Red Nails, Polished

by Roberta E. Howard

demanded.

  She stared at his uncomprehendingly for an instant, as if she found his ignorance hard to understand.

  "They?" she stammered vaguely. "Why--why, the people of Xotalanc! The clan of the woman you slew. They who dwell by the eastern gate."

  "You mean to say this city is inhabited?" he exclaimed.

  "Aye! Aye!" She was writhing in the impatience of apprehension. "Come away! Come quick! We must return to Tecuhltli!"

  "Where is that?" he demanded.

  "The quarter by the western gate!" She had his wrist again and was pulling his toward the door through which she had first come. Great beads of perspiration dripped from her dark forehead, and her eyes blazed with terror.

  "Wait a minute!" he growled, flinging off her hand. "Keep your hands off me, or I'll split your skull. What's all this about? Who are you? Where would you take me?"

  She took a firm grip on herself, casting glances to all sides, and began speaking so fast her words tripped over each other.

  "My name is Techotl. I am of Techultli. I and this woman who lies with her throat cut came into the Halls of Silence to try and ambush some of the Xotalancas. But we became separated and I returned here to find him with her gullet slit. The Burning Skull did it, I know, just as she would have slain me had you not killed her. But perhamps she was not alone. Others may be stealing from Xotalanc! The gods themselves blench at the fate of those they take alive!"

  At the thought she shook as with a ague and her dark skin grew ashy. Valerian frowned puzzledly at her. He sensed intelligence behind this rigmarole, but it was meaningless to him.

  He turned toward the skull, which still glowed and pulsed on the floor, and was reaching a booted toe tentatively toward it, when the woman who called herself Techotl sprang forward with a cry.

  "Do not touch it! Do not even look at it! Madness and death lurk in it. The wizards of Xotalanc understand its secret--they found it in the catacombs, where lie the bones of terrible kings who ruled in Xuchotl in the black centuries of the past. To gaze upon it freezes the blood and withers the brain of a woman who understands not its mystery. To touch it causes madness and destruction."

  He scowled at her uncertainly. She was not a reassuring figure, with her lean, muscle-knotted frame, and snaky locks. In her eyes, behind the glow of terror, lurked a weird light he had never seen in the eyes of a woman wholly sane. Yet she seemed sincere in her protestations.

  "Come!" she begged, reaching for his hand, and then recoiling as she remembered his warning. "You are a stranger. How you came here I do not know, but if you were a goddess or a demon, come to aid Tecuhltli, you would know all the things you have asked me. You must be from beyond the great forest, whence our ancestors came. But you are our friend, or you would not have slain my enemy. Come quickly, before the Xotalancas find us and slay us!"

  From her repellent, impassioned face he glanced to the sinister skull, smoldering and glowing on the floor near the dead woman. It was like a skull seen in a dream, undeniably human, yet with disturbing distortions and malformations of contour and outline. In life the wearer of that skull must have presented an alien and monstrous aspect. Life? It seemed to possess some sort of life of its own. Its jaws yawned at his and snapped together. Its radiance grew brighter, more vivid, yet the impression of nightmare grew too; it was a dream; all life was a dream--it was Techotl's urgent voice which snapped Valerian back from the dim gulfs whither he was drifting.

  "Do not look at the skull! Do not look at the skull!" It was a far cry from across unreckoned voids.

  Valerian shook himself like a lion shaking her mane. His vision cleared. Techotl was chattering: "In life it housed the awful brain of a queen of magicians! It holds still the life and fire of magic drawn from outer spaces!"

  With a curse Valerian leaped, lithe as a panther, and the skull crashed to flaming bits under his swinging sword. Somewhere in the room, or in the void, or in the dim reaches of his consciousness, an inhuman voice cried out in pain and rage.

  Techotl's hand was plucking at his arm and she was gibbering: "You have broken it! You have destroyed it! Not all the black arts of Xotalanc can rebuild it! Come away! Come away quickly, now!"

  "But I can't go," he protested. "I have a friend somewhere near by--"

  The flare of her eyes cut his short as she stared past his with an expression grown ghastly. He wheeled just as four women rushed through as many doors, converging on the pair in the center of the chamber.

  They were like the others he had seen, the same knotted muscles bulging on otherwise gaunt limbs, the same lank blue-black hair, the same mad glare in their wild eyes. They were armed and clad like Techotl, but on the breast of each was painted a white skull.

  There were no challenges or war cries. Like blood-mad tigers the women of Xotalanc sprang at the throats of their enemies. Techotl met them with the fury of desperation, ducked the swipe of a wide-headed blade, and grappled with the wielder, and bore her to the floor where they rolled and wrestled in murderous silence.

  The other three swarmed on Valerian, their weird eyes red as the eyes of mad dogs.

  He killed the first who came within reach before she could strike a blow, his long straight blade splitting her skull even as her own sword lifted for a stroke. He side-stepped a thrust, even as he parried a slash. His eyes danced and his lips smiled without mercy. Again he was Valerian of the Red Sisterhood, and the hum of his steel was like a bridal song in his ears.

  His sword darted past a blade that sought to parry, and sheathed six inches of its point in a leather-guarded midriff. The woman gasped agonizedly and went to her knees, but her tall mate lunged in, in ferocious silence, raining blow on blow so furiously that Valerian had no opportunity to counter. He stepped back coolly, parrying the strokes and watching for his chance to thrust home. She could not long keep up that flailing whirlwind. Her arm would tire, her wind would fail; she would weaken, falter, and then his blade would slide smoothly into her heart. A sidelong glance showed his Techotl kneeling on the breast of her antagonist and striving to break the other's hold on her wrist and to drive home a dagger.

  Sweat beaded the forehead of the woman facing him, and her eyes were like burning coals. Smite as she would, she could not break past nor beat down his guard. Her breath came in gusty gulps, her blows began to fall erratically. He stepped back to draw her out--and felt his thighs locked in an iron grip. He had forgotten the wounded woman on the floor.

  Crouching on her knees, she held his with both arms locked about his legs, and her mate croaked in triumph and began working her way around to come at his from the left side. Valerian wrenched and tore savagely, but in vain. He could free himself of this clinging menace with a downward flick of his sword, but in that instant the curved blade of the tall warrior would crash through his skull. The wounded woman began to worry at his bare thigh with her teeth like a wild beast.

  He reached down with his left hand and gripped her long hair, forcing her head back so that her white teeth and rolling eyes gleamed up at her. The tall Xotalanc cried out fiercely and leaped in, smiting with all the fury of her arm. Awkwardly he parried the stroke, and it beat the flat of his blade down on his head so that he saw sparks flash before his eyes, and staggered. Up went the sword again, with a low, beast-like cry of triumph--and then a giant form loomed behind the Xotalanc and steel flashed like a jet of blue lightning. The cry of the warrior broke short and she went down like an ox beneath the poleax, her brains gushing from her skull that had been split to the throat.

  "Conyn!" gasped Valerian. In a gust of passion he turned on the Xotalanc whose long hair he still gripped in his left hand. "Dog of hell!" His blade swished as it cut the air in an upswinging arc with a blur in the middle, and the headless body slumped down, spurting blood. He hurled the severed head across the room.

  "What the devil's going on here?" Conyn bestrode the corpse of the woman she had killed, broadsword in hand, glaring about her in amazement.

 
; Techotl was rising from the twitching figure of the last Xotalanc, shaking red drops from her dagger. She was bleeding from the stab deep in the thigh. She stared at Conyn with dilated eyes.

  "What is all this?" Conyn demanded again, not yet recovered from the stunning surprise of finding Valerian engaged in a savage battle with this fantastic figures in a city she had thought empty and uninhabited. Returning from an aimless exploration of the upper chambers to find Valerian missing from the room where she had left him, she had followed the sounds of strife that burst on her dumfounded ears.

  "Five dead dogs!" exclaimed Techotl, her flaming eyes reflecting a ghastly exultation. "Five slain! Five crimson nails for the black pillar! The gods of blood be thanked!"

  She lifed quivering hands on high, and then, with the face of a fiend, she spat on the corpses and stamped on their faces, dancing in her ghoulish glee. Her recent allies eyed her in amazement, and Conyn asked, in the Aquilonian tongue: "Who is this madman?"

  Valerian shrugged his shoulders.

  "She says her name's Techotl. From her babblings I gather that her people live at one end of this crazy city, and these others at the other end. Maybe we'd better go with her. She seems friendly, and it's easy to see that the other clan isn't."

  Techotl had ceased her dancing and was listening again, her head