The Road to Sinharat
Copyright© 2025 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 1
The door was low, deep-sunk into the thickness of the wall. Carey knocked and then he waited, stooped a bit under the lintel-stone, fitting his body to the meagre shadow as though he could really hide it there. A few yards away, beyond cracked and tilted paving-blocks, the Jekkara Low-Canal showed its still black water to the still black sky, and both were full of stars.
Nothing moved along the canal-site. The town was closed tight, and this in itself was so unnatural that it made Carey shiver. He had been here before and he knew how it ought to be. The chief industry of the Low-Canal towns is sinning of one sort or another, and they work at it right around the clock. One might have thought that all the people had gone away, but Carey knew they hadn’t. He knew that he had not taken a single step unwatched. He had not really believed that they would let him come this far, and he wondered why they had not killed him. Perhaps they remembered him.
There was a sound on the other side of the door.
Carey said in the antique High Martian, “Here is one who claims the guest-right.” In Low Martian, the vernacular that fitted more easily on his tongue, he said, “Let me in, Derech. You owe me blood.”
The door opened narrowly and Carey slid through it, into lamp-light and relative warmth. Derech closed the door and barred it, saying,
“Damn you, Carey. I knew you were going to turn up here babbling about blood-debts. I swore I wouldn’t let you in.”
He was a Low-Canaller, lean and small and dark and predatory. He wore a red jewel in his left ear-lobe and a totally incongruous but comfortable suit of Terran synthetics, insulated against heat and cold. Carey smiled.
“Sixteen years ago,” he said, “you’d have perished before you’d have worn that.”
“Corruption. Nothing corrupts like comfort, unless it’s kindness.” Derech sighed. “I knew it was a mistake to let you save my neck that time. Sooner or later you’d claim payment. Well, now that I have let you in, you might as well sit down.” He poured wine into a cup of alabaster worn thin as an eggshell and handed it to Carey. They drank, sombrely, in silence. The flickering lamp-light showed the shadows and the deep lines in Carey’s face.
Derech said, “How long since you’ve slept?”
“I can sleep on the way,” said Carey, and Derech looked at him with amber eyes as coldly speculative as a cat’s.
Carey did not press him. The room was large, richly furnished with the bare, spare, faded richness of a world that had very little left to give in the way of luxury. Some of the things were fairly new, made in the traditional manner by Martian craftsmen. They were almost indistinguishable from the things that had been old when the Reed Kings and the Bee Kings were little boys along the Nile-bank.
“What will happen,” Derech asked, “if they catch you?”
“Oh,” said Carey, “they’ll deport me first. Then the United Worlds Court will try me, and they can’t do anything but find me guilty. They’ll hand me over to Earth for punishment, and there will be further investigations and penalties and fines and I’ll be a thoroughly broken man when they’ve finished, and sorry enough for it. Though I think they’ll be sorrier in the long run.”
“That won’t help matters any,” said Derech.
“No.”
“Why,” asked Derech, “why is it that they will not listen?”
“Because they know that they are right.”
Derech said an evil word.
“But they do. I’ve sabotaged the Rehabilitation Project as much as I possibly could. I’ve rechanneled funds and misdirected orders so they’re almost two years behind schedule. These are the things they’ll try me for. But my real crime is that I have questioned Goodness and the works thereof. Murder they might forgive me, but not that.”
He added wearily, “You’ll have to decide quickly. The UW boys are working closely with the Council of City-States, and Jekkara is no longer untouchable. It’s also the first place they’ll look for me.”
“I wondered if that had occurred to you.” Derech frowned. “That doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that I know where you want to go. We tried it once, remember? We ran for our lives across that damned desert. Four solid days and nights.” He shivered.
“Send me as far as Barrakesh. I can disappear there, join a southbound caravan. I intend to go alone.”
“If you intend to kill yourself, why not do it here in comfort and among friends? Let me think,” Derech said. “Let me count my years and my treasure and weigh them against a probable yard of sand.”
Flames hissed softly around the coals in the brazier. Outside, the wind got up and started its ancient work, rubbing the house walls with tiny grains of dust, rounding off the corners, hollowing the window places. All over Mars the wind did this, to huts and palaces, to mountains and the small burrow-heaps of animals, laboring patiently toward a city when the whole face of the planet should be one smooth level sea of dust. Only lately new structures of metal and plastic had appeared beside some of the old stone cities. They resisted the wearing sand. They seemed prepared to stay forever. And Carey fancied that he could hear the old wind laughing as it went.
There was a scratching against the closed shutter in the back wall, followed by a rapid drumming of fingertips. Derech rose, his face suddenly alert. He rapped twice on the shutter to say that he understood and then turned to Carey. “Finish your wine.”
He took the cup and went into another room with it. Carey stood up. Mingling with the sound of the wind outside, the gentle throb of motors became audible, low in the sky and very near.
Derech returned and gave Carey a shove toward an inner wall. Carey remembered the pivoted stone that was there, and the space behind it. He crawled through the opening. “Don’t sneeze or thrash about,” said Derech. “The stonework is loose, and they’d hear you.”
He swung the stone shut. Carey huddled as comfortably as possible in the uneven hole, worn smooth with the hiding of illegal things for countless generations. Air and a few faint gleams of light seeped through between the stone blocks, which were set without mortar as in most Martian construction. He could even see a thin vertical segment of the room.
When the sharp knock came at the door, he discovered that he could hear quite clearly.
Derech moved across his field of vision. The door opened. A man’s voice demanded entrance in the name of the United Worlds and the Council of Martian City-States.
“Please enter,” said Derech.
Carey saw, more or less fragmentarily, four men. Three were Martians in the undistinguished cosmopolitan garb of the City-States. They were the equivalent of the FBI. The fourth was an Earthman, and Carey smiled to see the measure of his own importance. The spare, blond, good-looking man with the sunburn and the friendly blue eyes might have been an actor, a tennis-player, or a junior executive on holiday. He was Howard Wales, Earth’s best man in Interpol.
Wales let the Martians do the talking, and while they did it he drifted unobtrusively about, peering through doorways, listening, touching, feeling. Carey became fascinated by him, in an unpleasant sort of way. Once he came and stood directly in front of Carey’s crevice in the wall. Carey was afraid to breathe, and he had a dreadful notion that Wales would suddenly turn about and look straight in at him through the crack.
The senior Martian, a middle-aged man with an able look about him, was giving Derech a briefing on the penalties that awaited him if he harbored a fugitive or withheld information. Carey thought that he was being too heavy about it. Even five years ago he would not have dared to show his face in Jekkara. He could picture Derech listening amiably, lounging against something and playing with the jewel in his ear. Finally Derech got bored with it and said without heat,
“Because of our geographical position, we have been exposed to the New Culture.” The capitals were his. “We have made adjustments to it. But this is still Jekkara and you’re here on sufference, no more. Please don’t forget it.”
Wales spoke, deftly forestalling any comment from the City-Stater. “You’ve been Carey’s friend for many years, haven’t you?”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.