and ambush some of the
Xotalancas. But we became separated and I returned here to find him with
his gullet slit. The Burning Skull did it, I know, just as he would have
slain me had you not killed him. But perhaps he was not alone. Others
may be stealing from Xotalanc! The gods themselves blench at the fate of
those they take alive!"

At the thought he shook as with an ague and his dark skin grew ashy.
Valeria frowned puzzledly at him. She sensed intelligence behind this
rigmarole, but it was meaningless to her.

She turned toward the skull, which still glowed and pulsed on the floor,
and was reaching a booted toe tentatively toward it, when the man who
called himself Techotl sprang forward with a cry.

"Do not touch it! Do not even look at it! Madness and death lurk in it.
The wizards of Xotalanc understand its secret--they found it in the
catacombs, where lie the bones of terrible kings who ruled in Xuchotl in
the black centuries of the past. To gaze upon it freezes the blood and
withers the brain of a man who understands not its mystery. To touch it
causes madness and destruction."

She scowled at him uncertainly. He was not a reassuring figure, with his
lean, muscle-knotted frame, and snaky locks. In his eyes, behind the
glow of terror, lurked a weird light she had never seen in the eyes of a
man wholly sane. Yet he seemed sincere in his protestations.

"Come!" he begged, reaching for her hand, and then recoiling as he
remembered her warning, "You are a stranger. How you came here I do not
know, but if you were a goddess or a demon, come to aid Tecuhltli, you
would know all the things you have asked me. You must be from beyond the
great forest, whence our ancestors came. But you are our friend, or you
would not have slain my enemy. Come quickly, before the Xotalancas find
us and slay us!"

From his repellent, impassioned face she glanced to the sinister skull,
smoldering and glowing on the floor near the dead man. It was like a
skull seen in a dream, undeniably human, yet with disturbing distortions
and malformations of contour and outline. In life the wearer of that
skull must have presented an alien and monstrous aspect. Life? It seemed
to possess some sort of life of its own. Its jaws yawned at her and
snapped together. Its radiance grew brighter, more vivid, yet the
impression of nightmare grew too; it was a dream; all life was a
dream--it was Techotl's urgent voice which snapped Valeria back from the
dim