Beautiful Sacrifice

torchlight gave eerie life to the serpents supporting the altar’s legs, snakes winding about one another, twining, devouring, with neither beginning nor end.
    The keening wail of the flutes lifted to the night, notes climbing until they were just short of a shriek.
    Hunter sighted the AK-47. The weapon hadn’t been designed for accuracy. It had been created to lay down a storm of lead, not to pick off targets one at a time.
    No good shot. Too many Maya near Lina. Too much stone to ricochet against. I have as much chance of hurting her as freeing her.
    Which one is Carlos? Not one of the Bacabs. Maybe one of the two dressed in glittering chunks of obsidian and feathers.
    Wait, the one in the jaguar skin with the black mask. Obsidian. Yes. That has to be Carlos.
    Hunter sited down his weapon’s barrel and his finger slowly tightened.
    Without warning the crowd stood, blocking Hunter’s shot.
    Shit.
    Spraying lead might wound Lina, might push Carlos into killing her right now, and would certainly level the crowd until he ran out of bullets. As a last resort, he’d do it.
    But not yet.
    Cursing silently, steadily, Hunter worked through the jungle at the edge of the clearing, finding a place where theland rose enough to give him a good angle on Carlos. The chanting of the worshippers and shrilling of the flutes rose relentlessly.
    Lina lay on her back between the Chacmool’s mocking face and its upraised knees. Slowly she lifted her bound wrists above her head. Her body was taut, vibrating with life.
    Carlos walked forward until he stood at the edge of the Chacmool. He thrust his hands up to the darkness and wind. One hand held the codex. The other held the god bundle. An obsidian knife gleamed from a jaguar-skin belt circling his waist. Torchlight slid across the obsidian mask like oily water. It was impossible to read any expression behind the mask. Blood dripped from his lacerated left hand, smeared over his skin and the god bundle that he held.
    Lightning made the mask he wore glow like black water lit from within. It was mesmerizing, terrifying, reaching deep into the primal core that most humans denied even existed.
    Lightning turned the darkness brilliant, then plunged everything into a night that seemed twice as deep.
    More flutes cried above the droning of the crowd. The sound of the ceramic instruments was close to a scream and still climbing, climbing, climbing toward an unbearable climax, a sound more goading than melodic, driving the crowd to the edge of madness and ecstasy.
    The flutes poured out a shattering, terrifying shriek, then fell silent.
    “I hold your most sacred objects,” Carlos cried to the sky, to Kawa’il. “Give me the sign.”
    “That’s my codex, you son of a bitch!” Philip’s bellow ripped through the night.
    Everyone flinched and turned toward the sound.
    Lina brought back her knees and then lashed out with allher strength. Her heels sank into her would-be executioner’s crotch. She rolled off the Chacmool on the side closest to the cenote. Running hard past a stunned Bacab, she hurtled off the rim of the cenote and into the dark water below.
    The night exploded.
    With the strength of madness, Philip shoved and kicked through the crowd, rapidly reaching Carlos. Hunter pointed his rifle up and fired a short burst, magnifying the confusion into chaos. Using the gun butt when he had to and his feet the rest of the time, he circled around the edge of the crowd, heading for the Chacmool, the place he had last seen Lina before worshippers blocked her from his sight.
    Carlos screamed “Noooooo!” as he went down under Philip’s attack.
    The worshippers shifted, howled, and surged toward the Chacmool, where Philip clawed at the codex Carlos still held. Machetes flashed like teeth as the human wave rolled over the two grappling men. Torches went out when the wave swept to the brink of the cenote, paused…then withdrew, retreated, dissolving into the darkness and jungle with eerie speed and silence.
    The few torches still burning showed nothing. No Bacabs, no Philip, no Carlos, no artifacts. Hunter was alone but for the empty altar and the limestone pavers leading up to the rim of the cenote. Even the wind was still.
    “Lina!” he shouted.
    Nothing answered his cry.
    Assault rifle in one hand, flashlight in the other, he ran to the cenote’s brink and shined the light over the black surface of the water. The first thing he saw was two bloody bodies tangled in a shroud of