Forbidden Citadel of the Therns

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I had completed my business for the jed of Ptarth three days before I first heard the
tale of the red standards, and had I possessed then one-half the discretion which
later years were to teach me I should have turned the Thuria northward and been
content with duty well performed. Unfortunately, I was young, my sword was sharp,
my flyer fast, and Barsoom had not yet punished me sufficiently for curiosity.

The story came from a dying airman whom I found beside a wreck south of the
Toonolian marshes. He had little breath left for names, but enough to tell me that his
convoy had vanished near the Otz and that, while fleeing an enemy he would not
describe, he had seen scarlet standards flying above clouds where no city stood
upon any chart.

Men in three cities laughed when I repeated it. One old padwar advised me to seek
amusement among living women rather than dead pilots. This excellent counsel
fixed my decision.

For two days I cruised south beneath Otz without finding anything more remarkable
than desolation. On the third morning I caught sunlight upon metal far ahead and
presently made out an unknown flyer, narrow of hull and black beneath, moving
close against the cliffs as though its pilot feared the open sky.

I followed.

The country changed until even a man born beneath Barsoom's scarlet heavens
might have believed himself carried to another world. Chasms opened beneath me,
their bottoms lost in vapor; waterfalls dropped from ledges so distant that the
streams dissolved into mist. The walls rose in weathered ranks, and at first I took the
horizontal scars upon them for strata.

Then one of the scars became a colonnade.

Beyond it lay a gallery cut into the living cliff, with dark openings behind the pillars
and a landing shelf broad enough for three flyers. Farther on were stairs descending
where no natural stair could be, balconies, porticos, and whole façades hollowed
from the canyon walls. Figures moved upon one terrace. A moment later the black
flyer ahead slipped through an opening and vanished inside the mountain.

I throttled the Thuria until she scarcely moved.

There are names which a Barsoomian does not hear with the ears alone. Dor is one
of them.

From childhood we are taught of the River Iss and the final pilgrimage, of the Valley
Dor beyond Otz where the weary find the peace denied them in life. We are taught
also that none returns, and that any who does return is accursed before gods and
men. I had never questioned these things. Few do until they acquire some reason
better than philosophy.

Now I had one. The gods, it seemed, maintained landing galleries.

I continued close against the wall while my mind behaved with considerably less
discipline than my hands. If these were tombs, who swept the ledges? Who lit the
blue lamps beneath the arches? Who flew the craft I had followed? Why had living
hands hollowed a hidden city above the valley to which half Barsoom journeyed
willingly at the end of life?

The canyon narrowed, and there I found six red standards, three upon either wall.
Their device was older than any banner carried by Kaol, but I knew it from military
histories: the warning once set about plague cities, poisoned wells, and arsenals
whose contents had outlived their makers.

PASS BEYOND THIS MARK AND YOUR LIFE IS FORFEIT.

I stopped the Thuria between the cliffs.

For perhaps the first time in my life I gave prudence a fair hearing. My dispatches
were delivered. No oath required me to proceed. I had a father who preferred his
second son alive, a commission not yet disgraced beyond repair, and every prospect
of acquiring enemies in places where men at least admitted they existed.

I turned the bow three points north.

Then I looked again at the standards.

Warnings are not posted for the dead, nor are patrol routes cut through cliffs for
spirits requiring no roads. Someone expected strangers to come this way, feared
what those strangers might see, and had taken considerable pains to discourage
inquiry.

I laughed, though there was no one aboard to hear me.

“If the gods require warning flags, they have already lost half their mystery.”

With that logic, which satisfied me at the time, I swung the Thuria south and passed
between the standards.

For several hundred yards nothing happened. The canyon opened, the mist
brightened beneath me, and I had begun to congratulate myself upon the timidity of
unknown priests when a vertical line appeared in the cliff to starboard. It widened.

A section of rock the height of a palace gate withdrew soundlessly, revealing a
gallery crowded with armed men in white harness. At the same instant two black
flyers dropped from recesses above and took station behind the Thuria, while a third
rose from the mist directly ahead.

I put one hand upon my sword.

The nearest warrior pointed at me and drew his own.

So much for the gods having lost only half their mystery.