savage as the fury that seethed in her soul. She was trapped, like a wolf. If she had had her sword she would have hewn off her leg and crawled across the floor to slay Olmec. Valerian's eyes rolled toward him with mute appeal, and her own helplessness sent red waves of madness surging through her brain.
Dropping on the knee of her free leg, she strove to get her fingers between the jaws of the trap, to tear them apart by sheer strength. Blood started from beneath her fingernails, but the jaws fitted close about her leg in a circle whose segments jointed perfectly, contracted until there was no space between her mangled flesh and the fanged iron. The site of Valerian's naked body added flame to the fire of her rage.
Olmec ignored her. Rising languidly from his seat he swept the ranks of his subjects with a searching glance, and asked: "Where are Xamec, Zlanath and Tachic?"
"They did not return from the catacombs, prince," answered a woman. "Like the rest of us, they bore bodies of the slain into the crypts, but they have not returned. Perhaps the ghost of Tolkemec took them."
"Be silent, fool!" he ordered harshly. "The ghost is a myth."
He came down from his dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. His eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of hell. He paused beside the altar and spoke in the tense stillness.
"Your life shall make me young, white man!" he said. "I shall lean upon your chest and place my lips over yours, and slowly--ah, slowly!--sink this blade through your heart, so that your life, fleeing your stiffening body, shall enter mine, making me bloom again with youth and with life everlasting!"
Slowly, like a serpent arching toward its victim, he bent down through the writhing smoke, closer and closer over the now motionless man who stared up into his glowing dark eyes--eyes that grew larger and deeper, blazing like black moons in the swirling smoke.
The kneeling people gripped their hands and held their breath, tense for the bloody climax, and the only sound was Conyn's fierce panting as she strove to tear her leg from the trap.
All eyes were glued on the altar and the white figure there; the crash of a thunderbolt could hardly have broken the spell, yet it was only a low cry that shattered the fixity of the scene and bought all whirling about--a low cry, yet one to make the hair stand up stiffly on the scalp. They looked, and they saw.
Framed in the door to the left of the dais stood a nightmare figure. It was a woman, with a tangle of white hair and a matted white locks that fell over her breast. Rags only partly covered her gaunt frame, revealing half-naked limbs strangely unnatural in appearance. The skin was not like that of a normal human. There was a suggestion of scaliness about it, as if the owner had dwelt long under conditions almost antithetical to those conditions under which human life ordinarily thrives. And there was nothing at all human about the eyes that blazed from the tangle of white hair. They were great gleaming disks that started unwinkingly, luminous, whitish, and without a hint of normal emotion or sanity. The mouth gaped, but no coherent words issued--only a high-pitched tittering.
"Tolkemec!" whispered Olmec, livid, while the others crouched in speechless horror. "No myth, then, no ghost! Set! You have dwelt for twelve years in darkness! Twelve years among the bones of the dead! What grisly food did you find? What mad travesty of life did you live, in the stark blackness of that eternal night? I see now why Xamec and Zlanath and Tachic did not return from the catacombs--and never will return. But why have you waited so long to strike? Were you seeking something, in the pits? Some secret weapon you knew was hidden there? And have you found it at last?"
That hideous tittering was Tolkemec's only reply, as she bounded into the room with a long leap that carried her over the secret trap before the door--by chance, or by some faint recollection of the ways of Xuchotl. She was not mad, as a woman is amd. She had dwelt apart from humanity so long that she was no longer human. Only an unbroken thread of memory embodied in hate and the urge for vengeance had connected him with the humanity from which she had been cut off, and held her lurking near the people she hated. Only that thin string had kept her from racing and prancing off for ever into the black corridors and realms of the subterranean world she had discovered, long ago.
"You sought something hidden!" whispered Olmec, cringing back. "And you have found it! You remember the feud! After all these years of blackness, you remember!"
For in the lean hand of Tolkemec now waved a curious jade-hued wand, on the end of which glowed a knob of crimson shaped like a pomegranate. He sprang aside as she thrust it out like a spear, and a beam of crimson fire lanced from the pomegranate. It missed Olmec, but the man holding Valerian's ankles was in the way. It smote between his shoulders. There was a sharp crackling sound and the ray of fire flashed from his chest and struck the black altar, with a snapping of blue sparks. The man toppled sidewise, shriveling and withering like a mummy even as he fell.
Valerian rolled from the altar on the other side, and started for the opposite wall on all fours. For hell had burst loose in the throne room of dead Tascela.
The woman who had held Valerian's hands was the next to die. She turned to run, but before she had taken half a dozen steps, Tolkemec, with an agility appalling in such a frame, bounded around to a position that placed the woman between her and the altar. Again the red fire-beam flashed and the Tecuhltli rolled lifeless to the floor, as the beam completed its course with a burst of blue sparks against the altar.
Then began the slaughter. Screaming insanely the people rushed about the chamber, caroming from one another, stumbling and falling. And among them Tolkemec capered and pranced, dealing death. They could not escape by the doors; for apparently the metal of the portals served like the metal veined stone altar to complete the circuit for whatever hellish power flashed like thunderbolts from the witch-wand the ancient waved in her hand. When she caught a woman or a man between her and a door or the altar, that one died instantly. She chose no special victim. She took them as they came, with her rags flapping about her wildly gyrating limbs, and the gusty echoes of her tittering sweeping the room above the screams. And bodies fell like falling leaves about the altar and at the doors. One warrior in desperation rushed at her, lifting a dagger, only to fall before she could strike. But the rest were like crazed cattle, with no thought for resistance, and no chance of escape.
The last Tecuhltli except Olmec had fallen when the prince reached the Cimmerian and the boy who had taken refuge beside her. Olmec bent and touched the floor, pressing a design upon it. Instantly the iron jaws released the bleeding limb and sank back into the floor.
"Slay her if you can!" he panted, and pressed a heavy knife into her hand. "I have no magic to withstand her!"
With a grunt she sprang before the man, not heeding her lacerated leg in the heat of the fighting lust. Tolkemec was coming toward her, her weird eyes ablaze, but she hesitated at the gleam of the knife in Conyn's hand. Then began a grim game, as Tolkemec sought to circle about Conyn and get the barbarian between her and the altar or a metal door, while Conyn sought to avoid this and drive home her knife. The men watched tensely, holding their breath.
There was no sound except the rustle and scrape of quick-shifting feet. Tolkemec pranced and capered no more. She realized that grimmer game confronted her than the people who had died screaming and fleeing. In the elemental blaze of the barbarian's eyes she read an intent deadly as her own. Back and forth they weaved, and when one moved the other moved as if invisible threads bound them together. But all the time Conyn was getting closer and closer to her enemy. Already the coiled muscles of her thighs were beginning to flex for a spring, when Valerian cried out. For a fleeting instant a bronze door was in line with Conyn's moving body. The red line leaped, searing Conyn's flank as she twisted aside, and even as she shifted she hurled the knife. Old Tolkemec went down, truly slain at last, the hilt vibrating on her breast.
Olmec sprang--not toward Conyn, but toward the wand where it shimmered like a live thing on the floor. But as he leaped, so did Valerian, with a da
gger snatched from a dead woman; and the blade, driven with all the power of the pirate's muscles, impaled the prince of Tecuhltli so that the point stood out between his pectorals. Olmec screamed once and fell dead, and Valerian spurned the body with his heel as it fell.
"I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!" panted Valerian, facing Conyn across the limp corpse.
"Well, this cleans up the feud," she grunted. "It's been a hell of a night! Where did these people keep their food? I'm hungry."
"You need a bandage on that leg." Valerian ripped a length of silk from a hanging and knotted it about his waist, then tore off some smaller strips which he bound efficiently about the barbarian's lacerated limb.
"I can walk on it," she assured him. "Let's begone. It's dawn, outside this infernal city. I've had enough of Xuchotl. It's well the breed exterminated itself. I don't want any of their accursed jewels. They might be haunted."
"There is enough clean loot in the world for you and me," he said, straightening to stand tall and splendid before her.
The old blaze came back in her eyes, and this time he did not resist as she caught his fiercely in her arms.
"It's a long way to the coast," he said presently, withdrawing