After the dark corridor and a secret door that opened on silent hinges, the group found themselves in a world that was the stark opposite of the stinking sewers they had just climbed up from.

They found themselves in the beating heart of El Dorado.

Strange sounds and smells greeted them. The air was hot and dry and smelled faintly of rotten eggs, and they could hear chanting echoing down the corridor. There was a torch every ten feet down the wall, and together they illuminated more riches than Eddy had ever seen in his life. Gold and precious stones had been worked into the floor, walls, and even the ceiling to create intricate geometrical patterns of marvelous craftsmanship. There were also stone reliefs with gold highlighting scenes of Incan history, and others depicting their pantheon of gods, scenes of war, and what seemed to be human sacrifices.

They told a story that was as old as it was cruel, yet Eddy had little interest in their intellectual worth. He was more interested in the practical value. He had labored in gold mines, so he had seen his fair share of gold veins; none of them came even close to the amount of wealth that shone all around him.

Confronted with the riches and nobody in sight to stop them, the soldiers tried to pry off some gems and gold inlays from the walls, yet a hiss from their master jerked them back like dogs on a leash. There would be time enough to loot once he had what they came for, he promised. Like good dogs, the soldiers obeyed. Eddy was about to object, yet a slight shake of Azrael's head convinced him otherwise. He sullenly did as he was told.

Following Isabella's lead as she nimbly and silently moved from shadow to shadow, they soon found the Corridor of Golden Corpses, a broad passageway with gold statues that lined both sides of the wide corridor like silent guards.

The detail that went into the statues was astonishing; they looked so alive that Eddy had to touch one to be sure it was not. They all depicted humans, apparently Incas of importance: warriors with swords and spears in their hands, priests with golden tablets, even kings. Almost all of them were unified by one thing, however. Agony was etched into their faces, mostly suppressed, sometimes openly visible.

All gave Eddy the shudders.

"This is it," murmured the Marquis as he saw the statues, his eyes bright with a hungry gleam. "The Alley of Tormented Souls, the Corridor of Corpses my ancestor rambled about. It will lead us to a gallery right above the temple. There we will find the Black Diamond."

Eddy found the fervor in his voice a bit unnerving, even by his standards. He was about to comment on it to Azrael as they suddenly found themselves confronted with an Inca that came round a corridor in front of them. He seemed positively shocked to see their little raiding party and froze in his tracks. He was young, not older than twenty, and wore little more than a loincloth and two necklaces around his throat.

His eyes went wide in surprise, his mouth following quickly after to give voice to it, but no sound ever left his lips. A stiletto suddenly appeared in his throat. Isabella's stiletto. It had been hurled so quickly that, to Eddy's eyes, it appeared as if it had materialized from thin air. The Inca gurgled, blood gushing from the wound in his neck and from his mouth, and then he went down on his knees, dropping a small sack he had been carrying.

Azrael surged forward, getting beyond the collapsing Inca and covering the corridor from which he had appeared.

The outburst of violence passed as quickly as it came and left Eddy with a bad taste in his mouth.

"A messenger, maybe," said the Marquis, giving the heel of the Inca a small kick. "Hide him in the shadows. We had best not be here when somebody starts missing him."

After that they moved on even more carefully. Suppressing a pang of guilt, Eddy looked back at the alcove where they had stashed the body of the dead Inca; he hoped that this would be the last man they encountered.

More silently now, to avoid any other detection, they moved on, hugging every shadow they could find.

Once, while Eddy was hiding behind a statue—Isabella had given them a sign to lay low because of a group of Incas crossing the corridor ahead of them—he quickly reached upward to pry off the pinky of the figure above him. The golden digit came off surprisingly easily. A moment later Eddy realized why: it was hollow. Inside it, Eddy could see a human finger bone. Dust trickled from the hole in the statue's hand and tainted the air. Eddy swallowed hard and held his breath so as not to inhale the dust; he was relieved soon after when Isabella gave them the sign to move on.

The noble's words remained true, and they soon entered onto a large balcony that curved out of sight to the left and right. It was so richly adorned that the corridor they had just traveled through faded in comparison. Jewels of all sizes and types spotted the wall of massive gold, yet as impressive as it was, all paled as their eyes fell on the sight beyond the edge of the parapet.

A vast cave-chamber, oval in shape, stretched out in front of them for hundreds of leagues and was home to a lake unlike any they had ever seen: a lake of molten gold. Hundreds of small fires danced, died, and were reborn across its surface, illuminating everything in a warm orange glow. The air was sweltering and tasted of metal. Sweat began to run down Eddy's face, and not all because of the heat.

The sheer dimensions of the cave were mindboggling. Eddy had seen whole towns take up less space than the lake that filled the cave, the yellow metal bubbling and boiling like stew in a kettle. Following a visible bend, the gallery seemed to run around half the cave. On the lower level, Eddy could make out a tongue of rock reaching into the lake. At least five hundred feet in length, it rose fifteen feet over the boiling metal and seemed to be twice as wide. It reminded Eddy of a massive jetty.

Dozens of women, their lean bodies naked and covered in gold dust, danced on the jetty like candle flames in the wind. Their movements were slow, sensual, and mesmerizing. Eddy would have enjoyed watching them if not for the giant beast looming on the platform at the end of the jetty. It was the largest dragon he had ever seen in his life.

"The Dragongod," he whispered.

The beast was huge. His body was as large as a small house, and on a serpentine neck rested a head with dagger-long teeth in a mouth that was big enough to swallow a man whole. Ebony horns, each as long as he was tall, sprouted from his reptilian skull like a crown. His leathery body was the color of sand and bulged with enormous muscles that twitched slightly as he listened to the siren song the naked dancers were humming. In an almost relaxed fashion—like a tired man stretching his arms—he spread his sail-sized wings and refolded them around his mass like a king shrouding himself in his cape.

Suddenly Eddy had lost all interest in gold and riches. There was no chance that a group as small as theirs could defeat a beast as glorious and dreadful as this. An army would not be enough. All but Azrael cowered in a primeval mix of fear and respect behind the wall of the parapet, their eyes and mouths wide open as they regarded this terror. The dragon killer, however, stood unimpressed and stared at the beast from the shadow of a column.

A new chant filled the cave—stronger, more forceful, initiated by a tall woman with a feather-topped headpiece in the form of a stylized dragon's head. She stood in front of a vast block of gold that immediately reminded Eddy of an altar. Was she a ceremonial master? A priestess? Eddy was not sure what to make of her. She was definitely of some importance, since she stood closest to the dragon, atop a small staircase that led to the platform the beast rested upon. The dancers fell in quickly with her song, their bodies contorting and quivering in ecstasy as if they made love to an invisible lover.

Eddy found his previous terror fleeing, giving way to a more pleasant feeling that welled up inside him. Against his will, he smiled, then noticed that Isabella had crawled up to him and was looking at him reproachfully. He grinned, apologetic, and shrugged. Isabella rolled her eyes and focused on the ceremony again.

Performing some sort of ritual, the high priestess now raised a black diamond the size of a human skull toward the gargantuan beast like an offering. Eddy could hear the Marquis gasp for air. The high priestess gently moved the gemstone to the left and right, the women behind her mimicking the movement. The dragon seemed mesmerized, his forked tongue tasting the air.

"What a beast," murmured the Marquis, his voice for once having lost its arrogant tone.

"I've never seen anything like it," agreed Isabella, slightly more composed. Hushed whispers of the soldiers around them spoke in equal awe.

Only Azrael remained quiet. As Eddy looked at him, he found that his partner even seemed disappointed.

Crawling toward him, Eddy whispered, "What's wrong?"

The bounty killer, his eyes still on the dragon, shrugged slowly before he replied, "I envisioned him bigger . . ."

"Well," said Eddy, realizing once more how nuts his partner was, "we can't always get what we want."

Azrael grunted. Then Eddy saw something unnerving. The grim dragon killer's face took on a surprised expression. His eyes went wide; his mouth fell open.

"What the . . ." he said, then lost his voice.

Alarmed, Eddy followed his gaze.

Slowly, something huge lifted itself from the lake behind the platform. Like a mountain it rose from the golden tides, torrents of liquid metal cascading down its form like waterfalls. The sheer size of it was hard to comprehend; it dwarfed even the dragon on the platform. With nameless terror, Eddy realized that they had been wrong. The dragon on the platform was not the Dragongod. He may have been the biggest dragon he had ever seen, truly a king of his kind, but compared to the behemoth that now reared his ugly head, the smaller dragon was nothing.

A clawed paw bigger than a horse-drawn carriage slowly rose and then came down on the mesmerized dragon, slamming him to the ground with so much force that his bones shattered like glass and his abdomen ruptured, sending entrails spilling over the ground. The high priestess jumped back in order to avoid the carnage, and the song came to an abrupt end. Instead, the doomed dragon's agonized roar filled the cave and echoed off the walls. Desperately he tried to wriggle free in an almost pitiful attempt to escape, his claws scratching over the golden jetty, tearing layers of gold from the stone, yet to no avail. Behind him, more details of the Dragongod became visible as, like a wet dog, he lazily shook the gold from his frame.

The brute was ugly. Not even the gold that still covered him could hide that.

Dragons had always reminded Eddy of cats, with their feline eyes, their graceful movements, and the sheer cruelty with which they struck their prey. This monstrosity was nothing like that. If anything, his squat muscular form reminded Eddy of a pit bull, one who had seen plenty of battles in its life. His massive form was pitted with scars as deep and broad as trenches; the brutish head sat on a muscle-gnarled short neck that was broader than it was high; and his teeth were larger than grown men. He had no wings, yet two bony stumps rose from his massive back like lightning-split trees, indicating that this had not always been the case.

Most unsettling, however, were the eyes. They were as black and cold as the eyes of the spiders Eddy had seen in the caves, yet within them burned an alien intelligence that he had never seen in man or beast. Of one thing he was sure, however . . .

The brute was enjoying this.

The trapped dragon-king roared in defiance and tried to free himself with a last desperate attack by breathing fire at the cruel god, but to no avail. The seething flames only helped to dissipate the remaining gold that clung to the short neck, revealing skin that looked like black rock. The Dragongod made a sound that reminded Eddy of two cliffs grinding against each other—a chuckle, he was sure. Then, like a Rottweiler killing a cat, the Dragongod snapped his jaws shut around the smaller monster's neck and, with one terribly slow movement, tore his head off.

The king stopped twitching, and the god began to feed.

Everyone, even Azrael, followed the grisly spectacle in shocked silence. Once the god had satisfied his hunger, he sloshed back below the golden surface of the lake, and the priestess and the dancers left the jetty, leaving the Black Diamond behind on the gold altar. Eddy was reminded of cheese in a mousetrap.

He slumped behind the parapet like a wet sock sliding down a wall until he rested on his ass. He was drenched in sweat and thirstily gulped the rest of the water from his bottle. He craned his neck over to look at Azrael and was about to say, "Be careful what you wish for," but thought otherwise when he saw the dragon killer's face.

What he had mistaken for awe or even shock had been something completely different . . .

Azrael Grimes's face was now showing an expression of bliss.

He had gotten what he wished for.