After a hesitant moment, she tugged at a wing rein and the huffen banked majestically. They flew a mile to the south of the village, then beyond it toward the cloister where the priests of Big Joe guarded the entrance to the vaults. The cloister was marked by a patch of faint light on the ground ahead.
“Circle around it once,” he ordered.
“You can’t get in. They’ll kill you.”
He doubted it. No one ever tried to enter, except the priests who carried small animals down as sacrifices to the great Sleeper. Since no outsider ever dared go near the shaft, the guards expected no one. He doubted that they would be alert.
The cloister was a hollow square with a small stone tower rising in the center of the courtyard. The tower contained the entrance to the shaft. In the dim light of Phobos, assisted by yellow flickers from the cloister windows, he peered at the courtyard as they circled closer. It seemed to be empty.
“Land beside the tower!” he ordered.
“Asir—please—”
“Do it!”
The huffen plunged rapidly, soared across the outer walls, and burst into the courtyard. It landed with a rough jolt and began squeaking plaintively.
“Hurry!” he hissed. “Get your straps off and let’s go.”
“I’m not going.”
A prick of the knife point changed her mind. They slid quickly to the ground, and Asir kicked the huffen in the flanks. The beast sucked in air and burst aloft.
Startled faces were trying to peer through the lighted cloister windows into the courtyard. Someone cried a challenge. Asir darted to the door of the tower and dragged it open. Now forced to share the danger, the girl came with him without urging. They stepped into a stair-landing. A candle flickered from a wall bracket. A guard, sitting on the floor beneath the candle glanced up in complete surprise. Then he reached for a short barbed pike. Asir kicked him hard in the temple, then rolled his limp from outside. Men with torches were running across the courtyard. He slammed the heavy metal door and bolted it.
Fists began beating on the door. They paused for a moment to rest, and Mara stared at him in fright. He expected her to burst into angry speech, but she only leaned against the wall and panted. The dark mouth of the stairway yawned at them—a stone throat that led into the bowels of Mars and the realm of the monster, Big Joe. He glanced at Mara thoughtfully, and felt sorry for her.
“I can leave you here,” he offered, “but I’ll have to tie you.”
She moistened her lips, glanced first at the stairs, then at the door where the guards were raising a frantic howl. She shook her head.
“I’ll go with you.”
“The priests won’t bother you, if they see that you were a prisoner.”
“I’ll go with you.”
He was pleased, but angry with himself for the pleasure. An arrogant, spiteful, conniving wench, he told himself. She’d lied about Tokra. He grunted gruffly, seized the candle, and started down the stairs. When she started after him, he stiffened and glanced back, remembering the barbed pike.
As he had suspected, she had picked it up. The point was a foot from the small of his back. They stared at each other, and she wore her self-assured smirk.
“Here,” she said, and handed it casually. “You might need this.”
They stared at each other again, but it was different this time. Bewildered, he shook his head and resumed the descent toward the vaults. The guards were battering at the doors behind them.
The stairwell was damp and cold. Blackness folded about them like a shroud. They moved in silence, and after five thousand steps, Ash stopped counting.
Somewhere in the depths, Big Joe slept his restless sleep. Asir wondered grimly how long it would take the guards to tear down the metal door. Somehow they had to get past Big Joe before the guards came thundering after them. There was a way to get around the monster: of that he was certain. A series of twenty-four numbers was involved, and he had memorized them with a stolen bit of ritual. How to use them was a different matter. He imagined vaguely that one must call them out in a loud voice before the inner entrance.
The girl walked beside him now, and he could feel her shivering. His eyes were quick and nervous as he scanned each pool of darkness, each nook and cranny along the stairway wall. The well was silent except for the mutter of their footsteps, and the gloom was full of musty odors. The candle afforded little light.
“I told you the truth about Tokra,” she blurted suddenly.
Asir glowered straight ahead and said nothing, embarrassed by his previous jealousy. They moved on in silence.
Suddenly she stopped. “Look,” she hissed, pointing down ahead.
He shielded the candle with his hand and peered downward toward a small square of dim light. “The bottom of the stairs,” he muttered.
The light seemed faint and diffuse—with a slight greenish cast. Asir blew out the candle, and the girl quickly protested.
“How will we see to climb again?”
He laughed humorlessly. “What makes you think we will?”
She moaned and clutched at his arm, but came with him as he descended slowly toward the light. The stairway opened into a long corridor whose ceiling was faintly luminous. White-faced and frightened, they paused on the bottom step and looked down the corridor. Mara gasped and covered her eyes.
“Big Joe!” she whispered in awe.
He stared through the stairwell door and down the corridor through another door into a large room. Big Joe sat in the center of the room, sleeping his sleep of ages amid a heap of broken and whitening bones. A creature of metal, twice the height of Asir, he had obviously been designed to kill. Tri-fingered hands with gleaming talons, and a monstrous head shaped like a Marswolf, with long silver fangs. Why should a metal-creature have fangs, unless he had been built to kill?
The behemoth slept in a crouch, waiting for the intruders.
He tugged the girl through the stairwell door. A voice droned out of nowhere: “If you have come to plunder, go back!”
He stiffened, looking around. The girl whimpered.
“Stay here by the stairs,” he told her, and pushed her firmly back through the door.
Asir started slowly toward the room where Big Joe waited. Beyond the room he could see another door, and the monster’s job was apparently to keep intruders back from the inner vaults where, according to the ritual chants, the Blaze of the Winds could be kindled.
Halfway along the corridor, the voice called out again, beginning a kind of sing-song chant: “Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you—”
He turned slowly, searching for the speaker. But the voice seemed to come from a black disk on the wall. The talking-machines perhaps, as mentioned somewhere in the ritual.
A few paces from the entrance to the room, the voice fell silent. He stopped at the door, staring in at the monster. Then he took a deep breath and began chanting the twenty-four numbers in a loud but quavering voice. Big Joe remained in his motionless crouch. Nothing happened. He stepped through the doorway.
Big Joe emitted a deafening roar, straightened with a metallic groan, and lumbered toward him, taloned hands extended and eyes blazing furiously. Asir shrieked and ran for his life.
Then he saw Mara lying sprawled in the stairway entrance. She had fainted. Blocking an impulse to leap over her and flee alone, he stopped to lift her.
But suddenly he realized that there was no pursuit. He looked back. Big Joe had returned to his former position, and he appeared to be asleep again. Puzzled, Asir stepped back into the corridor.
“If you have come to plunder, go back!”
He moved gingerly ahead again.