Jack could hear the sheer terror in Elina’s voice as she cried out, “Please hurry!”
Dwight scooted forward, stretching his hand out for the rope. The beam extended perhaps eight feet from the edge, and the rope was just out of his reach. He inched out a little farther, but the whole structure shifted under his weight.
Dwight slipped and plunged into the darkness.
“Dwight!” Jack screamed. Just then he saw movement from the corner of his eye. A shadow detached itself from behind one of the carved figures and shot toward him like a missile.
Jack leaped out of the way as the dark shape landed in the spot where he had been standing. In the flickering glow of the flare, he recognized the diminutive figure, the tribe’s matriarch who seemed to be the leader. Dwight had called her Nun’dahbi.
She was cloaked in black veils and holding a long wooden shaft tipped with a jagged spearhead that looked like it had been fashioned from part of a kirac’s foreleg. She shrugged off her outer cloak and crouched before Jack. Jack suppressed a gasp as he got his first good look at her.
Her skin was ghostly pale and her head was completely hairless. Beneath the veils she wore a snug jerkin made from some kind of animal skin, interwoven with beads and animal claws. And Jack could see she was also still wearing the amulet she’d had on earlier. The image from his father’s papers.
Nun’dahbi glared at Jack with yellow eyes reflecting the light of the dying flare. The skin around her eyes was blackened, accenting the glow of her irises and giving her gaunt face a skull-like appearance. Her black lips peeled back and she hissed words Jack could not understand. Though one of them did register.
“Outsider!”
She spat the word with such contempt that Jack could almost feel her venom.
He swatted the spear away from his face and was reaching for his shotgun when something hard slammed into his ribs. He fell to his knees, gasping for breath. The woman’s bare foot drew back as Jack blinked, wondering how she had struck him with such power for her size.
He rolled to the side as the spear flashed out at him, slicing his shoulder. Jack sucked in painful gasps of air. He hadn’t seen anyone move so fast in his life. The woman crouched low and moved sideways, circling him like a cat preparing to strike. Jack had never taken any formal hand-to-hand combat training, no martial arts, nothing. So reacting purely on instinct, he swept his leg back across the woman’s feet, but she jumped easily out of the way.
Jack struggled to stand, dazed from the blow to his ribs. But before he could even straighten up, he felt another kick to his side and tumbled back to the ground. Nun’dahbi leaped in and out of the ring of light like a panther, striking hard and then jumping back into the darkness.
Jack had managed to stagger to his feet again when she drove a fist hard into his jaw and another one just under his sternum. He crumpled to the ground, gasping for breath. His mind wavered on the brink of consciousness and he reached blindly for his gun. Nun’dahbi leaped to the edge of the pit, raising her spear to finish him off.
But Jack rolled to the side and brought his shotgun up into her abdomen. His lips parted in a bloody grin.
“Not… so fast….”
Her face twisted into a mask of hate as Jack pulled the trigger. The blast launched her diminutive frame off the ground and out over the pit. She plunged, shrieking, down into the darkness.
“Jack!” Elina’s terrified voice cried from the pit.
“I’m coming.”
The wooden beam was tilted downward after Dwight’s fall. Jack leaned against the altar, gasping for breath. He was stretching out for the rope when a deafening shriek echoed up from the pit. But Jack knew it had no human source; he had heard that sound once before, out in the caverns as he and Ben were escaping.
Elina screamed again.
Jack snapped another flare and dropped it into the pit. Now he could see the hole went down at least twenty feet. Dwight lay in the mud, and Nun’dahbi’s twisted body was sprawled out on the rocks, covered in blood. Elina lay on the ground between them, wrapped tightly in ropes.
She looked up, wide-eyed. “Jack! Get me out of here!”
“I can’t reach the rope!”
“Hurry; something’s down here.”
Jack secured his shotgun and the bag of flares around his back and leaped out for the rope. He felt it in his fingers and clutched it. The log shifted again, and he slid down several feet before managing to stop himself. The rope tore the skin off his palms as he lowered himself farther into the pit.
He reached the bottom and bent over Elina’s quivering body. They had painted her face with what looked like the same type of marks that the warriors had covering their bodies.
“Are you hurt?” He fumbled with the ropes in his bloody hands. “Is anything broken?”
“No… I’m okay,” Elina said. “You’re bleeding.”
Jack shook his head. His wounds throbbed and stung, but he couldn’t afford the luxury of worrying about that now. “I’m okay.”
Jack surveyed the elongated cavern that extended away into darkness. The flare lit the immediate area, and Jack could see numerous tunnels and side passages leading off the main chamber. Large rocks and bones cluttered the floor of the pit. The remnants, he guessed, from an untold number of human sacrifices to the Soul Eater.
Beside them, Dwight groaned.
Elina sat up. “He’s alive?”
Jack moved to check him. “Dwight? Are you okay?”
Dwight groaned again and rolled onto his side. He looked up at the top of the pit and rubbed his head. “What happened?”
“You fell,” Jack said. “You should be dead.”
“Yeah…” Dwight sat up gingerly. “I should’ve been dead a few times in my life.”
Jack was still struggling with Elina’s ropes. “I can’t get them untied. I need to cut them.”
“Hurry.”
Jack turned to retrieve the spear wedged in the rocks beside Nun’dahbi’s limp body when he saw the amulet glimmering in the light of the flare. His eyes widened. He’d lost his pack in the caves earlier and with it, all the evidence he and Rudy had collected. But this medallion would be even better. To come back with an actual N’watu artifact, a piece of their culture…
Momentarily forgetting everything else, Jack crawled over and reached out for the amulet.
A cold, bony grip clamped onto his arm. Nun’dahbi clutched his wrist and lifted her battered head. Blood gurgled though her clenched teeth as she grimaced, hissing with what seemed to be pure vitriol.
Jack let out a yelp. Obviously the perilium made the N’watu as hard to kill as the kiracs.
Just then a second chilling shriek burst out of the darkness at the far end of the cavern, followed by a familiar tapping. Whatever was in the darkness was getting closer. Jack could hear a scraping sound—like something big being dragged across rocks.
Something very big.
“Hurry, Jack!” Elina’s voice came from behind him.
Jack yanked his hand free from Nun’dahbi’s grip. She immediately clutched the amulet in her broken, bloody fingers, still hissing curses at him and struggling to move. Jack picked up the spear instead and returned to Elina.
Dwight stumbled to his feet. “How do we get out of here?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been in this part of the caves.” Jack sliced through the top rope and started on the bands around Elina’s feet. Then the flare died out and darkness folded over them like a wave. Jack could hear Dwight digging through the bag for another one.
He snapped the cap off and ignited it.
Elina screamed.
Shadows fled away, partially revealing the bulk of an enormous, armored beast looming directly over Dwight. It reared up, flexing its huge mandibles. The jaws opened to reveal a hideous mouthful of dripping fangs. It lifted one of its massive, spiked forelegs and stabbed at Dwight, who barely managed to duck out of the way. The pointed claw sank into the ground where he had been standing. Then it swiped sideways and flung him into the rocky wall of the chamber. Dwight fell back to the ground, groaning.