“I’m sorry,” Preacher said honestly. “I’m afraid that hombre’s crossed the divide.”
“Damnation. That bloodthirsty scoundrel Tenoch ripped his heart from his chest while it was still beating, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know who Tenoch is, but the poor fella had his heart ripped out, that’s for sure.”
“Tenoch is their war chief and high priest,” Audie explained. “A tall, muscular man. Rather handsome in an arrogant way, I suppose you could say. Usually has a harness with eagle feathers attached to it strapped to his back.”
“That’s him,” Preacher agreed. “I’ve met him. Fought him a couple times, actually. Don’t like him one little bit.”
“I don’t blame you. He’s a monster. He and Toltecatl, the medicine man who’s always scurrying along after him. A repulsive little toad.”
“Can’t argue with you there.” Preacher reached up and brushed his fingers against some thick strands of rope. “They’ve really got you strung up, don’t they?”
“Yes, the ropes are tied to iron rings set into the wall. I’m just glad they don’t seem to have any chains. That would make freeing us more difficult.”
“It sure would,” Preacher said as he drew his knife. “I’ll have you cut loose in just a minute. All of you. Then we’ll fight our way outta here if we have to.”
“I’m afraid not all of us will be able to mount much of a struggle. Some of the prisoners have been here for quite some time, and they don’t feed us a great deal.” Audie’s voice took on a wry tone as he added, “No point in fattening us up just to carve our hearts out, I suppose.”
Preacher took hold of the ropes binding his friend’s wrists and began sawing on them. Made of braided plant fibers, they were stubbornly tough, but the knife’s keen edge gradually parted all of them.
Audie’s arms dropped. He moaned a little, probably from relief as muscles cramped from being stuck in that awkward position finally eased.
As Preacher moved over to locate Nighthawk and cut him loose, he heard a hiss from the doorway.
“Preacher!” Boone Halliday called quietly. “Somebody’s coming!”
Preacher could see the door’s outline, since it was little lighter outside than it was in the prison. He hurried over to it and told Boone, “Come in here and we’ll pull the door up. Maybe whoever it is won’t notice the bar ain’t on it. If they do and they start to bar the thing, we’ll have bust out and fight. If they bar that door, we’ll be trapped in here same as these other fellas.”
Audie came up behind him. “Give me your knife, Preacher. I’ll see if I can cut some of the other prisoners loose.”
Preacher handed over the knife, then he and Boone took hold of the door and pulled it inward, leaving just a small gap. Since it was dark outside, someone passing by in the street might not notice that it wasn’t completely closed. The danger lay in them seeing the bar sitting to one side and realizing that something was amiss.
They heard men talking in loud, boisterous voices.
They sounded drunk, Preacher thought, and he wondered if they had some sort of home-brewed firewater they imbibed in. He hoped so. If they had been drinking they would be less likely to notice anything different about the jail entrance.
The men were right outside in the street. Preacher thought they were about to pass on by, when one of the prisoners bawled, “Hey! Help! Hey, out there! Intruders!”
“Talbot, you idiot!” Audie exclaimed.
Talbot was the prisoner who had begged for his life earlier, promising to do anything if his captors would let him live, Preacher recalled. He must have hoped he could curry favor with them by shouting a warning.
The men outside yelled in alarm. One of them grabbed the door and started to open it. Preacher lowered his shoulder, grated, “Come on!” at Boone, and rammed the door open.
The heavy portal crashed against the man just outside and knocked him backwards. Still hopeful of dealing with the threat without rousing the whole city, Preacher left his pistols where they were and yanked out his tomahawk as he bounded into the group of warriors. In the dark, it was impossible to tell how many there were, but he had no trouble finding targets as he slashed back and forth with the tomahawk. Bone crunched under the blows and men toppled backwards.
The sounds of struggle intensified as Boone plunged into the melee, and then a huge figure swept out of the prison, grabbed up one of the warriors, and slung him into the others. Audie had freed Nighthawk, and the big Crow was taking a hand.
Unfortunately, more and more warriors were swarming around the three battlers. The fight swayed back and forth across the cobblestones. Preacher wreaked havoc with his tomahawk, but he realized that he and Boone were going to have to blast their way out with pistols, no matter how much of an uproar it caused. He shifted his ’hawk to his left hand and yanked one of the pistols from behind his belt with his right hand. Before he could bring it to bear, something smashed into the back of his head.
The blow knocked him forward. He tried to keep his balance, but another war club struck him in the small of the back, and he fell to his knees. His movements were more awkward because his head was spinning, but he managed to bring the pistol up, cock it, and fire just as one of the warriors was about to plunge a spear into him. The ball caught the man in the throat and drove him backwards as blood fountained darkly from the wound.
Boone crashed to the street beside Preacher, who couldn’t tell if the young trapper was alive or dead. A few yards away, Nighthawk was still struggling, but several men had hold of him and were trying to force him off his feet. More warriors piled on until Preacher couldn’t see the Crow anymore.
Preacher tried to get to his feet, but there were too many men around him. He lashed out with the tomahawk and the empty pistol. A war club caught him on the right forearm and made him drop the pistol. Two more men grabbed his left arm and trapped it against his side so he couldn’t swing the ’hawk anymore. Someone hooked his legs and yanked them out from under him. Clubs and feet pounded against him as he fell.
He felt the rough cobblestones underneath him as his attackers continued to batter him, but those brutal blows stopped as a high, clear voice shouted orders in that unknown tongue.
Strong hands still pinned him to the ground, but he was able to lift his head and look up. His eyes narrowed against the glare as someone ran up carrying a torch. A figure unlike anything he had ever seen—or expected to see—strode into view.
The woman was tall, lithe, golden-skinned in the torchlight. Her fine-boned features were undeniably beautiful. Her long, straight hair was the color of midnight and hung over her shoulders and down her back. She wore a large, fanlike headdress made of green feathers and a long necklace of what appeared to be round plates of beaten gold. The necklace hung down far enough to cover her breasts, for the most part. Her only other garments were a green sash tied around her waist from which a long loincloth was draped. It reached to her ankles but was narrow enough to leave her thighs and calves bare, especially as she strode forward. A flint knife hung from a strap attached to the sash and bumped against her skin as she walked.
She was one of the loveliest women Preacher had ever seen, but as she stopped and looked down at him, he saw no warmth in her gray eyes. They were cold as a field of ice. There was no mercy in her.
She proved that a moment later by snapping a command, and a war club in the hands of a warrior lashed out and crashed against Preacher’s head. He went spinning down into a well of darkness and knew nothing more.
CHAPTER 19
Preacher had been knocked out many times over the years. His skull was thick and solid and when he woke up he was usually clear-headed, although his head usually ached from being clouted. He never worried that such blows would scramble his brain.
But as consciousness returned to him and memories of what had happened began to seep into his thoughts, he had to wonder if he had finally gone loco.
He remembered fighting strange Indians
with war clubs and spears, warriors unlike any tribe he had ever encountered. The battle had taken place in a hidden, isolated valley, in a city the likes of which he had never seen, either.
And there was the woman . . . a stunning, breathtaking beauty in a scandalously skimpy outfit. Surely he had imagined her. She couldn’t have been real....
Preacher became aware that his arms were pulled above his head and held in place by ropes bound around his wrists. His feet barely reached the stone floor, so the strain on his arms and shoulders was quite painful. His body was lean and wolf-like, but it wasn’t exactly lightweight. Strung up like he was, it felt like his arms were about to pop right out of their sockets.
Darkness surrounded him, but when he tipped his head back, he saw stars glittering here and there above him and he realized he was in the prison where Audie, Nighthawk, and the others were being kept. He was seeing the stars through those little ventilation openings.
All of which meant he was a prisoner, too.
He heard harsh breathing, so he knew he wasn’t alone. He said quietly, “Audie? Boone?”
“Thank God!” Boone Halliday exclaimed from somewhere nearby, although Preacher couldn’t see him at all. “You’re still alive, Preacher.”
“Yeah, I reckon,” the mountain man said dryly.
“We were afraid they had killed you, after that lady told them to start whaling away on you again.”
Audie spoke up, somewhere on Preacher’s other side. “That was no lady, my young friend. That was Eztli, the high priestess of these people.”
Preacher said, “You seem to know quite a bit about these folks, Audie. I thought for a second when I woke up that I must’ve dreamed the whole thing, but this crazy shootin’ match is real, ain’t it?”
“All too real,” Audie said. “An entire civilization, if you can call it that, centered around blood and death. As difficult as it may be to believe, Preacher, these people are Aztecs.”
“Aztecs!” Preacher repeated. “That’s it. I’ve been tryin’ to remember the name of the folks you told me about once, a good while ago. How come they ain’t down in Mexico, where they belong? That’s where they come from, ain’t it?”
“That’s right. Are you sure you want to go into all this right now?”
Preacher let out a grim chuckle. “Ain’t got much else to do at the moment. I reckon you fellas are all strung up like I am?”
“Yes, they recaptured all of us before anyone was able to get away.”
“Nighthawk’s all right? Last I saw him, a bunch of those varmints were pilin’ up on him.”
Somewhere in the darkness, the big Crow said, “Umm.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Preacher told him. “It figures it’d take a dozen of ’em to bring you down, old son. Audie, you can go on with your story. How come you know all this?”
“One of the priests who comes here from time to time speaks some English, and he likes to practice it with me. I suspect he learned the language from the trappers who have been brought here over the months since the Great Shaking.”
“You’re talkin’ about the earthquake they had in these parts a while back,” Preacher guessed.
“That’s correct. It was another earthquake sometime in the dim past, at least two hundred years ago, I’d estimate, that sealed this valley away from the rest of the world in the first place, and it took a second earthquake to open a path again.”
“Two hundred years ago?” Boone put in. “How long have these savages been here, anyway?”
“The Aztec empire was at its height four hundred years ago,” Audie answered. “From what I gather, that’s when the ancestors of these people were banished.”
“Banished?” Preacher repeated.
“Yes. They were, ah, too bloodthirsty even for that red-handed empire. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Everything about this mess was hard for Preacher to believe, but he trusted Audie. The little man knew more about more things than anybody Preacher had ever met. He told the former professor, “Go on.”
“After they’d been driven out because of their cruel practices, they came north out of what is now Mexico and traveled through the mountains until they reached this region. How long that journey took them, I have no idea. They may have attempted to settle in other places but been forced to continue their pilgrimage for some reason.”
“Seems likely other folks wouldn’t want ’em around.”
“Yes, doesn’t it? At any rate, they finally found themselves in this valley, where they began to build their city and intermarry with the Indians who lived here. That was a slow process, too, and some of the familial lines kept themselves what they considered pure as much as possible. Of course, that inbreeding resulted from time to time in some less than perfect specimens. Gradually the population came to consist of two groups, those who are of predominantly Aztec lineage and those who are mostly Indian blood. The Aztecs are in charge, though, make no mistake about that. They’re the soldiers, the priests, the leaders of this society. In fact, many of the warriors are also priests, like Tenoch.”
“The fella I tussled with,” Preacher said.
“Yes, he’s the one. Then there’s Eztli.”
“The high priestess you mentioned.”
Audie sighed. “Yes. She and Tenoch are lovers, and she is, I suspect, even more insane than he is. After the earthquake, she’s the one who prodded him to revive the old custom of... human sacrifice.”
“They hadn’t been doing that all along?” Preacher asked.
“No, they prefer to slaughter outsiders. I suppose that’s a wise course when you have a limited population,” Audie added.
Preacher could understand that. “The whole business of cuttin’ out hearts . . . is part of their religion?”
“Most definitely. In the Aztec empire, many of the people who were sacrificed volunteered to be killed in order to honor one of their gods. It was considered a privilege. But Eztli and Tenoch follow Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, and to appease him, the blood of enemies must be shed. They offer up the hearts of those enemies so that he may feast on them.”
It all sounded crazy to Preacher, but having seen the high priest and priestess close up and witnessed the madness in their eyes, he could believe what Audie was saying. “So once that earthquake cracked the cliffs and they could get out of the valley again, they started capturin’ trappers to use as their sacrifices. Some of ’em they brought back here, to keep as prisoners for later, and some of ’em they killed on the spot.”
“That’s correct.”
“Well, they’re not gonna be able to do that anymore. There was an avalanche, and that trail through the cliffs is blocked now.”
Audie was silent for a long moment, then he said, “Preacher, my old friend, I wish you were right. Knowing that their insanity was bottled up again for all time might be worth the fate they have in mind for us, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. I’m sure you saw the pyramid at the other end of the city.”
“That’s what you call that big ol’ buildin’?”
“Yes. The ancient Egyptians built pyramids, too, although they’re somewhat different from the ones constructed by the Aztecs. What they have in common is that they’re tremendous feats of engineering, especially considering the primitive tools and equipment they were forced to use. They know how to work with huge chunks of stone.”
“You’re sayin’ they’ll be able to clear away the debris from that avalanche?” Preacher asked.
“I’m confident that they will. You see, the most valuable tool is something the Aztecs and the Egyptians also had in common. Humanity. The sweat and blood of slaves. I’m afraid that Eztli and Tenoch will work as many of the Indians to death as they have to in order to get what they want.”
Preacher’s voice was tense as he said, “And what’s that, exactly?”
“They want to take over everything west of the Mississippi and establish a new Aztec empire.”
CHAPTER 20
; For a long moment, Preacher didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of any response that would do justice to the statement Audie had just made. It was so outrageous, so unbelievable.
Finally he just said, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard so far, Audie.”
“Perhaps, but the priest I’ve spoken to assures me that it’s a fact.”
“It’ll never happen. The frontier’s too big, and to set up any sort of empire, they’d have to unite all the tribes. They’re too busy fightin’ amongst themselves to ever work together.”
“But what if they did?” Audie persisted. “Right now, the old tribal hatreds that have gone on for hundreds of years are still strong. But white men have been out here for a much shorter time, and already many of the tribes hate us worse than they hate each other. Eztli claims that the sacrifices and rituals will cause Huitzilopochtli, their war god, to grant them so much power they’ll be able to wipe out all the whites between here and the Father of Waters. If anything might cause the other tribes to set their differences aside and align themselves with the Aztecs, that would do it.”
Preacher hated to admit it, but Audie could be right. The more warlike tribes, say, the Blackfeet, had always hated the white trappers, regarding them as unwelcome invaders. Many of the other tribes felt the same way, if not quite so vehemently as the Blackfeet. He could imagine his old enemies throwing in with the Aztecs. Combined, they would be a powerful force. Some of the other tribes would join forces with them, just to avoid being wiped out.
Like a rock rolling downhill, such a movement could pick up momentum until it became an avalanche, destroying anything and anybody unlucky enough to be in its path.
“That’s why Eztli and Tenoch will do whatever is necessary to open up that passage through the cliffs again,” Audie went on. “They need victims for their bloody rituals. I think they believe in what they’re doing, but even if they didn’t, they’re canny enough to know that they have to continue with the sacrifices in order to keep their followers worked up. That blood lust makes the people obedient and pliable.”
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