Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

by S. M. Stirling

  “Macuahuitl,” Tezcatlipoca said.

  “Gesundheit.”

  “The swords. That’s what they’re called.”

  “I knew that.”

  “Go on.”

  “They also got some women I make for Rattlesnake Mother priestesses. At least six or seven. They all have the ugly stone medallions. Plus there’s a shitload of random cultist dudes. I’ve seen at least thirty-forty, and got no clue how many others may be inside. They got housing for twice that many, if everybody’s real friendly-like.”

  The cultists were not by and large a prepossessing bunch. To Zamora’s surprise most of them looked to be middle-aged—men who could remember what the world had been like before the Change. Some of them looked to be almost as old as he was, if not near as old as he felt right now.

  But to be doing something as bad as mass child sacrifice, they had to be stone fanatics. That and sheer numbers made them dangerous. Plus the Knights probably acted as cadre, training and leading them.

  “Excellent,” Tezcatlipoca said. “You’ve found what we both were seeking. Now you can disrupt the rites, and avenge your friend.”

  “Not so fast,” Zamora said. “There’s way too many of them for me to take on by myself.”

  “Ah, but you have no choice.”

  “Sure I do. And I choose ‘hasta la vista, baby.’”

  “You misunderstand. The sacrifice is due to happen tonight. As soon as the sun dies—or goes down, as you moderns would put it—the children’s lives will be offered to Coatlicue.”

  “And I feel terrible about that. But I told you: I got no chance. They’re way too active, and there’s way too little cover, for me to sneak in. And much as I hate the idea of them murdering those poor kids, it’s not gonna help them one little bit if I die trying to rescue them. Which is what’ll happen.”

  “And what of Brodie?”

  “Órale. I reckon revenge isn’t just a dish best served cold, but in individual helpings. Over time. And unless I get to come back as history’s most kick-ass ghost, I won’t be doing any avenging after I’m fucking dead. So, sorry. But the deal’s off. Not that we even had a deal.”

  “As I say, you misunderstand me. The Rattlesnake Mother wants—needs—this sacrifice to let her enter more fully into this world. And act in it.”

  “Why do I have a bad feeling about that?”

  “Because sacrificing the stolen children will be like opening a door. Once Coatlicue comes through, she’s going to need a whole lot more sacrifices to keep her here. And she’s pissed. She was never that sweetly reasonable to begin with, I assure you.”

  “And that would be a bad thing?”

  “The worst,” Tezcatlipoca said. “That’s when the real matanza begins. You dig?”

  Zamora sighed. “I dig.”

  “But I will sweeten the pot for you, Seeker. If—when—you stop the ceremony from happening—”

  “And free the kids.”

  “—that, too. Then you will learn why and how your friend was really tied up with this scheme.”

  “If I survive.”

  “That, too.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Tezcatlipoca.” The god chuckled. “You know what you must do, my friend. Unless you want the world—and your own life—to end in blood and fire and screaming and all that Lovecraft jazz. So I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Yeah,” Zamora said glumly.

  He looked up at the sky. The sun was close to the mountains, which were themselves much closer than they had been when he started this latest crazy quest of his.

  “My dad’s people always told me my curiosity would be the death of me,” he said. “Well, I got a couple hours to kill . . .”

  * * *

  The altar stone was uncomfortably hot on Zamora’s naked back and ass. But surprisingly smooth. The woven-yucca ropes were uncomfortably tight on his wrists and ankles, though.

  Okay, he told himself, looking at the sun.

  Which was big and red as a ripe tomato, and just about to burst like one on the peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental.

  I did plan on causing a diversion. Except this sure as fuck isn’t what I had in mind.

  The second part of his plan—freeing the kids and escaping in the ensuing confusion, hopefully into quickly gathering darkness—seemed to have run right off, and be receding farther and farther from view.

  He heard chanting from many voices, male and female. The language might have been Nahuatl, or another of Mexico’s myriad native tongues. Or it may be just some made-up bullshit.

  He sensed, somehow, it didn’t really matter. So long as they believed.

  Even less encouragingly, he smelled tangy mesquite charcoal smoldering in a brazier not far away. Aztec gods, he remembered, liked their hearts grilled. They got nourishment by huffing barbecue fumes like glue.

  He rolled his head back farther. Two figures stood a few meters away, silhouetted by the sun they were both looking at and discussing in muted but professional-sounding voices. The male wore a cotton loincloth elaborately embroidered in gold and red. The female wore a skirt of rattlesnakes. Live fucking rattlesnakes. All writhing slowly.

  Both appeared to be nude beneath. In the case of the man that was flat unfortunate, in Zamora’s eyes. The female, though as middle-aged as her companion and likewise on the . . . compressed side, had kind of a nice ass, though, he had to admit.

  They turned back to him. Both of them wore elaborate headdresses that looked as if they had been designed by Carmen Miranda’s hatmaker on a bad acid trip, with feathers and shiny bits of metal and rock in place of fruit. The man’s had an eagle beak, the woman’s a stylized rattlesnake head.

  They were naked from the waist up except for bulky stone medallions. Hanging over the dude’s hard biker paunch was a standard image of Huitzilopochtli, showing the War God in a beaked and plumed helmet, carrying a shield and a curved macuahuitl. Like his boss, the Eagle Knight had an obsidian-bladed sword and a shield slung by either hip.

  An idol sporting a wide rattlesnake head with doubled sets of fangs, four hands, beast feet, and, of course, a skirt made of rattlesnakes nestled between the priestess’ sagging breasts. Her face and her companion’s were painted with what looked, given the light and the nearly setting sun dazzle forming halos about them, like simple broad swatches of color.

  “So,” Zamora said. “You gonna do me with rattlesnakes, the way you did my pal, Brodie?”

  She smiled. “Oh, no. We prefer to reserve that means of sacrifice for the innocent.”

  Zamora laughed. It wasn’t even faked, to cover the rapid spinning of his mind as it sought a way out of this mess.

  “Brodie was a lot of things, sister,” he said, “but ‘innocent’ wasn’t one of them.”

  She laughed. She had a surprisingly nice laugh. She looked like a handsome, unusually well-preserved peasant woman of mature years. But people like that didn’t always have the best kind of life even before things Changed. So he could at least see why she might enjoy a power trip like this.

  He could also see, with some sense other than his eyes, that she had no real idea of the nature of the Power she was fucking with.

  Well, I was Seeking for reasons why the world turned out this way, he thought. And at least now I’m getting some pretty strong hints. If only it looked like I was gonna have more of a chance to integrate them . . .

  “He was, you know,” the priestess said. “Innocent. At least, he was remarkably credulous, for a man of his . . . background. He so eagerly embraced what we told him, about a mythical orphanage where children could be raised right and taught the means to a better life. And his abilities served us very well, until he began asking the wrong sorts of questions.”

  “He always did say it was easiest to scam a scammer,” Zamora said ruefully.

  “He just didn�
�t like the answers he was getting,” the priest grunted.

  He looked as if he might once have been among the goofy dentists and accountants who’d fancied themselves as restoring the proud heritage of the Meshika people, whom Zamora had run into when he visited the Federal District—Mexico City—as a boy. Just another silly-ass reenactor.

  But now he bore the badges of an Eagle Knight, including the tattoos. His fat was hard, and his biceps were big. Whatever he had been, he was no soft upper-middle-class poser now.

  And after all, reenactors had inherited the Earth.

  The Knight waved what he was holding in his right hand at the pen. With a heart that managed to sink farther from its present position, Zamora saw younger rattlesnake-priestesses already dragging out the first quartet of children, while Eagle Warriors poked the rest back into place with long poles. The big, brave bastards.

  “We told him the truth: they are being groomed to serve, in a far finer way than grubbing in the dirt. They are to become food of the Goddess!”

  He was using one of Zamora’s own pet bowie knives as a pointer.

  “That’s right,” the priestess said. “We shall sacrifice the innocent to Our Rattlesnake Mother, in the purest way: using Her children!”

  As if on cue, the dozen or two snakes tied by the tails around her waist stirred and stuck out their tongues. They seemed to be moving in slow-motion, as if under the influence of drugs. Or—something else. And not just that the sun was going down and their exotherm batteries were running low.

  “You, however,” she continued, “are called a mighty warrior, Seeker.”

  Sure, he thought glumly. Because I gave right up when your people started popping up from the brush all around me pointing crossbows at me?

  Not that he’d had a whole bunch of choice. He hadn’t even had a knife drawn while sneaking down toward their camp in the slanting, buttery light of late afternoon. And they had a lot of crossbows. It wasn’t like with the one dude back at the cantina. He’d have been lucky to nail one before they quilled him like a porcupine.

  It wasn’t as if his Pensamiento and Recuerdo, had been much help. They’d been preoccupied by the Mexican eagle, the snake-eating one from the flag—and the old Aztec legend—circling overhead. Really a big type of falcon, the caracara preyed on crows, when it couldn’t get anything better. More often, it bullied them off carcasses they were scavenging.

  Turned out that while the crows were being Zamora’s eyes in the sky, the fucking caracara had been doing the same for the cultists. As the crows themselves called to Zamora in passing, as they fled the suddenly stooping raptor, and every bush sprouted an Eagle Warrior or a cultist with a cocked arbalest.

  Now the caracara sat, appropriately, on a prickly pear not thirty paces away, eating what looked like a baby green rattlesnake. Maybe it hadn’t been up to Coatlicue’s standards . . .

  “As such, you shall be given as thanks to our Mother’s son Huitzilopochtli,” the priestess said, “in thanks for his assistance to his Mother, at the moment the sun goes down.”

  Which’ll be any minute now, thought Zamora. Much as I hate to think this—Tezcatlipoca, if ever there was a time for a little divine intervention—

  “Only using your own blade,” the Eagle Warrior said, “rather than the customary obsidian one.”

  He turned the weapon over in his hand.

  “Nice knife. Not as sharp as volcanic glass, but keen enough. Less likely to turn in my hand and cut me like a pinche güey cabrón, too.”

  “And in case you were hoping your jaguar-loving friend would help you—” the priestess said with a knowing smile. She held up the Smoking Mirror. A wisp of vapor coiled from its flat surface, stained as if with blood by the dropping sun.

  “Do you hear me, Tezcatlipoca? Night and Wind, Lord of the Near and the Nigh? Or are you in your Aspect of Tepeyollotl, and can’t answer because you’re skulking around on little cat feet?”

  She tensed, then hunched in interest over the stone. Her compatriot joined her, jostling bare shoulder to shoulder in his eagerness to see too.

  With a rustle a black shape landed by Zamora’s left wrist. Another lit by his right.

  Zamora kept his face turned resolutely upward, to a mauve sky already turning indigo in the east, lest the slightest hint of motion—or twist of his attention—betray the birds. But from the corner of his right eye he saw Recuerdo whip him a quick wink as the brothers began pecking the woven yucca fibers that bound his wrists to the sun-heated granite.

  For some reason none of the other assembled cultists spotted the birds. Even in the twilight, that was strange. But Zamora figured they were all engrossed either watching the two senior sectaries trying to get a rival god on the phone, or watching the reluctant captives being led to four priestesses who waited with rattlesnakes semiquiescent in their hands.

  Or maybe they were just eyeing the snake priestesses’ bouncing bare titties. Some of them were young and not bad looking.

  The High Priestess yipped. She threw the stone/Mirror to the sand by her feet. Smoke seemed to fairly billow from it now.

  “¡Mierda!” she exclaimed. “The puta got hot as a coal!”

  As one she and the Eagle Knight looked back at the altar. The priestess screeched in fury at seeing the crows working on Zamora’s bonds.

  “Get them!” she cried.

  The caracara snapped its head toward the altar. Zamora looked at him.

  Even in twilight, even though the bird’s eyes were already dark to the point of near blackness, he saw them go blacker. As if they’d suddenly turned into obsidian themselves. Or portholes into Void.

  With a booming of wings it launched itself from the cactus. Recuerdo immediately took off and flew away at an angle.

  “I’ll draw the bastard off!” he cried.

  Pensamiento continued stabbing at the rope around Zamora’s right wrist with his beak. “Go on,” Zamora grunted at him. “Get out of here. It was a nice try, but—”

  For just a moment, the raptor dithered, five meters off the ground, treading air with its wings like its much smaller cousin the kestrel. Then it arrowed in possessed fury for Pensamiento. With a squawk of terror the crow fled.

  But the bigger-winged caracara was faster and had a head start. He caught the crow with an audible thump of his claws thirty meters beyond the camp’s bare-beaten earth. Pensamiento gave a despairing cry and fell into the bunchgrass.

  Its wings never missing a beat, the eagle continued in pursuit of Recuerdo. They vanished in the gloom.

  “Hurry!” the High Priestess hissed to the Knight. “The sun, he dies!”

  Belly jiggling, the man scuttled toward Zamora on his skinny bowed legs. He held the bowie poised over his right shoulder, point downward.

  As he loomed over Zamora the knife came down. Hard and fast.

  With a grunt of effort Zamora snapped his left wrist free. Too late to try to stay his knife on its traitor course.

  Instead he shot his freed-up hand under the Eagle Knight’s loincloth, grabbed him by the balls, and squeezed for all his mighty grip was worth.

  The Eagle Knight howled like a gut-shot wolf.

  With a thunk! clearly audible over the scream the bowie planted itself four fingers deep in the cultist’s thigh.

  Violent femoral-artery spray painted Zamora’s arm instantly red. Hot drops stung his face. He let go the man’s well-violated parts. Batting now nerveless fingers from the hilt, he grabbed his bowie and wrenched it out of the Warrior’s leg. With a swipe that flung blood in a darkly glistening arc into the black velvet painting sky, he slashed through the rope that held his right arm to the altar. He nicked his own skin in the process—painful and unhygienic, but also the least of his worries.

  Slightly higher on the list was the fact that he was butt naked. But he had to play the hand he’d been dealt. Even if a couple of j
okers had turned up at an opportune moment to help him, the other side had plenty of high cards left to draw.

  The priest was doubled over, shrieking and clutching at his blood-hosing leg. Sitting up fast, Zamora gave him an overhand right to the side of his head. He sat down. As he did Zamora yanked the macuahuitl from his belt with his right hand.

  With icy deliberation the High Priestess walked toward him. She held a huge rattlesnake in her hand, fully roused, jaws opened almost flat, fangs protruding for Zamora’s face like curved spears. He had no time to defend himself with steel or obsidian, and was off balance to do so.

  Her eyes had turned dead black. “I . . . See . . . you,” she said.

  “Yeah? Well I raise you!”

  And he kicked her hard and straight in the crotch.

  That blow wasn’t quite as virulent to a woman as a man. But from experience Zamora knew it could still take one out. But that wasn’t the purpose.

  It wasn’t really a crotch shot. It was a snake shot.

  It succeeded beyond Zamora’s wildest expectations. The whole skirt full of rattlers seemed to wake up at once. And they woke up pissed. The High Priestess stopped in midstride and screamed as they buried fangs in her bare flesh.

  The snake she was holding twisted around and bit her in the cheek.

  She reeled back as the megadose of hemolytic toxins started popping her blood cells like bubble wrap in her veins. They turned into a black network, spreading rapidly beneath her skin. Neurotoxins started her convulsing.

  Zamora rolled the other way. He didn’t want to be near a passel of enraged rattlesnakes. As he did he felt something brush air across his bare back. His ears picked up the hum of a crossbow quarrel turning to the angle of its vanes as it whipped by.

  Fresh screams broke out all around him like fires set in dry grass by a shower of sparks. Apparently the other sacrificial snakes had all snapped out of whatever spell held them docile to the priestesses’ will. And they were expressing their ire in the only way they had, to the agonized dismay of the Rattlesnake Mother’s servants.