Guns of Mars 62
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 18.1
Xenbah Halak was leaning back against the rear rail of the quarterdeck to study the back of the odd pale creature at the wheel.
A zephyr of hot wind climbed up from the base of the mountain pass below. It blew a trailing end of his white headdress over his eyes. It tilted the deck hard to starboard and he pressed his grip harder on the rail to keep from sliding. He straightened as the ship righted itself under the capable steering of the hooded stranger. One of his companions, a red man named only Zanos had lost his footing to tumble over the swaying deck and crash against the railings. The other red man, Gullos, laughed at that.
The airship regained a level course and Xenbah stepped closer to the pilot to be heard over the passage of air and the whine of the generator below.
“We are stocked for five days travel,” he said coming up alongside the hooded man. “Is that based on the distance to this mystic well?”
“I cannot know,” the other said, eyes on the course before them as he turned the wheel this way and that to navigate between the walls rising to either side of the narrowing divide.
“Then how can you have estimated the food and water we would require?”
“Because the man who killed your brother took forty days’ supply for himself. I calculated our best speed against his.”
Xenbah nodded at this.
“And you are certain this is the course he took?” Xenbah said.
“The thark I told you of told me of the bounty man’s intentions. He has a map of sorts and insisted that a lake of purest water waits to the south and east.”
“Then we find this man and make him lead us there before we kill him.”
“Yes. We must take him alive. Unless he still carries the book. In which case we will not need him.”
Xenbah rubbed his jaw with a rough hand. His dearest desire was to kill this bounty man, a death stretched over as many days as he could keep the man breathing. He owed this man that for the murder of his brother. But this prize, this source of life-giving water would stay his hand for now.
He would not have believed the story of the hooded man, this Bhar-Bhartee, if he had not himself tasted the water from one of the stranger’s skins. It would have been a fable, a story for children, but for the sample he swigged. It was the purest drink of his life, as clear as the open sky. No process of distillation could have made it so. It could only have come, as the pale stranger claimed, from deep in the heart of the rock the world rested upon. Whoever controlled such a source would hold power. Not power over a dessicated place like Yttrium but over all of Barsoom. And the elder Halak was nothing if not an ambitious man.
He studied this creature standing steady at the wheel. Most persuasive he was with words of promise, promises of revenge and reward. Still, Xenbah was too wily to take any man, no matter what brand, at his word.
“You say this bounty man has skills,” Xenbah said, resting back against a post to face the hooded man.
“He killed your brother and his two companions. He sold their goods right under your nose and was gone before you ever got word.”
Xenbah grunted. He’d heard too late about the man who’d stolen Gar’s mounts and pelts. He assumed his brother, along with the Al Zinds, was dead somewhere out on the sand. No man alive could have thieved from them while they lived. And while he had little love for his unmannered younger brother, Xenbah did not suffer being played for a fool. He was the strongman of Yttrium and all that went on there, in the city and the mines, occurred only at his whim and will.
He established this by hanging the merchant Thalex alongside the toothless old man who’d given the bounty man aid and shelter. That would ensure that his hold over Yttrium remained until his return. And when he returned, he would wield a power greater than any blade or gun could give him. He would wield the power of life itself.
“And the thark? He was your partner?” he said to the pilot.
“Hardly that. More an instrument, a convenience,” the hooded man said, hidden eyes turned to the black man for an instant. “He was useful for what information he could impart and to see me across the barrens. Those men you sent after him will enjoy the reward I sought. If they can take him.”
“You must be convinced of the existence of this well to give up a bounty as rich as that.”
“Do you think your tongue lied to you? Do you doubt this well lies before us?”
Xenbah shrugged before turning to look at the pass before them widening out to reveal a broken landscape of faults and rises stretching to where they were lost in the waves of heat rising from the lifeless rock and sand.
He’d find this bounty man and, once his usefulness was exhausted, kill him.
And right after, the mockery of a man now steering them east.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
