Mallory’s suppliant figure cringed; Jones could see the sodden greenish-white of his flesh, dyed by the cell light, instinctively crawling away from under their macabre ministrations. His breath came gusty and strident as sandpaper.
“Why are they taking me and not you?”
“Pull yourself together,” Jones tried to brace him.
They hoisted him to his feet again and turned him toward the dungeon entrance. His head remained pleadingly turned around toward Jones. “What are they going to do to me? Larry!”
Jones hung his head mutely. There was nothing he could do, and the other man knew it.
They had him halfway over to the entrance now, his legs stiffly locked against them like an automaton’s. His breathing kept getting harsher and harsher, with terror and the will to resist.
“Larry, I’m not coming back.”
Jones lied to him, trying to give him a little courage to face the next few moments, whatever they were to be. “Yes, you are. Sure you are.”
They had him at the threshold now; he was trying to dig his nude heels into the sod. They wouldn’t catch. “I can tell by their faces I’m not. Larry, they’re going to kill me.”
This time Jones didn’t answer. He knew they were too. You could sense it. It radiated from them, in grim waves.
“Larry, Chris—”
They had him outside now.
“Take it easy, Mal,” was all Jones knew how to say. The wooden barrier crashed closed, and his captivity had become a solitary one.
He saw the thing by indirection, and that was almost worst than seeing it in full sight. Teetering on his feet, straining as far forward as the thong gripping his wrist would allow, peering upward through the vent that gave onto ground level outside, he saw it as one sees the lower part of a stage scene when the curtain has stuck on its way up, hangs there suspended, and only the lower parts of the performers’ bodies are visible.
Opposite his jail, across the open space outside, and set far enough back so that perspective brought at least the lower half of it within his sight, rose a surface of massive stone blocks. It had always been there, staring at him, in all the time he’d been in this keep, but now he understood for the first time, as he watched them, what its purpose was. It was one of those horrid elevated altars of human sacrifice that had once dotted all Middle America, to be brought into lavish use at every recurrent solar equinox. It was foursquare, but from where he looked it appeared to be two-dimensional, with only height and breadth. One edge was unerringly perpendicular, straight as a ruler; the other was indented by a channel of ascending steps cut into it. These were set at right angles to him; he saw them only from the side. Up above there must have been, though he could not see it, a flat surface, an altar platform, broad enough to hold the participants, the sacrificial block, and whatever else attended the grim ritual.
It was nearly high noon when the death drum began to beat, somewhere close at hand, from some nearby rooftop, but not, to the best of his ability to judge, from the top of the altar structure itself. This was nearly six hours after Mallory had been taken from the cell. Where he had been kept in the meantime, Jones had no way of knowing.
Figures gathered about the base of the truncated pyramid, standing passively waiting, but his view of the steps remained clear, for they did not quite close in around the base but left a clear space. Next a line of six priests, of the same wizened type as the one who had brought them their food, slowly began to ascend the steps single file. Their chanting made a thin high-pitched wail against the growing overhead drum, which filled the air like sultry thunder.
The fact that no warriors followed them upward was proof enough that this was no military or war execution, but a religious infliction of death, in honor of the sun.
The six lesser priests disappeared above. There was a brief pause, and then a solitary figure slowly ascended in their wake. The high priest, judging by his more elaborate but basically similar garb and accoutrements. He climbed with an almost cataleptic slowness that froze Jones’s blood. That fact, and what he carried with him. He held his hands stiffly and extended out before his body, palms up and rigidly side by side. Across them, glistening in the sunlight, lay a curved, razor-edged obsidian scalpel — the sacrifice knife.
Jones remembered that ominous scouring of the region over the heart he had seen them subject Mallory to before taking him out. A shudder coursed through him.
There was another wait, while the drum rumbled on. The shadows of those on the ground were circular about them now. The sun was almost directly overhead.
An opening was made by them, and four stalwarts advanced slowly through their midst to the base of the altar steps, bearing on their shoulders a gilded litter. In it she sat. He knew her right away, in spite of the nunlike coif that half hid her face, shadowing her eyes. She was garbed in white. On her chest a flashing golden plaque was suspended, with rays standing out from it to simulate the sun, whose handmaiden she was. Golden bands were on her arms, with amethysts and emeralds blinking from them.
They set the litter down and she stepped from it and slowly mounted the steps. A strange figure in a strange, dark pageant, which the outer world thought had been abolished centuries before.
It was incredible that this high priestess, this sun goddess or whatever she was designated, could be a girl who had once— But it was she, come to preside over this sanctified butchery; he knew her too well, he would have known her anywhere.
He wanted to call out to her, to scream to her, but for once he couldn’t. His mouth was dry; his throat seemed to close up into a pin hole and refuse him service.
Her head was gone now, up above into the sky, the sky where murder was to be perpetrated. Next her shoulders went, and then the slenderness of her waist. One golden sandal lifted and was gone, the other remained a moment longer, poised at the toe. Then that went too.
Presently, in the expectant silence, a gauzy swirl of faint blue smoke descended to the ground and trailed up again, leaving in its wake a sickly-sweet odor that even penetrated to where he was. She had cast a lump of aromatic gum into some censer or tripod burning unseen up above.
All was in readiness now, all the principals were waiting, only the victim was lacking. The drum suddenly stopped short, and high noon must have been reached at that instant. The silence was stunning.
Then a faint whimpering sound began to percolate through it, coming nearer; audible before the cause of it was visible. That half-tone sobbing by which man and the animals alike express their fear of imminent death, when they are unfortunate enough to be made aware of it beforehand.
Mallory’s white, almost unclad body made a strange pale thing in the midst of all their darker ones. They were dragging him forward by a sort of halter arrangement around his neck, like a steer led to slaughter, and urging him on from behind with repeated bites of a leather thong into his shoulders and across his back. Every step was contested, was flinched, but he was too weak to be able to offer much resistance.
Jones, sickened, turned his head away, and shut his eyes for a moment.
Everyone should die bravely. It’s so easy to say that, until you’re the one to do it.
When he looked again — and he had to look, though he didn’t want to — they already had the victim on the altar steps. Four of the priests had come down and taken over custody of him from the warriors, who remained below. Mallory had fallen prone on the steps, and was slowly dragged up them full length by their combined if somewhat faltering strength.