These died.
He stepped between the thrusting spears, gripped one in either hand and used the long shaft on his right to block a thrust from number three, the farthest out of roach. A swift kick dropped the tribesman on his right and left Remo with his weapon. He turned the spear on the others, nailing both of them and leaving them to wriggle like a pair of insects pinned on a dissecting needle.
The survivors were advancing with a bit more caution when a sudden babble in the corridor behind them reached his ears. And Remo saw the women now, God help him, some holding babies, others herding small, misshapen forms in front of them like livestock. They were shouting at the warriors on the staircase, managed to distract a couple of them from the work at hand.
It was enough.
Without another glance, Remo cleared a path like a whirlwind sent by the wrath of God.
Pike Chalmers found his nerve again somewhere between the amphitheater and the deserted courtyard. He came charging through the exit, snapping the neck of a native in his way, looking for a way to save himself. The others had evacuated, though, and that was fine with Chalmers, since he didn't feel like taking on an army when his only weapon was a bloody spear.
His guns were somewhere handy, if he just knew where to look. But he didn't speak the lingo, and they had only met one member of the tribe who had a grasp of English. And from what he saw, across the courtyard, poor Kuching Kangar was well past giving interviews.
Pike guessed the bloody lizard must have had him, though his corpse didn't display the kind of rip-and-render damage common to the others strewed about the courtyard. It would be more accurate to say their former guide looked broken, as if he had fallen from a lofty height, but that made no sense whatsoever, since he lay an easy fifteen paces from the nearest wall.
Forget it, Chalmers told himself. Not your problem.
He was gunning for a dinosaur, without a bloody gun, but now that he had found his guts again, all he could think of was the money he could make from packing home the monster's head—hell, any part of its anatomy at all. Live capture was a hopeless case, and it would take a cargo helicopter to transport the bloody carcass in one piece. Chalmers calculated that the head alone must weigh two hundred pounds or more, but he would settle for a jaw-bone and some bits of skin if he had to. Any egghead worth his salt could tell the specimens were fresh, and if that didn't do the trick, then he would lead them back to view the rotting carcass.
For a hefty fee, of course.
In fact, he saw a whole new profit angle on the site itself. He could run walking tours of the city, point out spots of interest for the visitors who could afford his services. The local wogs would want a piece of it, he realized, and they might cut him out entirely if they started getting greedy. In the meanwhile, though, there should be ample time for him to walk a film crew through the ruins, cut a deal with some fat-cat producer out of Hollywood—hell, why not Steven Spielberg?—for the movie rights.
Bui first, he had to bag his specimen.
He turned back toward the temple, moving toward the open doors, and made it halfway there before the elephant appeared. Not just an elephant, however, but an elephant with some ancient personage riding on its back. From the look of it, perhaps Chinese or Japanese.
Now, what in bloody hell?
The goddamned circus never ended—that was obvious. It wasn't bad enough that he had human mutants and some kind of prehistoric throwback to contend with; now they threw an ancient Oriental and a frigging elephant at Chalmers, just to see if he could handle it.
Too bloody right he could.
Chalmers broke into a trot, then sprinted all out for the open doorway, anxious to be out of sight before the old man or his elephant got wind of him.
And made it by a nose, as far as he could tell.
The bloody lizard-thing was wreaking havoc on its worshipers, just swatting one with its enormous tail as Chalmers barged into the temple. Not a pygmy, either, but he may as well have been, the way he flew across the room and landed in a heap some fifty feet away.
I'll have to watch that, Chalmers told himself, advancing cautiously along the central aisle. A crocodile could drop you that way, but its jaws still did the butcher work. This bloody thing was big and strong enough to kill a human being with its tail, the way your average man would splat an insect with a flyswatter.
Not for him, thank you very much.
He glanced around the spacious room, half-hoping he would find his weapons standing in a corner, but the guns were nowhere to be seen.
The decision had been made for him, then. He'd have to use the bloody spear or give it up.
There was a way to do it, Chalmers knew. In Africa, the pygmies hunted elephants with spears and arrows, but they had to hit a vital spot, and sometimes they lost a few men in the process. Chalmers didn't have a few spare helpers, at the moment, so he had to do the bloody job himself.
Which meant he had to get it right the first time, or be damned.
From what he saw and guessed about Nagaq's anatomy, his only hope would be a clean thrust to the brain. That meant he would be forced to go in through an eye, or through the great lizard's palate. The latter angle was a risk, since Chalmers didn't know if reptile skulls were even built the same way as a mammal's, but if that turned out to be his only option, he would have to do his best.
He stepped across a fallen tribesman, knowing he had to get a move on now, before the bloody gargoyles found their guts again and started back to find out what was going on between their lizard-god and any hapless stragglers in the amphitheater. Experience told Chalmers that a tribe of savages could stand for almost anything where their half-baked religion was concerned, and he had no doubt they would go for him before they ever tried to show Nagaq the gate. If he could top the lizard off before they got there, though, he might pick up some points for heroism.
Hell, he might wind up as some kind of a god himself!
A few more yards, and he could smell the damned thing now. More to the point, it caught a whiff of him and turned to face him, big jaws dripping mucus streaked with blood. The rumbling sound that issued from its throat was somewhere in between a belch and snarl.
And when it moved, Nagaq was lightning fast, not slow and plodding like a movie dinosaur. It ran, instead of walking, eight- or ten-foot strides that caught Pike Chalmers by surprise and left him no time to escape. The monster jaws were yawning over him before he even had a chance to raise his spear in lame defiance.
When the five-inch teeth clamped down on his body, there was nothing he could do but scream inside the reptile's suffocating gullet.
Chiun wasn't concerned about the white man who eluded him. It was not his job to protect or punish members of the Stockwell party, and he felt no urge to do so, since he wasn't being paid to baby-sit. He was concerned for Remo, but the Master of Sinanju had faith in his pupil. None of the deformed, pathetic creatures who inhabited this city was a match for Remo, even if they came at him in numbers—but the dragon was another proposition altogether.
It required a Master's touch.
Three tribesmen came around a corner of the temple seconds after the ungainly white man ducked inside, two armed with spears, the tallest of them carrying a bow. The archer nocked an arrow, aimed and fired, his one eye gaping in surprise as Chiun reached out to snatch the shaft in flight and snap it like a toothpick, smiling as he tossed the broken halves aside.
He spurred the elephant and ordered it to charge. The great gray beast responded like a born Korean native, lowering its head and rushing at the savages, a screech of fury rising from its throat.
Chiun's adversaries tried to bolt then, but they weren't fast enough. The elephant was on them, slashing with its tusks and stamping with its big round feet before they could escape. It almost felt too easy, killing this way, but the Master of Sinanju told himself his enemies deserved no better. They were not Korean, after all, and there was not an emperor or king among them worthy of a more elaborate death.<
br />
Chiun would save himself to face the dragon any moment now.
He turned his mount back toward the savages' temple, with its open doors. The snarling, snuffling sounds that emanated from inside there told him that the dragon had found something to amuse it and to quench the legendary reptile's thirst for blood. Chiun wondered if the other expedition members had been sacrificed, but didn't really care, as long as Remo wasn't found among the human offerings.
Impossible.
His white adopted son was far too swift and clever for these stepchildren of nature. If a hundred of them tried to corner him, Chiun would bet on Remo to emerge victorious.
But even skilled assassins sometimes made mistakes, Chiun realized, and no one was immortal. It was always possible that one of these creatures would creep up on a distracted Remo from behind and unleash an arrow while his back was turned.
A spark of anger flared inside Chiun, caught on and burst into a flame that seared his heart. No dragon god would save these savages if they were rash enough to harm his chosen son and heir. The very walls of jade would tumble down upon their heads before he finished with this miserable city of the damned. Chiun would wade waist deep in blood and shout his fury at the sky if Remo came to harm.
He caught himself before his mood affected the behemoth he had drafted as his warhorse. It was better to be calm around wild animals, lest excitement drive them mad and make them run amok.
In seconds flat, his pulse and respiration had returned to normal, while the burning fury in his gut was replaced by icy calm. He was prepared to face the dragon, and teach it that a Master of Sinanju had no peers where killing was concerned.
His mount stopped short outside the temple, peering through the open doors, its trunk raised, sampling the gamy air. Instead of trying to retreat, it trembled with a kind of urgency that told Chiun it would fight. A challenge issued from its tiny mouth, the bold note amplified by lungs like giant bellows, summoning the dragon out to war.
A moment later, Chiun beheld the monster's shadow, looming dark across the threshold. He wasn't sure what form it would take, if this one would have wings or blow fire through its nostrils, but he kept his seat and waited for his adversary to emerge.
The creature that appeared a moment later was familiar from a television program Chiun had seen, with Walter Cronkite. It was not Tyrannosaurus rex, but a smaller relative, and the most peculiar thing about it—aside from its very existence—was the pair of human legs that dangled from the monster's wicked jaws.
Chiun saw the blood-soaked khaki trousers, ankle boots, and knew what had become of the ungainly white man who had run inside the temple moments earlier.
With a sharp kick of his heels, he urged his mount to the attack.
The natives were almost ready to defend themselves as Remo vaulted down the spiral stairs. Almost But there is a world of difference, though, between a fit of mindless anger and cohesive strategy in crisis situations. Charging pell-mell toward an unknown adversary doesn't always do the trick. In fact, it can be self-defeating, as his adversaries quickly learned to their regret.
The leader met him with another of their carboncopy handmade spears, the darkened point out-thrust. It snagged a piece of Remo's shirt, but missed his flesh by inches as he went inside the thrust, deflected it and snapped the warrior's neck with an explosive straight-arm shot. The flaccid body tumbled over backward, down the stairs, and set the other tribesmen scrambling as they tried to get out of the way.
They never got the chance.
Still moving, homicidal poetry in motion, Remo closed the gap between them, striking left and right at his discouraged challengers. The tribesmen had already seen four of their comrades die, and while they might have happily retreated, there was nowhere left for them to go, with Death among them, reaching out to touch each man in turn.
One tried to vault the staircase railing, heedless of the drop below, some twenty feet between his perch and the unyielding floor of jade. A punch from Remo helped him get there, snapped his spine just where it joined the pelvis and converted what might otherwise have been an awkward leap into a deadly cartwheel, ending with the warrior's skull exploding like a shattered egg.
A long spiked club hissed past his face, and Remo countered with a swift kick that collapsed his adversary's rib cage, driving bony spikes into his heart and lungs. The warrior went down, spouting blood, already dead before his body reached the bottom of the staircase.
That left two, and neither one of them had any great enthusiasm for the fight, but neither could they run away. One tried, and Remo caught him with a short jab to a point below one shoulder blade, which stopped his heart and sent another dead man body-surfing down the spiral stairs.
The sole survivor had no options left. He came at Remo, shrieking through a set of crooked, fang-like teeth, and slashing with the thick shaft of his lance. It was a simple thing to block the downward blow, disarm him, hoist the scrawny figure overhead and toss him twenty feet across the hand-carved banister. The native went down screaming, flapping arms that wouldn't serve as wings, and hit the floor with a resounding thud.
The three surviving expedition members stared at Remo, wide-eyed, Audrey with her mouth agape. If she had closed her eyes, thought Remo, the expression would have been familiar, but she wasn't high on sex right now. Instead, like Stockwell and their Malay chaperon, she seemed both amazed and repulsed.
"How… ?" she began, choking on the words. "I mean—"
"I took some classes," Remo told her. "Can we go now?"
Angry voices from a another corridor, somewhere below them and to Remo's left, provided all the motivation they required to scramble down the stairs past the pair of crumpled bodies, down a hallway that he hoped would lead them to the open air. If they were forced to double back, it meant another confrontation with the palace guards. While he had no doubt of his ability to cope with the resistance, Remo couldn't guarantee that one or more of his companions wouldn't stop a spear or arrow in the process.
If he had been saddled with a lone companion, Remo could have simply carried him or her and run as fast as necessary to the nearest exit. As it was, though, progress was effectively restricted to the top speed of their slowest member—meaning that Dr. Stockwell set the pace. Protesting all the way, demanding that the others leave him, save themselves, the weary academic could do little better than a shuffling jog by now. They were losing precious time.
Somehow they found an exit and got out of there before the rabble in pursuit caught up with them. This door, like all the others, was constructed out of wood; it opened outward on a patio that seemed to join the courtyard proper somewhere to their right, around a corner of the temple. Remo dug his fingers deep into the wooden door and ripped a six-inch wedge-shaped portion free before he slammed the door and held it shut. The wedge went underneath, a solid kick ensuring that the hostiles on the other side would have their work cut out for them if they intended following this way.
"Come on," said Remo to the others. "We're already out of time."
They followed him through darkness, toward the open courtyard, where the awesome sounds of mortal combat told them that a battle from another age was taking place.
Chapter Nineteen
Audrey Moreland's mind was racing as she followed Renton Ward—or whoever the hell he was—in the direction of the courtyard. From the sounds, it was apparent that the dinosaur these tribesmen worshiped as Nagaq had left the temple, made its way outside, where it was raising hell. Its snarling, roaring voice was readily identifiable before she glimpsed the monster—and, Audrey suspected, she would hear it in her dreams for months to come.
It was the other sound that puzzled her right now. A kind of trumpeting. Some other animal perhaps… or were the natives trying to distract their killer god by blowing horns?
No, that was wrong. The sound was something she had heard before, if she could only place it, drag the necessary sound bytes from her memory and bring them forward into conscious t
hought. It sounded like…
An elephant!
Sherlockian deduction played no part in Audrey's sudden breakthrough. Rather, she had reached the corner separating her from the main courtyard, and she saw the looming pachyderm in front of her.
Not just an elephant, at that. It was an elephant complete with rider, and a queer old duck he seemed to be. A slight figure with white puffs of hair and wearing what appeared to be a jet black robe. An Asian of some kind, she realized, and clearly not a member of the local tribe. He held no staff or riding crop, as was the normal practice with most handlers, yet the elephant appeared to understand and willingly obey his orders… to a point.
The creature was distracted now, of course, by the ceratosaurus pacing back and forth some thirty feet away. From all appearances, the two great beasts were strangers to each other, nothing in the way of species recognition visible on either side. The reptile's attitude combined suspicion, anger and a kind of raw malevolence rarely associated with nonhuman species in the wild. The elephant, for its part, seemed determined not to give its snarling enemy the satisfaction of displaying fear. As Audrey watched, it raised its trunk and screeched another challenge at the prehistoric hunter.
The ceratosaurus hesitated briefly, rocked back on its haunches, great tail twitching, then shot forward, massive jaws agape and hissing. If the elephant was startled or intimidated, nothing showed. Instead of bolting for the open gates, it put its head down, furled its trunk to clear the long white tusks—and charged.
Before the two behemoths came together, Audrey saw the rider leap to safety, his kimono flared around him like a vampire's cloak open to the night. He made a perfect three-point touchdown, scrambled clear and turned to watch the jungle giants as they met with a resounding crunch of flesh and bone.
All eyes were on the grim, primeval contest, Audrey's no exception, but her thoughts were not confined to the potential fate of two inhuman gladiators. In the background, when their lurching bodies cleared the way, she had a fair view of the courtyard's phosphorescent fountain, shining like a beacon to her fortune.
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