Red Nails, Polished Page 14

something to the warrior, but she could not be sure. A few moments later she was leading her companions down the hall.

  Conyn glanced back as she went out the door, at that shambles where the dead lay on the smoldering floor, blood-stained dark limbs knotted in attitudes of fierce muscular effort, dark faces frozen in masks of hate, glassy eyes glaring up at the green fire-jewels which bathed the ghastly scene in a dusky emerald witchlight. Among the dead the living moved aimlessly, like people moving in a trance. Conyn heard Tascela call a man and direct his to bandage Valerian's leg. The pirate followed the man into an adjoining chamber, already beginning to limp slightly.

  Warily the two Tecuhltli led Conyn along the hall beyond the bronze door, and through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire. They saw no one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which bisected the city from north to south, their caution was increased by the realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and halls lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad dim hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened at silently under their fingers. Awed, they started into the green-lit chambers beyond. For fifty years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner going to a hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror that could befall a woman of the western castle. The terror of it had stalked through their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and Topol that bronze door was like the portal of hell.

  They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conyn pushed past them and strode into Xotalanc.

  Timidly they followed her. As each woman set foot over the threshold she stared and glared wildly about her. But only their quick, hurried breathing disturbed the silence.

  They had come into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli, and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber that was a counterpart of Tascela's throne room.

  Conyn glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and stood listening intently. She heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty feel. She did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in Xuchotl.

  "Come on," she muttered, and started down the hall.

  She had not gone far when she was aware that only Yanath was following him. She wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one arm out as if to fend off some threatening peril, her distended eyes fixed with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a divan.

  "What the devil?" Then Conyn saw what Topal was staring at, and she felt a faint twitching of the skin between her giant shoulders. A monstrous head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the hideous eyes were glazed.

  Conyn peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there limp in death, but such a serpent as she had never seen in her wanderings. The reek and chill of the deep black earth were about it, and its color was an indeterminable hue which changed with each new angle from which she surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what had caused its death.

  "It is the Crawler!" whispered Yanath.

  "It's the thing I slashed on the stair," grunted Conyn. "After it trailed us to the Eagle Door, it dragged itself here to die. How could the Xotalancas control such a brute?"

  The Tecuhltli shivered and shook their heads.

  "They brought it up from the black tunnels below the catacombs. They discovered secrets unknown to Tecuhltli."

  "Well, it's dead, and if they'd had any more of them, they'd have brought them along when they came to Tecuhltli. Come on."

  They crowded close at her heels as she strode down the hall and thrust on the silver-worked door at the other end.

  "If we don't find anybody on this floor," she said, "we'll descend into the lower floors. We'll explore Xotalanc from the roof to the catacombs. If Xotalanc is like Tecuhltli, all the rooms and halls in this tier will be lighted--what the devil!"

  They had come into the broad throne chamber, so similar to that one in Tecuhltli. There were the same jade dais and ivory seat, the same divans, rugs and hangings on the walls. No black, red-scarred column stood behind the throne-dais, but evidences of the grim feud were not lacking.

  Ranged along the wall behind the dais were rows of glass-covered shelves. And on those shelves hundreds of human heads, perfectly preserved, stared at the startled watchers with emotionless eyes, as they had stared for only the gods knew how many months and years.

  Topal muttered a curse, but Yanath stood silent, the mad light growing in her wide eyes. Conyn frowned, knowing that Tlazitlan sanity was hung on a hair-trigger.

  Suddenly Yanath pointed to the ghastly relics with a twitching finger.

  "There is my brother's head!" she murmured. "And there is my father's younger brother! And there beyond them is my sister's eldest son!"

  Suddenly she began to weep, dry-eyed, with harsh, loud sobs that shook her frame. She did not take her eyes from the heads. Her sobs grew shriller, changed to frightful, high-pitched laughter, and that in turn became an unbearable screaming. Yanath was stark mad.

  Conyn laid a hand on her shoulder, and as if the touch had released all the frenzy in her soul, Yanath screamed and whirled, striking at the Cimmerian with her sword. Conyn parried the blow, and Topal tried to catch Yanath's arm. But the madman avoided her and with froth flying from her lips, she drove her sword deep into Topal's body. Topal sank down with a groan, and Yanath whirled for an instant like a crazy dervish; then she ran at the shelves and began hacking at the glass with her sword, screeching blasphemously.

  Conyn sprang at her from behind, trying to catch her unaware and disarm her, but the madman wheeled and lunged at her, screaming like a lost soul. Realizing that the warrior was hopelessly insane, the Cimmerian side-stepped, and as the maniac went past, she swung a cut that severed the shoulder-bone and breast, and dropped the woman dead beside her dying victim.

  Conyn bent over Topal, seeing that the woman was at her last gasp. It was useless to seek to stanch the blood gushing from the horrible wound.

  "You're done for, Topal," grunted Conyn. "Any word you want to send to your people?"

  "Bend closer," gasped Topal, and Conyn complied--and an instant later caught the woman's wrist as Topal struck at her breast with a dagger.

  "Crom!" swore Conyn. "Are you mad, too?"

  "Tascela ordered it!" gasped the dying woman. "I know not why. As we lifted the wounded upon the couches she whispered to me, bidding me to slay you as we returned to Tecuhltli--" And with the name of her clan on her lips, Topal died.

  Conyn scowled down at her in puzzlement. This whole affair had an aspect of lunacy. Was Tascela mad, too? Were all the Tecuhltli madder than she had realized? With a shrug of her shoulders she strode down the hall and out of the bronze door, leaving the dead Tecuhltli lying before the staring dead eyes of their kinsmen's heads.

  Conyn needed no guide back through the labryinth they had traversed. Her primitive instinct of direction led her unerringly along the route they had come. She traversed it as warily as she had before, her sword in her hand, and her eyes fiercely searching each shadowed nook and corner; for it was her former allies she feared now, not the ghosts of the slain Xotalancas.

  She had crossed the Great Hall and entered the chambers beyond when she heard something moving ahead of her--something which gasped and panted, and moved with a strange, floundering, scrambling noise. A moment later Conyn saw a woman crawling over the flaming floor toward him--a woman whose progress left a broad bloody smear on the smoldering surface. It was Techotl and her eyes were already glazing; from a deep gash in her breast blood gushed steadily between the fingers of her clutching hand. With the other she clawed and hitched herself along.

  "Conyn," she cried chokingly, "Conyn! Tascela has taken the ye
llow-haired man!"

  "So that's why she told Topal to kill me!" murmured Conyn, dropping to her knee beside the woman, who her experienced eye told her was dying. "Tascela isn't as mad as I thought."

  Techotl's groping fingers plucked at Conyn's arm. In the cold, loveless, and altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli, her admiration and affection for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human oasis, constituted a tie that connected her with a more natural humanity that was totally lacking in her fellows, whose only emotions were hate, lust, and the urge of sadistic cruelty.

  "I sought to oppose her," gurgled Techotl, blood bubbling frothily to her lips. "But she struck me down. She thought she had slain me, but I crawled away. Ah, Set, how far I have crawled in my own blood! Beware, Conyn! Tascela may have set an ambush for your return! Slay Olmec! She is a beast. Take Valerian and flee! Fear not to traverse the forest. Tascela and Olmec lied about the dragons. They slew each other years ago, all save the strongest. For a dozen years there has been only one dragon. If you have slain her, there is naught in the forest to harm you. She was the god Tascela worshipped; and Olmec fed human sacrifices to her, the very old and the very young, bound and hurled from the wall. Hasten! Tascela has taken Valerian to the Chamber of the--"

  Her head slumped down and she was dead before it came to