The Sword Bearer Epub Download
Anastacia Iacono
I stood upon the little porch of the cabin enjoying the softbeauties of this Arizona night; and as I contemplated the peace andserenity of the scene, it did not seem possible that but a fewyears before the fierce and terrible Geronimo had stood in thissame spot before this self-same cabin, or that generations beforethat this seemingly deserted canyon had been peopled by a race nowextinct.
I had been seeking in their ruined cities for the secret oftheir genesis and the even stranger secret of their extinction. HowI wished that those crumbling lava cliffs might speak and tell meof all that they had witnessed since they poured out in a moltenstream from the cold and silent cones that dot the mesa land beyondthe canyon.
My eyes, following the pathway of my thoughts, searched theheavens until they rested upon the red eye of Mars shining there inthe blue-black void; and so it was that Mars was uppermost in mymind as I turned into my cabin and prepared for a good night's restbeneath the rustling leaves of the cottonwoods, with whose soft andsoothing lullaby was mingled the rippling and the gurgling of thewaters of the little Colorado.
My cabin consists of two rooms. The smaller back room is mybedroom. The larger room in front of it serves all other purposes,being dining room, kitchen, and living room combined. From my bunk,I cannot see directly into the front room. A flimsy partitionseparates the bedroom from the living room. It consists ofrough-hewn boards that in the process of shrinking have left widecracks in the wall, and in addition to this the door between thetwo rooms is seldom closed; so that while I could not see into theadjoining room, I could hear anything that might go on withinit.
I do not know that I am more susceptible to suggestion than theaverage man; but the fact remains that murder, mystery, andgangster stories always seem more vivid when I read them alone inthe stilly watches of the night.
I had just reached the point in the story where an assassin wascreeping upon the victim of kidnappers when I heard the front doorof my cabin open and close and, distinctly, the clank of metal uponmetal.
A low laugh came from the adjoining room. "It is a good thingyour wall is full of cracks," said a deep voice, "or otherwise Imight have stumbled into trouble. That is a mean-looking gun I sawbefore you blew out your lamp."
"Light your lamp and I'll come in," replied my nocturnalvisitor. "If you're nervous, you can keep your gun on the doorway,but please don't squeeze the trigger until you have had a chance torecognize me."
He sighed and then smiled again. "God alone knows how old I am.I can recall no childhood, nor have I ever looked other than I looktonight; but come," he added, "you mustn't stand here in your barefeet. Hop back into bed again. These Arizona nights are none toowarm."
"It is an expression of the normal morbid interest in thehorrifying," I said. "There is really no justification, but thefact remains that I enjoy such tales. However, I have lost myinterest now. I want to hear about you and Dejah Thoris andCarthoris, and what brought you here. It has been years since youhave been back. I had given up all hope of ever seeing youagain."
He shook his head, a little sadly I thought. "It is a longstory, a story of love and loyalty, of hate and crime, a story ofdripping swords, of strange places and strange people upon astranger world. The living of it might have driven a weaker man tomadness. To have one you love taken from you and not to know herfate!"
At last he spoke. "Human nature is alike everywhere," he said.He flicked the edge of the magazine lying on my bunk. "We thinkthat we want to forget the tragedies of life, but we do not. Ifthey momentarily pass us by and leave us in peace, we must conjurethem again, either in our thoughts or through some such medium asyou have adopted. As you find a grim pleasure in reading aboutthem, so I find a grim pleasure in thinking about them.
Within its frowning walls lives many a Zodangan who feels noloyalty for Helium; and here, too, have gathered numbers of themalcontents of the great empire ruled over by Tardos Mors, Jeddakof Helium. To Zodanga have migrated not a few of the personal andpolitical enemies of the house of Tardos Mors and of his son-in-law, John Carter, Prince of Helium.
I visited the city as seldom as possible, as I had little loveeither for it or its people; but my duties called me thereoccasionally, principally because it was the headquarters of one ofthe most powerful guilds of assassins on Mars.
The land of my birth is cursed with its gangsters, its killers,and its kidnappers but these constitute but a slight menace ascompared with the highly efficient organizations that flourish uponMars. Here assassination is a profession; kidnaping, a fine art.Each has its guild, its laws, its customs, and its code of ethics;and so widespread are their ramifications that they seeminextricably interwoven into the entire social and political lifeof the planet.
For years I have been seeking to extirpate this noxious system,but the job has seemed a thankless and hopeless one. Entrenchedbehind age-old ramparts of habit and tradition, they occupy aposition in the public consciousness that has cast a certainglamour of romance and honor upon them.
The kidnappers are not in such good odor, but among the morenotorious assassins are men who hold much the same position in theesteem of the masses as do your great heroes of the prize ring andthe baseball diamond.
Furthermore, in the war that I was waging upon them, I was alsohandicapped by the fact that I must fight almost alone, as eventhose of the red men of Mars who felt as I did upon the subjectalso believed that to take sides with me against the assassinswould prove but another means for committing suicide. Yet I knowthat even this would not have deterred them, had they felt thatthere was any hope of eventual success.
That I had for so long escaped the keen blade of the assassinseemed little less than a miracle to them, and I presume that onlymy extreme self-confidence in my ability to take care of myselfprevented me from holding the same view.
Certain types of killings upon Mars are punishable by death, andmost of the killings of the assassins fell in such categories. Sofar, this was the only weapon that I had been able to use againstthem, and then not always successfully, for it was usuallydifficult to prove their crime, since even eyewitnesses feared totestify against them.
When an assassination was reported, my organization acted in therole of detective to ferret out the murderer. Then it acted asjudge and jury and eventually as executioner. Its every move wasmade in secret, but over the heart of each of its victims an "X"was cut with the sharp point of a dagger.
We usually struck quickly, if we could strike at all; and soonthe public and the assassins learned to connect that "X" over theheart as the mark of the hand of justice falling upon the guilty;and I know that in a number of the larger cities of Helium wegreatly reduced the death rate by assassination. Otherwise,however, we seemed as far from our goal as when we firststarted.
Our poorest results had been gained in Zodanga; and theassassins of that city openly boasted that they were too smart forme, for although they did not know positively, they guessed thatthe X's upon the breasts of their dead comrades were made by anorganization headed by me.
I hope that I have not bored you with this exposition of thesedry facts, but it seemed necessary to me that I do so as anintroduction to the adventures that befell me, taking me to astrange world in an effort to thwart the malign forces that hadbrought tragedy into my life.
In my fight against the assassins of Barsoom, I had never beenable to enlist many agents to serve in Zodanga; and those stationedthere worked only in a half-hearted manner, so that our enemies hadgood reason to taunt us with our failure.
To say that such a condition annoyed me would be putting itmildly; and so I decided to go in person to Zodanga, not only forthe purpose of making a thorough investigation, but to give theZodangan assassins a lesson that would cause them to laugh out ofthe other side of their mouths.
Disguise for me is a relatively simple matter. My white skin andblack hair have made me a marked man upon Mars, where only theauburn-haired Lotharians and the totally bald Therns have skin aslight colored as mine.
Although I had every confidence in the loyalty of my retainers,one never knows when a spy may insinuate himself into the mostcarefully selected organization. For this reason, I kept my plansand preparations secret from even the most trusted members of myentourage.
In the hangars on the roof of my palace are fliers of variousmodels, and I selected from among them a one-arm scout flier fromwhich I surreptitiously removed the insignia of my house. Finding apretext to send the hangar guard away for a short time early oneevening, I smuggled aboard the flier those articles that I neededto insure a satisfactory disguise. In addition to a red pigment formy own skin and paints for the body of the flier, I included acomplete set of Zodangan harness, metal, and weapons.
That evening I spent alone with Dejah Thoris; and abouttwenty-five xats past the eighth zode, or at midnight earth time, Ichanged to a plain leather harness without insignia, and preparedto leave upon my adventure.
The hangar guard may have thought that it was an unusual time ofnight for me to be going abroad, but he could have had no suspicionas to my destination. I took off toward the West and presently wascutting the thin air of Mars beneath the myriad stars and the twogorgeous satellites of the red planet.
The moons of Mars have always intrigued me; and tonight, as Igazed upon them, I felt the lure of the mystery that surroundsthem. Thuria, the nearer moon, known to earth men as Phobos, is thelarger; and as it circles Barsoom at a distance of only 5,800 miles,it presents a most gorgeous sight. Cluros, the farther moon, thoughonly a little smaller in diameter than Thuria, appears to be muchsmaller because of the greater distance of its orbit from theplanet, lying as it does, 14,500 miles away.
7fc3f7cf58