It was easy—too easy—Markham thought, and a cold sweat prickled along his spine. The priest’s ready agreement and even voluntary cooperation could only mean one thing. He was letting Markham walk blindly into a trap. But there was no turning back now.
Markham nudged his captive forward, giving a low-voiced order. Tutul Xac translated the command and the two captive guards wheeled stiffly and marched away into the crowd. Markham had no use for their presence and he didn’t want to be hampered by having to watch them continuously. His own grim business of effectually smashing the earth-shattering spire above would demand all of his attention.
When the warriors had gone, Markham and the priest began the long climb up the carved steps to the pyramid’s flat top—up to the altars, the padded hammer and the deadly quivering spire.
Abruptly, Markham jerked his captive to a halt and peered back, his eyes widening. The forefront of the dense crowd below was stirring, shifting, milling apart to open a narrow lane from the rear.
And through that lane, a regal figure in sweeping ceremonial garments and plumed head-dress, marched Tolkilla.
CHAPTER VII
Mission’s Failure
Markham cursed feverishly and fluently.
“What’s the game?” he snarled in Tutul Xac’s ear. “You called her here, somehow. What for? What are you trying to put over?”
“What I promised you,” the priest answered coldly. “Your destruction, which you cannot escape.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Markham waited, every nerve in his body quivering with mounting tension, while Tolkilla crossed the clearest space below and mounted the stone stairway. Through narrowed, desperate eyes he watched the stiff woodenness of her gait and the cold blankness of her pale, set face. In her movements was a suggestion of hypnosis.
“Tell her to go back,” Markham snarled in sudden, inexplicable fear. “Send her back.”
Tutul Xac laughed.
“Go back, Tolkilla. You aren’t wanted up here,” he said, amused.
Tolkilla gave no sign of hearing. She kept on her relentless upward climb, stiffly, like a lovely robot, until she reached the step on which they waited. Then she stopped, staring blankly at and through Markham and the priest, still not speaking or showing emotion.
“What have you done to her?” Markham cried. “If you have—” he broke off, wild-eyed. “Damn your soul, I know what you’ve done. You’ve moved into her mind, taken over control of her body. I’ve got your body captive here, so you sent your will over to operate through her!”
Tutul Xac’s eyes narrowed maliciously.
“You are more clever than I thought.”
“But you won’t stop me,” Markham raged. “I can still destroy this body of yours. Your control can never survive the destruction of this body.”
He caught up the priest’s thin figure and raced up the remaining steps to the pyramid’s top, leaving Tolkilla to follow relentlessly, mechanically behind. At the top, he set Tutul Xac’s feet on the stone and faced the vibrating spire of glistening, silvery metal. Once again, he was painfully conscious of the tangled skein of terrible vibrations in the tortured air, fainter now but still agony to his sensitive ears, hammering at his raw nerves.
Forcing himself to a degree of calmness, Markham twisted the choking belt tighter around Tutul Xac’s throat with his left hand. His right hand lifted, pointing the flat case at the broad, scarred base of the spire. One blast from that blunt muzzle would melt the silvery metal like butter, destroy the delicately-achieved tonal pitch of the great tuning fork.
“Is it—” Tutul Xac choked the words through his constricted throat. “Is it worth Tolkilla’s life to destroy the weapon of the Great Attainment?”
“What?”
Markham’s head whipped around for a moment, his heart stopped beating.
The lovely figure of the priestess had reached the pyramid’s top. As Markham whirled, she was climbing up onto the great altar on which he had so nearly been sacrificed.
As he cried an involuntary warning, she moved woodenly out to the very edge of the altar, where it lay flush with the edge of the pyramid’s top, and poised there with her slender arms upraised. Two hundred dizzying feet below, at the base of the glass-smooth, blood-encrusted slope of the pyramid, gaped the Chichen Chikin—the mouth of the western well. There was no doubt in Markham’s mind but that the well penetrated deep into the bowels of the rock pinnacle supporting this weird, fantastic land.
And as his breath caught, the girl stepped to the very edge of the altar, directly above the well, and swayed forward.
“Tolkilla! Stop, for God’s sake—”
Madness flamed in Markham’s brain. The thought of her glorious body smashed against the rocks below filled him with agony.
“She will wait,” Tutul Xac said calmly. “She has been instructed not to leap until the exact instant you fire the sunlight beam at the spire. Or—” he added, laughing, “until you make a move to save her or to harm me further.”
Too late, Markham saw the trap into which he had blundered. He was much too far away to possibly reach Tolkilla before she could send her body hurtling down to destruction. And he knew that the evil genius controlling her helpless body would not hesitate to make her leap.
Markham’s reeling brain clutched at one forlorn hope.
“She isn’t real,” he cried hoarsely. “You wouldn’t dare sacrifice your own priestess. That’s only a phantom projection of her real body, the way you both projected yourselves to me in New York.”
There was no audible command, but Tolkilla’s arms dropped. Her hands fumbled at the golden plates confining her breasts. A moment later, she straightened, nude except for the girdle about her slim waist, and the diaphanous crimson robes falling from it to her sandaled feet.
The gold breast plates thunked solidly to the slab at Markham’s feet. The sound and the impact brought a groan to his lips. It was undeniable evidence that the figure of the lovely priestess was no vision but a flesh-and-blood reality. He remembered all too well that in the phantom form, they had not been capable of grasping or moving material objects.
No, Tolkilla was horribly real, and at the first move Markham made to destroy the earth-shaking instrument, to harm Tutul Xac or to approach her own dizzy perch, she would hurl herself to death below. It was an impasse. The decision facing Markham tore at his heart, for if he chose to disregard Tolkilla’s safety, it would take him but a moment to smash the vibrating spire beyond further danger to earth.
“Well,” Tutul Xac’s voice, even choked as it was by the constricting belt, held mockery. “Have you chosen? Will you sacrifice the priestess or do you prefer to throw your weapon over the edge and release me at once? The decision is yours. Choose quickly.”
CHAPTER VIII
The Moon’s Return
Below, as if in response to some command inaudible to Markham, columns of feathered warriors marched through the tense crowd. Forming a solid phalanx, they wheeled and started up the stone steps of the pyramid.
For Markham, it was stalemate—and the end!
Whether Tolkilla leaped to her destruction or not; whether he blasted away the silvery spire or not—these inexorable warriors were marching upward, each savage mind consumed with hatred toward the one who had desecrated the shrine and laid violent hands upon the person of their High Priest.
“I’ll choose,” Markham panted. “I’ll choose—”
He lifted the sunlight gun and rested it across his left arm. Very carefully, he centered the blunt tube straight at the base of the deadly spire.
“I have chosen,” Markham said, and squeezed the golden trigger.
But Tutul Xac, sensing Markham’s grim purpose, whirled suddenly, a fear-filled scream welling from his throat. His taloned fingers snatched
the heat gun from Markham’s fingers. Then, he strove desperately to bring it to bear—on Tolkilla, Markham thought.
Markham cursed, snatched at his arm, flung an arm around Tutul Xac’s throat.
Yellow light flamed out—not toward the girl, ready to leap to her death but straight at the edge of the great golden altar. The flame struck, an inch below where Tolkilla’s sandaled feet projected over the edge.
Under the impact of the powerful beam, the soft metal of the altar smoked and turned a cherry red as the gold approached its melting point from the terrific concentration of heat.
And Tolkilla did what Tutul Xac obviously wanted her to do—what any flesh-and-blood person, drugged or fully sensible, would do when the ground underfoot grew too hot for comfort.
She leaped backward, away from the sudden burst of agonizing heat that seared her feet. Away from the yawning chasm that beckoned her to destruction.
Instantly, Markham snatched the gun from Tutul Xac, sent him reeling with a hard shove. In the same motion, he dove across the intervening space, swept Tolkilla into his arms and carried her a safe distance from the deadly brink.
As he held her, he stared into her wide eyes and saw there a dawning return to full consciousness, an awareness of what Markham had done and mute gratitude. It was his first actual contact with the thrilling warmth of her material body, and the contact made his pulses race and his brain reel dizzily.
For a moment, he felt an insane urge to abandon his futile struggles, to relax and spend the last precious seconds of his life in her arms.
But his hesitation was only momentary. The vague but never-ending agony at his nerve-ends snapped him back to the hellish reality of the quivering shaft above his head.
He twisted around and jerked up the sunlight gun. A single quick, flaming blast and those deadly pulsations would be stilled. His thumb depressed the golden lever, sent the beam of searing heat lashing out.
His movement was swift, but another’s was swifter. In that single instant of hesitation when he stared into Tolkilla’s dark eyes, Tutul Xac had recovered his balance. Springing to his feet like a striking serpent, the lean priest scooped up the heavy gold breast plates that had been Tolkilla’s and hurled them straight at his enemy.
The linked gold, massive and sharp-edged, struck Markham’s shoulder with crushing impact, wringing an involuntary grunt of pain from his lips. The sunlight beam shot wide of its mark as the flat case flew from his suddenly-numbed fingers and vanished from sight over the brink of the pyramid’s top.
Then Tutul Xac was upon him, his plunging body slamming Markham back with stunning force while lean, incredibly-strong fingers dug into his throat. Markham rolled and twisted, driving vicious, futile blows while the deadly clutch tightened until his vision blurred and the pound of blood in his ears blotted out every other sound.
Desperately, Markham got his bent arms under Tutul Xac’s tight-pressed body and, with his elbows for leverage, pried upward. He felt the thin body yield unwillingly to the pressure and used the last ounce of his waning strength to drive one knee upward in a blind, vicious jab.
The priest’s body jerked and then jerked again. There was a sound like the impact of a croquet mallet against a ball. The clutching fingers tore free from Markham’s throat and the crushing weight rolled off his chest.
Reeling, gasping at the sharp sting of fresh air into his bruised throat, Markham got to his knees to see Tolkilla staring at him in mingled terror and relief. The golden breast plates now dangled from her hands and there was a fresh crimson stain along one edge. Tutul Xac lay motionless, blood oozing sluggishly from a gash across his dark forehead.
“Thanks,” Markham panted, struggling to climb up onto his feet. “That makes our score even.”
He snatched the breast plates and wheeled, in time to see the first rank of feathered warriors pour up over the rim. A wild yell of fury rose at the sight of their priest stretched over a puddle of his own blood. Roaring, they charged in a solid wall of flesh. For the moment, they seemed afraid to use their sun rays for fear of striking either Tutul Xac or Tolkilla.
“Come and get it!” Markham roared and stood, feet planted wide apart, swinging the linked breast plates in a vicious whistling arc. “Tolkilla, you’d better work your way around and get away before the boss wakes up and tells these blood-thirsty heathens that you sold him out to the enemy.”
But Tolkilla was unconscious of his words. She was on her knees, head thrown back, eyes closed and every muscle of her glorious body frozen in an attitude of intense concentration.
Markham was too busy to look around. The first wave of yelling warriors came within reach and he met the attack with deadly effect. The breast plates, whirling like a bludgeon, crushed through plumed head-dresses and light gold helmets to smash skulls beneath like egg-shells. Warrior after warrior went down under his blows, facing death rather than the risk of a stray blast of their weapons striking priest or priestess.
For a few moments, it was slaughter. But for every attacker who fell, there were a dozen others to leap over the body. Slowly but inexorably, the sheer weight of their numbers drove Markham back, a step at a time, until his heels were out over the dizzying brink of the narrow platform, with nothing but the glistening ramp of the pyramid side and the hungry mouth of the well below.
Tutul Xac’s prone form was no longer near him, yet still the roaring horde neglected their guns to concentrate on forcing Markham back that last fatal step over the edge. Then, he sensed rather than saw the reason. Tolkilla was slipping to his side, bending low to avoid a chance blow from his flailing arm.
“Get back,” he panted frantically. “Get back away from me, Tolkilla.
You’re getting in my way and you’re liable to get pushed over when they rush me.”
“No, my Steven. That is not the way of escape. This is the only path to freedom for us.”
With the words, she suddenly straightened, threw the full weight of her slender body against Markham’s chest and hurled him back into empty space.
In the first sickening instant of the plunge, their two bodies spinning lazily downward, the one thought frozen into Markham’s brain was that this was the end. Somehow, Tutul Xac still controlled Tolkilla’s will and had driven her to suicide in a last desperate effort to accomplish the destruction of their enemy.
Clinging together, they struck the blood-stained slope of the pyramid with jarring impact and shot down its polished surface at breath-taking speed. It seemed to Markham that the gaping mouth of the well below was the maw of a hungry monster, opening to receive its prey.
He caught a split-second glimpse of a sea of upturned brown faces and a wailing Aie-e-e-e-e of vocal lament passed his ears like a breath. Then, the mouth of the great well engulfed them and they plunged down into impenetrable blackness. It seemed to Markham in that instant of transition from sunlight to darkness that the whole world was falling with them, rushing down to the destruction of the inevitable fatal impact.
Abruptly, the darkness was split by a shaft of golden light. The light swept up from unimaginable depths below and engulfed them and its touch was like a physical impact. The light itself seemed to be thickening, congealing around them so that the rate of their mad plunge was retarded. In another moment, they were no longer falling at all but were floating swiftly but gently down the golden tunnel of light. Markham’s senses reeled, as much at the miracle as at the sudden checking of their descent.
He looked down and saw that they were nearing a black hole that penetrated one side of the well-shaft. As they neared this, it became the entrance to a horizontal tunnel leading off from the well. Opposite the mouth of this tunnel, they came to a full stop and floated gently, incredibly in mid-shaft.
“What—what happened?” Markham gasped, finding words at last. “What stopped us?”
“Sun force,
released from below,” Tolkilla whispered. “It is the way my people travel from the plateau upon which the city is built down to the ledge where your flying ship landed. We of Chichen Chikin have known for ages how to harness the sun force and bend it to our purposes.”
“B—but how—?”’
“While you fought against the warriors, I projected my image to the Keeper Of The Force, far below, and ordered that he send up this beam to catch us. Because I am his Priestess, he dared not question or refuse. But we must get into the tunnel quickly, for when Tutul Xac recovers and learns of our escape, he will instantly order the beam cut off, hoping to dash us to the rocks at the bottom of the well.”
“Getting out of here suits me,” Markham grunted.
Taking his hand, Tolkilla began a paddling, swimming movement that drifted them gently to the narrow ledge at the tunnel’s mouth. As Markham hauled himself out onto the solid rock, reaction to the nearness of destruction and to the unbelievable miracle of their escape gripped him. His knees buckled and cold sweat drenched his body.
He leaned against the rock wall for a moment, calming his nerves. As he straightened again, the golden beam in the well-shaft flicked off, leaving them in dense darkness.
“The beam,” Tolkilla gasped, seizing his hand. “That means Tutul Xac has recovered and knows the direction and means of our escape. Come quickly, my Steven. We will rush to your flying ship and escape from the ledge before the warriors leap down the shaft in pursuit.”
“Hold on a minute!” Markham barked, jerking his hand from hers. “You don’t think I’m going to run away now and leave those hellish shafts up there to keep on shaking the earth until God knows what happens? If those terrible earthquakes keep on, there won’t be any world left for us to flee to, anyhow.”
The Adventure Novella MEGAPACK® Page 19
