Matthew Reilly - Temple

Renco covered the idol once again. As he did so, the old priestess stepped forward and placed something around his neck. It was a thin leather cord with a dazzling green gem stone attached to it—a magnificent shining emerald that was easily the size of a man’s ear.

Renco accepted the gift with a solemn bow and then turned quickly to face me.

‘We must go now,’ said he.

Then, with the idol under his arm, he made for the hole in the floor. I hurried after“ him. The four burly warriors all took hold of the great stone slab that would cover our exit.

The old priestess did not move.

Renco climbed down into the sewer. I lowered myself after him. As I did so, however, I noticed something quite peculiar.

The vault was silent.

The pounding outside had stopped.

And as I pondered this curiosity some more, I realised with some dread that the pounding had in fact ceased some goodly time before.

It was then that the entrance to the vault exploded inwards.

A great flash of white flared out around the edges of the huge stone doorway, and an instant later, the whole six-foot doorstone just blasted out into a thousand fragments, showering the vault room with fist-sized rocks.

I couldn’t explain it. A battering ram could not possibly have fragmented so large a stone so instantaneously…

And then the smoke and dust in the doorway cleared and I saw the great black barrel of a cannon in the space where the doorstone had been.

My mind reeled.

They had blown open the vault door with a cannon!

‘Come on!’ Renco called from the sewer beneath me.

I immediately started lowering myself into the hole, just as the first Spanish soldiers came charging in through the dust cloud, firing their muskets in every direction.

And as I disappeared through the hole in the floor, the last thing I saw was the Captain, Hernando Pizarro, striding into the vault room with a pistol in his hand. His eyes were wild, and his head turned this way and that as he searched the vault for the idol that he so longed for.

And then, in a single horrifying instant, I saw Hernando look down in my direction and stare directly into my eyes.

I sloshed madly through the dark sewer tunnels, trying with all my might to keep up with Renco. As I did so, I heard shouts in Spanish echoing off the hard stone walls of the tunnels, saw long ominous shadows stretching out around the corners behind us.

Ahead of me, Renco just plunged onward through the filthy water with the Incan idol under his arm.

We hastened through the tunnels, waist-deep in the water, ducking left, bending right, weaving our way through the dark stone labyrinth back toward the river entrance and freedom.

After a while, however, I began to notice that we were racing in the wrong direction.

Renco was not heading back toward the river entrance.

‘Where are we going!’ I called forward.

‘Just move!’ he called back.

I turned a corner just as a torch on the wall above my head was blasted from its mount by a musket shot. I turned and saw a team of six conquistadors wading through the tunnel behind me, the flaming torchlight of the passageway glinting off their helmets.

‘They’re right behind us!’ I called.

‘Then run faster!’

More musket shots rang out, loud as thunderclaps, deafening my ears. Their projectiles exploded against the damp stone walls around us.

Just then, ahead of me, I saw Renco leap up onto a ledge and push up with his shoulder against a stone slab in the ceiling—a slab which I saw bore in its corner the same mysterious symbol that I had seen before, the circle with the double ‘V’ inside it. I leapt up onto the ledge after him and helped him heave the stone upward, revealing the starry night sky.

Renco climbed out first and I followed immediately behind him. We were standing in a narrow cobblestoned street of some sort.

Impenetrable grey walls lined both sides of the alleyway.

I hurriedly began to replace the stone slab when all of a sudden, a musket shot from within the tunnel pinged against the edge of the hole, narrowly missing my fingers.

‘Never mind. Come on, this way,’ said Renco, pulling me down the tiny street.

The walls on either side of me became indistinguishable blurs of grey as we all but flew through the crooked alleyways of Cuzco with Hernando’s soldiers ever close behind us.

As we evaded our pursuers, every now and then we would see brigades of Spanish troops running through the streets, racing for the ramparts.

We also—I am ashamed to say—saw stakes not unlike those outside the city walls. They were set up in every one of the city’s plazas, row after row of stakes, upon which were impaled the horribly mutilated bodies of captured Incan warriors. These warriors had had their hands, heads and genitals hacked off.

In one such plaza, Renco saw an Incan longbow hanging from one of the desecrated corpses. He seized it and the quiver full of arrows on the ground beside it and then ducked back into the maze of alleyways.

I just followed close behind him, not daring to let him out of my sight.

At length, however, Renco turned abruptly and entered a building of some sort. It was a squat stone structure, remarkably solid. In fact, so solid it almost looked fortified.

We passed through several outer rooms before we descended a flight of stone steps and came to a very large subterranean hall.

The hall was divided into two levels—one wide lower and an upper landing that was little more than a balcony that ran around the circumference of the hall.

But it was the lower storey that held my attention.

There were nearly one hundred holes in the dirt floor of hall—pits over which a network of thin stone bridges With a surge of dread, I realised where we were.

We were in an Incan dungeon.

I was reminded of the fact that these Incans had not yet metallurgy, hence they had no bars to create A pit, I saw, was their answer to this dilemma.

I looked up at the balcony that overlooked the lower It was a guard-walk, for the prison guards to patrol they looked down on the prisoners.

Renco didn’t miss a step. He just marched out onto one narrow stone bridges and peered down into the holes it. Wails and shouts erupted from below, from the starving prisoners who had been left in their pits the siege had begun a week earlier.

Renco stopped above one of the pits. I followed him out the stone bridge and looked down into the dirty hole truly, this is what I saw.

The pit itself must have been at least five paces deep, earthen walls. Escape was impossible. At the got-of the dirty well sat a man of average size, but filthy and putrid.

Although he was thin, this man did not seem nor was he shouting like the rest of the poor, forlorn creatures in the prison hall. He just sat with his back pressed up against the wall of his pit, looking, if anything, relaxed and at ease. His composure that wanton coolness of criminals around the world—made my skin crawl. I wondered what Renco could want with such a character.

‘Bassario,’ said Renco.

The criminal smiled. ‘Why if it isn’t the good prince Renco…’

‘I need your help,’ said Renco directly.

The prisoner seemed to find this humorous. “I cannot imagine what the good prince could possibly want with my skills,” the criminal laughed. ‘What is it, Renco? Now that your kingdom is in ruins are you thinking of embarking upon a life of crime?’

Renco looked back toward the entrance to the underground chamber, watching for Spaniards. I shared his concern. We had been in this dungeon too long already.

‘I will only ask you this once, Bassario,’ said Renco firmly.

‘If you choose to help me, I will take you out of here. If you do not so choose, then I will leave you to die in this pit.’