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The jade mask glowed and seemed to throw out rays of emerald light. Tezmec
held the still, beating heart in his hand. It was throbbirig and moving as if
trying to get away, twisting in his grip, slippery and bloody. The golden
knife dropped from Tezmec's grasp when another hand covered his.
Casca, his body enveloped in the green fire of the sea, stood holding Tezmec's
hand stationary over the altar fire in which the heart was to have been
burned. And then Casca took his own beating heart out of the priest's hand.
"I told you I was a god. It takes a god to kill a god, and my time is not yet
come.
Tezmec was paralyzed with fear. Then, like a puppet with its strings cut, he
fell on his face in front of Casca.
Casca turned to the terrified masses below, his chest cavity agape and
bleeding from the ragged, serrated edges of the golden knife. Holding his
beating heart in his hand above his head, he cried out:
"Look and see that which none has seen beforel" The multitude trembled as they
obeyed, as they watched Casca take his own heart and put it hack into his
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chest.
"I am the Quetza!" he screamed.
He put his hands on either side of his open chest and pushed the edges
together, sealing them. His heart back where it belonged, still beating, the
terrible pain seemed to be a distant echo. Raising his arms to the raging sky,
he cried out in Latin. The rain beat on his face and washed rivulets of blood
down through the hairs of his chest and onto his legs, until the life essence
of Casca ran red on the floor of the pyramid. Rage filled his words:
"You win again, Jew, and I am what you made of me. I am Casca. I am the
Quetza."
His voice rose to compete with and to beat down the screaming of the storm,
and in Teotoc he thundered:
"I am God!".
TEN
The pain was terrible.
Step by step Casca made his way back down the long flight of steps, past the
intertwined carvings of serpents, past the goggle-eyed rain god TIaloc.
No chanting.
No ceremony.
This time the only sound was that of the storm raging around the temple and
the pyramid. The people and the priests were silent. Motionless. Stunned. Less
lifelike than the stone carvings.
As though time had stopped for them.
As though they were from in a nightmare.
And only Casca moved.
Casca and the storm.
He and the storm were one.
Step by step.
Casca fought away the tremendous pain. Nausea boiled within him as fiercely as
the storm without and threatened to throw the insides of his stomach to the
raging wind.
Sweat ran freely down from the inside of his mask. His throat constricted and
tightened. Mindless of the people about him he moved. The greater the pain the
more powerful became his step until he was striding, head erect, a proud
image, a god indeed. They bowed. They prostrated themselves before him.
Step by measured step he proceeded past their prone bodies toward his
quarters, himself now the full and only embodiment of ceremony, the thundering
storm his only escort.
But, although to them he might be a triumphant god riding the wind, to him the
effects of the coca leaves were wearing off, the pain was intensifying, and he
was beginning to feel the real world around him, conscious now of the rain
starting to fall, rain that would be a curtain of water in moments, like the
curtain of unconsciousness rapidly overtaking him. He had only seconds. He
might not reach the safety of his quarters. Yet he knew he must not let them
see their god collapse in the mud so near to security. His hands and feet felt
numb, distant. The aching throbbing in his chest was all, present, the pain
there overshadowing all else. He could not endure....
But in the last few seconds before he was certain the end was upon him he
found himself at the doorway of his quarters. Turning, he took the jade mask
from his face.
"Hear me!" His voice boomed out with all his remaining strength, one
tremendous superhuman sound, for the louder he cried out the more bearable the
pain seemed to be. His voice overrode the storm. "Let none disturb me until I
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