Lin Carter - The City Outside the World (16 page)

"Oh, we have let the Serpent into Eden all right," sighed Herzog. "You saw it yourself, my boy. The cats had never been hunted before, no. They didn't even know what was happening. They—I think they thought maybe the men wanted to—to
play. ..."

And Ryker felt sicker than before.

He began to wish they had killed him before he had made the replica of the stone seal. But it was too late for recriminations now.

• • •

The strange white sun-star of this world sank in a sunset sky the color of tangerine and the long filaments of cloud were painted vermilion and magenta.

Ryker sat on a log before his tent looking at the City.

He hadn't known what to expect of Zhiam. But a city of devil worshippers had no right to be this serene and cool and beautiful. The ugliness, the perversion of its people, their dedication to evil, should have shown in their handiwork, somehow.

But the City was a dream of fragile beauty, slim towers floating against the dying fires of the sun, domes like ripe fruit or the breasts of women seeming to float like enormous bubbles upon the waters. . . .

No, there was no evil in the City men called Outside.

But—in its people?

It was hard to hazard a guess. It was the orothodox Martians who called them
zhaggua
—worshippers of devils. He had yet to hear Valarda's side of the story.

But then his heart hardened and his face grew grim. Beautiful or not, this was Valarda's kingdom, and she had lied to him, fooled him, tricked him, cheated him, robbed him, left him to die, bound and helpless, among his enemies.

There was no doubt about
that.

The City knew they were there, but paid no attention. No flags flew, no bugles were blown, no warriors gathered to the defense of Zhiam.

The City dreamed in the dim moonlight, under the glitter of ten thousand stars.

There were fewer stars blazing in this sky of nights than made splendid the nighted skies of Mars. But, like Mars, this planet also had twin moons, one larger than the other.

The moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, were too small and too low in albedo to be clearly visible even at night. In fact, they were all but impossible to see with the unaided eye. You had to know exactly where they were in the sky to glimpse them at all.

But here the moons, although small, were visible, disks of pallid silver against dark purple velvet.

The desert men ignored the splendor of the skies. They were not made for this warmth and humidity, and the air of this planet was so rich in oxygen, compared to what they had known, that its headiness intoxicated them. They perspired greasily, stripped to mere loincloths, panting breathlessly in what seemed to them an unendurably tropical heat.

To Ryker and his companion, the night was mild and balmy. Both Earthlings had gone through the series of treatments that readjusted their body chemistries to conditions on Mars. But this did not mean they could not readjust to conditions more like those on Earth. Their organic modifications reacted like thermostats to whatever conditions they found themselves in. So they, at least, were comfortable.

Doc seemed utterly fascinated by the spectacle of the skies. The constellations were strange and new to both of them, of course and, although he said nothing, Ryker guessed the scientist was trying to find a signpost in the altered constellations which might indicate their position in the universe.

In this he guessed wrong, as things turned out.

' 'Doc, you aren't gonna find any stars you recognize,'' Ryker argued . ' 'We're in another dimension, aren't we?"

The Israeli savant snorted through his nose, rudely.

"My boy, when you don't know what you're talking about, then shut up," he said. "The only dimensions you

got to worry about are length, breadth and thickness."

"What about the fourth dimension?"

"Duration. And it's not really a dimension like the others, it's a condition for existence. To exist at all, a thing has to have length, breadth and thickness—and it has to endure for a measurable unit of time. They been misquoting Einstein for two hundred years, it's time they stopped. So stop, already!"

Ryker grinned and shut up. Doc could be cantankerous at times, especially when you interrupted him during a bout of cogitation.

But he couldn't help wondering what Doc was cogitating about. He gave it up and turned in to sleep. Doc would tell him when he was ready to, and not one moment before.

The night was so balmy he couldn't endure the notion of wrapping himself up in the fleece-lined sleeping cloak of
orthavva
fur, so he simply stretched out on the cool, dewy moss and slept in the raw.

In the morning the assault on Zhiam would begin, he knew.

Despite his thirst for revenge, he wasn't looking forward to it.

Zarouk was up before dawn, rousting his men from their hot, untidy slumbers—for they had slept in the furs, as they were accustomed to sleeping—and preparing for the assault.

The advance unit marched across the causeway to the closed gate, without being attacked from above. Neither spear nor dart was let fall upon them from above. And the walls indeed seemed unattended.

They marched back, feeling foolish.

Two squads were sent back into the forest to cut down the trees so that Xinga's team could construct rams and scaling ladders. And all the time the City lay dreaming beneath the radiance of dawn, serene and untroubled, scarcely deigning to notice them.

Before noon, they attacked the walls. The ladders went up and the ram team assaulted the gates of the City. They were of bronze, and rang beneath the beaten blows like a mighty gong.

Strange figures appeared atop the walls, and, at first, Zarouk grinned at the sight of them. It was a relief to be no longer ignored; it had been as if their force was so neglible that the men of the City were indifferent to it. Now, at last, the defenders of Zhiam had come forth.

But they were strange defenders.

Darts glanced off them, tinkling to fragments, without causing them any discomfort. Their bodies were curiously thick and sheathed in some odd crystalline white substance which hid even their faces.

They carried no weapons at all.

Ignoring the rain of darts—ignoring the heavy, metal-shod spears—they confined their activities to throwing the ladders back off the walls, one by one. Men fell, squalling, from the toppling ladders, and the ones who were lucky landed in the moatlike lake before the gate. The unlucky ones fell in the bushes or on the mossy ground, to their considerable detriment. There were broken legs aplenty, and more than a few men fell on their heads.

The ladders were raised again—and again—and again —by the dozens. But the strange armored men threw them down every time. They seemed utterly impervious to the darts, even to the darts tipped with the nerve poison the Martians distill from venom, and the heavy spears

ricochetted from their breasts or heads or shoulders without even staggering them.

Zarouk was baffled, and getting angry. He sent a team out armed with lassos made of leather thongs, to capture one of the warriors on the wall.

It was a man-shaped statue of living stone.

The desert men shrank back from the uncanny thing, hissing in superstitious terror. Even Zarouk blanched and recoiled from it, shuddering.

It was rather roughly hewn from some strange, sparkling white stone, hard and crystalline, resembling quartz. Its hands were shaped like crude mittens, and its face was devoid of any features whatsoever, not even eyes.

And it really was entirely made of solid stone.

Yet it lived, and moved.

Ryker stared with fascination as the stone giant writhed slowly, straining against its bonds until they snapped and broke. The places where elbows or knees would have been on something human, the stone seemed to suddenly soften—the joints became viscous—when the limb was about to flex. As soon as the limb had moved, the stone hardened again.

A head and a half taller than the tallest of the warriors, the stone colossus got clumsily to its feet and began ponderously to stride back towards the City.

The men shrank from it fearfully, but it ignored them.

Xinga turned questioning eyes on his master, and hefted a lasso tentatively.

"No, let it go," muttered Zarouk. "How do you kill a thing that isn't really alive? Let it go."

The walking statue crossed the causeway, approaching the gate. Then it began to climb, using the ornate carvings around the gate for stepping-stones. It fell twice and

climbed back each time unhurt before it gained the top of the walls again.

Zarouk watched with hating eyes, while the City dreamed on, indifferent to anything he might bring against it.

18. The Winged Serpents

Zarouk was in
a furious rage, and Houm carefully avoided his company in so far as he was able. Even Xinga thought it most prudent to busy himself with certain tasks which precluded his personal attendance on his prince.

Zhiam seemed quite adequately defended by the Stone Giants, and any further attempts to storm the walls by ladder appeared hopeless of success. Nevertheless two more such forays were launched during the night, under the cover of darkness.

At four widely separated points about the walls of the City, assault squadrons, muffled in dark robes and careful to avoid excessive noise, stole in secret to the foot of the ramparts and sought to scale the battlements without being discovered.

The night was heavily overcast with clouds, and was probably as dark as ever nights were on this strange world. However, despite the furtive and stealthy nature of the attack, it was a dismal failure.

The Stone Giants, as they had done before, simply threw the ladders down from the walls, and the men who were ascending them fell squalling lustily. Then, gathering up their dead and injured, and retrieving the ladders, they limped away and returned to camp to report to their scowling master.

Evidently, the Stone Giants had senses that could perceive the approach of dangerous enemies even in the moonless, starless gloom. Also, they seemingly patrolled

the ramparts by day and by night, which was, thought Ryker, only to be expected. Men fashioned of lifeless stone, who were invulnerable to injury, also should be impervious to weariness or fatigue, and—not actually being living creatures, save in a technical sense—did not ever require sleep.

None of this did anything to improve the ferocious temper of the Desert Hawk.

The following day, Zarouk made a tour of the outer works of the Dreaming City, and rode the circuit of the walls, looking for weaknesses. He was forced to ford the streams and canals, and to ride about the small lake, but otherwise he examined every yard of the perimeter, finding no loopholes in the defenses of Zhiam.

There was only one gate, and it was of solid metal. While it might prove possible to break in through this portal by the employment of rams, that would take considerable time. The City had no other gates, not even a small postern gate.

The stone ramparts completely encircled the metropolis of the Lost Nation, and were of equal height at every point. And during his tour of the defenses, Zarouk counted no fewer than sixty of the Stone Giants maintaining their constant and imperturbable vigilance.

Unless he could manage it so that his warriors attacked the wall at more than sixty points, it did not seem possible for them to successfully assault the barricades. And such was the length of the wall and the size of the City itself, that even were he to mount such an attack, the Stone Giants would still be near enough to the unprotected portions to reach them in time to prevent any of the desert raiders from reaching the crest of the walls.

And, besides, to attempt to attack the ramparts simultaneously in more than sixty places was numerically im-

possible. Zarouk did not have enough men with him to mount such an attack effectively.

Even it it was possible for him to get a few men atop the wall, they would be useless against the unkillable defenders. None of their weapons could inflict upon the Giants an injury sufficient to disable them.

For that he would need power guns. And Zarouk had no power guns.

It looked like stalemate.

Later that day, Zarouk sent his warriors against the gate in full strength. The trees in the forest did not make the best rams imaginable, but they were all Zarouk had to work with and would have to do. Back on Mars, his raiders would have used stone pillars slung by chains from heavy braces for this purpose. Here it was still probably possible to find such resources in a quarry or outcropping, but he lacked the tools to chip or cut lengths of stone into the proper proportions.

For an hour or two his men toiled away against that portal of solid metal, finding it unyielding. The Stone Giants, or some of them at any rate, gathered atop the wall at the gate to observe the attack, but made no effort to injure the men who toiled below.

This was in itself curious. Surely, they could have striven to discourage the ram teams with spears or darts. Lacking these, they could have emptied cauldrons of boiling water or burning oil upon the men below. But none of these actions were undertaken by the stone colossi, who seemed content merely to observe the labor of the invaders.