Trapped On Talonque: (A Sectors SF romance) (33 page)

Lolanta mounted her own, sleek black kemat, and the mixed column of cavalry and foot soldiers moved out. The animal carrying Nate was placed in the middle of the column to foil any attempt at rescue. He made his peace with fate. There was no way Thom could rescue him, not with only one weapon. Nate allowed himself to hope Bithia was safe and wouldn’t risk herself to come after him.

But he didn’t really believe it.

CHAPTER TEN

Nate was dizzy from being carried head down, draped over a kemat like an oversized sack of grain. When the column finally reached their destination at the temple, a laughing guard tipped him headfirst off the kemat. Somersaulting helplessly, Nate slammed onto his back on the hard ground. Blinking to clear his head, Nate found himself at the foot of a massive, crumbling statue, one of a pair guarding the stairs to the top of the temple. Badly weathered and defaced though the idol was, Nate could make out the uniquely horrific features of Huitlani.

One of the guards slashed the ropes at his ankles. Other men hauled him to his feet.

“Climb the sacred stairs under your own power,” said the guard on his left. “We’ve better things to do than carry you.”

This pyramid was smaller than the one at Nochen, but it was a long slog to the top. He couldn’t see much point in resisting, so he climbed as he’d been ordered. Lolanta rushed up the stairs to join him, grabbing his arm to steady herself.

There was something ancient and evil, not quite human, about Lolanta, even before her face had been marked by the radiation. “This place will have to do for tonight’s ceremony,” she said. “We’ve much rebuilding to do, since the shrines in the capital were destroyed by you and your Sleeping Goddess.”
 

She continued climbing the broad flight of easy stairs with him, chatting away the whole time. The guards followed a stair or two behind, keeping a watchful eye on Nate.
 

“The Githholz no doubt are destroying or defiling any other places of our worship their soldiers find,” Lolanta told him at one point with barely suppressed fury.

As if it’s my fault
.
 

“My network of priestesses tell me the enemy advance through the lowlands, welcomed by the peasants, and those fools, the city governors, are doing nothing to work together and fight the enemy. Too concerned with their own holdings to care about the greater sway of the empire we once ruled. Huitlani will gladly drink your blood and eat your heart, warrior, wherever he can get it—old temple, bare field, anyplace properly consecrated with the rituals. Your part in bringing this ruin crashing upon all our heads must be punished. He’ll reward me well for killing you.”

“Your day is done, and so is Huitlani’s. Killing me isn’t going to do anything but temporarily satisfy your twisted urge for revenge.” Nate considered throwing himself backward, taking her with him in a deadly fall from the top of the stairs.

As if reading his mind, Lolanta disengaged her arm from his and stepped away. Instantly, one of the massive temple guards took her place, his grip on Nate implacable. The brief chance, if ever it had existed, to escape death on the altar by a suicidal plunge off the pyramid was gone.

“Huitlani told me what must occur in order for him to re-establish rule over this world.” Lolanta’s voice held contempt for Nate’s predictions. “Your death is the first, essential step in that process. I follow the god’s plan.”

He studied her for a moment. “Why do you find it so necessary to argue with me, then? I think you don’t genuinely believe your own words. I think you’re questioning your faith and whether your god has deserted you forever.”

Lolanta slapped him, rocking him in the hold of the temple guards. “Take him away. Put him in the holding cell until sunset, and then we’ll have his heart.”

“Do my words come too close to the truth for comfort?”
 

She turned, standing so she could gaze over the flatlands far below the plateau.

The guards dragged Nate across the smooth surface at the top of the pyramid, past more crumbling columnar statues of the god and moss-covered altar stones. His captors took him into the small temple at the far side of the sacrificial platform. The temple interior was basically a wide hallway with four small rooms opening off the passage, obviously abandoned for centuries. There were cracks in the roof, permitting shafts of waning sunlight in here and there, illuminating faded, flaking frescoes. Windblown debris and dead leaves crackled under his feet. Scurrying away, small creatures squeaked or hissed. One of the guards kicked futilely at an escaping rodent with a curse. Nate was escorted to the last room on the left and chained to the wall in a dank cell. The guards left him there in the near dark, slamming the rotting wooden door shut with a hollow thud.

A few minutes later, the cell door reopened. Nate tensed, thinking the guards couldn’t be coming for him so soon. It was only late to midafternoon by his reckoning, and the giant sun of this planet made an unusually slow traverse of the sky.

Lolanta entered the cell, unaccompanied. She set the small torch she was carrying into a convenient holder beside the door. Then she stood for a long moment, staring across the width of the cell at Nate, her expression unreadable.

“What the seven hells do you want now?”
Can’t she leave me alone until the appointed hour? Give a man a chance to make peace with his own deity?

“Once in Nochen, in better times, I offered you a bargain, warrior, and you refused it. I’ve come to speak of possibilities again.”

“I don’t know how to make it any more plain. I despise you and everything you stand for. I’d kill you where you stand right now, my word on it, if I wasn’t cuffed to the wall. You and I could never be on the same side of anything. We have no common ground. There are no possibilities where we are concerned.”

“Don’t be so sure, or so rash.” She came closer until she stood in front of him. He tried not to pay attention to the ravaged side of her face, focusing instead on her normal eye. The intense perfume she wore washed over his senses in a cloying wave, overwhelming the stench of the mildew and mold on the surrounding stone walls.

“I’ve considered what you said to me just now on the stairs,” she said. “Most of it was pure blasphemy, but perhaps there was some sense to a part of it. Perhaps it’s not your death Huitlani demands of me today. Perhaps your heart is meant to serve in another fashion.”

Nate maintained a stubborn silence.

“My husband is dead. I need a strong warrior to rule with me, to lead the armies to recapture what we’ve lost.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Even in these extreme circumstances, Nate laughed at the unthinkable suggestion. “You and I don’t fight for the same side, lady.”
How many times do I have to tell her the obvious truth before she leaves me alone?

“But we could. Don’t be so stubborn. I like strength in a man, but you carry it to the extreme.” She touched his cheek in a grotesquely intimate gesture. “We could do much together, I’m sure.”

Nate jerked his head away from her touch, from those clawed nails. “Leave me the hell alone.”
 

She stepped away from him, eye glinting with fury. Lolanta fussed with the silky hood of her cape so the damaged side of her face was shielded from view.
 

Nate took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for you,” he said, looking her right in the eyes, so she couldn’t mistake his meaning. “Killing me isn’t going to do you any good.” He studied her averted face. “You’re after revenge, pure and simple. You want T’naritza and me to pay, to suffer for ending your days of bloody glory. Admit it. Don’t keep dressing it up, or trying to excuse your actions with these absurd claims about my death restoring the city of Nochen or anything else. You don’t really believe what you’re spouting, do you?”
 

Lolanta studied him for a long moment. “You know nothing of Huitlani and his powers.” She tried to smile, working hard to regain her usual icy demeanor. “I might admit some of my actions are personal. But whatever I do also serves the greater purposes of Huitlani, even your death on my altar.”

“You’re in for a lot of disappointment.”

“Perhaps your death alone won’t suffice. You probably speak truth.” Lolanta inclined her head in graceful acknowledgment of a point to Nate. “But you forget your value as the means to a more important end—the capture and sacrifice of T’naritza. Perhaps you do love that pitiful girl. We’ll see how much she cares about you. I know your companions are nearby. Will they abandon you? At sunset, I’ll make her my offer from the temple steps—her life for yours. Care to wager what happens?” Laughing, she swept from the cell, forgetting to take the torch in her triumphant mood.

Nate contemplated his options after she left. There was no way he was going to get free. The shackles were rusty and covered in green mold, but still stronger than he could pull open. He hoped Thom and Bithia had ridden on, per his emphatic orders. Knowing them, that was a thin hope indeed. Thom had never abandoned him in any tight situation before, nor would Nate have let his friend die on the altar, were the positions reversed, without expending every effort to save him. And Bithia, having put herself at risk before to save his life, was hardly going to stand by idly while Thom launched a rescue attempt. But how could the three of them hope to beat Lolanta, who had at least fifteen men at her command, as well as the high ground?

Something slid across his left foot, rasping over his skin. Glancing down, he discovered a scarlet and blue tolokon coiled next to him in the gloom. Its colors were iridescent and unmistakable even in the shadows of the cell. The reptile raised its head, studying him for a long moment before uncoiling and slithering out of sight through a large crack. Nate let out the breath he’d been holding. He wasn’t a big believer in omens, but it was uncanny to see his first tolokon now after hearing about them for all these months.
Getting a little space happy.
He leaned his head against the clammy stone wall and closed his eyes.

Eventually, two guards arrived to take him for the sacrifice. Before unlocking him from the tight restraints, one of the men tipped a black bowl to his lips, trying to force Nate to drink the fluid sloshing within. He spat out the few sickly sweet drops leaking past his compressed lips but knew he’d swallowed some. “What the seven hells is that?”
 

The guard with the bowl clutched in one meaty paw stared at him, a sympathetic expression on his broad face. “You should drink the offering of Lolanta, warrior. A potion to take fear from a man’s heart. She does you great favor to provide this.”

And dull my reflexes so I can’t put up a fight.
“I’ve told the bitch before not to do me any favors. I’m not afraid.”

“You will be,” the other guard said with a leer.
 

There was no more discussion, and the guard didn’t offer the contents of the bowl again. The men released him from the wall shackles and held him tightly by the arms, forcing him to walk into the corridor where Lolanta waited, decked out in what remained of her full priestess regalia. The effect should have been pitiful, but instead there was an aura of demented magnificence.
 

“Halt, I wish a few final words.”

“He refused the quiloe wine, my lady.”

“The more fool you,” Lolanta told Nate, good eye narrowed, other eye twitching as she studied him. “I warned you this won’t be an easy or quick death.”

“Get on with what you have to do. Stop making threats.” Nate was contemptuous.
 

Be ready.
Bithia’s voice was clear in his head.
Thom says delay her. We’re nearly there.

The signal I’ve been waiting for.
Nate wrenched his arm free from the guard on the left, grabbing the bowl and smashing it into the face of the man on the right. As the soldier collapsed, Nate kicked the legs out from under his first captor and attempted to grab Lolanta. More soldiers arrived from farther back in the hallway and piled on as the priestess screamed and retreated.

Determined not to make it easy for them, trying to buy the time Thom needed, Nate resisted being dragged onto the platform with all his power. The enemy had the advantage of sheer muscle mass, but he’d nothing to lose now, no slightest compunction about killing, while they were under stringent orders from Lolanta to get him chained on the altar alive. Nate managed to get free for an instant, knocking one guard out cold with a well-placed jab to the throat and breaking another’s knee with a savage martial arts kick. More of the hulking men joined in the fray. Working together, the pack of burly guards got him onto the black stone altar on his back, but not before Nate sent a third soldier reeling, his eye socket split by a well-placed kick.
 

He battled as the guards closed heavy shackles over his ankles and wrists, nearly getting free again, adrenaline lending him strength. Eventually, Nate was pinned, unable to move more than an inch in any direction.

Lolanta strolled to his side once the guards stepped away. Standing beside the waist-high altar, she toyed with the cuff at his ankle and laughed. “What a pity to waste such a man, but sacrifice is your choice, warrior. Too late to change your mind now.”

He spat in her face. “Go to hell.”

Wiping her cheek with the corner of her cloak, she said, “Now I’ll make this ceremony as drawn-out as I can, to savor each moment of your pain, this I promise. The quiloe wine would have helped you to endure the ordeal, and I intended to be more merciful, but your actions of resistance anger me, and the gods.”