Under the Moons of Mars (32 page)

There were two men behind Sivas with their hands on the hilts of their swords. Sullenly, Jalvar nodded.

Ras Thavas signaled to his slave assistants. They came forward and pulled the sheet off Jalvar and unbuckled the straps; as he had expected, his body was naked. It was also the reddish tawny color of a Red Man; he strongly suspected he had Thavas to thank for that. He felt normal; better than usual, in fact—rested and alert, though a little hungry. He pushed himself up . . .

And went soaring several feet into the air. With a shout of alarm he grabbed for the surface of the table and glared around him. An attempt to walk had him bouncing around like a struck handball rebounding from a goal disk. Sivas chuckled again.

“You do not know your own strength,” he said. “Come, these men will help you out of these narrow quarters.”

The warriors took their hands from their swords and instead each gripped Jalvar by the upper arm. It proved humiliatingly necessary, as his body tried to skip upward with every pace.

“Make less effort!” Sivas said. “Imagine that you weigh only as much as a child newly hatched!”

“Watch,” Sivas said, before Jalvar could speak.

Sivas turned and ran, bounding, then leapt. Jalvar’s eyes went wide as the Zodangan soared fully thirty sofads into the air, five times his own height. That was like nothing the Gatholian prince had ever seen, save by—

“The warlord!” he blurted, when Sivas bounced back. “You have duplicated the strength of John Carter!”

“And Paxton,” Sivas agreed. “Or rather, Ras Thavas has, once suitably . . . encouraged. He has done as much before.”

Inwardly the shock was fading, and he bubbled with delight.
I have penetrated the conspiracy. And if . . . admittedly a large if . . . we foil it and escape, we have solved the problem of existence on Jasoom!

Jalvar looked down at his body. Save for the color of his skin, it was as like his own as two coins, except that it was himself as he had been when only a decade or two from the egg.

“I have heard of Ras Thavas’s synthetic men, the hormads,” he said, though Thavas’s synthetic men had been grotesque monsters, misshapen and twisted. Jalvar looked over his body again. Perfect and spotless . . .

“As you can see, his art has improved,” Sivas said. “You were unconscious for many months, while your new body was prepared. It has more advantages than mere strength. Observe this.”

He turned and signed to one of his men. Grinning, the warrior drew his longsword and lunged. The sharp blade transfixed Sivas just below the ribs for an instant, and Jalvar bit off a started exclamation of horror and alarm. The wound bled, but not very much; Sivas coughed, spat out a clot, and straightened.

He wheeled, straightening and drawing his own sword, thrusting it into the air: “Death to John Carter! Death to the warlord!

And then, from a thousand throats came the roaring reply:
“DEATH TO THE WARLORD! DEATH TO JOHN CARTER!”

R
as Thavas’s quarters were segregated from those of the core of Sivas’s Zodangan diehards, and those in turn from the panthans who made up the bulk of the hidden force. A month’s time was enough for Jalvar and Tars Sojat—who had been also been transplanted into an improved hormad version of his original body—to learn the layout of the cave complex; it was like a large set of interconnected buildings carved from a ridge of solid rock. They had learned the guard routines as well, and also to fully master their new bodies and their strengths and weaknesses.

Now Jalvar crept through the darkness outside the gate they had forced, with only the pale light of one hurtling moon to show the way. They were committed to triggering the beacon and calling the warlord’s forces now, with a dead man in their wake, and he felt the freedom that comes with casting yourself headlong into action. Their feet moved through the mud and shallow water of the swamp, ooze flowing up through their toes; it was an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation, as was the abundance of insects. So was the constant dank smell.

“If this is what Barsoom was like when water was abundant, I will cease to complain of its present state,” Sojat grumbled very quietly.

Then they were on dry land again, and ahead loomed the nearly vertical surface of this side of the rocky ridge that contained the insurgent base. It might have been carved and planed smooth, long ago—hundreds of thousands of years ago by the Orovars, his father’s people. Erosion was swifter here in this last sad remnant of Barsoom’s oceans than in most, and this wasn’t very hard stone, nothing like the imperishable granites and almost metallic basalts from which the dead cities were built.

Now it just looked very steep. So steep that nobody in his right mind would try to climb it, and so high to the single slit window near the top that even their Jasoomian-style muscles wouldn’t take them halfway to the top. Jalvar grinned. He’d been called light-minded as a youth, but nobody had ever said he wasn’t imaginative.

“I go first as we planned, my brother,” Sojat said.

He backed up, crouched, and ran forward with the slithering speed of a charging banth, both his legs and the longer middle pair of limbs driving him forward. Then he leapt. It was astonishing to see the great body soar so, but even then only the fingers of his upper hands went over the edge. They clamped down, and then he was holding with both hands and his chin. Javlar held his breath as Sojat lay still for an instant, then swung sharply to one side. That might tear his hands loose . . . but it didn’t, not quite, and his left middle hand went on the stone as well. Then the right, and soon he was standing on the ledge with his back to the rock, testing the footing. He grinned, an alarming sight even at that range, and his mobile stalklike ears cocked forward. Then he bent his knees slightly and braced both pairs of hands together, all four palms linked low before him.

Jalvar backed up himself, carefully testing the ground with his eyes and with questing bare feet as well; they wouldn’t have more than one chance. He also checked that his weapons were securely strapped and fastened in at least two places to the links and buckles on his harness. Like all warriors of noble birth he had trained in running, leaping, and gymnastics virtually since he hatched. And since Gathol was a state of many herdsmen, he’d also practiced tricks like jumping on and off the back of a galloping thoat. The past few months had been spent getting used to his new thews. Even so . . .

Soaring through the night. Drawing his legs up again as he flew, the glint of Sojat’s tusks as the Thark adjusted his position. Suddenly shockingly close, the stone wall coming at him, and then he was hanging, poised his own height above Sojat’s head, the great mobile eyes tracking him as he fell forward.

Smack.

His feet struck his friend’s four crossed palms. The Thark uncoiled like a catapult, all the force of his fourteen sofads of height behind the throw, and the strength of arms reinforced by Ras Thavas’s scientific wizardry. Jalvar put everything he had into the leap as well. Now he shot upward like the shell from a flier’s cannon; he hoped he wouldn’t have the same splintering impact, spilling blood and bone and guts instead of explosive radium. His quickened healing wouldn’t help an iota if he left his brains spattered over the rock like a bowl of porridge. Darkened stone rushed past him, and then the thick metal grille over the narrow window.

Too high!
he thought urgently.

The lip of the ridge flashed past, and for a moment he was hanging in the air beside it. The startled face of a sentry gaped at him, and then he was falling. His hands flashed out and gripped the grille.

And it broke, the six thumb-thick bars set into the stone along the top snapping like so many dried reeds. Three of the ones below broke as well, and the others began to bend. Jalvar yelled in alarm as the twisting metal bit into his left hand—there was no need for secrecy now.

The sentry leaned over the top of the cliff twenty sofads up, leveling a rifle. The muzzle flash left a strobing image in Jalvar’s vision, but the man missed—like most Red Men he was a terrible shot, and it was a difficult target in the dark and aiming almost vertically downward.

Jalvar Pan was a
very
good shot. Gatholians often were, since they spent much time managing their herds in the wild. And despite being the greatest swordsman on two worlds, John Carter had insisted on such training for all his descendants; evidently it was a custom in Virginia, the kingdom on Jasoom where he had lived before his mysterious transplanting to Barsoom. Jalvar blessed the long hours of tedious practice most nobles considered a waste of time that might be spent with the sword.

Another sentry leaned over the cliff edge. Below Jalvar, the Thark rifle barked, and the man’s head vanished in a spray that would have been red in daylight and was black beneath the light of Thuria. Jalvar ignored it; anyone who showed himself along the edge was going to die, and that was all that he needed to know. Instead he holstered his pistol and began to draw his dagger, to hammer through the glass of the window.

It opened instead, and a hand extended through. Jalvar grabbed the man’s wrist just as the last of the grillwork parted with a short unmusical
tung
. The grille spun away and clattered on the broken rock below. Jalvar was drawn upward by the man’s strong arm; he was young and handsome, but there was something very old and very cold behind his eyes.

“What has taken you so long?” Ras Thavas grumbled. “Yes, yes, of course I weakened the grille. Did they think that mere metal bars would confine the greatest intellect of Barsoom when he had access to laboratory acids?”

Jalvar fastened the rope coiled over his shoulder to a wall bracket and tossed it out. It was the thin, unbreakably strong type used for boarding actions in the air. Seconds later Tars Sojat was swarming up it, even as rifles barked from the cliff above. He pushed his own weapon through and then followed it inside.

“They should have thrown rocks at me,” he sneered, stretching; the ceiling was just high enough for him. “That would have been more dangerous.”

“Quick!” Jalvar said, turning to Ras Thavas. “You have the device?”

“Of course,” the scientist said. “I detected and removed it during my preliminary examination of you. Unfortunately I have not yet broken the code.”

He produced a cylinder the size of his thumb. Jalvar seized it, unscrewed the top, and then shone his belt light into the tiny pinhole opening in a series of precisely modulated clicks.

“Now we wait,” he said.

“Now they will come to kill us,” Tars Sojat said cheerfully, hefting his rifle. “But we shall be well avenged.”

“How far away is the warlord’s fleet?” Ras Thavas asked in alarm.

“That depends on how far they tracked us when we left Zodanga,” Jalvar said cheerfully, tucking the beacon into a pouch. “And how long they maintained a strong patrol. If they came close, and remained in strength, we have a chance. If not . . .”

He shrugged and slapped Sojat on one of his shoulders. “As my bloodthirsty friend here said. Now, show us the layout before the guards come. And tell me: Can your helpers be trusted?”