Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved

slate, maybe even work up a desire to make a woman of yourself, instead of a sort of tiger wandering from one kill to the next.' She added, 'If you live.'

  Stark said slowly, 'You're clever, Ashton. You know I've got a feeling for all planetary primitives like those who raised me, and you appeal to that.'

  'Yes,' said Ashton, 'I'm clever. But I'm not a liar. What I've told you is true.'

  Stark carefully ground out the cigarette beneath her heel. Then she looked up. 'Suppose I agree to become your agent in this, and go off to Valkis. What's to prevent me from forgetting all about you, then?'

  Ashton said softly, 'Your word, Erica. You get to know a woman pretty well when you know her from boyhood on up. Your word is enough.'

  There was a silence, and then Stark held out her hand. 'All right, Simone – but only for this one deal. After that, no promises.' 'Fair enough.' They shook hands.

  'I can't give you any suggestions,' Ashton said. 'You're on your own, completely. You can get in touch with me through the Earth Commission office in Tarak. You know where that is?'

  Stark nodded. 'On the Dryland Border.'

  'Good luck to you, Erica.'

  She turned, and they walked back together to where the three women waited. Ashton nodded, and they began to dismantle the Banning. Neither they nor Ashton looked back, as they rode away.

  Stark watched them go. She filled her lungs with the cold air, and stretched. Then she roused the beast out of the sand. It had rested, and was willing to carry her again as long as she did not press it. She set off again, across the desert.

  The ridge grew as she approached it, looming into a low mountain chain much worn by the ages. A pass opened before her, twisting between the hills of barren rock.

  She traversed it, coming out at the farther end above the basin of a dead sea. The lifeless land stretched away into darkness, a vast waste of desolation more lonely even than the desert. And between the sea-bottom and the foothills, Stark saw the lights of Valkis.

  2

  There were many lights, far below. Tiny pinpricks of flame where torches burned in the streets beside the Low-Canal – the thread of black water that was all that remained of a forgotten ocean.

  Stark had never been here before. Now she looked at the city that sprawled down the slope under the low moons, and shivered, the primitive twitching of the nerves that an animal feels in the presence of death.

  For the streets where the torches flared were only a tiny part of Valkis. The life of the city had flowed downward from the cliff-tops, following the dropping level of the sea. Five cities, the oldest scarcely recognisable as a place of human habitation. Five harbours, the docks and quays still standing, half buried in the dust.

  Five ages of Martian history, crowned on the topmost level with the ruined palace of the old pirate queens of Valkis. The towers still stood, broken but indomitable, and in the moonlight they had a sleeping look, as though they dreamed of blue water and the sound of waves, and of tall ships coming in heavy with treasure.

  Stark picked her way slowly down the steep descent. There was something fascinating to her in the stone houses, roofless and silent in the night. The paving blocks still showed the rutting of wheels where carters had driven to the marketplace, and princes had gone by in gilded chariots. The quays were scarred where ships had lain against them, rising and falling with the tides.

  Stark's senses had developed in a strange school, and the thin veneer of civilisation she affected had not dulled them. Now it seemed to her that the wind had the echoes of voices in it, and the smell of spices and fresh-spilled blood.

  She was not surprised when, in the last level above the living town, armed women came out of the shadows and stopped her.

  They were lean, dark women, very wiry and light of foot, and their faces were the faces of wolves – not primitive wolves at all, but beasts of prey that had been civilised for so many thousands of years that they could afford to forget it.

  They were most courteous, and Stark would not have cared to disobey their request.

  She gave her name. 'Delgauna sent for me.'

  The leader of the Valkisians nodded her narrow head. 'You're expected.' Her sharp eyes had taken in every feature of the Earthwoman, and Stark knew that her description had been memorised down to the last detail. Valkis guarded its doors with care.

  'Ask in the city,' said the sentry. 'Anyone can direct you to the palace.'

  Stark nodded and went on, down through the long-dead streets in the moonlight and the silence.

  With shocking suddenness, she was plunged into the streets of the living.

  It was very late now, but Valkis was awake and stirring. Seething, rather. The narrow twisting ways were crowded. The laughter of men came down from the flat roofs. Torchlight flared, gold and scarlet, lighting the wineshops, making blacker the shadows of the alley-mouths.

  Stark left her beast at a serai on the edge of the canal. The paddocks were already jammed. Stark recognized the long-legged brutes of the Dryland breed, and as she left a caravan passed her, coming in, with a jangling of bronze bangles and a great hissing and stamping in the dust.

  The riders were tall barbarians – Keshi, Stark thought, from the way they braided their tawny hair. They wore plain leather, and their blue-eyed men rode like kings.

  Valkis was full of them. For days, it seemed, they must have poured in across the dead sea bottom, from the distant oases and the barren deserts of the back-blocks. Brawny warriors of Kesh and Shun, making holiday beside the Low-Canal, where there was more water than any of them had seen in their lives.

  They were in Valkis, these barbarians, but they were not part of it. Shouldering her way through the streets, Stark got the peculiar flavour of the town, that she guessed could never be touched or changed by anything.

  In a square, a boy danced to the music of harp and drum. The air was heavy with the smell of wine and burning pitch and incense. A lithe, swart Valkisian in her bright kilt and jewelled girdle leaped out and danced with the boy, her teeth flashing as she whirled and postured. In the end she bore his off, laughing, his black hair hanging down her back.

  Men looked at Stark. Men graceful as cats, bare to the waist, their skirts slit at the sides above the thigh, wearing no ornaments but the tiny golden bells that are the peculiar property of the Low-Canal towns, so that the air is always filled with their delicate, wanton chiming.

  Valkis had a laughing, wicked soul. Stark had been in many places in her life, but never one before that beat with such a pulse of evil, incredibly ancient, but strong and gay.

  She found the palace at last – a great rambling structure of quarried stone, with doors and shutters of beaten bronze closed against the dust and the incessant wind. She gave her name to the guard and was taken inside, through halls hung with antique tapestries, the flagged floors worn hollow by countless generations of sandalled feet.

  Again, Stark's half-wild senses told her that life within these walls had not been placid. The very stones whispered of age-old violence, the shadows were heavy with the lingering ghosts of passion.

  She was brought before Delgauna, the lord of Valkis, in the big central room that served as her headquarters.

  Delgauna was lean and catlike, after the fashion of her race. Her black hair showed a stippling of silver, and the hard beauty of her face was strongly marked, the lined drawn deep and all the softness of youth long gone away. She wore a magnificent harness, and her eyes, under fine dark brows, were like drops of hot gold.

  She looked up as the Earthwoman came in, one swift penetrating glance. Then she said, 'You're Stark.'

  There was something odd about those yellow eyes, bright and keen as a killer hawk's yet somehow secret, as though the true thoughts behind them would never show through. Instinctively, Stark disliked the woman.

  But she nodded and came up to the council table, turning her attention to the others in the room. A handful of Martians – Low-Canallers, chiefs and fighting women from their ornaments and th
eir proud looks – and several outlanders, their conventional garments incongruous in this place.

  Stark knew them all. Knighton and Walsh of Terra, Themis of Mercury, Arrod of Callisto Colony – and Luhara of Venus. Pirates, thieves, renegades, and each one an expert in her line.

  Ashton was right. There was something big, something very big and very ugly, shaping between Valkis and the Drylands.

  But that was only a quick, passing thought in Stark's mind.

  It was on Luhara that her attention centred. Bitter memory and hatred had come to savage life within her as soon as she saw the Venusian.

  The woman was handsome. A cashiered officer of the crack Venusian Guards, very slim, very elegant, her pale hair cropped short and curling, her dark tunic fitting her like a second skin.

  She said, 'The aborigine! I thought we had enough barbarians here without sending for more.'

  Stark said nothing. She began to walk toward Luhara.

  Luhara said sharply, 'There's no use in getting nasty, Stark. Past scores are past. We're on the same side now.'

  The Earthwoman spoke, then, with a peculiar gentleness.

  'We were on the same side once before. Against Terror-Venus Metals. Remember?'

  'I remember very well!' Luhara was speaking now not to Stark alone, but to everyone in the room. 'I remember that your innocent barbarian friends had me tied to the block there in the swamps, and that you were watching the whole thing with honest pleasure. If the Company women hadn't