Lin Carter - The City Outside the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

grating beneath the house leading into the old sewer tunnels! The houses in this quarter are old enough to have been built over the sewers which once drained into the ancient seas. We can follow the tunnels beneath the bazaar, and reach the Gate of the Dragons that way!"
    "But how will we know which way to—" Ryker started to ask bewilderedly, then closed his lips to the unspoken question. He had forgotten that he was in the company, not of men like himself, but of three of the People. And the People have from of old an uncanny sense of direction that never falters or betrays them.
    The girl now took the lead in some unspoken way that even Ryker did not pause to question. She whipped off her black silk mask impatiently, as if it were no longer needed. Then, followed by the boy and the old man, with Ryker blundering along in the rear, she searched until she found a low door which led down beneath the street level into the crypts and vaults which were commonly built under native houses as ancient as this one.
    Ryker followed, but without enthusiasm. They told unpleasant tales of the old crypts beneath the houses in this ancient quarter, and of unwholesome things that squirmed and slithered through the black, foul darkness of the tunnels below this part of the city. They were unhealthy, those black tunnels that had been burrowed underneath the cities of Mars before his Earthling ancestors had entered into the Stone Age.
    But he had little choice but to follow after Valarda and her companions, if he wanted to live out this night.
    For the priests had aroused the mob again, it seemed, and had fanned back into fierce existence that hot red thirst to kill. As he went stumbling down the worn stone steps that led down and down into the black depths beneath the house, he could hear them howling down the hollow canyon of the street, and the thud of the first blows against the tall and narrow door of ancient metal echoed and reechoed after them.
    He had stifled the mob's thirst for murder once that night, with the bright fury of his guns. But the trick would
    not work a second time, he knew. For now the faceless shadows that howled down the night-dark streets and hunted them would be armed with swords and knives, and with those tubelike dart guns with which the People were Mich deadly and unerring marksmen.
    4. Beyond the Dragon Gate
    Of their nightmarish journey through the foul and low-roofed tunnels, Ryker could remember but little in the aftertimes. The stone floor underfoot was slick, worn smooth by the passage of waters which had rushed down the black throat of these sewers on their way to join oceans that were legends a million years before Egypt.
    No waters rushed here now, but there was moisture, of a sort, enough to sustain mould and lichen and sprouting, tubular fungus. These flaccid growths squelched unpleasantly underfoot, and his boots crushed them to a vile stinking slime as he blundered down the black passages, half-bent to avoid scraping his head against the low curve of the roof.
    It had not been hard to locate the entrance to the labyrinth of underground tunnels. The door to the crypts they barred with a massive length of heavy iron which leaned against a wall at the head of the stairway, conveniently at hand for that very purpose, perhaps.
    The boy had found the barred grating in a corner of the crypts. It had rusted into place over the ages, and it required a bolt from Ryker's guns—the focus narrowed to needle-beam width—to loosen it. The boy's name was Kiki, it seemed. The old man's name was Melandron or so the girl called him.
    Once they had lowered themselves down through the floor grating and dropped to the floor of the tunnelways below, they found themselves in an unlighted gloom so completely impenetrable that, to Ryker, it was like being struck totally blind.
    Luckily, the natives of Mars, who trace the descent of i heir race from a quadrupedal feline shaped by the Gods into manlike form and by Them