-pom
beat of the giant wings driving them along very fast indeed. Something hung between them—a net slung
below a cable, and one end of that clutched in each great set of claws. Things were
sticking
to the net, a yard-long feather . . .

Jeremy’s eyes widened. He reacted without thought, and
leapt
. The jump put him twenty yards ahead of Teyud, and for a moment twenty feet up; the fine-mesh net came rushing at him like God’s flyswatter.

Darkness
.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th edition
University of Chicago Press, 1998

MARS
:
Dvor Il-Adazar

Olympus Mons is the largest known volcano in the solar system. The Italian astronomer Schiaparelli first identified it in 1879 as a probable mountain often surrounded by orthographically induced cloud cover. It is a perfect cone, like Mauna Loa or Fuji, but enormously larger; the base of the mountain is no less than 400 miles across, giving it a surface area similar to that of the American state of Missouri, and a length greater than the entire Himalayan range. A rampart of cliffs some three to four thousand feet high and impressively sheer surrounds the entire base of the mountain and marks it off from the Plains of Tharsis.

No less impressive is the height that Mons Olympus reaches; nearly 64,000 feet above the northern-hemisphere sea level, and 60,000 above the surrounding Plain of Tharsis—approximately
three times the height of Mt. Everest on Earth or two and a half times that of Ad’cha on Venus.

Even on so dry a planet, a mountain of this bulk has profound climatic effects, enhanced by the presence of four other volcanoes of comparable if somewhat lesser size, located within a few hundred miles. Frequently wreathed in cloud or surrounded by ground fog, certain altitudes on Mons Olympus are the wettest areas on Mars, experiencing as much as thirty or forty inches of rainfall per annum—although one should bear in mind the length of the Martian year. The light, porous volcanic rock absorbs most of the rainfall, which in prehistoric times emerged as springs, seepage swamps, and rivers in the surrounding lowlands.

The presence of water, timber, and relatively abundant animal life attracted early settlement after the introduction of hominids to Mars by the ancients in approximately 200,000 BCE; the area may in fact have been the site of the first introductions and the hub from which intelligent life spread over the planet. Mons Olympus and the surrounding plains were definitely the scene of the earliest plant and animal domestication on Mars, circa 40,000 BCE, and the location of the extremely obscure pre-Imperial Martian civilizations.

After several Dark Age interludes known only through the equivalent of myth, the “modern” Martian culture developed as a series of city-states spaced around Olympus Mons and the nearby volcanoes in approximately 36,000 BCE.

The city of Dvor Il-Adazar—the City That Is A Mountain—emerged as an early center of learning and trade on the northwestern (and most humid) edge of the volcanic mass. Its rulers, the progenitors of the Crimson Dynasty, conquered widely about and engaged in equally impressive engineering feats that culminated in the construction of the Grand Canal, which encircles the entire mass of the mountain and channels its waters into the productive farmland of the Tharsis plains. Building on this base, they had unified the planet’s habitable zones by 34,000 BCE, the traditional date of the ascension of Timrud sa-Enntar, the First Emperor, and created a brilliant culture which raised the characteristic Martian biotechnology to impressive heights and established the classical canons of art, philosophy, and literature.

With the fall of the unified planetary empire of the Kings Beneath the Mountain and the slow deterioration of the global climate . . .

Dvor Il-Adazar, the city carved from the barrier cliffs of Mons Olympus and tunneled deep into its bulk, has no real analogue upon Earth. It is incomparably older than any Terran city, yet it has been continuously inhabited and is still the largest and richest of the modern Martian city-states—almost as if Uruk in Sumer existed today—and occupied a role similar to Singapore or New York combined with that of Oxford, Boston, Rome, Lhasa, and Mecca. The striking carved-stone terraces that fall from the mountainside toward the Grand Canal are only the most obvious part of this great artifact. Forty thousand years of building and tunneling have turned much of Olympus Mons into a complex of tunnels, halls, reservoirs, river systems, and underground fungus farms heated by geothermal waters, much now lost and unknown even to the inhabitants. Whole ecologies, natural and artificial, exist within them.

Few Terrans have more than the most superficial knowledge of its immensity, and its rulers, who claim the heritage of the Crimson Dynasty, allow contact only on their own terms.

Mars, The Deep Beyond
Tharsis Plain, west of Dvor II-Adazar
May 23, 2000 AD

Teyud leapt desperately as the net with Jeremy’s limp form entangled in its meshes swept by overhead, despite the sickening jab of pain from her wounded shoulder. The tip of her sword nicked one thread, and then the
Paiteng
were soaring upward, trading speed for height and flogging at the air with their wings in beautifully synchronized unison.

She rammed the sword into the sand point-first and snatched at her pistol . . . and then lowered it. There had been a moment when she might have hit one of the great birds of prey with a dart, but then both would strike the ground—and Jeremy would be turned into a bag of crushed flesh and splintered bone.

I cannot fire
, she thought.
Odd. I cannot pursue any course of action
which results in his death, even if survival dictates it. My degree of emotional commitment is greater than I believed
.

Instead she slapped the pistol back into its holster and watched the
Paiteng
-mounted raiders ascend in a spiral until they were tiny dots headed east. Then she organized the four crewmembers still on their feet to drag the unconscious ones away from the raging pyre that the
Traveler
had become, treat the wounded, and lay out the dead.

“Regret,” she murmured, placing Baid tu-Or’s head next to the body; there was a look of enormous surprise on her face. “You fulfilled your obligations in exemplary fashion; I would have taken great pleasure in rewarding you.”

By then, the party from the airship was visible; their rectangular parachutes opened little more than a thousand feet above, and they landed in a neat skirmish line. Any resistance would be futile; there were more than a score of them. Her eyes still went a little wider at the sheer snap with which they deployed . . . and at the black combat armor beneath their reddish brown–blotched robes. Their leader pushed up the visor of his helmet as he approached.

“I profess amiable greetings, Deyak sa-Vowin sa-Sajir-dassa-Tomond,” he said, and gave the salute to a civilian superior.

His eyes swept the battlefield, took in Faran’s body and the manner of his passing, and his posture of formal-respect changed to one of professional-appreciation.

“I am Notaj sa-Soj, Commander of the Sword of the Crimson Dynasty, operating out of Dvor Il-Adazar, and tasked with bringing you to your father.”

“I reciprocate your greetings, Notaj sa-Soj,” she said, searching his face.

The kinship of the Thoughtful Grace was there, of course. But there was something else as well . . .