Age of Aztec

TWENTY-EIGHT

Same Day

Thelast thing Mal wanted to do was head back into the beleaguered city. It was counterintuitive. Worse than that — it was downright crazy.

But Reston, damn him, was right. The Serpents’ suits of armour were their one real shot at escaping. She didn’t know how difficult the suits were to fly. Probably quite difficult. But simpler, surely, than a disc.

As she and Reston made their way back up the harbour road, they met a crowd of people heading in the other direction. It seemed the idea of hitching a lift on a boat had occurred to several of Tenochtitlan’s ancillary and domestic staff. They’d crawled out through the shattered part of the wall, only to discover that the harbour was now empty, but they were continuing anyway, because conditions had to be less hazardous to health outside the city precincts than within. Mal and Reston butted past them, against the tide of exodus, and climbed the wall and over the breach. A look back showed Mal that several of the workers were so desperate to leave that they had dived into the lake and begun to swim. It was a good five or six miles to shore, a distance even a strong swimmer would struggle to cover. She wished them luck.

Just as she and Reston re-entered the city, there was a lull in the onslaught from above. Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl had fulfilled their mission remit and returned to base. Serpent Warriors patrolled the skies, scanning the horizon. Gunships were now airborne, too. They soared out to form a defensive perimeter a mile around the island, their double-barrelled weapons nacelles swivelling.

On the ground, non-armoured Serpents were regrouping and entrenching. Blockades were set up at strategic points throughout the city: on plazas where there were clear lines of sight and enfilading crossfire was possible, and at street chokepoints where any invaders coming in on foot could be pinned down and pincered. Heaps of rubble from ruined buildings were put to use as shooting cover. Holes in facades became sniper nests. Places of refuge were established too, for the injured and for noncombatants who’d been caught out in the open.

All of this impacted Mal and Reston, hampering their progress through the city. Their aim was to infiltrate one of the underground bunkers. That was where the suits were stashed, Reston reckoned, recalling Colonel Tlanextic’s instruction to Ueman and his men to “go to the bunkers and get armoured up.” But the bunker entrances were now the city’s most heavily fortified spots, which seemed to confirm his theory but at the same time made it almost impossible to take practical advantage of. It was tricky even getting near them, and they had several too-close-for-comfort encounters with Serpents. They couldn’t risk being spotted by the soldiers; Tenochtitlan might be on a war footing, but the two of them were still officially wanted. Colonel Tlanextic was under the impression they were dead, but that false report couldn’t yet have filtered out among the main body of his troops. All in all, although they had a clear objective, the obstacles to attaining it were well nigh insurmountable.

Reston remained upbeat.

“What we have to do,” he said, after they had once again been stymied by the concentrated Serpent presence at a bunker entrance, “is lie low and wait. As Quetzalcoatl’s lot step up their attack, order will break down. Chaos will be our best ally. Maybe by nightfall we’ll be looking at a whole different set of circumstances. And then, of course, we’ll have the cover of darkness on our side as well.”

“You just don’t give in, do you?”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Would you rather I turned into a quivering jelly?”

“No, it’s simply, I find it really annoying, and I shouldn’t. Not now. Not any longer.”

“Not when it might work in your favour.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

They found themselves a bolthole on the third floor of a ziggurat that turned out to be the administrative hub of Tenochtitlan, a warren of offices where smartly dressed workers cowered under their desks or congregated in frightened huddles, unsure what to do with themselves. The borrowed hieratic vestments, though tattered and torn now, were still in good enough condition and still carried enough inbuilt authority to allow Mal and Reston to walk the corridors unopposed and unquestioned, especially since everyone else was so preoccupied with other matters. They searched for a room that was unoccupied and would provide a good vantage point. One door they tried opened onto a supply closet where a pair of respectable-looking middle-aged bureaucrats were in the throes of strenuous upright sex, she braced against the shelves with her skirt hitched up, he taking her weight and pumping hard with his pants round his ankles. Both were so engrossed in their business that they didn’t notice the intrusion.

“Get it while you can,” Mal observed, quietly closing the door.

“An office romance blossoms under adversity,” said Reston.

“Now or never.”

“Could be dead within the hour.”

The room they ended up taking over as their own was a corner office whose two converging walls of plate-glass window afforded a clear, uninterrupted view outside. There was a crossroads below, a cocourse with a monorail platform and a bunker entrance. Diagonally opposite the office building lay a block which Mal quickly deduced must be a Serpent Warrior barracks — rows of small rooms, each with a single narrow bed and little in the way of interior decor. Adjacent stood a water tower and, behind that, the functional concrete bulk of a fusion plant, the city’s source of power.

She used the desk to barricade the door, and for the next few hours she and Reston crouched by the windows and watched.

It was a hell of a show, and they had the best seats in the house.

About an hour after Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl called off their initial assault, they returned for more. This time they brought along Quetzalcoatl himself.

Quetzalcoatl was as adept at aerial combat as the other two gods. He was also invulnerable, thanks to the spherical forcefield which enclosed him like an oily bubble and absorbed direct hits from the Serpents’ l-guns.

The Serpents, however, had upped their game since the previous attack. Not only were gunships in play now, but the sentinels on the outer walls were contributing intense surface-to-air barrages. The gods found making their approach runs to the city much harder. Beeline flying was impossible: Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl had to dodge and swerve, and even Quetzalcoatl was knocked off-course by the pulses of heavy plasma fire. His forcefield repeatedly took a pounding and he was batted this way and that like a tlachtli ball.

Tenochtitlan did suffer during the second wave, but not as badly as before. When the three gods relented and pulled back, it seemed more like a retreat than a tactical withdrawal.

In the hiatus that followed, many of the armoured Serpents returned to the ground and trooped off down into the bunkers.

“Bingo,” said Reston. “Bet you anything they’re going to recharge their suits’ power packs.”

“Probably to have a pee, too. I would if I’d been stuck inside one of those things for so long.”

“Only you would think of a practicality like that.”

“Hello? Woman.”

“Yes, and therefore incapable of bladder control.”

She punched him on the arm, hard enough to leave a mark. “I bet you’d just piss inside it if you had to.”

“Actually, I would.”

“You’re even fouler than I thought.”

“You’re talking to a man who lay in a pile of fresh corpses for two hours, pretending to be one of them. I know foulness.”

“Yeah,” Mal said. “D’you know, when I realised that’s how the Conquistador must have got away from the City of London ziggurat, all I could think was how fucking batshit crazy this guy must be, whoever he was.”

“And now?”

“I still think you’re batshit crazy, but I sort of understand why. The Empire took everything from you.”

“It took something from you too.”

“My brother, you mean? Yeah, maybe, but the difference is, I gave Ix up. I’m the one who threw him to the wolves when I could have saved him. Because he compromised me. He was like a stain. Being related to a petty crim could have nobbled my career. So I scrubbed him off me, publicly, thoroughly.” She gave a bitter chuckle. “I told myself it was for his own good but really it was for mine. All said and done, he was still my big bro, wasn’t he? And I should have protected him.”

“You did what you felt was right at the time. You can’t condemn yourself for it.”

“Oh, yes I bloody can.”

“Well then, you mustn’t. Or else you’ll end up like me.”

“Perish the thought.”

“I mean it. There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t wish I could have helped Sofia, done more for her.”

“What, though? It wasn’t your fault at all, as I understand it.”

“Wasn’t it? I married her.”

“You didn’t make her how she was. You didn’t drive her to do what she did.”

“I knew, going in, that she was a bit flaky. But she seemed so right for me. For the man I used to be,” he amended. “Want to know why I first asked her out?”

“Because she was a catch, the trophy wife every bloke with a fat wallet was trying to bag?”

“No. Well, yes. But it was also because… I already knew about her, but when I actually laid eyes on her for the first time, at some drinks party or other, she was picking a piece of hors d’oeuvre out of her teeth.”

“Really?” Mal said. “That was it, the big attraction? She was picking her teeth?”

“She thought nobody was looking and she was digging at something stuck between two molars. Levering it out with one manicured, lacquered fingernail. This great swanlike society beauty. This ethereal, worshipped creature. Doing something so mundane and ordinary, her mouth wide open, hand rummaging away. That was when I knew I was in with a chance. That was also when I knew I could love her. She was human, after all.”

He looked wistfully out of the window.

“You like a bit of grit in the works, don’t you?” Mal said.

“If life’s too easy, what’s the point?”

“And yet the rest of us — the ‘other half’ — we’re all trying to fight our way up out of the muck, into the so-called good life, a life like you had.”

“Who’s content with their lot?” Reston said. “No one. Except maybe the Great Speaker.”

“Not even him, judging by how he whinged to Quetzalcoatl.”

“True. Then again, he seemed enthused by the prospect of this war. Like it was something he was looking forward to, after so long. Speaking of which…”

There was the distant sound of l-guns discharging on the outer walls.

“Looks like things are hotting up again.”

The Gods’ third strike was broad-based and comprehensive. They didn’t confine themselves solely to the air. Ground forces were also deployed.

The first sign was a terrific commotion originating from over in the direction of the main gate. There was shouting and a mass of concentrated gunfire. Shortly afterwards, non-armoured Serpent Warriors came hurrying into the concourse below the administrative ziggurat. They were on the run, pulling back, harried by an enemy.

“Xipe Totec,” said Reston. “And Mictlantecuhtli.”

The Flayed One was in full shock-mode, his skin transparent, all his viscera on display. Mal looked on with fascinated disgust as he cut a swath through the routed Serpents, wielding a pair of hook-shaped knives with finesse and almost surgical precision. He darted about, dodging his enemy’s shots; he seemed to have a sixth sense as to where the next plasma bolt was coming from. And his blades flickered and slashed, and here a Serpent fell with his torso opened wide from shoulder to waist, and here another Serpent staggered in circles with blood fountaining from a severed jugular, and here a third screamed and tried to stem the flow of life jetting from the stump of his arm.

“It’s like, he’s showing you his insides before he shows you your own,” Mal breathed.

Reston nodded. “Sort of a visual promise, isn’t it? ‘Look, here’s what’s coming your way.’”

Alarming as Xipe Totec was, however, he was nothing compared with Mictlantecuhtli. If the former was a scalpel, the latter was blunt force trauma. The Dark One strode like a juggernaut, implacably, as though nothing could daunt or deter him. His hands were encased in massive black gauntlets, and with these he did two things: deflected incoming l-gun shots and killed human beings. Often he would be performing the one action with one hand and the other with the other simultaneously. The gauntlets were large enough that a Serpent’s head could fit inside their grip, comfortably, at least until Mictlantecuhtli squeezed and the head was crushed, helmet and all, like a pistachio nut. A punch from one of those huge metal fists was capable of removing an entire arm at the shoulder. A swat easily disembowelled.

It was a hopelessly one-sided battle, right up until the moment armoured Serpents began buzzing out of the bunker like angry wasps and joined the fray. They pressed Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli hard, pinning them down with ferocious salvoes of gunfire, forcing them to spend all their effort defending.

One Serpent was at the forefront of the fightback: Colonel Tlanextic. Mal felt herself tense up at the sight of that gold-zigzagged armour. She willed Xipe Totec to get the better of him, or Mictlantecuhtli. Either of the gods was welcome to kill Aaronson’s murderer. If she was unable to do it herself, she would settle for that.

No such luck, however. Tlanextic and the other armoured Serpents succeeded in repulsing Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli and driving them off the concourse. The battle raged on down the streets of Tenochtitlan, out of view.

The few Serpents remaining at the bunker entrance had a brief respite. They reinforced their positions and tallied their living and their dead. By now the sun was setting. For a time, the air thickened and turned smoky gold. The sky was blood-red, then amethyst, then purple-grey. Stars winked. Streetlights came on automatically. Everything was still and quiet.

Then, amid the shadows on the concourse, shapes started to move.

At first Mal thought it must just be tired eyes, a trick of vision. That or wisps of dust being whisked up by breezes.

“Did you see that?” she murmured to Reston. “Down in that doorway just now. And over there by the monorail track. I could have sworn…”

“There’s something there, all right. Animals of some kind.”

“What?”

“Not sure.”

The Serpents themselves had noticed they weren’t alone on the concourse. They swung their l-guns in different directions, trying to train them on the creatures flitting and scurrying between pools of darkness. To Mal, from the fragmentary glimpses she was catching, the animals looked like large rats or perhaps small dogs. But they were furless, leathery-skinned, and their movements weren’t right. There was something of the reptile about them, not least the long tapering tails, and also something disturbingly humanoid, especially the paws, which bore a marked similarity to hands and feet.

All at once a Serpent screamed. One of the creatures had latched onto his back. He reached behind him, clawing desperately, and the animal squirmed out of his grasp and wrapped itself round his neck. It had a shovel-shaped muzzle, and twin rows of serrated teeth glittered like diamonds in the lamplight. It sank its jaws into the man’s throat and, with one wrenching twist of its head, tore out his trachea, Adam’s apple and a great deal of gristle and muscle. Blood gushed over it, and the creature became frenzied, burrowing deeper into the Serpent’s neck, hind feet scrabbling for purchase on his uniform, tail lashing the air.

This first drawing of blood was the cue for a concerted wave of attacks. More of the repugnant monsters sprang from the shadows onto the Serpents. Some threw themselves down off ledges and cornices and bit their faces, while others writhed up their legs and went for the soft parts at the crotch. Plasma bolts crisscrossed as the Serpents tried to fend off the creatures, but the vast majority of the shots were wild, fired by panicked or pain-wracked fingers. Martial discipline went to pieces in the face of an enemy that was so obscenely swift and that didn’t play by the standard rules of engagement.

“Just what the hell are those things?” Mal said. Rhetorical question. She wasn’t expecting Reston to have the answer.

It turned out he did. “Over there.” He pointed to one of the streets that fed onto the concourse. At the corner, lurking, was an old woman with wild white hair and an eager, gloating posture. “That’s Tzitzimitl.”

“So those animals would be…”

“The Tzitzimime.”

The Demons of Darkness. The mindless, rapacious servants of the mother goddess. According to the myths, they were destined one day to overrun the earth and devour all humankind.

Mal felt an old familiar chill creep through her. As a child, she had had nightmares about the Tzitzimime. There’d been one particular textbook at school, a religious primer, which had carried pictures of them, an artist’s pen-and-ink impression of how the demons might look. Those black, leering homunculi had plagued Mal’s sleep for years.

The flesh-and-blood reality was worse still. Uglier and more vicious than even that textbook draughtsman could have imagined.

Most of the Serpent Warriors were on the ground now, shrieking in horror and agony as the Tzitzimime ate them alive. Their suffering filled the old crone with delight. Tzitzimitl clasped her hands and shivered, and now and then did a little stiff-kneed jig on the spot.

“What did I tell you?” Reston said. “She really doesn’t like us.”

It wasn’t long before there were just three Serpents left, and they were attempting to get to the bunker and find sanctuary there, but the Tzitzimime kept cutting them off from the entrance. Every way they turned, there was a pack of the creatures spitting and snarling. They tried feinting at them, but the Tzitzimime simply feinted back. Eventually the Serpents were surrounded, encircled. Their lightning gun batteries were drained and for metres around they could see nothing but squat, quivering bodies and rows of deadly sharp teeth.

They were done for and they knew it. One of them made a proposal to the other two. All three drew their macuahitl s.

“Those won’t be any use,” Reston commented.

“I don’t think that’s what they’re up to,” said Mal.

She was right. The three Serpents formed themselves into a triangle. Each held up his sword point-first at the chest of the man on his right. Then one gave the command and they drove the swords home. All three fell, as one, and the Tzitzimime scampered onto the fresh corpses and feasted.

A sharp, loud whistle from Tzitzimitl had the Tzitzimime pricking their ears and raising their gore-streaked muzzles. A second whistle, and they abandoned their meals and hurried towards her, a great flowing carpet of low-slung bony beast. They assembled at the goddess’s ankles, clambering over one another and fawning for her attention. Tzitzimitl gave them all a gracious smile, patted a few heads, then set off with the Tzitzimime trotting behind her in a long obedient line, onwards to whatever atrocity she planned next.

“She bred them, didn’t she?” Mal said. “Trained them. Made them.”

“I’d guess so.”

“They were little bits of this and that. A bunch of different animals put together.”

“I think these gods can do things human scientists can only dream of. Manipulate genetics. Splice elements of one creature into another. You should see Xolotl. He’s half dog, half man, but it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”

“So that’s another gift they didn’t give us: how to tamper with nature.”

“Do you think it would have done us any good to have it? Or, no, put it this way — do you think we’d have done any good with it?”

“No.”

“Exactly. On the plus side, Tzitzimitl has at least given you and me something.”

Mal surveyed the concourse, now little more than an abattoir. “A clear run to that bunker.”

“So what are we waiting for?” said Reston.