by Lisa Smedman
“When I took over as priest, I saw Rosalita’s magic in a different light. She had a healing touch like that of Christ himself. I knew it could not truly be evil. And I understood that a person can sometimes make mistakes—could sometimes start down the wrong path and only later find the way back into Christ’s embrace. I also am a firm believer that any who seek salvation should be granted the chance to achieve it, no matter what their background might be—Christ, after all, accepted lepers and other outcasts into his first ministry.”
The maid returned with more rolls then—a good thing, since Rafael had already scarfed the last of them down. Gus smiled at her, and I saw them exchange a meaningful look. I couldn’t read the subtext, however. The maid cleared away the empty plates and left the courtyard as quietly as she had come. She moved with a silent grace—a bit unnerving, when she appeared suddenly like that, but I supposed that being unobtrusive was the hallmark of a good servant.
“And so I baptized Rosalita,” the priest continued. “Your abuelita was a woman driven by her need to heal people. When I cautioned her, saying that she was destroying her own health in the process, she laughed at me. Then she explained that her healing was the penance she must do for the sins she had committed as a member of the cult. She mentioned those sins to me once, during a confession ...” He paused and visibly shuddered. “But of course I am bound by my oath and cannot repeat them to you now.”
“I can guess what they were,” I said, interrupting Gus. “Murder. Human sacrifice.” Even as I said the words and knew they must be true, I found them hard to believe. Mama G had always seemed so innocent, so free from malice of any kind. But I’d been wrong about people before. Not often, but it did happen.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” I said. “If Mama Grande left the cult nearly twenty years ago, why were its members still interested in her? If she was going to turn them in to the policía, she’d have done so long ago.”
Gus laughed out loud. “Turn them in?” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t understand this country at all, do you? The government’s priests secretly encourage this sort of activity. It’s all part of their plan to awaken the ancient gods and help Aztlan to conquer the world.”
I just stared at him, one eyebrow raised. Awaken the gods? Conquer the world? This was starting to sound like some sort of paranoid fantasy or late-night B-trid.
Rafael must have been thinking the same thing. “So why would the cultists—and the government—be so interested in my Mama Grande?”
Gus pursed his lips. “Just before she . . . left Aztlan, Rosalita left a note for me. In it she said she had discovered something that could lead to what she called the ‘end of the world.’ She said that no one must ever learn the secret she had discovered. She was fearful because the cultists had contacted her—they seemed to sense that she knew something of value and was keeping it from them. She said it was only a matter of time before they made her tell.”
I winced. The words were all too familiar. On the evening after the missionaries questioned her, Mama Grande had used that same expression: “They made me tell.” I shivered, despite the warmth of the infrared heaters.
“But Mama Grande was . . . confused,” Rafael protested.
“Not when the cultists first contacted her,” Gus said.
“The note Mama Grande left you sounds like a suicide note,” I said. “What happened to her? Did she try to take her life? Is that how she wound up”—I searched for a euphemism but couldn’t find one—“brain damaged?”
The priest shifted uncomfortably and stared for a long moment at the Olmec sculpture, refusing to meet my eyes. After a moment he turned back to me. “What do you know about magic?”
“A little.” I shrugged. “Mostly about spell effects and how they pertain to forensic investigations.”
He looked taken aback at that one. I had yet to tell him that I was an ex-cop.
“Have you heard of a fovea?”
“No. It sounds like a Latin word. Is it?”
The priest nodded. “It means ‘pit.’ I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of foveae—they seem to exist only in Aztlan, or at least to be most prevalent here. They’re holes in the mana flow. Blank spots where magic won’t work. If a magically active individual enters one . . .”
He suppressed a shudder. And that made me start to wonder about him. But he continued before I could put my finger on what exactly had pricked my suspicions.
“A mage or shaman who enters a fovea in astral form dies or is driven mad. It’s much the same effect as when someone tries to use magic in space. It is . .. unpleasant, to say the least.”
His voice dropped. “Your abuelita entered a fovea deliberately, in an effort to kill herself. Her motivation was pure—she believed she was sacrificing herself for the good of others. But what she did was still a sin.”
I nodded. Suicide was right up there on the Catholic top ten list of things not to do, if you don’t want to slot God off.
Rafael was silent for a moment. His eyes narrowed, as if he were in pain. “She did what she had to do,” he said grimly. “That would be like her. She always wanted to help people. She never cared about her own safety. It fits.”
But I was still mulling it over. “These holes in the mana flow,” I said. “Can a mage or shaman who’s jandering about in astral space see them?”
I was only trying to understand—to get a grasp on what these fovea things were. But my question made Gus shift uncomfortably. He sat up as if he were about to get out of his chair, sat back, then squirmed around almost like a suspect being grilled about a major crime. Then he buried his face in his hand and choked out a sob.
“It’s my fault,” he said. His hands clenched. “I told her about the fovea. I’m to blame. I share her sin and no amount of penance can ever absolve me of it. I told her about the fovea in jest, saying that there were worse things than the end of the world—one could experience the anguish of entering a fovea. I should have known when she started asking me more and more about it. But I didn’t realize what she was going to do until it was too late—until she disappeared.”
He looked up at us, eyes begging for mercy. The priest had become the pentinent.
“I found her,” he said. “Wandering alone in the desert. Confused. Hurt. Suffering. She had not died when she entered the fovea, but she had been driven loco. She could no longer perform her healing magic—the gift God gave her was gone. She could no longer care for herself. I was going to take care of her, to take her in. But my friends in the rebel movement insisted she be sent to El Norte. She had family there, they said. She would be safe. But she was murdered, just the same. And now she is dead, and here you are.”
Rafael sat with arms crossed and a steely look on his face. If Gus was expecting absolution, he wasn’t going to get it from him. I felt sorry for the priest, but there was one last thread we had yet to unravel.
“This secret that Mama Grande discovered was a place,” I said slowly. “At least, that’s what my investigation has led me to believe. Think, Gus. Did Rosalita ever mention a specific location that the cultists might be interested in—or even hint at one?”
I held my breath, waiting for him to compose himself enough to answer. But my hopes were soon dashed.
“No,” Gus answered. “Never. She did not confide in me—even in the confessional. Whatever the secret was, she took it with her to her grave.”
He was wrong, of course, but I didn’t correct him. At least one person knew Mama G’s secret—the man we suspected was her murderer, the Azzie priest Domingo Vargas. He’d hacked it out of her, one painful macauitl blow at a time. And we were no closer to capturing him than we had been before.
I looked at Rafael, whose face mirrored my own disappointment. “That’s it,” I told him. “Dead end.”
“The game’s not over yet,” he answered grimly. “We’ll get that fragger—just wait and see.”
I sighed. We might—hut it would be tough going. We had
only one hope—somehow getting to Vargas during the fifth game of the ball court finals.
It was only a slim hope, full of danger. And I didn’t like it one bit.
16
We left Izamal on Saturday afternoon. Teresa—the maid who’d sheltered us in her employer’s hacienda that morning—had been given the rest of that day and Sunday off so she could visit with her family in a tiny village several kilometers south of Izamal. The town was having a fiesta that evening and hordes of people would be converging upon it. Even if the soldiers who’d pursued us in the jeep the night before had gotten a good look at us—and I doubted it, since what they mostly saw were our backs—they’d be hard pressed to spot us in the milling crowds at the bus depot. And they’d be looking for two people, not three.
Teresa had been hesitant, at first, to have us accompany her. But despite her obvious misgivings, she let Gus talk her into it. I guessed that she’d do anything for him—it was as if she owed him some big favor and was willing to repay it in any way she could.
We had decided to make our way back to Tenochtitlán, since there didn’t seem to be much else we could learn by remaining in Izamal. If the policía did stop us to ask questions, the two tickets to the ollamaliztli finals in Rafael’s pocket were a good reason for us to be headed in that direction. And they fit with our cover story—that we were sports buffs on leave from our jobs at the Nuevo Laredo dog racing track. Although we’d be hard pressed to explain why we were coming to the capital from the opposite direction, from war-torn Yucatán . . .
The bus was crowded—the three of us had to squeeze into a seat designed for two. Rafael sat between Teresa and I, one muscular arm draped across the back of the seat behind her, smiling and bragging for the entire forty-kilometer journey about how he’d be a professional combat biker one day—and boring Teresa silly, I’m sure. I spent my time trying to get comfortable with my hoop hanging half off the seat. I had to take a deep, steadying breath each time we stopped at an Aztlan military checkpoint—especially since I still had the Azzie officer’s Savalette Guardian inside my jacket. But the soldiers who squeezed through the press of people on board the bus to scan passengers’ ID datacards didn’t even pause to listen to my hastily concocted story about us coming to Izamal to visit our “niece” Teresa. They appeared to be looking for someone else.
Teresa seemed to be looking at the soldiers as nervously as I was. I felt guilty for using her as part of our cover story. She was just a teenage girl, after all—one who led a sheltered life as maid to a rich family. Traveling with two strangers who obviously had something to hide was probably scaring her witless.
I had been using my cyberear to listen in on the soldier’s conversations, to give us advance warning should they decide to single us out. As our bus pulled away from yet another checkpoint, I heard two men in the back of the bus in whispered conversation. Their voices were hushed enough that even the people in the seat ahead of them wouldn’t be able to hear what they were saying, but with my amplified hearing I caught the word sonador. I immediately filtered out everything else—the other voices, the bus’ engine rumble, the squeaking of the seats and creak of the luggage rack overhead—to listen in.
“... but if a dragon can become president of the UCAS . ..”
“Soñador doesn’t have a chance. The Azatlan Party has governed this country since 2015—the elections are all rigged, but nobody can prove it because it’s all electronic. All the ORO Corporation has to do is juggle the data from an election and . . .”
“We could vote the old-fashioned way, by ballot.”
“It still wouldn’t work. The PRI rigged elections in the last century, and they were using paper ballots then. No, Soñador is truly dreaming if it thinks it can have the Yucatán declared a sovereign nation by popular vote. Only the armed revolution can . .
I tuned out. The conversation had told me what Soñador’s “dream” was—the dragon wanted to follow in the footsteps of Dunkelzahn and govern its own country. But I really wasn’t interested in a political debate. I dozed as the bus bumped and rattled its way along the highway, toward Teresa’s village.
Rafael nudged me awake when we reached our destination. Night was falling as the bus pulled up at a depot near the town’s central plaza. All around our bus, streams of people surged back and forth, laughing and shouting.
As we prepared to get off the bus, something egg-shaped sailed in through the open window next to Teresa and smacked into Rafael’s chest. He shouted in alarm and reared back—knocking me off the seat and into the aisle—only to have those around him burst into laughter.
“Don’t worry,” Teresa shouted over the uproar. “It’s only a glitter egg. All part of the fiesta.”
Grumbling, Rafael brushed a mixture of confetti and glitter from his chest.
We struggled out of the bus with the other departing passengers and waited while Teresa collected her luggage from the men who were tossing bags down from the rack on top of the vehicle. Our connecting bus didn’t leave for two hours, and Rafael insisted on walking Teresa to her parents’ home. She refused—adamantly at first, shaking off his hand when he tried to take her arm and insisting on carrying her own travel bag. She at last gave in reluctantly when she saw that she wasn’t about to get rid of Rafael that easily.
I could see that Rafael’s attentions were doomed to failure. I decided to tag along and play chaperone, just to rub it in.
We made our way across the plaza, weaving in and out of the celebrants. Colored lights had been strung from the buildings, painting the night with festive colors. We passed a mariachi band of musicians wearing formal black suits studded with silver buttons who were playing trumpets and armadillo-shell guitars. Cerveza vendors stood behind tubs filled with ice and beer bottles, doing a brisk business. Music, laughter, and shouts filled the air—it was almost possible to believe that we’d left the civil war behind. But when a string of firecrackers on a tall bamboo scaffold exploded with sharp cracks and flashes, more than one person around us cried out and ducked.
The air was filled with mouth-watering smells. Food stands offered spicy tamales, beef broiled over charcoal and served in strips, churros dusted with sugar, and treats from north of the border such as popcorn or cotton candy. I considered stopping to buy something to eat to satisfy my growing hunger, but didn’t want to be left behind. Rafael’s attention was totally focused on Teresa—it was doubtful that he’d notice my absence.
Crepe paper streamers hung from the trees, and over the heads of the crowd, magical buskers created illusions of fantastic creatures, including dancing skeletons, a pinata that exploded to shower illusionary pesos down on the crowd, and even a feathered serpent that wriggled sinuously above the spectators, drawing gasps and excited gestures.
“What are they celebrating?” I asked Teresa as we made our way through the crowd.
“A day they say is holy to one of the ancient gods,” she answered. “It used to be a celebration sacred to Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals, but we’re not allowed to celebrate Christian holidays any more. So we hide our observances behind a fiesta dedicated to the heathen gods, instead. There will be a service in the teocalli later. I avoid the rituals whenever possible, even though we are forced by law to attend. But a number of people really do believe in these false gods and worship them willingly.”
I followed her gaze to a knot of people who were clustered around a man who stood on a plastic shipping crate. While they watched, he pierced his tongue with a spine that looked as though it had come from a cactus, then threaded a string through the bleeding hole. Affixed to the lower part of the string were a series of barbs. Slowly, with a look of rapture on his face, he pulled the string through his tongue, sending gouts of blood flowing down over his chin. I gagged and turned away. Suddenly I wasn’t quite so hungry any more.
The crowd around us suddenly parted and hushed and I saw ACS personnel in their by-now familiar tan uniforms and serape capes striding toward us. They were me
an-looking fraggers, cybered to the max with obvious cyberlimbs complete with weapon gyromounts, hard-mounted and smartlinked submachine guns, dermal plating grafted to their skulls, dermal sheathing colorized in a camouflage pattern, eyes that looked like chrome-ringed trideo camera lenses, and medical pumps mounted over veins in their necks that probably held combat drugs. They moved with a jerky, menacing gait and looked as if they were more machine than meat. I wondered if they were the “cyberzombies” we’d heard rumors about when I was back with the Star.
For one panicked moment I thought they were headed toward us. Then Rafael tugged me back into the crowd and I realized that the grotesquely enhanced soldiers were simply passing by. There were four of them in total, moving in tight formation around a man in a sweeping feather cape and a jade-encrusted headdress. Huge gold plugs distended his ears and his otherwise bare chest was covered with a heavy gold pectoral. His loincloth looked like it was made of real fur—jaguar, by its gold hue and pattern of dark spots—and he wore gilded sandals on his feet.
“It’s the ... priest,” Teresa whispered in my ear. She seemed loath to call him by that name and her lip curled up in a disdainful sneer as she spoke. “He’ll be conducting the ritual at the teocalli later. Let’s go.”
We turned and made our way deeper into the crowd as the priest with his escort of cybered-up soldiers swept haughtily by.
I didn’t think that Rafael could be distracted for one nanosecond from Teresa, but I’d forgotten about his obsession with sport. We passed a stall that was selling souvenirs of the ollamaliztli finals, and his eye was immediately caught by one of the items on display. He picked up a palmsized, animated jaguar doll bearing the Tenochtitlán Jaguars logo. It had a face as cute as any kitten and was covered with a fuzz of spotted fur that the vendor assured us grew out of synthetic skin, developed as a spin-off of the medical industry. I didn’t have to be a mind-probing mage to tell that Raf intended to buy it for Teresa. In light of what was to come, his choice of gift was a bit ironic. But I didn’t know that at the time.