Age of Aztec (46 page)

“Why?” The god mused. “Good question. Let me see. Could it be that, as humans, you might have a vested interest in the future of earth? It is, after all, your planet. Your home. And could it be that I would value having the two of you fighting at my side? I saw how well the two of you fared against that gunship, how you prevailed in the teeth of overwhelming odds, the teamwork you showed...”

“Teamwork?” Stuart and Vaughn exclaimed in unison.

“Not to mention your evident resourcefulness – purloining those suits of armour and adapting to their use so swiftly.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Vaughn. “You’re recruiting us?”

“Asking if you’d care to help out, yes,” Quetzalcoatl replied. “The struggle is as much yours as ours.”

“But you don’t need us, surely.”

“Two more assets in the theatre of conflict? Two more arrows in my quiver? Why ever not?”

“We’re not gods.”

“No, but you’re humans and therefore ought to be as keen to fight for your destiny as we are, if not far more so. But if the idea doesn’t appeal...”

At a gesture from Quetzalcoatl, the opening in the undergrowth appeared, just as Stuart remembered it. A pillar of light shone up from below, and through the rectangular hatch the tiers of the upside-down ziggurat could be glimpsed, shelving away deep into the ground.

“Bloody hell,” was Vaughn’s only comment.

Quetzalcoatl made to go down the steps. “I’m glad to have made your acquaintance, both of you. I know now for certain that humankind is worth fighting for and preserving, and indeed worth dying for. Perhaps, if nothing else, you could wish me luck?”

“No,” said Stuart. “Wait.”

Quetzalcoatl halted at the lip of the staircase. Didn’t look round.

“What the hell, I’m in.”

“Reston...” said Vaughn.

“He’s right, Vaughn. This is about us. Our future. It would be wrong not to get involved.”

“Are you nuts?”

“So you keep assuring me. But listen. This is the fight I began as the Conquistador, against the Empire. The same campaign, only taken to the highest level. It’d be a shame to have come so far and not go all the way. Might as well see it through to the end.” He added, “It’s not as if I’ve got much else to do with my life.”

“Don’t,” she said as he moved towards the hole. “Don’t go down in there with him.”

“Why the sudden show of concern?”

“It’s not concern. It’s just... If you do, I’m going to have to go too, you bastard.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Yes I fucking am, because A, there’s no way I’m going to let you hog all the glory, and B, I’m still itching to have a crack at that wanker Tlanextic.”

“Both of which are sound justifications,” said Stuart. “And is there by any chance a C?”

“Yeah. You’re an idiot, and idiots need other idiots to watch their backs.”

THIRTY-ONE

Same Day

T
HEY SAT IN
the refectory. Mal was famished. She hadn’t eaten since – when was it? Last night? Must be, judging by how her stomach was growling. There was food on the tables, and more kept arriving, courtesy of two goddesses, Coatlicue and Quetzalpetatl, who waltzed out from the kitchen to deposit dish after steaming dish on the tables. Both of them were beautiful in different but equally bountiful ways, the matriarch goddess statuesque and imperious, Quetzalcoatl’s sister voluptuous and long-legged. Mal couldn’t help envying their figures and their height, and supposed that that was what you were meant to do with goddesses of a certain kind. They had to be what a woman aspired to be and a man desired to have, otherwise what was the point of them?

Mostly, however, she concentrated on the grub, because it was superb and her belly badly needed filling.

More than once she caught Reston eyeing up Quetzalpetatl’s rear view as the younger goddess sashayed out of the room. She found this unreasonably annoying.

“Out of your league, mate,” she commented. “Way out.”

“That wasn’t why I was looking at her.”

“Oh, I know exactly why you were looking at her and exactly which part of her you were looking at and all.”

“Well, maybe a little. But the question I was actually asking myself was, if she was
my
sister, would I sleep with her?”

“That’s terrible.”

“Just idle speculation.”

“No, what I mean is, you’re trying to shift the blame for everything onto
her
, aren’t you? It was all Quetzalpetatl’s fault because she’s so sexy. That’s such a man thing to do. Like blaming a rape victim for dressing provocatively. ‘She was asking for it.’”

“As I understand it, Quetzalpetatl and Quetzalcoatl were equal partners in crime – if incest is a crime.”

“A moral one, if not a legal one.”

“Anyway, the real culprit’s Tezcatlipoca, surely. He’s at the root of this whole sorry saga.”

“Does it matter?” Mal said impatiently. “We’re having dinner served to us by gods. I for one am just going to soak that fact up for the time being. The rest’s immaterial.” She tore off a sliver of cornmeal pancake and used it to scoop up a generous blob of chocolate-infused guacamole. It was delicious. The one word she didn’t want to use to describe the taste – but she couldn’t think of a better – was
divine
.

Reston looked down at himself. He was in borrowed clothing, as was she. The outfits hung baggily off both of them, several sizes too large. God garb, furnished by Quetzalcoatl.

“It’s weird,” he said. “I didn’t have that Serpent armour on for long, but now I feel almost naked without it.”

Mal nodded. “Who has it, again?”

“Quetzalcoatl said he was taking it to Toci. She’s their resident science queen.”

“To soup it up.”

“And make it look less like Serpent hardware so as we don’t take friendly fire by mistake.”

“Why not just give us new kit instead? They must have spare suits of armour lying around.”

“Nothing that would fit us, or haven’t you noticed? I’m six foot and I’m a shrimp compared to them. Which makes you –”

“Steady.”

“I was going to say perfectly proportioned, for a human.”

“No, you were going to say even shrimpier.”

“Hello! Hello!”

This fruity cry accompanied the arrival in the refectory of a woman, or was it a man? He or she strode straight up to the table and enfolded Mal and Reston in a double embrace, drawing them in towards a chest that was both muscular and soft. “You again,” he or she said to Reston. “And this time you’ve brought your other half. Well done, you.”

“I’m not his –” Mal began wearily.

“Dear,” said the androgyne, all seriousness, “I’m Ometeotl. I know opposites, I know what complements what, and I know other halves. You’re his. I can tell at a glance.”

“No, really.”

“You’re everything he is not. He is everything you’re not. You define each other as sea defines land, and between you is the beautiful friction that can only come when equal and opposing forces meet, like the crash and tumble of surf on a shore. I’m so glad you’ve both volunteered to join the fight. It’s a sign – an encouraging one. Two humans who are oneness in duality. Couldn’t be more apt.”

Ometeotl let go of them and bustled onward to another table, where food awaited to be pounced on and devoured.

Mal couldn’t look Reston in the eye, and vice versa.

More of the gods entered, but these ones, unlike Ometeotl, were footsore and battle-weary. They filed past, giving Mal and Reston looks that ranged from curious to hostile. None spoke to them save Mictlantecuhtli, who leaned in close and intoned, “Quetzalcoatl has extended his protection to cover you both. That is the thing that is keeping you alive for this heartbeat, and this one, and this one” – he snapped his fingers in time – “and it is the only thing. Do not make me regret my consent to abide by the Plumed Serpent’s wishes and my suppression of the urge to slay you where you sit. By which I mean, do not let us down in the field of combat tomorrow and be the weak link that breaks the chain. Or then, truly, you will know the Dark One’s ire.”

From anyone else, threats of this order would have brought a sharp retort to Mal’s lips and possibly an invitation to step outside. But she had seen Mictlantecuhtli in action, and there was nothing in his face but hard, implacable menace. It radiated off him in invisible waves. He was an abyss, everything that was hopeless and pitiless in the world, everything that was despairing and brutal. She had seen eyes like his on stone-cold killers and also on their victims, but in neither case as chilling or as dead.

“Told you,” Reston said after Mictlantecuhtli had moved on. “Next to him, Xipe Totec’s a teddy bear.”

“I heard that!” the Flayed One called out through a mouthful of chilli pepper gruel. “Watch your tongue, human.”

Mal was feeling deeply uncomfortable and eager to leave. She’d never been in a room where she was so obviously unwelcome, not even as a Jaguar when raiding a suspect’s home or rousting a cell of heretics. Just as she was about to get up to go, however, in came Quetzalcoatl himself. A hunched, dwarfish little creature lolloped along at his side. Xolotl, she presumed.

With little preamble Quetzalcoatl launched into a speech.

He gave an assessment of how the siege had gone so far. “According to plan – but plans have a nasty habit of falling apart, with little warning.”

He congratulated his fellow gods on their martial prowess and on the vast differential in the casualty totals on either side. “Two of us have fallen, and that is two too many, and I mourn the sacrifice that Mixcoatl and Coyolxauhqui have made. But their loss is all the more reason to persist and prevail.”

He advised everyone to take advantage of this pause in their assault. “Rest, recuperate, and prepare yourselves for a resumption of hostilities at first light.”

Finally he drew attention to the two new additions to their ranks. “They represent the determination and forthrightness of this race that we have come to cherish. In siding with us, they prove their own worth and the worth of our cause. They are the best of their kind.”

“Which isn’t saying much,” griped Xipe Totec.

“And that makes them the equal of any of us,” Quetzalcoatl continued, staring hard at his heckler. “Their comparative physical shortcomings aside, they have heart, and heart is what counts.”

Ometeotl cheered and clapped loudly. No one else did.

“’Til tomorrow, then,” Quetzalcoatl concluded. “’Til the end.”

M
AL AND
R
ESTON
were assigned separate but adjacent rooms for the night, featureless, bare-necessities spaces like belowdecks cabins on an oceangoing freighter. Mal settled down on the narrow bed and closed her eyes. She was beyond exhausted. It had been an extraordinary day as well as a long and arduous one. Was it only this morning that she had been woken by the phone call from Mixquiahuala Jaguar HQ? A few hours and a lifetime ago. Now Aaronson was dead and Reston was, against all odds, an ally and not an enemy any more. Her whole world had been turned upside down and inside out. Everything was wrong and yet somehow right. She felt as though she was a riddle she’d always believed she knew the solution to, only to discover that the true solution was something else altogether.

To cap it all, tomorrow she was going to be part of a brigade of gods – gods! – attacking the home of another god with a view to ending him and his Empire. The same Empire she’d served loyally and indefatigably for nigh on a decade.

Little wonder that, for all her numbing fatigue, she couldn’t sleep.

Eventually she got up.

She touched the door to her room and it vanished.

Keyed to my own bio-data. And it just pops out of existence. There’s another thing to keep the old brain awake and racing
.

She padded barefoot down the corridor to the next room.

Hesitated a hundred times about knocking, then knocked.

Then that door vanished too, and there stood Reston, in just his underpants. A well muscled torso, with just the right amount of chest hair nestled between his pectorals.

Dammit.

“Can’t sleep,” she said.

“Me either. Should. Can’t.”

“Can I come in?”

“Shouldn’t. Can.”

She did.

They stood apart but facing, within reach of each other.

She put a hand on his forearm.

He moved the arm so that her hand fell into his.

“Ought we?” she said.

He nodded. “Ought. Will.”

She took a step towards him. “You’re still a smug dickhead, Reston. Know that.”

“Stuart,” he said.

“Mal.”