Red Nails, Polished Read online

It was the sullen Yasala, Olmec's maid.

  "What the devil were you doing bending over me? What's that in your hand?"

  The man made no reply, but sought to cast away the object. Valerian twisted his arm around in front of him, and the thing fell to the floor--a great black exotic blossom on a jade-green stem, large as a woman's head, to be sure, but tiny beside the exaggerated vision he had seen.

  "The black lotus!" said Valerian between his teeth. "The blossom whose scent brings deep sleep. You were trying to drug me! If you hadn't accidentally touched my face with the petals, you'd have--why did you do it? What's your game?"

  Yasala maintained a sulky silence, and with an oath Valerian whirled his around, forced his to his knees and twisted his arm up behind his back.

  "Tell me, or I'll tear your arm out of its socket!"

  Yasala squirmed in anguish as his arm was forced excruciatingly up between his shoulder blades, but a violent shaking of his head was the only answer he made.

  "Gigolo!" Valerian cast his from his to sprawl on the floor. The pirate glared at the prostrate figure with blazing eyes. Fear and the memory of Olmec's burning eyes stirred in him, rousing all his tigerish instincts of self-preservation. These people were decadent; any sort of perversity might be expected to be encountered among them. But Valerian sensed here something that moved behind the scenes, some secret terror fouler than common degeneracy. Fear and revulsion of this weird city swept him. These people were neither sane nor normal; he began to doubt if they were even human. Madness smoldered in the eyes of them all--all except the cruel, cryptic eyes of Olmec, which held secrets and mysteries more abysmal than madness.

  He lifted his head and listened intently. The halls of Xuchotl were as silent as if it were in reality a dead city. The green jewels bathed the chamber in a nightmare glow, in which the eyes of the man on the floor glittered eerily up at him. A thrill of panic throbbed through Valerian, driving the last vestige of mercy from his fierce soul.

  "Why did you try to drug me?" he muttered, grasping the man's black hair, and forcing his head back to glare into his sullen, long-lashed eyes. "Did Olmec send you?"

  No answer. Valerian cursed venomously and slapped the man first on one cheek and then the other. The blows resounded through the room, but Yasala made no outcry.

  "Why don't you scream?" demanded Valerian savagely. "Do you fear someone will hear you? Whom do you fear? Olmec? Tascela? Conyn?"

  Yasala made no reply. He crouched, watching his captor with eyes baleful as those of a basilisk. Stubborn silence always fans anger. Valerian turned and tore a handful of cords from a near-by hanging.

  "You sulky gigolo!" he said between his teeth. "I'm going to strip you stark naked and tie you across that couch and whip you until you tell me what you were doing here, and who sent you!"

  Yasala made no verbal protest, nor did he offer any resistance, as Valerian carried out the first part of his thereat with a fury that his captive's obstinacy only sharpened. Then for a space there was no sound in the chamber except the whistle and crackle of hard-woven silken cords on naked flesh. Yasala could not move his fast-bound hands or feet. His body writhed and quivered under the chastisement, his head swayed from side to side in rhythm with the blows. His teeth were sunk into his lower lip and a trickle of blood began as the punishment continued. But he did not cry out.

  The pliant cords made no great sound as they encountered the quivering body of the captive; only a sharp crackling snap, but each cord left a red streak across Yasala's dark flesh. Valerian inflicted the punishment with all the strength of his war-hardened arm, with all the mercilessness acquired during a life where pain and torment were daily happenings, and with all the cynical ingenuity which only a man displays toward a man. Yasala suffered more, physically and mentally, than he would have suffered under a lash wielded by a woman, however strong.

  It was the application of this masculine cynicism which at last tamed Yasala.

  A low whimper escaped from his lips, and Valerian paused, arm lifted, and raked back a damp yellow lock. "Well, are you going to talk?" he demanded. "I can keep this up all night, if necessary."

  "Mercy!" whispered the man. "I will tell."

  Valerian cut the cords from his wrists and ankles, and pulled his to his feet. Yasala sank down on the couch, half reclining on one bare hip, supporting himself on his arm, and writhing at the contact of his smarting flesh with the couch. He was trembling in every limb.

  "Wine!" he begged, dry-lipped, indicating with a quivering hand a gold vessel on an ivory table. "Let me drink. I am weak with pain. Then I will tell you all."

  Valerian picked up the vessel, and Yasala rose unsteadily to receive it. He took it, raised it toward his lips--then dashed the contents full into the Aquilonian's face. Valerian reeled backward, shaking and clawing the stinging liquid out of his eyes. Through a smarting mist he saw Yasala dart across the room, fling back a bolt, throw open the copperbound door and run down the hall. The pirate was after his instantly, sword out and murder in his heart.

  But Yasala had the start, and he ran with the nervous agility of a man who has just been whipped to the point of hysterical frenzy. He rounded a corner in the corridor, yards ahead of Valerian, and when the pirate turned it, he saw only an empty hall, and at the other end a door that gaped blackly. A damp moldy scent reeked up from it, and Valerian shivered. That must be the door that hed to the catacombs. Yasala had taken refuge among the dead.

  Valerian advanced to the door and looked down a flight of stone steps that vanished quickly into utter blackness. Evidently it was a shaft that led straight to the pits below the city, without opening upon any of the lower floors. He shivered slightly at the thought of the thousands of corpses lying in their stone cypts down there, wrapped in their moldering cloths. He had no intention of groping his way down those stone steps. Yasala doubtless knew every turn and twist of the subterranean tunnels.

  He was turning back, baffled and furious, when a sobbing cry welled up from the blackness. It seemed to come from a great depth, but human words were faintly distinguishable, and the voice was that of a man. "Oh, help! Help, in Set's name! Ahhh!" It trailed away, and Valerian thought he caught the echo of a ghostly tittering.

  Valerian felt his skin crawl. What had happened to Yasala down there in the thick blackness? There was no doubt that it had been he who had cried out. But what peril could have befallen her? Was a Xotalanca lurking down there? Tascela had assured them that the catacombs below Tecuhltli were walled off from the rest, too securely for their enemies to break through. Besides, that tittering had not sounded like a human being at all.

  Valerian hurried back down the corridor, not stopping to close the door that opened on the stair. Regaining his chamber, he closed the door and shot the bolt behind him. He pulled on his boots and buckled his sword-belt about him. He was determined to make his way to Conyn's room and urge her, if she still lived, to join his in an attampt to fight their way out of that city of devils.

  But even as he reached the door that opened into the corridor, a long-drawn scream of agony rang through the halls, followed by the stamp of running feet and the loud clangor of swords.

  Twenty Red Nails

  Two warriors lounged in the guardroom on the floor known as the Tier of the Eagle. Their attitude was casual, though habitually alert. An attack on the great bronze door from without was always a possibility, but for many years no such assault had been attempted on either side.

  "The strangers are strong allies," said one. "Tascela will move against the enemy tomorrow, I believe."

  She spoke as a soldier in a war might have spoken. In the miniature world of Xuchotl each handful of feudists was an army, and the empty halls between the castles was the country over which they campaigned.

  The other meditated for a space.

  "Suppose with their aid we destroy Xotalanc," she said. "What then, Xatmec?"

  "Why," returned Xatmec, "we will drive red nails f
or them all. The captives we will burn and flay and quarter."

  "But afterward?" pursued the other. "After we have slain them all? Will it not seem strange to have no foe to fight? All my life I have fought and hated the Xotalancas. With the feud ended, what is left?"

  Xatmec shrugged her shoulders. Her thoughts had never gone beyond the destruction of their foes. They could not go beyond that.

  Suddenly both women stiffened at a noise outside the door.

  "To the door, Xatmec!" hissed the last speaker. "I shall look through the Eye--"

  Xatmec, sword in hand, leaned against the bronze door, straining her ear to hear through the metal. Her mate looked into the mirror. She started convulsively. Women were clustered thickly outside the door; grim, dark-faced women with swords gripped in their teeth--and their fingers thrust into their ears. One who wore a feathered headdress had a set of pipes whch she set to her lips, and even as the Tecuhltli started to shout a warning, the pipes began to skirl.

  The cry died in the guard's throat as the thin, weird piping penetrated the metal door and smote on her ears. Xatmec leaned frozen against the door, as if paralyzed in that position. Her face was that of a wooden image, her expression one of horrified listening. The other guard, farther removed from the source of the sound, yet sensed the horror of what was taking place, the grisly threat that