Age of Aztec a-4

by James Lovegrove

  “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

  They 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.

&
nbsp; 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.”

  Mal and Reston 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.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  4 Flower 1 Movement 1 House

  (Friday 21st December 2012)

  Stuart lay stroking the hair of the maddening, mesmerising woman who lay snuggled against him. Her cheek was against his chest and she was snoring ever so slightly.

  He cast his mind back to the previous night and smiled. Vaughn — Mal — had proved to be an energetic, enthusiastic lover. No surprises there. What had taken him aback was her overwhelming need, like the hunger of the starving. He had responded in kind, and there had been that sort of tough tenderness, that gentle greed, which typified the best lovemaking. The two of them had slotted together, fitted together, in a way Stuart had never experienced before. Not even with Sofia had he known the same mutual rightness or the same instinctive synchronisation. Barely speaking, communicating almost entirely through their bodies, he and Mal had brought each other to a climax that was gloriously gratifying. Mind-blowing, in fact. A moment of ecstasy that had erased all thought and ego, leaving no room inside him for anything other than itself. After that, sleep had come crashing over them both like a tidal wave.

  If last night was a one-off, if it never happened again, Stuart could live with that. And if it wasn’t, if it was the start of something more substantial, he could live with that too.

  He was, he realised, content. For the first time since Sofia and Jake died, he was at peace.

  Mal’s serene sleeping face told him she was too.

  Pity that today was scheduled to be -

  A tremor shook the room.

  Not just the room.

  Stuart could feel it — the entire underground edifice shuddering around him.

  “Huh, whuzzat?” said Mal foggily.

  “Don’t know.” He leapt out of bed. “But I’m pretty sure it’s not good.”

  The tremor subsided.

  Then came another, fiercer, more violent.

  “Earthquake?” said Mal, swinging off the bed and pulling a sheet around her.

  “I don’t think we’re in a seismic activity zone.” Stuart danced into a pair of underpants. “And even if we are, earthquakes feel like waves on a rough sea. This is more like — ”

  A third tremor overwrote the second. Everything in the room vibrated and shook.

  Stuart disappeared the door. Distant shouts of alarm echoed along the corridor. He dashed out, Mal following. The first of the pantheon they encountered was Azcatl, who was scurrying along like one of his beloved arthropods.

  Stuart grabbed him. “What’s going on? What is this?”

  “Unhand me!” snapped the Red Ant. “We’re under attack is what’s going on. Tezcatlipoca’s forces. They’ve found us somehow. I must marshal my best shocktroops.”

  He hurried onward. Stuart looked at Mal. “Armour time.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Toci’s lab. Which is… this way, I think.”

  In truth, he had no idea. But as they ran, he hoped they would bump into another of the gods who would give them directions.

  In the event, they bumped into Itzpapalotl. Stuart didn’t know it was her, having never seen her sans armour. All he saw was a tall and impossibly athletic female, almost as dark-skinned as Mictlantecuhtli, moving with obvious urgency but not in a blind panic. He made a deduction and called out her name.

  “We need our armour, too,” he said. “Where do we find it?”

  Without breaking stride, the Obsidian Butterfly made a gesture: follow me.

  Two levels down, near the bottom of the inverted ziggurat, lay a chamber that was part armoury, part laboratory. The equipment that filled it was mostly unrecognisable to Stuart and Mal, a plethora of sleek machines and subtle instruments whose nature and purpose they could only guess at. What was familiar was the jumble of it all. Offcuts and oddments littered workbenches. There were disorganised shelf-loads of tools and spare parts. Everywhere, a sprawl of unfinished projects and experiments-in-progress. Scientific chaos was scientific chaos, no matter if the scientist who generated it was also a goddess.

  Itzpapalotl went straight to her suit of midnight-black armour and began clamping it on. Huitzilopochtli was already here, doing the same. A woman with a thatch of blonde hair and keen, beady eyes — Toci, it must be — was busy loading flame spears into the rack the Hummingbird God toted on his back.

  “Toci, please, our armour…?” said Stuart.

  Toci wagged a finger distractedly towards a corner of the room. The Serpent Warrior suits were set ou
t on armatures, no longer as snake-featured as before. The helmets had been reshaped, their fronts flattened and the eye lenses joined up into a single bulbous visor. All of the sections had been recoloured, not mamba green now but a silvery blue that would afford some camouflage in the daytime sky. There were other modifications, such as l-gun attachments on both arms and the tips of blades projecting from the wrists.

  “Been busy on those all night,” Toci said. “You’ll find them very much improved, although there’s a limit to what I could do, given the crudeness of what I had to work with. Tezcatlipoca was never much of an engineer, and I discern human touches everywhere — shortcuts, quick fixes, general bodging, no finesse. The lightning guns are activated by studs on the palms of the gauntlets. They recharge more rapidly than you’ll be used to, and last longer too. The blades extend to full length with a flick of either arm and retract the same way. Both of you, I understand, are proficient with swords. Of necessity, these ones are short, but they’ll cut through anything short of a forcefield.”

  “Forcefields,” said Stuart. “Any chance we have those?”

  “Exclusive to Quetzalcoatl. Mictlantecuhtli has his gauntlets, Xipe Totec his knives, Huitzilopochtli his flame spears… Each a particular suite of capabilities, to fit each’s individual style and temperament. There is no sharing or crossover. That is not our way. Be grateful for what you’ve got.”

  Another tremor rocked the gods’ lair. It felt less potent than previous ones, but Stuart assumed that that was because they were deeper underground.

  “Hurry,” said Itzpapalotl. It was the first word Stuart had heard her utter, and he wasn’t sure if the remark was directed at him and Mal or not.

  The two humans helped each other into the customised Serpent suits, fast as they could manage. When only the helmets remained to be put on, Mal said, “Here we go. Can’t say I’m not dreading this.”

  “You’d be crazy if you weren’t.”