The Jaguar Knights (49 page)

T
he stair was very long, perilously steep, caked with old blood. Up ahead, the bearers carrying Dolores mounted sideways, two at each end of the stretcher, with the rear two having to hold their side head-high. Wolf hurried as much as he dared, trying not to imagine what would happen if they dropped the litter, or even if he stumbled. The drums grew louder. The steps reeked like an abattoir. Pale smoke from the braziers drifted overhead, sparkling with its own red stars. His head began to ache as he approached the center of spirituality.

When he drew his breath of relief on reaching the summit safely, he was facing the blackened altar stone, the heart of evil, flanked by two great braziers. His forehead ached, but not as badly as it had in the Forge at Ironhall—so far. Many black acolytes, busy as ants, were loading wood into the fires, and two were playing drums. He saw other drums and conches not yet in use, and dozens of flint knives set out on a stone table. How many other pyramids would he see from here if he came in
daylight? How many tens of thousands died here every year? The city was dark and mysterious, seeming very far below, hardly a light showing. The slaves carried the litter around one of the braziers and set it down some way back from the altar; then they were herded away by a couple of acolytes.

Wolf knelt beside the litter. “We’re on our way home, love.”

Dolores was just conscious enough to ask, “How many…sacrifices?”

“I don’t know. Lynx says they’d all die anyway, very soon.” He must rationalize this atrocity somehow or he would go mad.

She pulled a face. The eagle knight appeared, plumage shining metallic green in the firelight. He took up position between them and the altar, fortunately blocking all Dolores’s view of it and most of Wolf’s also. More drums and a conch were joining in the music, if that was what it was. The four slaves who had carried the litter were drinking something, with acolytes fussing around them.

She smiled with bloodless lips. “So that was the famous Celeste?”

“You see why Athelgar was smitten?”

“What happens about her child?” Her voice was so soft he could barely hear it.

“I promised we’ll adopt him. You don’t mind, do you?”

“It won’t matter what I…” She screwed up her face for a moment. When the spasm passed, she said, “I don’t mind.” Later she said, “I’ll make this one a girl, then, all right?”

He laughed and kissed her. “Anything except kittens! Did you know before the healer told you?”

She shook her head, then murmured, “I wondered.” She was drifting into sleep or coma, and the next few things she tried to say were inaudible under the thundering drums, the scream of conches, acolytes wailing incantations. Wolf remained kneeling by the stretcher and kept his face turned away from the altar stone, watching Dolores, or the lake, or anywhere. He must not think about the clean-picked bones of Cam Obmouth and Rolf Twidale on the rocks at Quondam.
Where is your outrage now, sinner?

One of the ragged, revolting acolytes came to kneel at the end of the litter. His face was shadowed from the fires, a blank darkness with
two eyes visible. Then he smiled, showing white teeth also. He reeked worse than a midden. Wolf looked away and found another at the other end. These two were to be his traveling companions, and no doubt they had their orders. Their hair hung in matted strings, never cut, their fingernails were long and jagged.

Drums boomed. Conches wailed.

The four bearers, now naked and thoroughly drugged, were escorted back from the far side of the platform. Three were stopped close to the litter, but the fourth was led on, around to the altar stone. Wolf guessed what was about to happen and quickly looked away. Perhaps the ache in his forehead grew a little worse, but he heard nothing sinister over the racket of drumming and wailing. The second slave was taken.

He would not watch. He could imagine.

Except that he couldn’t. They
really
did not resist? Against his will, his eyes followed the fourth slave all the way around to the altar. The man went willingly until the last few steps. Then he tried to draw back, but four acolytes seized him and stretched him across the great stone, face up. Wolf’s view was obstructed by Amaranth-talon’s outspread wings, but he closed his eyes anyway. He thought he heard the hiss of the beating heart landing in the brazier.

The corpses were rolled down one side of the great staircase. The procession of captives came up the other side, the side Wolf could see. All were naked, all doomed, all drugged almost senseless. And they just
stood
there, a line of four men waiting like sheep between the uppermost step and the murder site. Then another body would be dragged away, another young man grabbed and thrown down. The rest would take two steps forward and a replacement victim appear at their backs.

How much was this done by drugs and how much by indoctrination? Once Wolf had sat on the anvil at Ironhall waiting for a sword through his heart, but he had known it wouldn’t kill him.

None of the victims cried out, but they probably couldn’t, once their chests were cut open. How long must this go on? He had lost count already. He wanted to scream at them to stop. But why? He was the King’s Killer, wasn’t he?

His head was throbbing now. The conjuration must be concentrated
around the altar stone, but the ride on the Spirit Wind would hurt, as he knew from today’s experience. Long journeys brought mental confusion, Lynx said—that was why he and Fell had managed to overcome Plumed-pillar at Quondam. Wolf must plan. He must be ready to act when he reached Quondam. Only if he knew exactly what he was going to do could he hope to be fast enough to overcome the Eagle.

Yet he could not tear his eyes away from the horrifying parade of drugged victims, could not help staring at them, wondering why they did not rise in revolt and at least try to die fighting. Most of them were appallingly young. Young or old, their faces were totally blank, their eyes dull as pebbles in the torchlight. Then came one who was paler than the others and had a straggly beard. He was Euranian…Chivian, in fact…his name was Louis, known as Flicker.

Without thinking, Wolf surged to his feet. The pain in his head clanged like a great bell, so he staggered—and then just stood there, staring, paralyzed.

There was no sign of Heron-jade, who ought to stand out because of his size, but he might be farther back, lower down on the long climb. No, he had to be dead, or he would have identified himself and called for his lord, Sky-cactus. A blood-caked swelling disfigured the left side of Flicker’s face, perhaps a relic of the blow that had disabled him and led to his capture. Had it rendered him unable to talk, to explain who he was, or had his protestations just been ignored? Who would believe a Hairy One, trying to lie his way out of the abattoir pen? Had the Eldoradoans killed Heron-jade by mistake, or had he fallen to the Distlish forces and Flicker gone on by himself? There were a thousand possible explanations.

Another man died without a cry, another corpse rolled away down the staircase to the waiting butchers. Flicker was urged forward by an acolyte, and another man stepped up behind him. Now Flicker was only two men back from the stone.

What could Wolf do? However the Tlixilian prisoners might feel about donating their hearts, Flicker would not feel honored.

Nothing. Wolf could do nothing. He had promised not to interrupt the ritual, and the pain in his head was ample warning that elementals
had been gathered in great strength. To release so much power at random would surely cause disaster. He could not save Flicker and why should he even want to? He had sworn to kill the rat. He was a rapist. Let him die now!

Another heart dropped in the brazier. Another corpse rolled over the brink and was gone. Flicker was only one man away from the altar stone. His unsteady gaze wobbled past Wolf, then returned. Something changed. He seemed to make an effort to focus. He frowned uncertainly.

Dolores began to fret and her eyes opened, as if the pain had returned. She could not see Flicker from down there.

But Flicker could see Wolf. Life began to shine in his eyes. He was struggling against the mind-numbing drug—perhaps even using some inquisitors’ trick to resist it. The acolytes noticed his alertness and two of them jumped forward to grip him even before the previous victim had been completely processed. He shouted feebly and tried to struggle. He was turned around and dragged down on the altar.

Wolf knelt down to attend to Dolores. His head hurt less down there. “What’s wrong?” He had to crouch close to hear her whisper through the thunder of the drums.

“How many? Wolf, stop this! Murders?”

Wolf kissed her. “Soon be over,” he promised.

“Wrong!” she muttered. “Wrong, wrong!”

Not all wrong. Flicker had gone. All the waiting victims were Tlixilians.

The rising moon was smearing the eastern sky with gold.

Wolf had fulfilled his oath—he had executed the rapist Louis Duteau, known as Flicker. Why should that bother him? The spirits knew he had slaughtered enough of his brother Blades in the line of duty, and this latest killing ought to bring him great personal satisfaction—and no small relief, because in mortal combat Flicker would have been as dangerous an opponent as any he had ever encountered. Was that why? Or because he had let others do his dirty work for him, like an Athelgar? Or because it might have been possible to save him with a whispered word to the Eagle? Or because he was not quite certain of Flicker’s guilt? No, no, no…

How would Dolores feel when she learned that saving her life had cost hundreds of deaths and it had all been in vain, because what she wanted to do with the conjury was impossible, that Tlixilian spells would always require mass slaughter? Wolf was cheating her as much as he had cheated Two-swans-dancing. He was the King’s Killer, but he would not rescue a culture so unspeakably barbaric that even Lynx could not discuss what underlay its power. Dolores was wrong. Jorge had been right. The Distlish were right. El Dorado must die.

He must have his plans clear in his mind, so he could act instantly when he arrived on the turret at Quondam. It would be dark, possibly snowing. If the sentries noticed his arrival at all, they would take a few minutes to react. He knew what the cold of a Chivian Secondmoon night felt like, and the Tlixilians did not. He must take the Amaranth-talon first, certainly, before the Eagle could use the Serpent’s Eye on him. If he could kill the Eagle and the two acolytes and throw their bodies over the edge, to fall far down the cliffs below, then he might just get away with it. If he didn’t, Athelgar could have the pleasure of deciding whether to hang him for murder or behead him for treason. Flicker would certainly have tried to stop him, but Flicker had met his just deserts.

The moon peered over the mountains. There were no more men waiting at the stone and the ritual had ended. Amaranth-talon raised his head to the stars and screeched in triumph. He swung around to face the stretcher, spread his wings. Wolf screamed at the explosion of agony in his head.

T
he world rocked. After the din of trumpets and drums, the bonfires in the night, he was plunged into blazing sunlight and a salty gale as cold as any icy torrent. And intolerable pain. Screaming, he drew his sword. The howling wind helped, making the Eagle stagger, and he was too big
a target to miss, even in that sudden blinding glare. Wolf leaped over the stretcher. A slash might have been deflected by the tough feathers, so he lunged, withdrew his blade, and rammed
Diligence
into the monster again before it had collapsed on the shingle. He stabbed it a third time to be sure.

The sun was not far above the horizon, a brilliance in a hazy maritime sky. Surf boomed on the rocks, hurling up pillars of spray. One of the acolytes scrambled to his feet and Wolf felled him with a slash to the neck. The other screamed and tried to run, reeling and flailing on the loose shingle, but heading the wrong way, toward the sea. Wolf ran un-steadily after him. A breaker exploded on rocks directly ahead, hurling foam skyward and probably terrifying the Tlixilian out of his few remaining wits. Wolf caught up with him and killed him too.

By then the pain was almost gone from his head. He felt no guilt or regret as he hurried back to Dolores. Those three had been pitiless murderers on a vast scale. Compared to such butchers, the King’s Killer was merely a naughty child. He removed Amaranth-talon’s regalia and smashed it to fragments with a rock so that no other Eagles could come to see what had gone wrong. The only one who knew the way now was Bone-peak-runner, who had accompanied Amaranth-
talon on the raid a year ago, but Wolf doubted strongly that the Eldoradoans would risk him. At the new moon they might. Not now.

It was a wild morning, but the damp in the air was flying spray, not rain. Impelled onward by the wind, he almost fell over the stretcher. Dolores made incoherent noises. He wrapped blankets around her.

“It’s all right, love,” he said. “We’re home in Chivial. We’ll have you to an octogram very soon.” Not as soon as he had hoped. He had asked the Eagle to deliver them to the turret, but they were down in Short Cove. He wondered if he could have bullied one of the acolytes into helping him carry the stretcher. Probably not, and murdering him later would have been more difficult in the presence of witnesses.

“Why, why?” Her whisper was almost lost in the wind. Her pallor was terrifying. “Why kill them?”

“Because what you wanted isn’t possible, dearest. Their conjury only works with beating hearts. The Distliards have tried to make it work otherwise
and can’t—Rojas told us, the Conch-flute says so, too. This horror must be stopped. I’ve stopped it. Now let’s get you out of the wind.”

She stared at him unbelievingly, tears in her eyes. “All those deaths? Why did you let them die?”

To get her home, of course. He raised one end of the litter and dragged it off the beach, into the grass, and there found her a sheltered spot in the lee of a boulder. He was still exposed to the gale, though, and it was a struggle to change into the Euranian-style garments that Raging-stone had provided. They were not Chivian style, but would seem less bizarre than his Tlixilian garb. The hose were two large for him, the shirt and tunic too snug. No doubt they had belonged to Distliards who had left their hearts in El Dorado.