Dai-San - 03 (10 page)

The flames streamed at his back.

There came a grinding roar, as his corpus ballooned, blurred.

The night turned platinum.

Ronin and Moichi covered their eyes and when they could look once again towards the Sacred Pyramid’s summit, there were four figures descending, eschewing the central stairs, striding across the immense steps of the structure.

‘It is done,’ breathed Kin Coba, her slanted face even more alien in the unnatural light. ‘Xaman Balam lives again!’ She turned to look at Ronin.

‘Who is it?’ he said.

‘The One-Who-Is-Four,’ said Uxmal Chac. He took a step up the face of the Sacred Pyramid. ‘He who survived the cataclysms of the ages. They who held up the four corners of the world in the Old Time when the great flood came, reaching up, grasping the stars for support, lest they slip into the deep.’

They were identical, these four, with long blazing eyes, neither of man nor beast, long noses like the trunks of elephants, narrow, tapering skulls gleaming in the frosted light, wide mouths with thick, curling lips. One was garbed all in red; one in white; one in yellow; one in black.

Simultaneously, the four mouths opened and four identical voices rolled eerily down to them, inundating them:

‘I am come now, unstoppable: Xib, Sac, Kan, Ek. Xaman Balam speaks after lo these many
katun
.’ Moichi shivered at the sound of the voices.

The figures continued to descend, until they stood on the penultimate step nearest the ground.

‘The summoning of Tzcatlipoca is at hand and when He comes He shall lead the Majapan back from the deep to the land of the Chacmool, to Xich Chih, most holy of cities!’

Pale green lightning crackled in the air and its sharp stench invaded them, borne from the place where Xaman Balam had been birthed.

‘With the gathering of sides, the Sacred Sacrifice commences.’ They pointed to Ronin. ‘You will play against the forces of Tzcatlipoca, just as it was done in the Old Time, for without contention, without the spilling of blood, He cannot come. You will ascend to the fourth step.’ Ronin counted. There were nine steps in all. ‘The boundaries,’ they continued, ‘are contained across this face of the Sacred Pyramid—’

And abruptly, Ronin found himself able to move. Yet still not in control, he watched his legs take him up the central stairway to the fourth level.

‘The skull,’ said Ek, the black aspect of Xaman Balam.

Xib, the red aspect, stood directly above Ronin on the seventh step. He wore a mask of a grinning skull.

‘The vulture.’

Sac, the white aspect, in a swooping bird’s mask, stood on the sixth step, to the left of Ronin.

‘The crocodile.’

Kin Coba, in a mask that was all jutting jaws, stood also on the sixth step, but to Ronin’s right.

‘The monkey.’

Kan, the yellow aspect, stood on the fifth step, on Ronin’s far left.

‘Flint.’

Uxmal Chac, in a towering, angular mask, stood on the fifth step, on Ronin’s far right.

‘These are your adversaries,’ said black Ek, ascending to the Sacred Pyramid’s top step. ‘As they are arrayed against you, they will attempt to force you downward, off the face of the pyramid. When they succeed in this, you and your companion will die and in so doing you shall be catalysts in the summoning of Tzcatlipoca. Your severed heads, your steaming hearts, shall bring Him once again to His beloved Xich Chih.’

‘And if I win?’ said Ronin.

Ek smiled, his teeth pointed and black, shining with saliva. ‘If you should manage, by some miracle, to ascend to the summit of the Sacred Pyramid, then you and your companion shall be free to depart from here.’ The strange eyes bloomed like poisoned flowers. ‘But I tell you now that there is no hope. I know that you have seen the statue of Atsbilan, He-Who-Sets-The-Sun; I know that you have seen the vandalized temple of his defeated Father, whose name must not be mentioned. But they were driven out of Xich Chih and the memory of the Majapan at the time of the Sundering. The Book of Balam has been rewritten and we have nothing to fear. The power of Tzcatlipoca is supreme in Xich Chih—!’

‘If this is a game,’ called Ronin, ‘then there must be sides. Where are my forces?’

Ek laughed, his eyes like beacons: ‘Find them, mighty warrior!’ And his deep voice resounded in the close valleys and stepped hills of the stone city, precise, geometric, deserted.

Now from above him, Kan, in the rippling brown monkey mask, advanced. He brandished a staff, hooked at one end, carved into the head of an animal.

Ronin drew his sword in time to parry a flicking jab of the long staff. Over and over, the monkey’s weapon slashed at him, blurry, indistinct with speed, powered it seemed by the merest movement of the wrists. Again and again it slammed against him with explosive force.

Green and blue lightning ringed the theater of combat, emanating from the temple behind Ek at the summit of the Sacred Pyramid.

The monkey pressed his attack, the blows constant and unremitting and Ronin moved slowly backward under the intense assault along the length of the great stone step. He was still slightly dazed, his reflexes dull and unresponsive. His brain refused to think clearly.

Backward he was forced to his left, until he was directly below the vulture on the sixth level. In that moment, as the monkey held him in that position, the vulture stepped down to the fifth level.

Glancing up, Ronin began to perceive what was happening. Ek had not fully explained the rules of this game, just as he would not divulge the nature of Ronin’s forces. He realized now that the monkey had deliberately forced him to retreat toward the left side of the pyramid’s face in order to allow the vulture to descend. He knew now that he had to battle each opponent while staying away from each of their corresponding spaces on his step, else they were permitted to move against him simultaneously.

Feinting, he spun away from the monkey, willing his body to work for him, concentrating on clearing his mind of distractions. As he left the vulture’s space on his level, he was gratified to see him freeze into immobility on the step just above him.

But the monkey was intent on his attack once more and he pressed forward, forcing Ronin down a step onto the third level. He attempted a fierce counterattack, but when even the complex
faes
failed against the monkey, he was certain that he would not be able to prevail using merely his sword. Somewhere lay the key. Where are my forces?

He spun away from the oncoming staff, trying desperately to think of the answer.

‘You understand now the impossibility of victory, the inevitability of defeat,’ called Ek from far above, ‘for you battle not men but the last gods of the Majapan!’

His weapon was useless for the moment; he sheathed it. Sensing victory, the monkey lunged at him. The staff whistled through the dark, electric air and Ronin reached out for it. They struggled for endless moments, linked by the wooden weapon. The head of the staff was before his face and abruptly, intuitively, he bent his knees, exerted force. Muscles rippled along his mighty arms and tendons stood out like corded rope down the sides of his neck. He ground his teeth, grunted, finding renewed strength within himself, transmitting it up through his legs, muscles jumping with the strain, into his torso. His body twisted one way and, as the monkey began to compensate, to turn his body with the expected force, Ronin let go, reversed the momentum, whipping his shoulders and arms with explosive power in the opposite direction.

If one operates only within the conscious, one sees just what one wants to see. But the brain registers everything the eye picks up and in Combat training one learns to allow the subconscious to scan the entirety of the vision field, unraveling the frequently curious paths of victory by working out clues not readily available to the conscious.

The staff was his.

When the weapon was in front of his face, he had been concentrating on strength and balance with his conscious mind. But his subconscious had been working on survival and it had picked out from the myriad images within his vision field, the carven head of the monkey’s weapon. He had been mistaken when he had thought it an animal. Or perhaps not. It was a man’s head. The subconscious had worked on the problem and had found the solution.

He slammed the carved head into the monkey mask with enormous force. It shattered into a cloud of choking powder blossoming garishly into the humid night. Kan’s headless body sank to the cold stone.

‘The first move is completed,’ Ek intoned mechanically. ‘Man defeats monkey.’

So there
is
a way, after all, thought Ronin as, peripherally, he caught a movement from just above and saw the vulture drop down to the fourth level. He reached up with the staff and the vulture, his arm ramrod stiff, cracked it in half. Ronin threw it from him. The pieces spun in the air, bouncing off the lowest step and onto the stone paving before the Sacred Pyramid.

And a different counter to each opponent. But how am I to know?

The vulture reached the third step.

Ronin had defeated the monkey but in so doing he had lost a step and now was one level closer to being driven off the face of the pyramid.

He concentrated on his second foe. The vulture carried no weapon but his arms were thin, brownish-yellow, scaled, and, as he lifted them, Ronin saw that they ended in four-fingered claws tipped with curved talons. These commenced to beat the air in front of the vulture as it came at him.

In a flurry, the talons flashed out and he jerked aside, hearing the hissing of their close passage. They came at him again, aiming for his cheek. He ducked and the other set of talons sank into his shoulder, ripping at his flesh. He groaned, staggering. The step became narrow and his boot went over the edge. He toppled over, taking the clutching vulture with him onto the second level.

He scrabbled at his belt for his dirk as the claw sank deeper into the muscles of his shoulder. At last he pulled it free and the flickering light licked along its blade as the edge scraped across the scales of one of the vulture’s arms, but the claw refused to relinquish its painful hold on him. Again the talons twisted in his flesh and fire seared through him. Gasping now, he hacked with the point of the blade. A shrill call came from within the vulture mask and he smelled an awful, sickly sweet stench: mummified remains, lying within moldy corridors of the ages; cement and limestone walls collapsing; rotting vegetation rising thickly; fetid swamps burbling their liquid call…

Pain; the edge of the second step like a sword blade on his back as the vulture bore its weight down upon him. He was on his way down to the first level!

‘Moichi!’ someone cried. ‘Moichi!’

Up his throat.

And he called out again.

A rustling, a thud of boot soles.

His body tipped precariously while the vulture bore down even harder.

‘Ah!’

A soft breeze behind him.

Talons gouged and he closed his mind against the pain.

The vulture heaved at his body.

Going over.

No! No!

He never reached the first step. His back fetched up against solid flesh, immobile, rocklike. He braced himself against the unexpected bulwark, feeling the hard thud of the heart against the ridged muscles of his back. He gained strength, backstopped. He reached up with both hands, dropping his useless dirk and, screaming, wrenched the convulsed claw from his shoulder.

He took a deep breath, his frame shuddering, and as his blood oxygenated, he felt a surge of adrenalin and now, lowering one wrist to act as a fulcrum, he slammed his balled fist into the claw. Sweat broke out along his forehead, rolled down his heaving sides, along his tensed legs. The vulture wailed as, with a splintering of bone and dry sinew, the wrist snapped. Shards of hollow bone punctured the rent skin and black blood ran in icy rivulets from the maimed member.

The vulture mask vibrated as if with hate and the good claw flailed, the questing talons making a dark melody as they swept through the air. Then the vulture leapt at him.

Gray blur blooming, deadly; heavy whiff of discarded centuries. And, without further thought, Ronin leapt upward and away.

On the third step, panting, he turned, looked downward. The broken body of the vulture knelt against the edifice of Moichi’s body as if it had hit a stone wall instead of—

‘The second move is completed,’ Ek intoned from the pyramid’s summit. ‘House defeats vulture.’

Already there was motion above him and Kin Coba, the crocodile, landed above him on the fourth step. The long jaws gaped, just centimeters from his face. He rolled away and she came after him, brandishing a short-hafted battle ax in her right hand.

He drew his blade once more and it clashed against her swing, the metal scraping together. She pivoted, swung again, and as he ducked away, leapt to the third step.

He recovered and slashed at her, bracing for the concussion as their weapons crashed together in a welter of sparks and noise.

Blood streamed from his shoulder where the vulture’s talons had sunk. For the moment, the pumping adrenalin compensated for the energy drain, but all too soon—

He stood his ground, letting her come against him, over and over, gauging the manner of her combat.

She was a warrior. She swung from her widely planted bare feet, using her hips and upper torso to make up for her arms, which were more slender than a man’s. And she was clever. Time and again she nearly got behind his guard for a killing blow. But perhaps more importantly she was tireless. Stunting, varying the angles of her attacks, carefully calculating each blow, she became a machine of destruction and, with pain and fatigue lapping at the periphery of his senses, the idea of defeat crept into his mind.

He shook his head, risked a glance toward Ek high above him. Was it his imagination or was the ebon-robed figure bent in concentration? With that, he knew that the thoughts of defeat were not his own and he returned his concentration to his battle on the third step. Once again, he knew that his sword alone could not prevail against the god. What then?

And out of the corner of his eye, a possible answer came crawling along the cold stone. A small lizard on the step perhaps a meter behind the crocodile, its bright eyes staring, its forked tongue flicking the air before it.