Age of Aztec

SEVENTEEN

Same Day

Stuart was on first watch that night. He and a man called Auilix patrolled the perimeter of the clearing separately, Stuart at one end, Auilix at the other. Every now and then they met in the middle to exchange nods and maybe a word or two.

Since his conversation with Chel, Stuart had oscillated between feeling the Xibalba leader was hopelessly deluded and wondering if he might not be on to something. If the plan could be carried out without a hitch, it would make everything Stuart had done as the Conquistador look small-time indeed. It might even, as Chel insisted, cause the Empire to crumble. At the very least, shake it to its foundations and leave significant cracks in its facade.

But…

The odds against success were inordinately, almost ridiculously high.

But…

If there was even a tiny percentage chance it would work, wasn’t it worth attempting?

One Flint Knife was half a trecena away. Stuart had seven days to make up his mind.

The rainforest was unusually loud this evening. The animals seemed to have recruited several new members to their nightly glee club. The racket made it hard to think. Stuart, as he did his semicircular circuits of the clearing, could scarcely hear his own footfalls.

Then, all of a sudden, it stopped.

A hush descended.

The hush stretched on, as eerie as it was absolute.

Stuart strode over to Auilix. The Mayan had the lightning gun, while Stuart had a semiautomatic rifle. Stuart could see he was perturbed.

“What’s up?” he whispered. “Why’s it gone so quiet?”

Auilix shook his head uncertainly, and both men stared into the darkness of the trees. The only sounds were the burble of the waterfall, the faint ripple of a breeze through high branches, and their own breathing.

“Sometimes, if there’s an apex predator around, the other animals are subdued,” Auilix said. “But not like this. Not this silent.”

Stuart felt the hairs prickle on the backs of his hands.

“Someone…” said the Mayan, so softly it was almost inaudible. “Someone is moving around out there.”

Immediately Stuart racked the bolt handle on the rifle. The sound seemed astonishingly loud, but he was happy with that. Whoever was in the forest, he wanted them to know he and Auilix were aware of their presence and ready to deal with them.

His eyes searched for movement. With the Eagles he had learned to use peripheral vision at night. The blind spot at your focal point, his training sergeant had said, could hide an elephant.

There.

Black amidst the blackness. Something shining. A glint.

Stuart raised the rifle and sighted along the barrel.

But the glint had gone. It could just have been moonlight reflected off a leaf.

But Auilix beside him had glimpsed something too. The l-gun began to whine.

Stuart moved closer to the trees, leading with the rifle. He was expecting to come under enemy fire at any moment. In his gut, he was terrified. In his head, he was calm. The real danger here was losing his nerve. Keep that and he might just keep living.

“Come on, you bastard,” he murmured under his breath. “Where are you? Show yourself.”

He reached the tree line. Behind him, Auilix grunted, urging caution, but Stuart didn’t pause. The best tactic, when facing the possibility of ambush, was to take the fight to the ambushers. Your opponents’ one advantage was their hidden position, and that could be negated by a direct, full-frontal approach, flushing them out from cover.

He entered the forest, and the tree canopy closed overhead, blotting out the moon. Everything was a play of silver and black, patterns of pale filigree light. He trod toe-to-heel, feeling for each step with his feet, never dropping his gaze once to look where he was treading.

The whole of the forest held its breath.

Then there was a yelp of surprise, and the percussive snap! of a lightning gun being fired.

Stuart whirled round in time to see Auilix disappearing.

Upwards.

The Mayan was whisked into the air above the clearing, suspended beneath something large, black and insectlike. Stuart glimpsed shiny curved contours, giant outspread wings — then the thing and its squirming human burden were gone, soaring out of sight. It had happened so swiftly that Auilix had managed to get off that single, reflexive shot with his l-gun, and that was all.

Stuart had time to wonder what the winged creature was. Then he heard voices. They were coming from nearby in the forest. Two of them. Conversing urgently and low. He couldn’t make out what was being said… but there was something weirdly familiar about both of the voices. The cadences, the timbres.

He couldn’t help Auilix. The Mayan was a captive now, possibly dead already. He could, he supposed, alert the rest of Xibalba. Chances were the l-gun discharge had done that anyway.

But the voices…

Who was talking? He had to find out.

Stuart turned and headed in the direction of the sound. He wasn’t so unwary as to think this might not be a trap; he was most likely being lured. But he had a weapon, didn’t he? That evened the odds somewhat.

He ventured away from the clearing, further into the forest. Everything had suddenly become strange. That thing, that flying creature — it didn’t make sense. Far bigger than any airborne animal he knew of. Encased in a hard armour like a beetle’s. What with that and those ants the day before yesterday… The world was topsy-turvy. This place, this sector of rainforest, harboured anomalies, phenomena that shouldn’t by all the laws of nature exist. He felt as though he was in some alien zone where the usual rules no longer applied.

Steady, he told himself. Focus.

He concentrated on regulating his breathing. Pinning his mind on the task at hand.

The voices grew louder, clearer, as he homed in on their source.

One of them, now, he was certain he could identify. It was Ah Balam Chel’s.

Damn it, what was Chel doing out here, chatting away in the forest? Why wasn’t he back there at his and Chimalmat’s cabin where he ought to be?

A thought occurred. Was the Xibalba leader behind all these shenanigans? Was this some sort of exercise? A test of his men’s preparedness? No, it didn’t seem reasonable. Or possible.

Now Stuart was within a few yards of the two people who were talking so intently, Chel and another man. He still couldn’t see them, but he could hear every word. They were speaking in Nahuatl, and the tone was distinctly conspiratorial.

“We,” said Chel, “are going to fly it to Tenochtitlan and land there.”

Chel was sharing his plan with someone else. But who?

The other person laughed. “And get blasted to buggery the moment we step out.”

Stuart couldn’t have put it better himself.

“Not if we don’t step out,” the Xibalba leader replied.

“Just sit there on the landing pad, then, and wait for Serpent Warriors to board.”

Hold on a sec, Stuart thought.

“The slightest hint of something dodgy going on,” Chel’s interlocutor continued, “and they’ll storm the disc all guns blazing.”

What the fuck…?

“In a confined space, against dozens of them, I don’t rate our chances.”

Stuart reeled. That was him. That was his voice. Those were his exact words from that very morning.

This wasn’t any old conversation. It was a playback of the talk he and Chel had had in the aerodisc.

Chel’s next statement confirmed it. “Neither would I. What you’re not seeing, Reston — and it’s not your fault, because you’re not in possession of the full facts — is…”

Stuart charged the last few paces towards where the playback was coming from. He expected to find a loudspeaker attached to some kind of recording device. Somebody had bugged the aerodisc, eavesdropping on Chel’s revelation of his intentions for the Great Speaker. Somebody was taunting Stuart with the knowledge that they, too, knew what Xibalba was up to. If this was the Serpent Warriors’ doing, then it was unusually sneaky behaviour. Stuart felt almost indignant.

There was no loudspeaker, no recording device. Stuart rounded a tree trunk and found himself confronted by a man.

A tall man, dressed in smooth, sleek armour.

And crouching at the man’s side, a dog. Or something that resembled a dog, at any rate. In the dim light it was hard to make out its features, or those of its master. It had fur, certainly, and sharp pointed ears. But it was big, too, almost apelike. And the way it sat on its haunches was very un-canine. More human, if anything.

What Stuart could see quite clearly was that it was the dog that was doing the talking. All the talking. Its jaws moved and speech came out — speech that mimicked precisely his and Chel’s voices.

“What conference?” the dog said, in Stuart’s own tones. “I didn’t know there was one happening.”

Then, as Chel, it said, “It’s not been widely advertised. These hieratic synods rarely are, for security reasons.”

Stuart suddenly felt small and unreal, his soul shrivelling inside him. He was witnessing an impossibility, to add to the other impossibilities of the past day and a half. It wasn’t just the latest in the list, it was the one that capped the previous ones, the final straw.

A dog that spoke. That could replay conversations like a parrot.

Everything had gone stark staring mad.

But he still had the rifle in his hands. A loaded weapon.

Bullets were hard and reassuringly real. They could change things — end madness.

He took aim at the dog’s head. He curled his finger round the trigger, braced for recoil, and squeezed.

The gun bucked. The muzzle flashed.

Stuart almost didn’t see the armoured man move. Move he did, though. So fast it was more like a flicker of light, a quicksilver ripple in the darkness. His hand darted out in front of the dog’s face and darted back again.

Stuart’s aim had been good. At this range, virtually point blank, he couldn’t have missed.

But the dog was alive, and intact. And the armoured man was holding up his hand, and a small object was pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

A bullet.

The round that was meant to have blown the dog’s brains out.

Stuart gaped. Stuart gasped.

Then the tall man stiffened, straightened. From the back of his armour, objects began to unfurl. Pointed extrusions fanned out behind his head, forming a semicircle of comb-like teeth.

The dog, which had stopped talking the moment Stuart shot at it, looked up at its master with admiration and approval.

The armour started to glow. All at once, brilliant light shot out from it. Stuart was blinded. He threw a hand in front of his eyes. The light was dazzling, shimmering, iridescent. Even through eyelids squeezed shut, Stuart could see multicoloured patterns, a pulsing full-spectrum radiance. The light had power. He could feel it all over him, bathing him, putting pressure on his skin, driving itself into him. The rifle dropped from his hands. He could no longer hold it. He could barely stand. He reeled before the light as though before a strong wind. It was a physical force pummelling him. He staggered backwards, hoping to escape, yet there was no escape. The light was suffusing him. Its rainbow intensity was within him, crawling through his muscles, sinking into his bones. Nothing could withstand it. The light was all-consuming. It was taking him over completely, leaving nothing left, just a shell in the shape of Stuart Reston. He was vaguely aware of himself screaming, but his scream seemed to have no substance. It was weightless and meaningless, as light as light.

Unconsciousness, when it came, was a blessing. Stuart blacked out, and the blackness extinguished the light.