by Alex Archer
On the heels of that realization came another. The voice she was hearing was that of Dr. Knowles, and if she was hearing him correctly, he was currently pleading with the king for their lives.
Something to her left caught her attention. She focused and saw a male Incan warrior lying on a mat similar to the one she was on. His arms were crossed over his chest and his eyes were closed.
He looked as if he was sleeping.
Except that his chest was still.
Puzzled, knowing that there was something wrong with her thought processes, that she was not connecting the dots properly or with her usual speed, Annja tried to stand, only to be overcome by a wave of dizziness. She sat back down and waited until the room stopped spinning around her and then slid onto her hands and knees instead.
She crawled toward the sleeping man.
It was less than two yards, but it seemed to take forever.
With each movement forward her thoughts seemed to grow clearer. She started to remember recent events—the initial audience with the king, the move to the gold mine, the confrontation with Claire and the others. Even the blow from Marcos that had rendered her unconscious. By the time she reached the man on the mat before her, her thoughts had returned to their usual order and she knew who she would find lying there.
Cuzco.
She was right. The Incan prince lay unmoving on the mat and she didn’t need to touch his cold flesh to know that he was dead. The bullet hole in the center of his forehead confirmed what she already knew.
When his usefulness had run out, Claire, or one of her mercenaries, had killed him.
Suddenly it was too much.
Tears began to pour down her face, crossing her cheeks to fall wetly on the body in front of her like raindrops from the sky, and great racking sobs burst up from her chest and fell from her lips. She was unable to stop them and could only let it pour out in a flood.
Dimly, in the back of her mind, she told herself, You’ve got a concussion. Memory loss. Wildly swinging emotions. No ability to think clearly. All signs of injury due to blunt trauma to the head. Hang in there and you should balance out again.
Gradually, she became aware that the room around her had grown silent. She could feel the eyes of others staring at her back, but she couldn’t seem to take her gaze away from Cuzco’s face and that damning bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
It was her fault, she realized. If she hadn’t agreed to lead Claire and the others here, they might never have found it on their own. She was to blame and she loathed herself for it.
* * *
EASY, NOW, THAT VOICE in her head warned. Remember that you’ve got a concussion...
Tears slipped down her cheeks.
Someone was kneeling next to her and Annja turned slowly to find the dark-haired interpreter watching her from a foot or so away.
“Why do you weep?”
The question caught Annja by surprise and she answered with the first thing that came to mind.
“Because it is my fault.”
The interpreter’s face was carefully blank as she said, “What is your fault?”
Annja gestured toward Cuzco’s body. “This. His death. Everything.”
“Did you pull the—” she struggled with the proper term and, not finding it, was forced to change the sentence “—shoot the weapon that did this?”
Annja shook her head. “No, but I guided them here in the first place. I led them to the island. Without me, they never would have found the dig site. Without me they never would have encountered you. And he would still be alive!”
Annja’s voice rose as she continued to talk and she was practically shouting by the time she finished.
The interpreter stared at her and then did something entirely unexpected. She bent over and kissed Cuzco’s lips.
In that moment Annja understood.
The interpreter was more than just an interpreter. She was the king’s wife, the queen, and the man on the mat in front of her was her son, the king’s heir.
And Annja had just admitted to being responsible for his death.
The queen straightened and then without warning viciously slapped Annja across the face.
The blow sent Annja’s head to reeling again.
Dimly she heard the queen shouting something across the room, but she was too busy trying to understand what was going on.
“Annja! Are you all right?”
Dr. Knowles was bending over her, his face full of concern. It was his fear more than anything else that brought clarity back to her.
“Yes,” she said, weakly at first and then with more strength. “Yes, I’m all right.”
Knowles gently helped her to her feet, but when Annja looked up she found that they were surrounded by guards with very angry looks on their faces. She was convinced the guards would have torn her and Richard limb from limb if the king wasn’t in the room.
Instead, they forced them to kneel in front of the dais, where the king waited, the queen at his side.
The king glowered at them, then tapped his staff of office three times, bringing silence to the room.
Whatever’s next is going to be official, Annja thought, and indeed she was correct.
It was official.
An official death sentence, in fact.
The king spoke and the queen translated. “Since you have admitted your responsibility in the death of my son, Quehuar Tupac, your blood is forfeit in exchange for his own. You shall serve him as a concubine in the afterlife. Sentence to be carried out immediately. I, Inca Tupac, have spoken.”
The guards stepped forward, intent on dragging her outside and carrying out the sentence, but Annja had other plans. Her thoughts were back in order and she knew she had only one option available to her, one thing that might allow her to live longer than the next five minutes, and that was a card she was eager to play.
“I demand a blood debt,” she called out. And then again, louder this time, “I demand a blood debt!”
For the second time that day the room went silent.
The queen stared at her and said, “She is not one of us. She has no right! Carry out the sentence!”
The guards closed in. Annja was about to call her sword and go down fighting rather than be taken for execution when the king’s voice boomed out.
The guards stopped, looked back toward the throne. The king and queen stood there, arguing vehemently. After several tense minutes the queen bowed her head in acquiescence and accepted whatever it was the king had demanded.
“The prisoner will rise and speak,” she said, refusing to look at Annja.
Annja didn’t care; she’d gotten a chance to speak and that was all she cared about right now. She rose to her feet, shook off the hands of her guards and then stepped forward to face the king.
“The same woman who killed your son killed my people, as well. My life is forfeit to the king to repay the blood debt owed him for his son, but my blood debt is just as valid and must be paid before sentence is carried out. I demand the right to track this killer and return her to justice to satisfy the debt owed to me.”
It was a long shot. Annja knew that. It had been some time since she’d done a focused study on Incan customs and religious beliefs. If she was incorrect about any of the elements she’d just strung together, she’d find out soon enough.
At last, the king nodded.
She had won a reprieve for herself, only a temporary one. But that wasn’t all the king had to say.
Speaking through the translator once more, the king said, “You know our customs. You respect our laws. You weep for my son as if he were your own. And yet...and yet you do not speak our language and it is on you that this killer is in our midst. I do not understand you. Nor do I trust you.”
He paused, considering. “You have four days to track this killer and return her to this place to face justice. If you succeed, your blood debt will have been repaid.
“If you do not succeed, if you fail to return
, know that I will slaughter each and every one of the prisoners left in my care, starting with this one.”
The interpreter pointed at Dr. Knowles.
He would be the Incas’ hostage until Annja returned.
Great. No pressure.
35
In the company of the Inca
Cocos Island
Annja knew she had her work cut out for her. A quick check in with Knowles before they led him away let her know that she’d been unconscious for a good three hours, maybe longer. Claire and her murderous bodyguards had that much of a lead. Never mind that they weren’t traveling with a concussed head to slow them down.
Thankfully, the Inca had one more trick up their sleeves. When she had assembled a pack full of food and water and prepared herself for the journey, two Incan warriors showed up, accompanied by the queen.
“Will they return to their boat?” she asked.
Annja thought so and said as much.
“If you can beat them to the boat will you be able to stop them?”
“Without a doubt,” Annja replied.
The queen considered this and then said something to the two men with her in their own tongue. After they replied, the queen said, “These two men will escort you on a path through the mountain. It should cut your travel time in half, if you keep up with the pace they set. Do so and you should beat them to your destination.”
Annja liked the sound of that but something didn’t seem right. “Why are you helping me?” she asked.
“Because I want the woman who killed my son, and you are my best chance at success.”
“You trust me to deliver justice for your son?”
The queen smiled, but it was a cold and lifeless smile. “Of course not,” she said to Annja. “But I trust that you will do your utmost to save the lives of your companions. Especially when you know that I will torture them mercilessly if you do not return as promised.”
Steel entered Annja’s expression, to clash with the iron in the queen’s.
“I will be back,” she told her. “If a single hair is harmed on any of their heads before I do...”
She left the last bit of it unsaid, confident that the queen had gotten the message.
Satisfied that they both understood each other, the queen took her leave and left Annja with her new guides.
As it turned out, neither of them spoke English. She decided that this would make things difficult but not impossible; she’d worked with non-English-speaking guides before and in this case she had the advantage of having been over the territory once before. At some point, things should start to look familiar.
Her biggest concern was the injury to her head. She’d had a chance to take a look at it since her audience with the king and one thing was certain—she was going to need some medical attention as soon as she got back to the mainland. There was no doubt that she had a concussion—the dizziness, nausea and general difficulty remembering things were proof enough of that—but she was worried she might have a fractured skull, or worse. She wouldn’t feel comfortable until she had it checked out.
Nothing to be done about it now. She’d deal with any problems if and when they arose.
She indicated with hand motions that she was ready and her two guides took off at a solid trot. Annja fell in line and followed suit. They took her across the city to the far wall of the cavern, close to where they had entered the first time. Instead of taking the switchbacks up the main wall to the opening high above, the guides stuck to the ground floor, taking an underground tunnel that led them deeper under the side of the mountain.
At any other time she would have been fascinated by the route her guides took her through. It was clear they had been this way before; all of the tunnels and passageways looked the same to her but they had no trouble picking out which branch or turn they should take at any time during their march. Their footfalls were the only sound they made as they moved, and after a while Annja began to feel as if she was following ghosts, so lightly and quietly did they move. Her own steps sounded clunky and loud in comparison.
Time seemed to blur and blend together as they moved through that underground realm. Tunnel after tunnel, chamber after chamber, they ran on. They only stopped for water breaks on rare occasions and even then they were short. The guides had been given orders to get Annja to Chatham Bay as quickly as possible and they had no intentions of letting their queen down.
At one point they came to a section where the tunnel had collapsed and a pile of debris blocked their way forward. After a brief discussion between her guides, Annja was led into a narrower tunnel that she was told should take them around the blockage. The same uneasiness she’d experienced while entering Knowles’s dig site a few days ago came over her thanks to the closeness of the walls and ceiling. She just kept telling herself to breathe easy and that got her through.
After descending for quite some time, they began heading back upward, which Annja took to be a good sign. Another long stretch of climbing, and finally Annja could see the sun. Moments later they emerged into the sunlight.
Annja had been on her feet for almost thirty-six hours by the time they emerged from the tunnels. The exit from the cave deposited her on a promontory in the jungle that was part of a north-south ridgeline a few miles away from Chatham Bay. If she’d had a pair of binoculars, she might have been able to make out the Pride anchored in the bay, but it was just too far away without them.
She turned to thank her guides and found herself alone, the two Incan warriors having already disappeared back into the tunnels, no doubt on their way home.
If only her job were that easy. Unfortunately, the hard part was still to come.
She sat down and had some water and a couple of pieces of fruit, wanting some energy for the final leg of the trip. If she could reach the bay before the sun set, she’d be in a good position to deal with the others come morning.
When she was finished, she slipped her pack over her shoulders and headed off down the slope in front of her.
She hadn’t gone far before she began to run into difficulties.
She was moving through virgin jungle, so her speed was reduced substantially from her travel through the tunnels. What she’d thought would only take a few hours quickly became a half day or more, and Annja wasn’t certain that she had that much time. If Claire beat her to the boat...
Annja pushed on.
And on.
And on.
As the sun began to go down in the later afternoon, Annja was barely able to keep her eyes open. One wrong step and she’d stumble off the ledge and break her neck on an outcropping of rock.
She needed to rest.
She spent a few minutes hunting about to find a suitable tree that she could climb into with limited energy expenditure and then lashed herself to the branch with a short piece of rope to keep from falling off in the middle of the night.
The knot on the rope was barely tied before her eyes fluttered shut and she slept.
* * *
ANNJA AWOKE TO THE FEELING of being in a bed with clean sheets tucked in tightly on either side. When she tried to move her arms and legs, she found she couldn’t do so; she was strapped in as securely as if she were in a straitjacket.
Wait a minute. Strapped in? Straitjacket?
Her eyes snapped open.
A massive snake encircled her, its gold-black scales gleaming wetly in the morning dew.
Anaconda!
The snake had wrapped itself multiple times around her body, from about shin level to just below her neck. Its head slithered back and forth about a foot away from her own, its tongue flicking out repeatedly as if to test the air. Annja had the sense that it was watching her, waiting for that sign of weakness to show that the prey was all but finished.
The coils tightened as the snake pulled its body forward, exerting more crushing force against her own. Some of her air left her in a bit of a rush. Annja knew that all the snake needed to do was tighten itself up a little bit more
and she wouldn’t have any strength left to fight it off.
The pressure against her body was also starting to cause her head to ache; what started as a low-grade pain would soon spread into a migraine that would be just as debilitating as the coils around her flesh. She needed to get free and she needed to do it quickly.
One of her hands was free. The other was trapped beneath the thick coils of the snake’s body. The snake was as wide around as her thigh and had to be at least fifteen feet long. There was no chance she was just going to be able to grab this thing with her free hand and pull it off.
No, more extreme measures were required.
Annja willed her sword into her hand and nearly sighed with relief when it appeared there without a problem. The broadsword was bulky and not all that maneuverable in a tight space, but it was razor sharp and should do the job nicely.
The tricky part was going to be right after she made the first cut. The snake would instinctively tighten up and might even strike at her with its teeth. Short of lopping off its head with a single blow, she was going to have to deal with both attacks at the same time. If she didn’t finish the job quickly after that, she was going to be in serious trouble. Nothing to be done for it, though; she had to get free and this was the only method of doing so.
Annja took a deep breath, kept her eyes on the snake’s head and then struck with the sword, slashing it against one of the snake’s many coils.
The snake’s body parted like butter, the sword driving deep into its flesh.
The snake struck in response to the pain, but thankfully, Annja had been waiting for it to do that very thing and she was able to jerk her head out of the way in the last second before the teeth could sink into her face.
It recoiled, preparing to strike again, but so was Annja. Her sword flashed a second time and this time it cut clean through the coil, severing a section from the lower half of its body.
Instantly she could breathe easier and move better.
The great beast hissed in anger and lunged.