Guns of Mars 55
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 15.1
They set out south along the canal floor the next morning. An accord was struck but was a tenuous agreement as the thark and the hooded man had no compelling reason to trust one another.
The hooded man insisted that Kal Keddaq walk ahead while the man rode. The man would not lend the thark a firearm though he allowed Kal to keep his saber.
Kal wondered at the nature of his new partner. He’d not seen the man’s like before. The over large eyes and flesh had the same pallor of the blind, multi-legged salamanders he would find under rocks as a child. A true delicacy.
Perhaps this stranger was victim of a rare ailment or the result of a malign birth. Kal had seen a few of his own siblings, the issue of later hatchings, come out of their eggs shrunken, sickly and runted. These were slain by his father, their heads dashed against rocks. This peculiar partner might be a hatchling born weak but allowed to survive, coddled by a mother with more compassion than sense.
When the sun had reached its zenith along the southern horizon, its light streamed into the canal to cast shadows against what appeared to be a break in the wall ahead. As they drew closer it revealed itself to be a circular opening set low in the eastern wall. It was identical in design and scale to the pipes that led into the canal from the great sluice. The only difference was an iron frame that ringed the cavity and held in place the doors of a partly opened lock. It appeared to have been operated ages ago from a mechanism at the top of the canal wall. Great chains, with links bigger around than Kal’s arms could span, lay in snarled heaps of rusted steel where they’d fallen from runners set in the wall with long bolts.
Below the mouth of the huge cavity was a slope of detritus, backwash from the centuries of use the drain had endured. It consisted of silt and finely broken rock. Kal clambered up it to stand in the gap between the massive lock doors. He entered the gloom of the opening and spat on one of his hands. He held his palm up to the darkness and felt a feeble but steady wind blow across his hand. Stepping further into the dark, he sniffed the air, taking in a tentative sample then filling his nostrils. It was a fetid smell, a dead smell of things long extinct that might have lurked here.
He exited and slid down to where the hooded man waited by the thoat, reins in hand.
“It’s some kind of conduit,” he said. “No idea how far into the rock it goes.”
“An aqueduct,” the hooded man nodded. “It once fed a water supply for a city. If it’s not blocked it will lead to a reservoir of some type.”
“A city, you say?” Kal said. “The bounty man will be heading there to find a new mount.”
“And supplies to reach his destination.”
“This is a way out of this damnable ditch,” the thark said, shading his eyes with two hands to peer up the sheer wall where a gantry or armature extended outward.
“If it is unblocked.”
“I felt air moving out of it. I say we see how far we might make it.”
“Into an orluk’s belly perhaps.”
Kal shook his head. “I’d have smelt that. This is no great beast’s lair. And even if it were, I’d rather beard a leviathan than walk this canal until we die of thirst or starvation.”
“We’ve not much daylight left.” The hooded man turned his visored gaze to the sun now moving over the lip of the western wall. “Not that it’s of much matter. It will be night inside this channel no matter the hour.”
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
