Temple

I leapt to my feet, exhilarated in the moment. I looked for my sword, couldn't find it anywhere, gazed out over the clearing.

I saw Renco on the far side of the clearing, fighting with two swords against two sabre-wielding conquistadors.

Two Incan warriors grappled with a pair of Spaniards not far from where I stood—they seemed to be the only other men left alive on the rock tower.

And then I saw Hernando—with the idol in his hands— hurrying away into the foliage to my right, dashing down the stone stairway there.

My eyes went wide.

He was going for the rope bridge.

If he got there, he would almost certainly cut the bridge and leave us stranded on the tower, stranded with the rapas.

I hurried after him, bounding across the clearing, hurdling a rapa as it lay on the ground tearing into the body of a dead conquistador.

I flew down the stone steps two at a time, my heart racing, my legs pounding, chasing after Hernando. As I rounded a bend in the stairs, I saw him about ten paces in front of me, stepping out onto the rope bridge.

Hernando was large and muscular, and he moved as such. I was smaller, more nimble, faster. I gained on him quickly and dashed out onto the bridge after him, at which moment, with absolutely nothing else to call on, I hurled myself—swordless—at his back.

I collided with him most heavily and we fell together onto the thin floorboards of the rope bridge, high above the canyon floor.

But such was the weight of our landing that the floor boards beneath us shattered like twigs and to my utter horror we fell straight through them, down into the abyss…

But our fall was brief.

With a sudden, jarring jolt the two of us came to an abrupt halt. In the terror of our fall, Hernando had reached out for a handhold, had grasped for anything that would stop his fall.

What he had found was the free end of the rope that was still tied to my right wrist. Now the rope lay stretched over a lone floorboard on the rope bridge, with Hernando and myself dangling from both of its extremities!

And so we hung there like counterweights hanging from a pulley, at different ends of the same rope, with dangling cords of the partially-broken rope bridge hanging down all around us.

Through force of luck—bad luck in my case! hung below Hernando, my head down near his dangling knees.

Hernando hung up higher, just below the remaining floor boards of the bridge.

I saw that he had the idol in his left hand, while he held onto my rope with his right. He reached up with his left hand, trying desperately to loop the idol over the rope bridge's surviving floorboards and garner a handhold.

Once he succeeded in doing that, I realized, he would be safe to let me fall. At present, my weight—small though it was compared to his—was the only thing holding him up.

I had to do something. And quickly.

'Why are you doing this, monk!' Hernando roared as he reached for his salvation, so close now. 'What do you care about this idol! I would kill for it!'

As he raged, I saw one of the thin cords dangling down from the rope bridge above us-one of the cords that had previously held up the bridge's handrail.

If I could just…

'You would kill for it, would you, Hernando?' said I, trying to distract him as I endeavoured to untie the length of rope that was tied around my right wrist—the rope that connected me to Hernando. 'That means nothing to me!'

'No?' he shouted. It was a race now, a race to see who would get to his objective first—Hernando to the floorboard above us, me to untie the rope that joined us together.

'No!“ I called back—just as I succeeded in releasing myself from the length of rope.

'Why, monk?'

'Because, Hernando, I would die for it.'

And with that, having now freed myself from the rope tied to my wrist, I reached out for the thin cord dangling down from the bridge above me and grabbed hold of while at exactly the same moment I released my grip on the length of rope connecting me to Hernando.

The response was instantaneous.

With the counterweight at the other end of his rope now gone, Hernando fell. Straight down.

He fell past me, his body a streaking blur of screaming humanity, and as a fitting final insult, as he whistled by in front of me, I reached out and plucked the idol from his grasp.

'Noooooo!' Hernando screamed as he fell.

And as I hung there above the abyss—dangling one- handed from the rope bridge's cord, holding the sacred idol in my free hand—I watched the look of absolute terror on his face get smaller and smaller until, finally, it disappeared into the dark abyss beneath me and soon all I could hear was his screaming.

It would stop a moment later at the same time as I heard a distant, sickening splat.

I arrived back in the clearing some time later, the idol in my hand.

The sight which greeted me was like a glimpse of the underworld itself.

In the flickering light of the torches that littered the clearing, I saw the rapas kneeling over the ranks of dead conquistadors, gorging themselves on fresh human flesh.