Remo pressed his back against the padded wall. His vision was fading, the colors in front of him dissolving to gray, then black, until there was no light, nothing but the sound of breathing in the small room: Lizzie's loud and gasping, amplified and slow. The boy's panting, sounding like a rhythmic hiss. Remo's own deep, soft intake, ringing through his ears like wind. And Chiun the Master's, barely audible.
?Chapter Six
When Remo came to, the earthquake had stopped and Chiun was standing in front of the pod's open door, his hand lightly touching its handle. The old man's face showed concern. "Come here, Remo," he said softly.
"What is it?" Lizzie groaned, unfastening the seat belt around her waist. The boy blinked sleepily, as if he had just awakened from a nap.
"What the hell," Remo whispered as he stepped from the pod. The cobwebby gray hangings draped on either side of the aisle were replaced by bright woven cloth, stiff with gold and red paint, depicting primitive scenes of animals and children at play.
"These are new," Lizzie said, peering at the hangings.
Remo shook his head, bewildered. "But I wrecked two of them. They fell apart like they were made of powder. I saw it myself." He moved forward down the white plastic aisle of the craft, through the vehicle's airlock door, past a new wall recently erected around the sides of the door.
Beyond the wall was a chamber, intact, filled with extravagant artworks: Vases encrusted with turquoise and shell, gold ornaments in shapes of fanciful animals, boxes of jade and silver, filled with pearls and precious stones.
"It's magnificent," Lizzie whispered from behind him. "Perfect. The most perfect examples of Mayan art I've ever seen."
"Stay back," Remo said.
"What for? I'm as puzzled by this as you are. Why shouldn't I look?" she said petulantly, moving through the fabulous chamber. She stopped, frowning, near an eight-foot-high statue of a man, sculpted in the classic Mayan block manner except for the head, which had no features at all. Instead, sitting atop the figure's shoulders was a blank stone sphere.
"That's odd," she said. "There's no face." She turned from the statue and picked up an oval vase sitting on a pedestal near a doorway. "Absolutely priceless," she said, turning the vase in her hands.
A piercing scream broke the silence. Lizzie's vase dropped from her hands and shattered on the floor.
Remo and Chiun looked at one another. The sound was one they knew, because only one creature could produce it, and in only one circumstance: it was the scream of a man succumbing to violent death.
They searched the walls for an entrance. Remo found it, a short maze leading from the room of treasures into a third chamber. What lay inside it made his stomach churn.
A group of men, tall and slender and dark-haired, attired in fine robes woven with intricate patterns and gold thread, were clustered silently around a four-foot-high altar where a youth— a boy of sixteen or younger— lay. His arms and legs were bound with rope. His chest was laid open, its torn flesh still bright with new blood.
Behind the youth stood the most gloriously garbed personage of all, a man of aristocratic features and deep blue eyes that shone with the passion of a hunter after the kill. He was dressed in a gown of purest silver, and he wore a thick silver ornament on his head like a crown. His arms were heavy with bangles of jade and carved bone, and on his chest dangled a giant topaz on a silver chain.
In one upraised hand was a dagger, large and slick with dripping blood. In the other was the still-beating heart of the youth.
At the sight of the intruders, the finely robed men gasped and murmured among themselves. Only the one in the middle, the one holding the dying heart, remained silent. His eyes narrowed as he muttered something low and menacing in a language half fluid, half guttural, a language Remo had never heard before.
"What'd he say?" he asked Chiun, who knew the speech of most of the world.
The old man frowned. "I do not know," he said. "I have not heard this language before."
"I thought I picked out certain derivatives of local Mayan speech," Lizzie said excitedly. "Maybe it's some kind of cult, or—"
"It is the Old Tongue," the boy said softly.
They all turned to look at him. "The Old Tongue?" Remo asked.
"The language of my ancestors," Po said, his eyes fixed on the tall man covered with blood. "He told us to leave."
"Gladly," Chiun said.
The man spoke again, pointing at Remo and Chiun. His voice was deep and resonant, his face cruel.
"What was that?" Remo asked. But the boy didn't answer. Instead, he stepped forward, his chin jutting, his face flushed, and shouted something at the man.
As he spoke, the other members of the group around the bloody table looked uncertainly at one another, then fixedly at Remo and Chiun. At one point, the leader of the group opened his mouth to speak, but the boy silenced him with a fresh torrent of the strange-sounding words, gesturing to the sky, then pointing again at Remo and Chiun. His childish voice took on a peculiar air of command as he spoke, standing still, his posture erect, his voice clear. When he was finished, the men standing around the table lowered their eyes. The boy snapped out another command, and they sank to their knees, chanting something in unison.
Only the central figure remained standing, the man in the splendid robes whose topaz amulet glinted with reflected blood. He stared at Po, his eyes as cold as the dagger still in his hand.
Po did not speak again, and his eyes never left the man's. Then, after what seemed like hours, the tall man laid down the stilled heart and the dagger, nodded once curtly, and strode out.
"Come," the boy said. "He is taking us to his king."
"That was some showdown," Remo said, following him through the temple toward the entrance. "What was going on back there? Should we have done something?"
"No," Po said. "It was a sacrifice. That is their way. The man is a priest." He added, "But I do not trust him.
"He didn't look like he was crazy about you, either," Remo said. "How'd you talk him into taking us out of here?"
"I told him the truth," Po said.
"Oh? You mean that we got stuck in an earthquake and somehow ended up in the wrong temple? He bought that?"
"Well, not exactly the truth," the boy said. "I told him that we fell to earth in a flaming chariot."
"Oh, good," Remo said. "Something believable."
"And that he should be prepared to deal with the great god Kukulcan and his son."
Chiun beamed. "I knew there was something I liked about this boy," he said.
Outside the temple, the view that greeted them was a shock. The jungle brush that had all but obliterated the sunlight had been cleared. In its place was a thriving city of baked clay and cement and stone buildings, some of which were of immense proportions.
A row of merchants in cloth covered stalls shouted to passersby, displaying a wide variety of wares: obsidian blades; tobacco in large, dried leaves; blocks of white rock salt; dried fish; stacks of dishes and pottery; masks decorated with fine colored feathers and bright paint; metal incense burners; flint; canes and staves; jade and jewelry.
Dazed, Lizzie exlained some of the more unusual items in the stalls as they passed by. A shop displaying nothing but white spikes was, she said, the place to buy stingray spines.
"They used to be used for bloodletting," she said, adding lamely, "Maybe they still do. Somewhere..."
She was beginning to shake. "Calm down," Remo said. "We'll find out where we are soon enough."
"But we didn't move!" she protested.
"We don't know that," Remo said reasonably. "Everything went crazy once the earthquake hit. We might have moved." He corrected himself. "We had to have moved. We wouldn't be here if we hadn't."
"But the temple—"