Dark Resurrection (6 page)

At blasterpoint, Ryan crossed the footbridge and passed through the iron gate, which opened onto a narrow, dank, stone corridor. The passage was lit by a string of bare, dim bulbs draped along the ridge of the ceiling. Ryan guessed the walls were at least five or six feet thick—thick enough to stop a sixteenth-century cannonball.

From behind came the clanks of chains and the sounds of boots scraping on the limestone floor; the other slaves were being hurried along by the Matachìn.

When Ryan, High Pile and their escort exited the corridor’s far end, they stepped out into the corner of a huge courtyard. Harsh light from the battlements illuminated the long colonnades on either side. On the left, the structure was faced with red brick; on the right it was naked limestone. Through the room-size arches on that side, Ryan could see the exterior wall and the gated entrance to the fort’s dock. The three masts of a large sailing ship were visible above it. Stretching out before them was a grassy sward. A two-story building blocked the far end, its rows of tall windows overlooking the courtyard.

Immense, sculpted stone heads of the various Atapuls guarded the colonnades’ entrances, ten heads to a side, glaring across the sward at one another. As Ryan walked on, he saw evidence of other recent human sacrifices. Fist-size gobbets
of blackening flesh lay on the ground at the base of each of the idols.

Excised hearts. Twenty of them in all.

Along the left-hand wall were the rest of the remains, torsos in one heap, heads in another.

It smelled like a charnel house, and there wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the death stench inside the compound.

A group of eight men awaited them in front of the building at the end of the courtyard. Seven were robed and head-dressed priests, led by none other than the hairless spider himself. Ryan glanced up at the battlements on either side, three stories above. They were lined with red sashes. Close to three hundred of the sec men, he reckoned. All armed. All looked down at the spectacle.

The pirate commander advanced the last twenty feet by himself. Ignoring the priests, he knelt in front of the eighth man, who apparently outranked them all.

At first Ryan thought the guy was wearing an elaborate mask over his face, then he realized it
was
his face.

The one-eyed warrior had seen plenty of disfigurements in Deathlands. Some were accidental; some were battle scars like his own; some were hard punishment meted out for crimes; some were purely decorative. This one was in a league of its own.

A living fright mask.

The corners of the man’s mouth had been surgically extended deep into his cheeks, and the lips excised top and bottom, this to reveal inch-and-a-half-long fangs of gold where his canine teeth had once been. It gave him a permanent, awful, stylized grin, like the Atapul heads. Evenly spaced welts of purple, scarified tissue bridged his nose and
cheeks, making them look corrugated, like a boar’s snout. Unlike the Atapul representations, his tongue wasn’t pointed or a foot long. His high-piled dreads were caged in a ceremonial headdress. The breastplate of his gilded battle armor was spattered with drops of fresh blood.

At a hand signal from the pirate captain, the Matachìn pushed Ryan forward, then kicked him behind the knees to make him kneel before their headman’s headman.

Fright Mask addressed the audience of pirates, priests, red sashes and prisoners in a booming voice, punctuated by punches thrown at the night sky. Ryan couldn’t understand a word of it, but it drew rounds of cheers from the red sashes.

He glanced back at Krysty and the others. They stood helpless, outnumbered, awaiting whatever fate this jabbering asshole had in mind.

Fright Mask shouted something down at him to get his attention.

Ryan squinted up at the hellish mask of flesh. “Speak English, fuckhead,” he snarled back.

The bossman called out impatiently to the rest of the gathered slaves. Ryan thought he caught the now-familiar word “Shi-ball-an-kay.”

Doc shouted something back in Spanish and was immediately dragged from line and forced to his knees beside Ryan.

“So here we are,” Doc said with resignation.

Fright Mask yelled something in Doc’s face. As he did so, saliva spilled from the corners of his vast, carved mouth, gooey, yo-yoing strands drooling onto his gilded battle armor.

“This strikingly handsome fellow wants to make certain you know that he’s a high muckety-muck,” Doc loosely translated.
“Governor of the city-state of Veracruz. His name’s al Modo, Generalissimo al Modo.”

Fright Mask yelled some more, this time at considerable length.

“Apparently,” Doc continued during a pause in the tirade, “the governor-general, here, is of the firm opinion that your capture and that of someone he calls Hunahpu, represents the turning point in a war waged by the Lords of Death since the day of creation, itself.”

“How worried should I be?”

“Very worried,” Doc said. “As should the rest of us. The governor says you will be tried by a duly assembled religious tribunal tomorrow and then executed pursuant to holy writ before the following dawn. What your supposed crimes are, he did not elaborate.”

Ryan glowered at the priests he presumed would be sitting in final judgment on him. “Does it really matter?”

“Perhaps not,” Doc said. The time-traveler stared him in the eye, his haggard face full of anguish and sorrow. “You and I have come an awful long way to take our leaves in a place such as this,” he said, “with our hands and feet bound, and our weapons out of reach.”

“Doc, no matter how bad it looks, this isn’t over yet,” Ryan said. “Don’t give up. Don’t let the others give up, either.”

As Doc was dragged away, he called out to Ryan. “I pray we meet again, my dear friend, if not in the here and now, then somewhere beyond this fucking vale of tears.”

“Remember the islander boy,” Ryan called to him. “Remember Garwood Reed.”

Something slammed into his left temple so hard that it made him see stars. He looked up at Fright Mask, who showed
him a balled, metal-gauntleted fist. Ryan was grateful for the blow, which allowed him to focus his anger.

“Unchain me for a minute,” Ryan told his captor, “and I’ll widen that smile all the way to the back of your head.”

The governor-general didn’t understand the threat, and so ignored it. He gestured to the pirates, who pulled Ryan to his feet and hauled him off to one side.

Fright Mask had other, more pressing business to attend to. He snapped his gauntleted fingers twice in High Pile’s direction.

As the Matachìn commander took a small, dog-eared notebook from inside his armor, the priests started making rhythmic scraping sounds, steel on whetstones. They were touching up the edges on their ceremonial daggers.

High Pile walked over to the line of slaves. Pausing in front of the first man, who was naked to the waist, his back and shoulders blistered and peeling from the sun and the lash, the captain referred to a page in his little book and made a check mark with a tiny stub of a pencil. When he nodded, the crewmen unhooked the captive from those waiting behind him. Before the poor bastard could make a break for it, the pirates grabbed him under the armpits and rushed him toward Fright Mask and the waiting priests.

Though the slave screamed and fought, and tried to dig in his heels, it was to no avail. The Matachìn carried him bodily the last fifteen feet, then flung him to his knees in front of the men in robes. One of the pirates grabbed the prisoner from behind by a hank of hair and pulled his head back; another held his cuffed hands out of the way. A priest stepped forward and expertly dispatched him with a backhanded knife slash across the exposed throat. The slave made a gurgling sound as blood sheeted down his bare chest. After a moment the
pirates let their victim slump onto his back. Kneeling, the priest plundered the still-heaving chest for its precious clod of muscle.

No sooner than the gruesome butcher job was done, a second slave was unhooked and bum-rushed to a nearly identical death.

As Ryan watched the next man in line dragged off to meet the point of a knife, he saw the priests were taking turns in the chilling duties, so as not to overtax themselves. All but the hairless spider, who was chanting in a nasal singsong and doing a little shuffle-foot dance behind them. High Pile made another check mark in his little book before consigning a fourth prisoner to the same fate. The courtyard echoed with shrill screams and the cheers of the red sash audience.

Were they going to sacrifice all the slaves? Ryan asked himself. His companions were still a good ways back in the file. For the first time, he saw the possibility that he might actually outlive them, spared from death for another day; and worse, that he would be forced to stand by and watch them all slaughtered.

That was not something he could accept.

He had tested his manacles so many times since their capture that he had worn away the skin of his wrists, but he tested them again, anyway.

Mind working in overdrive, he tried to see a way clear. If he could overwhelm the pair of pirates guarding him, then what? Chill the Matachìn with their own blasters, allowing the slaves to flee? Even if he managed to do that, the only way to get out from under the sights of the red sashes along the battlements was to make it inside the hard cover of the colonnades. But the prisoners were chained together. They’d have
to all pass through the same archway, which meant instead of ten exits to cover, the red sashes would only have one. They could concentrate fire. It would be a turkey shoot.

Escape was impossible against these odds on this terrain, Ryan concluded.

As High Pile advanced down the line of the condemned, the piles of corpses and severed hearts grew. Realizing what was coming, the slaves struggled futilely with their bonds, weeping and begging their captors for mercy.

All but the companions.

Jak, Krysty, Mildred, Doc and J.B. were staring at Ryan. Their fixed, defiant expressions all said the same thing: we’re not going to check out like that. Not like chickens on the chopping block.

The one-eyed warrior nodded in agreement, then he looked away. If they couldn’t escape, they could do the next best thing. They could take out as many of the bastards as possible before they were cut down.

Ryan Cawdor withdrew deep into the core of his being, shutting out the grisly sights and sounds around him. He wasn’t preparing himself to die, he was preparing to fight and chill to his last ounce of strength. To expend it all, here, now. And when that strength was gone, death could nukin’ have him, ready or not. It took only a moment for him to make the attitude shift: it was like a gate swinging open, and when it was done, Ryan felt a sense of freedom and power.

The hairless spider was gathering dripping lumps of muscle in a wicker basket as High Pile stepped up to Jak, who was next in line for sacrifice. Ryan knew the pirates weren’t going to discount the albino because of his size or mutie appearance. Just the opposite. They’d already seen him in action
with a commandeered machete. One of them put a submachine-gun muzzle to the back of Jak’s head before they unfastened his ankle chains from the others.

Ryan planned to make his play the moment the pirates started to rush Jak forward to his doom. When they pulled the albino youth to the side instead, he held back. One by one, High Pile ordered the companions released from the file and moved over to join Jak. They were then rechained together at the ankles. After J.B. was linked to the others, the next slave in line, to his surprise and dismay, got the standard dagger treatment.

The companions glanced at Ryan again, wanting the go signal.

He shook his head. It looked like they weren’t going to be slaughtered along with the rest. It appeared their captors had other plans for them, which changed everything as far as he was concerned.

A pirate approached High Pile with a heavy, blanket-wrapped bundle. The captain ordered the man to untie it and lay it out on the ground at Fright Mask’s boots. When the bundle was opened, Ryan saw it held his scoped Steyr longblaster, J.B.’s scattergun and the rest of their weapons.

Trophies of conquest.

Or mebbe objects of ridicule.

Fright Mask got a big laugh over the LeMat. After inspecting it closely, he held Doc’s black-powder blaster by the barrels and swung its butt like a hammer head into his palm—as if pounding nails was all it was good for. He tossed the antique pistol back onto the blanket, which the pirate rolled up and retied.

High Pile waved the blaster-bearer ahead of him, through
a white stone archway toward the dock and sailing ship beyond. Surrounded by Matachìn, Krysty, Jak, Mildred, Doc and J.B. were then shoved in that direction. They looked back over their shoulders at Ryan one last time, still awaiting his signal for them to act.

He shook his head. A final emphatic no.

It was also a goodbye.

The companions disappeared from sight.

Ryan had no clue where they were being taken or why. But whatever fate held in store for the others, the odds had to be better than what they faced here. If they still had a chance to survive, they had to leave him behind and take it.

The sacrificial chilling of the galley slaves continued as his pirate escort spun him the opposite way and forced him to walk under the red brick colonnade. They followed a dimly lit passage that led through the fort’s exterior wall, and out the door of a cylindrical guardpost.