“Or we could have actually gotten a vehicle from the local Praetorians that actually had a two-way radio—”
“It’s AM band at best, limited range, and hardly secure.” Trennus flipped a hand at Kanmi irritably. “Unless we’re all willing to sit there and use one-time pads and spell out messages, assuming they caught us while we were still in range . . . gods.” He rubbed his face.
“We can’t do anything about it,” Kanmi told the younger man, pragmatically. “Best we can do is get some sleep and do our jobs in the morning.”
Kanmi, for his part, couldn’t take his own advice. He swore, somewhere around two antemeridian, and got out of bed to go stare out the window into the darkness for a while, one hand flat against the glass. It was the same old feeling of being helpless and knowing that someone was in trouble, all over again. He peeled his hand away from the glass and looked at the skin there; it was clean and unscarred, not blackened and bleeding, as he somehow thought it ought to have been.
And when he finally did sleep, he was plagued by the damned dreams. They’d haunted him since he was twelve, and had stood in the harbor at Tyre, knowing that his father’s ship was due to come in, but that there was a storm. Thunder, lightning, high winds, waves surging in twenty-foot swells. Most captains had actually left the marina, or had had their ships pulled up on shore; no one wanted to risk their livelihoods, letting the ships slam into the old stone quays.
Standing on the shore, watching to see if their father’s boat would enter the harbor, the three boys huddled in oilskin cloaks against the cold rain. Kanmi was the youngest; his two older brothers were both apprentices on fishing boats, and had looked at this tempest-tossed day as a welcome respite from leaving the house at dawn. Hanno shoved Kanmi, five years his junior, towards the foaming, filthy water just below their feet. “You’re scared of the water, aren’t you, baby?”
In his sleep, Kanmi grimaced, fighting the dream. Half the time, it ended as it had when he’d been six; his brothers holding his head down under the water till he nearly drowned. Hearing the sound of their laughter, distorted through the brown, stinking harbor water.
This time, however, the dream flickered, and he again saw the ship coming into the harbor; the captain was desperate to get his goods ashore, and was taking risks, thinking that his large cargo vessel could handle the waves. Wind howling. The ship hitting another boat that had capsized earlier in the day . . . .no, that’s not how it happened . . . his older brothers ducking his head under the water . . . stop it, or I will kill you, you shits, I know how to defend myself now . . . .
Standing at the edge of the water, seeing the ship hit by a massive wave, and breaking in half. Jumping down into the water himself, putting his hands, instinctively, against the stone pillars that supported the quay, and getting driven into the rock by the pounding waves. Reaching out with mind and will and feeling the motion of the waves, the energy in them, each one a curve, what he knew now to call a sine wave . . . and flattened the curve. Took the energy from the waves into himself, almost bursting with it, needing to put it somewhere else. Energy and matter couldn’t be created. Couldn’t be destroyed. They could only change states.
So he gave the water’s energy to the rock, with himself as a conduit, and the harbor turned as flat and glossy as a mirror, and he’d screamed as he pulled his hands back from the red-hot rock, blackened and bleeding as his brothers reached down to pull him back up, “What are you doing, baby, no one told you to jump in—oh, gods, what happened to his hands?” Steam coming up from the water below the quay as the waves took the molten rock and shattered it, sending jagged splinters of stone everywhere . . . but the people on the boat were safe, his father was safe . . . . And so long as his father was around, his brothers wouldn’t try to drown him again.
He awoke, sweating, as he usually did from that dream. His brothers hadn’t actually associated his actions with the bay settling down. They’d hauled him home, cursing under their breaths, unable to account for his burns to his mother, and because Hanno and Tabnit had, on several occasions in his younger years, held his head down under the sea’s waters, they’d been afraid she’d blame them for the burns. A trip to the hospital later, the news broadcasts over the radio calling the calming of the waves the act of an unknown sorcerer who had undoubtedly saved the lives of the entire crew of the Ninutra Star . . . and the young doctor in the ER had made the connection, on seeing that Kanmi’s clothing was soaked in salt water, and hearing his brothers babble about the stone shattering beside the quay.
His brothers had been sullen, angry, and not a little jealous when he’d been sent to the local academy of sorcerers for testing . . . and had passed, with flying colors. All they knew, all day, every day, was the backbreaking labor of pulling in nets. Must be nice, never having to lift a finger again, huh, baby? Spoiled brat. They didn’t understand how dangerous sorcery was, but his teachers drilled it into his head. He could have killed himself. Most first-time sorcerers, untrained, did. He’d found somewhere else for the energy to go. Most people didn’t realize that, and burned themselves alive.
That had been rather sobering. But he’d happily escaped the resentment at home to go live in a world of magic and science. His parents couldn’t afford the fees at any of the schools, so he’d had to excel, if he didn’t want to wind up a hedge-wizard or a sea-caller, out on the damned boats, trying to calm the waves or lure the fish to the nets, day after day. The Academy of Tyre had taken him in because they couldn’t, in conscience, not train a sorcerer with his level of aptitude. The Preparatory School of Carthage? Full scholarship, and thankfully, hundreds of miles away from his family. The University of Athens . . . again, full scholarship. His brother’s resentment, for all that they had both had wives and children by that point, hadn’t dwindled. They were convinced he’d never do a day’s honest work in his life.
Kanmi looked at the clock. Five antemeridian. Less than three hours’ of sleep, but he knew he wasn’t going to be getting any more. It all tied together in a sick knot, because Caetia and ben Maor were in danger, when he should be saving their hides right now. And of course, he and Trennus were heading to investigate Xicohtencatl, whom he’d met at the university, and it all just . . . congealed in his head.
His brothers had always bullied him for being younger and weaker, and Kanmi had hated them, every minute of his life. He believed, powerfully, that those who happened to be stronger than others didn’t have a right to dominate the weaker. And there were all kinds of strengths that let small groups of people control others. Physical power. Being stronger or taller or better trained with a weapon. Political power, derived from noble birth. Financial power, derived from, usually, noble backgrounds, or, sometimes, an ancestor who’d had a genius for technology or business. Religious power, derived from an effort to convince people to think as a group . . . which was just really a type of political power. Magical power, derived from training and talent. And, of course, the god-born themselves, whose mere existence was inherently unfair. They were born with power that most others had to work to achieve. Many of them held political or religious authority on top of their existing, inborn powers, and, to Kanmi’s way of thinking, most of them tended to be bullies. People out to hold down the little people, the masses. To hold their heads under the water until they cried and begged just to be allowed to live in peace.
That Caetia didn’t, in general, flaunt her powers, didn’t make her any less of a god-born. That Matrugena didn’t, most days, act like the son of a king, didn’t make him any less of a naïve, noble-born child—and a physically large and imposing sort, though he didn’t carry himself like the giant he actually was, a foot taller than Kanmi himself. Ben Maor was neither god-born nor a noble, and thus, the least offensive of his companions to Kanmi’s more democratic leanings. And yet . . . Baal take it . . . . he actually liked all of them. Respected them, even. But that didn’t mean he’d ever give them a free pass.
The drive the following day had largely been
a silent one, and they’d had to meet with the Tenochtitlan gardia. Jurisdiction was jurisdiction, and it didn’t pay to step on other people’s toes unnecessarily. “I don’t know what you’ll think you’ll find,” a Nahautl detective in red slacks, a white, sleeveless shirt, and a formal, colorful cape told them at the door of Xicohtencatl’s large, familial manor. “We turned this place inside out.”
“Fresh eyes,” Matrugena told the Nahautl man, smiling and pushing his glasses back up his nose. And then they’d gotten to work. Kanmi had half-closed his eyes and pushed out his other senses, looking for places in the house where energy patterns were distorted, uneven. Where charges of energy had been left, residual traces of magic and will.
“Getting anything?” Matrugena asked, poking his head into the study after an hour’s search. “I’m gathering that he left in a hurry. Half the clothes in the bedroom were dumped on the floor.”
“Yes. He left a half-dozen charged batteries here, in his desk. That’s like a man taking his pistol, but forgetting his bullets. Either he was in a hurry, or wherever he’s going, he expects to find more.” Kanmi pushed a chair with leather cushions out of the way, and studied the area under it; a rug protected the floor from the chair, but there was something off here. Patterns in the floor indicating . . . material had been altered, and recently. “Help me move the desk.”
Matrugena obliged, sliding it out of the way, as Kanmi pulled up the rug and stared at the tile underneath. “Does this look odd to you?”
“The mortar’s a different color,” Matrugena replied, immediately. “Either he put in different grout in a repair job, or . . . .”
“He shifted its composition back to mud, and reset it too fast,” Kanmi finished. “Huh. Didn’t think he could manage that trick.” He gave Trennus a look. “You mind? I’m less effective with solids. Not as much practice.”
“Sure.” Trennus’ eyes defocused, and Kanmi could feel a rush of power, as the mortar in the area promptly altered state; for him, this trick would have required heating the molecules and forcing ambient fluid in the air in between the solid portions of the matrix that comprised the mortar. For Trennus, it was an entirely different operation; ley-energy excited the material and shattered it all into a fine powder, allowing them to tip up the tiles, carefully. “Well, what do we have here?” Kanmi muttered, and they lifted the rolled-up sheets of paper to the desk, spreading each out and studying them. “This . . . this is a design schematic for those altered Tholberg coils we saw down in Tikal,” he told Trennus, after a moment.
“This one’s a ley-line map of the area north of Tenochtitlan. Revolving largely around a region called . . . Teotihuacán.” Trennus mangled the pronunciation, shook his head, and went on. “It’s noted as a ruined city. Gods. Whoever built this place originally . . . really knew what they were doing.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s located directly atop where two lines intersect, and are in resonance. Geologically, fairly stable . . .” Trennus leafed through a few other charts that were tucked in with this one. “Huh. That’s unusual.”
“What?”
“There’s a large, natural cavern underneath this pyramid. Typically, you don’t build heavy architecture over the top of open spaces in the earth . . . this one is even, technically, what they call a cenote around here, or was, when it was built.” Trennus pointed out a note on the map. “It was considered a road into the underworld, like all cenotes. They’re supposed to replicate the birth passage. You know, long tunnel, water—”
“Yes, thank you, I was there for the birth of both of my sons. There’s usually quite a bit of blood and screaming involved, too. Would you like more details?”
Trennus blinked, rapidly, and shuddered. “Ah, no. That’s quite all right.” He recovered. “Usually, being positioned over a natural spring and cavern like this would be . . . stupid . . . but the ley formations in the area make it actually very stable. Also doesn’t hurt that the pyramid’s built like a damned mountain.” He paused. “At any rate, it’s set up right atop two major ley-lines that both intersect each other and are in resonance with each other. That’s . . . actually rather rare. A lot of potential energy to be tapped there.”
They flipped through the papers some more, and then Kanmi swore out loud. “Well, I think we’ve figured out where they were transmitting power from, that was reaching the station in Tikal.” He gestured to a series of schematics, that showed Tholberg coils below the pyramid, and a series of wires leading to a large, proposed mast similar in design to the one they’d seen much further to the south.
“No,” Trennus said, immediately. “It’s a rare formation, certainly, and very powerful, but there’s no way they’d be getting enough power out of it to send it that far south, not without losses. And as you keep reminding me, the power we were detecting at the Tikal facility wasn’t ley.”
Kanmi exhaled. Matrugena was, annoyingly, correct. “Well, perhaps we should drive up there and check the site out.”
They were preparing to call Livorus’ hotel in Tikal that night to get permission to do precisely that, when the phone in Kanmi’s room rang on its own. On answering, Kanmi’s eyes widened as ben Maor’s voice came over the line, and a wash of relief passed through him—relief he quickly masked. “So, you’re alive. And here I thought your head would be decorating a pike down there.”
“My skull isn’t much of a prize. Though, truthfully, I was more worried about my heart.”
“Eh, one leads to the other.”
“True enough.” The lightly-accented, elegant Latin paused, then picked up again, “We got a line on a possible location for our bumblebee and our other lost soul.”
“So did we. Temple of the Sun, Teotihuacán.” Kanmi was delighted at the pause that this garnered on the other end of the line.
“Glad to have some confirmation.”
“Should we go scout it out?”
A pause, as ben Maor conferred with Livorus and the others, so far to the south. “Negative. We’re actually a day behind you. We’ll be there . . . sometime very damned late tomorrow night. The propraetor says to continue to look busy. Don’t tell the local gardia what you found—”
“We took it out without letting them see it. Locked it all in a hotel safe in Matrugena’s room that I, well . . . welded shut. Chain of evidence, if we’re concerned with it, should be intact.” Kanmi paused. “Look busy, eh? We can do that. We’ll check into the priest’s house in the morning. Then . . . northwards?”
“As soon as we get there and can roust out enough local gardia support . . . damn. Actually, Ehecatl’s saying something about that right now . . . . Eagle warriors? Why . . . oh.” Ben Maor paused. “Fair enough. Eagle and Jaguar warriors come from all over the Nahautl Empire, he says. Less chance of them being bought than local gardia in Tenochtitlan.”
“Fair enough,” Kanmi agreed, grimly. “I don’t want to go in there without being fairly confident in the people who have my back.”
____________________
Iunius 14, 1954 AC
The window outside the propraetor’s room was dark, and through it, they could all see the lights from Tenochtitlan’s skyscrapers and bridges, not to mention the spotlights atop its pyramids. It was barely four antemeridian, and Sigrun’s eyes were grainy.
Livorus looked around the room. “Are you quite certain you wish to do this now?” he asked his various lictors. “Would it not be better to wait a day, when you’re all well-rested?” He turned and glanced at Sigrun.
“I napped in the car when Ehecatl took a turn driving,” Adam said, and turned to look at Sigrun. “Sig?”
She shook her head. “I am as rested as I am likely to be.” Her expression was hard. “Propraetor, if this is their main location, then it’s wise to go to them as quickly as possible—if they’re even there—before they either conduct another sacrifice, or have a chance to disassemble whatever machinery they have there . . . or simply destroy all evidence and go deeper into hiding.” She
bit her lower lip. “We should go, and as quickly as possible.” The combination of the machinery and the sacrifices was bothering all of them. It simply didn’t make sense.
She’d taken the time to observe Tiwesdæg; she’d pulled on her chainmail shirt, helmet, and feathered cloak once more. And, naturally, given the humid climate, Sigrun was now sweating heavily. “Bullet-proof flak jackets,” Adam reminded her, his voice silky with temptation, and his eyebrows arched playfully.
“It would still be warm. And bulky.”
Livorus was to stay behind, guarded by the various new Praetorians; Sigrun was a little uneasy about that. This was her detail, hers and Adam’s, and she didn’t know these men and women particularly well. She hadn’t read their dossiers, hadn’t gotten to measure the steel in their souls. But they couldn’t leave any of their main people behind, and Ehecatl in particular wanted in on this venture. Xicohtencatl and Tototl were responsible for the death of a Jaguar warrior. A brother, if one he’d never met. The Nahautl man’s expression was made of stone as they drove north. A truck, following them closely, held five men from the local barracks of the Eagle warriors. Where Jaguar warriors relied on stealth, Eagle warriors were among the best stand-up fighters in the Nahautl Empire. They carried traditional enchanted obsidian knives, like Ehecatl did, but also single-shot derringers, spears, and smoothbore muskets. Sigrun didn’t know if any of that would be useful, but even numbers could be very useful, just on a psychological level.
The dirt road to the archaeological site was poorly marked, and there were no lights alongside the rutted track; Teotihuacán was not exactly a tourist attraction, not with the ancient pyramids and bright lights of Tenochtitlan just thirty miles away. “Lights off,” Adam commented over the short-range radio to the truck behind them. “Tire noise can’t be helped, but let’s not announce ourselves.” At least these are ley-powered vehicles, he thought. Not as good as electric, but much quieter than that damned kerosene-powered combustion engine on that truck down in Tikal. “Only problem is, now I can’t see a damn thing,” Adam muttered.
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 38