by Unknown
* * * * *
But Kirby did not get to see.
A strangled cry of terror smote his ears. Naida leaped toward him from one side, while Elana, the lovely youngest girl, sprang from another direction, hurled Naida aside, and stopped in front of Kirby.
Through the glaring room flickered a tiny red serpentine creature which the Duca hurled from a crystalline tube in his hand. As the minute snake struck Elana's breast, she gave a choked cough, and then, as she half turned to smile at both Naida and Kirby over her shoulder, her eyes went blank, and she collapsed gently to the polished stones of the floor--dead.
A second later came squirming out from under her the ghastly, glimmering little snake which had struck.
Slowly, while every mortal in the room stood paralyzed, Kirby stepped forward and set his heel upon the writhing thing. When he raised his boot, the snake was only a blotch on the floor.
The Duca was standing as still as girls and caciques. The laughter with which he had started to greet what he had thought would be Kirby's extermination had faded to a look of wonder--and fear. He was an easy mark.
Up to him Kirby rolled, and with all the force of soul and muscular body, drove his fist into the Duca's face.
"By God," he roared, "you want war, and you shall have it!"
The Duca was simply out--not dead. Since Kirby did not want him dead, he did not strike again, but swung back from the sprawled body, faced Naida, and pointed to the tower door.
"Up there!" he snapped. "Seize the tower. I have a reason!"
At the Duca's crashing downfall, had come to the caciques a tension which made Kirby know they would not be dummy figures much longer. His eyes never left them.
"Quick, Naida!" he snapped again. "We must hold the tower!"
Naida, all of the girls, were staring dazedly at Elana, dead.
"The tower!" she choked. "But we cannot go there. It is the Duca's!"
"Because it is the Duca's," Kirby said firmly, "is exactly why we must hold it. Come, Naida, please--"
* * * * *
And then he saw comprehension begin to dawn at last.
He also saw two of the caciques glide from the wooden line, and slink toward him past the unconscious Duca, stealthily.
As Naida suddenly cried out to her companions, pushed at two of them, and then darted like rainbow nymph toward the silent and forbidding upward spiral of steps, Kirby faced the gliding caciques.
One he clutched with viselike hands, and lifted him. As the other shrieked and sprang, he was mowed down by the hurtling body of his fellow priest which Kirby flung forward mightily.
The rest of the caciques were howling. While Naida waited beside the tower door, the other girls flashed up the steps. The Duca still lay where he had fallen, a thread of blood oozing from his mouth. Kirby, after his last look over all, solemnly stooped and gathered in his arms the limp, radiant little body of the girl who had given her life that her friends might be left with a leader.
A moment later, he was standing on the steps. Naida, unopposed by the still stupefied caciques, swung shut the tower door and shot a double bolt.
"Naida--" Kirby whispered as he held Elana closer to him, "oh, I am so sorry that we could have won only at such a price."
As Naida stooped to kiss the pale little forehead with its halo of golden hair, sobs came. But then she raised her eyes, and they were, for Kirby, alight with the message that she could and would accept Elana's sacrifice, because she would gladly have made it herself.
"We will not forget," she whispered. "Carry her tenderly, and come."
For better, for worse, the Duca's tower was theirs.
CHAPTER VI
At the end of an hour, Kirby was taking a turn of guard duty at the foot of the steps, while the others remained with Elana in a chamber above. To Kirby, with things thus far along, it seemed that the seizure of the tower had proved a shrewd stroke.
It seemed that the tower was to the Duca what hair was to Sampson. From Naida had come the information that the Duca lived hidden within the great shaft of obsidion, and appeared but seldom even before his caciques. Apparently a large part of his hold upon his subjects was maintained by the mystery with which he kept himself surrounded. And now his retreat was lost to him! Such had been the moral effect of the loss upon both Duca and caciques, that his whole first hour had gone by without their doing anything.
Kirby, standing just around the first turn of the winding stairway, presently cocked his ears to listen to the conclave being held in the amphitheatre.
"Why not starve them out, O Holy One?" he heard one of the caciques ask of the Duca, only to be answered by a growl of negation.
The Duca, Kirby had gathered before this, wanted to fight.
"But there is no food in the tower, is there?" the cacique still pressed on, and this time he was supported by other voices.
"No," the Duca rumbled back. "But am I to be deprived of my retreat, left here like a common dog amongst other dogs, while these accursed fiends starve slowly to death? No! I tell you, you must fight for me!"
* * * * *
But he had told them so several times before and nothing had happened. Kirby grinned at the thought of the caste the Duca was losing by being driven to this belittling parley.
"Holy One," exclaimed a new priest in answer to the urge to fight, "what can we do against the golden haired fiend? The stairs are so narrow that he could defend them alone. And then there are the gates of bronze. If we could shatter the first, at the foot of the steps, we should only encounter others. The Duca must remember that his tower was built to withstand attack."
"Even so," the Duca snapped back, "it must be attacked! I--"
But then he fell silent, having been made so by the sounds of dissension which arose amongst his caciques. Kirby, laughing to himself, turned away from his listening post, and tip-toed up the steps.
After he had closed and bolted behind him three of the bronze portals so feared by the caciques, he turned to the entrance of the chamber in which he had left Naida and the others. Here all was silent, and he found his friends grouped about a couch on which lay Elana. Feeling the solemnity of the moment, he would have taken his place quietly amongst the mourners.
Naida, however, came to him at once, and in a low voice asked for news from the amphitheatre, and when Kirby answered that the caciques were unanimously in favor of leaving them alone until they starved, she exclaimed:
"Oh, then it is good news!"
After that, however, a shadow of doubt flickered in her great eyes.
"And yet, is it? It means temporary immunity, of coarse. But--starvation!"
Kirby assured her with a grin.
"If we had to starve we might worry. But there is more food here than the Duca thinks. Look!"
* * * * *
From a bulging pocket of his tunic he fished a strip of the roots on which he had subsisted so comfortably. Naida's eyes widened, and several of the girls gave low cries.
"Yes," Naida exclaimed, "but such food! Why--why, do you know what you are offering us? Why, this is the sacred Peyote! Only the Duca eats it, and, at rare intervals, his priests."
Kirby was really startled now.
"But surely you and the others have taken quantities of the stuff away from the Valley of the Geyser. Do you mean--"
"Because we gathered the Peyote does not mean that we have ever tasted it. We gather it for the Duca. To taste would be complete, utter sacrilege. Have you been eating it?"
Inwardly Kirby was chuckling at this added proof of the buncumbe with which the Duca--and other Ducas--had fooled all.
"Of course I've been eating the Peyote."
"And--and nothing has happened to you?" Naida asked.
"Hardly. I certainly haven't been blasted by the Lords of the Sun and Moon, or the Serpent either!"
Naida and all the others were silent. The conflict between their reverence for the food and their clear desire to eat it, now that it was become the food of their
leader, was pathetic.
Kirby put one of the strips in Naida's hand.
"Why not?" he asked. "We have bested the Duca in fair fight. We have seized his tower. Why not eat his food?"
As he had hoped it would, the suggestion at last settled the matter. A moment later, as Naida nibbled her first bite, she smiled.
"Why, it--it's good!"
With the question of provisions settled at least for a time, Kirby's next thought was of the tower. The present lull of peace seemed made for exploration.
"Come along," he said to Naida, "we've plenty to do," and then, when he explained, they set out, accompanied by Nini, a cousin of Naida's, and Ivana, a younger sister.
All of the others remained with little Elana.
* * * * *
While they climbed spiral stairs, Naida explained that the chamber they had just left was used by the Duca as a place in which he prayed before and after contacts with caciques or subjects. A sort of halfway station between earth and heaven, as it were, where the Duca might be purged of any sullying influence gained from human relationships.
At thought of the rank, egotistical hypocrisy implied by the story, Kirby smiled grimly. Then they came to a new door, heavier than that which barricaded the prayer chamber. Unlocked, the thing swung ponderously at Kirby's push, and with the three girls pressing close beside him, he entered--and stopped.
"Naida!" he gasped.
"Oh, oh!" she cried, and while Nini and Ivana gasped, she clapped her hands in an instinctive, feminine reaction of joy. "But there are things here which I believe none but the Ducas of our race have ever seen! Oh! Why, the sacred girdle is as nothing compared to this display!"
By "display" she meant a treasure which took Kirby's breath away, which made his heart act queerly.
The walls of the chamber were fashioned of polished blocks of obsidion on which stood out in heavy bas-relief a maze of decorative figures fashioned of pure, beaten gold--the same kind of gold which had gone into the making of the cylinder of gold. With his first glance at the gorgeously wrought motifs of Feathered Serpent and Sun and Moon symbols, Kirby knew to a certainty whence the golden cylinder had come originally.
But even the gold--literally tons of it there must have been--was nothing compared to the gems.
* * * * *
They were spread out in blinding array upon a great table in the center of the room. There were pearls as big as turkey eggs and whiter, softer than the light of a June morning growing in the East. There were rubies. One amongst the many was the size of a baseball and glowed like the heart of a red star. The least of the two or three hundred gems would have outclassed the greatest treasures of the Crown jewels of England and Russia combined.
Most overwhelming of all, however, was the jewel which rested against a square of black cloth all its own in the center of the table. While his heart still acted queerly, while Naida, Nini, and Ivana hung back, delighted, but still too bewildered to move, Kirby advanced and took gingerly in his hands a single white diamond about eighteen inches long, and almost as wide and deep as it was long.
The thing was carved with exquisite cunning to a likeness of the living head of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent.
Kirby dared not guess how many pounds the carven hunk of flashing, blue-white carbon weighed. He knew only that like it there was no other diamond in the world, and that the thing was real. Naida and the two girls were silent now, and suddenly Kirby realized that to their awe of the gem was added awe of deepest religious nature. Slowly he put the diamond head of the Serpent back upon its square of cloth.
"We--we had heard that this thing existed," Naida said presently, voice hushed, "but no one except the holy men of our race has ever beheld it."
"But, what is it?" Kirby asked. "Whence came it?"
However, when Naida would have answered, he interrupted.
"But wait! Tell me as we go. We could stay here for the rest of our lives without much trouble, but we've got to cover the rest of the tower and get back to the others."
* * * * *
It was after they had closed the door to the treasure room that Naida told him the story.
"There is not so much to tell," she began. "The diamond itself is so gorgeous that it is hard to talk about. But here is the story. A great many ages ago one of the Ducas of our race found the diamond, decided to carve it into a perfect likeness of the head of the Serpent God. All of the craftsmen of the race helped him and when they were done, they took their image to Quetzalcoatl himself, and showed him what they had done.
"Quetzalcoatl was pleased. So pleased, that he promised all of the wise men that he would cease to prey upon them as he had in the past, and henceforward would take his toll of sacrifice from the ape-men alone. Them he hated and would continue to hate because they worshipped not him but Xlotli.
"And so it came about," Naida went on slowly, looking up at Kirby as they still mounted wide steps to the upper reaches of the tower, "that our people gained immunity from a God which had always before harmed and destroyed them. Our race presently began to build this castle here on the high plateau, and Quetzalcoatl kept his compact with them. He still comes out of his chasm at intervals and preys upon the ape-men, but no one of our race has seen him for thousands of years, and he has always let us alone. And there is the whole myth and explanation of why the great diamond is revered among us as a holy of holies."
* * * * *
They had mounted to a new door which Kirby guessed might give entrance to the Duca's living quarters. But he was in no mood to open it at once.
"Wait a minute," he said as they all paused. "You say that, although none of your race has seen Quetzalcoatl since the diamond head was carved, he still comes out of his chasm and makes trouble for the ape-men. Just what does that mean?"
"Why--" Naida looked at him wonderingly. "I mean what I have said. The Serpent comes out of his chasm and--"
"What chasm?" Kirby asked sharply.
"Why, the one we crossed this morning. It extends to the far reaches of our country, beyond the Rorroh forest, where the ape-men dwell but which our people never visit. It is in that distant part of the chasm that the Serpent dwells."
"But--but--Oh, good Lord!" Kirby whistled softly. "Naida, do you mean to tell me that Quetzalcoatl was not simply a mythical monster, but an actual, living serpent which is alive now?"
Naida and the others shrugged.
"Why not?" she answered. "Sometimes we have captured a few ape-men, and they tell us stories of how Quetzalcoatl kills them. They say he is very much alive."
"But," Kirby mumbled in increasing wonder, "is this living creature the same which your ancestors worshipped first as long ago, perhaps, as a million years?"
"That," Naida answered unhesitatingly, "I'm not sure of. Our caciques believe that the Serpent, although it lives longer than any other sentient thing, finally dies and is succeeded by a new Serpent which is reproduced by itself, within its own body."
So overwhelming did Kirby find this unexpected sequel to their discovery of the great diamond head, so staggered was he by the fact that Quetzalcoatl, of Aztecan myth, might exist as a sentient creature here in this cavern world, that he had little heart left for exploring other wonders.
* * * * *
Nevertheless, he presently pushed open the new door before which they had paused, and behind it found, as he had expected, the Duca's living quarters.
These were as severe as the jewel chamber had been gorgeous. A thin pallet spread upon a frame of wood formed the bed, and beside it stood a single stiff chair. That was all. The walls of glistening obsidion were bare.
There was, however, a door in one circular wall, and as Kirby flung this open, his previous disappointment changed to delight. For shelves along the walls of the small chamber held roll after roll of parchment covered with script. And in one corner lay six undamaged, almost new Mannlichers and several hundred rounds of ammunition!
"Naida," he exclaimed, "do you know what tho
se are?"
"I suppose that they are weapons of the sort you used against the ape-men this morning?"
Kirby grinned.
"They are the same kind I used, and then some. With these weapons we can do what we never could with the smaller one. How did they get here?"
"They came when I was much younger," Naida answered with a shade of sadness in her voice. "The men who had them penetrated the Valley of the Geyser, coming by a different route from the one you followed. When the Duca learned they were there, he sent such men of the race as were still able to fight to kill them. That order of the Duca's was one of the first things to turn me against him. The men were not harming us, and they should have been permitted to go away. But the Duca insisted that they be killed, and in the fight were lost eight of our youngest and strongest men."
* * * * *
Kirby stooped to inspect the rifles.
"Has no one learned to use these weapons?"
"No," Naida answered. "The Duca kept them for himself."
"We think," put in Ivana, "that he hoped to learn to use them, and was afraid for us to have the knowledge."
Kirby filled one of the magazines, and felt the heft of the gun with pleasure.
"Very well," he said. "It looks to me as though your time to learn the art of shooting has come at last. Come, I think we had better be getting back downstairs."
Kirby took three guns himself, and with the others lugging the rest, they started back. The parchment rolls, he decided, must be left for examination later on.
They were all elated when they rejoined the girls in the prayer chamber, and high spirits were still further increased by the report, promptly given, that all had remained quiet in the amphitheatre. Save only for the presence of Elana, radiant and calm in death, the give and take of questions would have been accompanied by actual gaiety.
But the time of peace did not last much longer. While Naida was in the midst of answering incessant questions about the wonders of the jewel chamber, Kirby heard a sound from below, and suddenly went over to the downward-winding steps.
"Listen," he called sharply back to the others.