Our King and His Court

by Rich Larson

  In that way, the two are connected. In that way, what happens next will be because of the padre.

  Scipio and the Padre

  When Scipio leaves the armory, winding fresh geckowrap around the handle of his knife, he finds the padre lying in the corridor. Beached, like one of the whales that swam up from the toxic sea to die on Yucatan’s phosphate-soaked sand so many years ago. The ethanol stench hangs over him like a cloud.

  “¿Está perdido, padre?” Scipio asks.

  The man gives a gurgling laugh. “We are all lost,” he says. “We are all lost souls here.” He heaves himself upright, clutching at his swollen belly. When he recognizes Scipio, he barely flinches. Once he would have gone pale with fright. But the brewery in his gut has reddened his skin and dulled his nerves. “Is this where the crow sharpens his beak?” he slurs, pointing to the knife.

  It was blunted by sawing through vertebrae, but now, as the padre observes, the blade is bright and keen again. Scipio stows it in his sleeve sheath. He has never liked priests much.

  “I’ll send for the physician,” he says. “You look ill.”

  The padre chokes on another laugh. “Qué malito eres. No, no. Keep that devil away from me. He’s done enough damage.” He holds his gut again, running fingers along where the surgeons implanted him. “I forgive him, of course. He did only the bidding of his master. Same as you and I. A loyal servant of El Tirano.”

  “Vaya con Dios, padre.” Scipio steps over the man’s splayed legs and heads down the corridor, toward the bone room and his station in the beast’s shadow.

  “I know why you are loyal, Scipio!”

  The last word freezes him in place. Scipio turns back to see the padre clambering to his feet, palms flat to the wall for balance. Nobody but El Tirano knows the name Scipio, the name his mother in Parera gave him. He has been El Cuervo for years and years.

  “Our master told me why you are loyal. He confessed to me.” The padre takes a wheezing breath. “He thinks I can’t remember things, because of the yeasts. But that story, I remember.”

  Scipio looks up and down the stone hallway. Empty. “So tell me,” he says.

  The padre slips back down the wall with a thump. He grimaces, closes his eyes. “It was in Juarez,” he says. “There was a little boy. Staying with an addict who couldn’t pay his debts. Addicts, they can be so creative when desperation takes hold.”

  Scipio feels the handle of the knife in his sleeve. The geckowrap ripples at his touch, ready to leap into his grip. He reminds himself that he can make the padre stop speaking whenever he wants. He tries to keep his heartbeat slow.

  “But eventually even that wasn’t enough,” the padre says. “So the debt collectors came and they tore off his fingers with pliers and then shot him in the head. El Tirano was not El Tirano then. He was just a foot soldier. Practically a boy himself.

  “It was Semana Santa, and none of them wanted a child’s blood on their hands on a holy day. But their boss had said to kill every living thing they found in the apartment. So El Tirano, he volunteered. He said, leave me the gun. I’ll do it.”

  The memory lances through Scipio’s mind: the filthy apartment, the dark congealing puddle under his uncle’s body, the buzzing flies. His bony shoulders pushed back against the wall like he can disappear into it. El Tirano standing there watching him, holding a gun too big for his tattooed hands, his head tilted to one side.

  “But here you are,” the padre says, opening his eyes. “Here you are alive. Do you wonder why?”

  “Mercy,” Scipio says.

  “So he told you, so he told you,” the padre coughs. “But he pulled the trigger. Pulled it twice. The gun was jammed. He confessed that to me. The gun was jammed, and the apartment smelled awful, and he needed someone small to run a brick under wire-fence. So you are alive.”

  Scipio springs the knife from his sleeve; the geckowrap suctions warm and pebbly to his callused fingers. He walks to the padre in two swift strides and yanks his head backward, baring his chubby throat.

  “I know he pulled the trigger,” Scipio says flatly. “I remember the clicking sound. But God works in mysterious ways, padre.”

  The padre shuts his eyes again, his breath wet and labored. His hair is greasy in Scipio’s fingers. The blade hovers at his throat. El Tirano will be displeased to lose his priest and clown, but Scipio does not want anyone else to hear this particular story. It opens him like a wound.

  Footsteps in the corridor behind them. Scipio stows the shaking knife. He decides he will do it tonight, in the padre’s chambers, and make it look as though the man has choked to death on his own vomit.

  “¡Comandante!”

  Scipio turns to see one of Sol’s men, one whose face is a swirl of shifting tattoos. The whites of his eyes are bright within the blue pigment.

  “Mateo’s convoy was attacked outside the city,” he blurts. “He’s gone, and they took the medico, too. It was the Maras, it fucking has to be, those dog-fuckers, they took Mateo.”

  From where he’s sprawled on the floor, the padre crosses himself. “Lost souls,” he murmurs. “All lost souls.”

  Scipio gives him a vicious kick that makes him jackknife, groaning, then follows Sol’s man to the bone room.

  * * *

  El Tirano hoists Mateo up into his arms, clinging so fiercely to him Scipio almost believes his love is real. He gives a wild laugh that echoes to the corners of the bone room and up into the dark sky. With Mateo cradled against him, he turns back to his throne. The neural implant bobs at the back of his head.

  “Mi hijo, mi hijo,” he says. “I am saved.” He presses his lips to his son’s blood-flecked forehead. For an instant Scipio sees a shiver go through Mateo’s entire body. The accountant must have seen it, too, because he flinches backward. With his head bent, only his mouth is visible beneath the brim of his black hat. Scipio sees he is chewing his lips raw.

  The accountant knows what will happen next. More than Nazaret, more than the padre. He was the one who selected the meteor.

  Scipio and the Accountant

  There are three of them left in the bone room. El Tirano, who has not slept since Mateo was taken, is pacing. The accountant stands to one side, his glowing tablet hooked to a generator by tangled wires, awaiting news from El Tirano’s many ears and eyes. Scipio sits at the foot of the skeleton, where there is a pocket of faint perfume in the air that smells like Nazaret.

  He watches El Tirano go back and forth, back and forth beneath the beast’s spiky tail. A bottle of rum dangles from his hand, cocaine clings white to his nose hairs, and his eyes are all glowing pupil as he inspects the hanging corpses of his enemies.

  “Was it you, cabrón?” he demands, stopping at one of the upside-down bodies. He seizes it by the chin and peers into its mutilated face, where the bacterial film is taut across gouged-out eye sockets. “Your sniveling nephews, out to avenge you? So they take my son? Is that it, Quini?”

  He gives the corpse a contemptuous slap that sets it spinning like a children’s top. He goes to the next.

  “Javier, have your Southern dogs grown bold again?” El Tirano murmurs. “Tell me, Javier. You weakling. You puto.” He runs his tongue along the body’s ruined cheekbone, then spits on the floor. “Oye, he tastes like shit.”

  “He’s dead,” Scipio says flatly. He has no patience left for El Tirano’s theatrics. He is waiting, like a taut wire, for news of Mateo. Mateo, who once rode on his shoulders through the sunny garden. Mateo, who never flinches at the sight of him.

  El Tirano takes a deep swig from his bottle and wipes his mouth. “Don’t you say that fucking word to me.”

  “I said nothing. It was the skeleton.”

  El Tirano hurls the bottle away; it smashes somewhere in the dark as he darts to the other side of his throne, past the startled accountant.

  “You’re right,” he says. “Look. Look at how this fucking thing laughs at me.” He squats down, rapping his knuckles against the beast’s grinning teeth
. “You know why he laughs? He was the king once. He was a great meat-eating bird, no wings, but savage as a shrike. Big as a tree. He was the king until a meteor deposed him.”

  Scipio looks at the skull, wondering what could have bested its owner. “What is a meteor?”

  “A rock,” El Tirano says. “A big rock with an unlucky trajectory.” He puts his hand on top of the skull, gripping the ridge of bone over the eye socket. Then he fingers the neural implant at the back of his skull. “Now he laughs, because he thinks my meteor is coming. I need my son back. I need him to live.”

  There is an electronic chime from the accountant’s tablet, a noise that has repeated every few minutes for the past several hours, but this time the accountant’s eyes snap upward.

  “They’re in Barrio Alto,” he says. His voice is faint and cracked and carries the accent Scipio is still unsure of. “An old plague house. Calle Guerra.”

  El Tirano seizes the tablet to see for himself. His hands clench tight around it, then he looks up with his eyes gleaming silver. They were peeled for night vision by a back-alley surgeon when he was young, when he was a drug runner in Juarez, back before the government collapsed. Before he was El Tirano and before Scipio was anyone at all.

  “Take the men you need,” he says. “I don’t care how many. You are going to bring Mateo back to me.” He sticks the tablet back into his accountant’s hands and grips Scipio by the shoulders, leans in close to whisper. “Swear that to me, Scipio. Swear it on your dead.”

  Scipio has too many dead to remember them all. He thinks of his village, razed to the ground, butchered bodies steaming in the morning air. But Mateo is not responsible for that. Not for any of it. Mateo is the one bright thing that was ever born in El Tirano’s shadow.

  “I swear,” Scipio says.

  El Tirano squeezes his shoulders, releases him. “Go, go.” He turns toward the accountant. “Make the arrangements for him to be in the barrio by dawn. No one can know.”

  The accountant nods, eyes invisible beneath the black brim of his hat. Scipio feels a premonition tapping cold fingers up his spine. He says nothing as they leave the bone room, as El Tirano clambers back up into the beast, muttering to himself, but the instant they are through the arched entryway and its inbuilt scanners he wraps his hands around the accountant’s pale throat. His hat, knocked loose, flutters to the floor like a wounded bat.

  “I want to talk about numbers,” Scipio says. He pushes his thumbs into the accountant’s yielding skin. He can feel the pounding pulse. “El Tirano has thirty-three courtesans. Only one of them comes from Parera. But El Tirano, he thinks I was born in Juarez. Was it chance that Nazaret was sent to me? One in thirty-three? Or was it you?”

  The accountant blinks his black eyes. “Me,” he whispers.

  “Was it chance the padre came to me in the armory?” Scipio asks.

  The accountant shakes his head.

  Scipio tightens his grip around the man’s throat. “Is it chance Mateo disappears, and now reappears where we were most sure to find him?”

  “There’s no trap,” the accountant hisses. “Mateo is alive. You leave now, you’ll find him alive. And when you find him, you’ll understand.”

  Scipio lets him go; he reels against the wall, gasping. Scipio has more questions, many more, but if he learns the answers to them he knows he will have to kill the accountant, and things will continue as they are. Instead he asks only one.

  “How many villages like Parera?”

  The accountant’s eyes flash up and left. “This year? Seven.”

  “Sol will be watching you,” Scipio says. “Don’t try to leave. When I come back with Mateo, we’ll speak again.”

  The accountant snatches his hat from the floor and dusts it off against his leg, not looking Scipio in the eyes. He nods.

  * * *

  El Tirano climbs carefully back up into the beast, setting Mateo on his lap. One of Sol’s men gives a ragged cheer and it catches, carries around the bone room. The skull-painted soldiers holler and stamp their feet. The accountant tucks his tablet under one arm and quietly applauds, while the padre slams his meaty hands together beside him.

  “God smiles,” he bellows. “God smiles on you, El Tirano!”

  El Tirano holds up his fist for silence and the noise chokes off. He looks at Scipio now, and Scipio looks back. “You swore to bring Mateo back to me,” he says. “And hijoputa, you have. You flew through the night and you struck down my enemies and you brought him back. Tell me, my loyal crow. Tell me what you want, and you’ll have it.”

  Scipio feels the eyes of the court on him now, like razors slicing and peeling him. He wants so many things. He wants the mother who held him on her hip. He wants to undo a thousand deeds, even ones he has not done yet. He wants for El Tirano’s gun not to have jammed. He wants to go back to Parera.

  “I want to be the meteor,” Scipio says.

  El Tirano frowns. “What?”

  Scipio and the Crow

  Dawn is streaking the sky with filaments of red when they arrive at the plague house. Scipio and seven of Sol’s men, all gloved in combat black, armed to the teeth, running clean and cold on amphetamine injections. Scipio leads them in single file along the side of the crumbling building, moving low and quick over broken glass and caked dust. The stench of death is gone now but the wall is still scrawled with typical plague graffiti: Dios mío, Dios mío, ¿por qué me has desamparado?

  They breach the dented metal door with a shotgun, and Scipio deads the first two guards before they can raise arms, two bullets left cooling in shattered craniums. His revolver is silenced but it’s still enough noise to bring a third man running. Scipio ducks low, springs the knife from his sleeve, and as the guard turns the corner he slashes upward and opens the femoral artery. Blood hoses across the wall and floor in a wild arc; the guard wails, slips. One of Sol’s men finishes him with a round in the chest.

  Scipio wipes his knife clean on the dead man’s pants, avoiding the spreading blot of shit from shock-emptied bowels. His heart is thrumming. The plague house has three floors and a basement; the door to the stairwell is jammed open.

  “Clear the floor,” he says. “Then work upward. Watch your triggers until Mateo is safe.” He picks a soldier at random. “You, with me. To the basement.”

  The other men salute and disperse. As Scipio heads to the stairwell he feels like he is being drawn by a magnet. The accountant’s words loop through his head. He lopes down the concrete stairs, listening for the shuffle of feet, the chitinous click of weapons being readied. Sol’s man is breathing too loudly behind him.

  The basement level is cold. The chilled air carries the scent of antiseptic and something that is not quite gasoline. Scipio hears a humming generator and the whine of fluorescent tubes. He shuts one eye before he opens the door.

  Harsh white lights stark the scene. An operating table. Trays of glinting metal implements. IV bags hung from the ceiling. Small heaps of bloody gauze. A rippling curtain.

  Scipio hears a scratching noise and swings to face it, but it’s only a black-and-yellow beetle skittering around inside a glass dish. Above it on the wall screen, its insectoid anatomy is laid out like blueprints, covered in notes.

  The chemical stench is strong. Scipio moves slowly into the room and finally hears a panicked breath. He motions Sol’s man toward the metal lockers at the back of the room, where the toe of a shoe is just barely poking out from behind. Scipio himself goes to the curtain and peers through the gap.

  Mateo is lying there on a cot, naked, not moving. For the first time in a long time, Scipio feels something black and bubbling in his gut. Fear.

  For an instant, it is Scipio there on the cot, prone and shivering.

  But the accountant told the truth: Mateo is still breathing. Scipio sees his skinny chest rising and falling. He pulls the curtain aside and walks closer, studying the shiny pink scar tissue on Mateo’s belly, a neat line of surgical sutures. He frowns.

  “It�
�s the medico,” calls Sol’s man. “He’s alive.”

  Scipio turns back. El Tirano’s personal physician, the one who oversaw the padre’s surgery, who so closely monitors his master’s health and Mateo’s as well. He is a tall man but now he stoops; his eyes are bagged and his shock of gray hair is matted with sweat. Scipio looks at the physician’s clever hands, liver-spotted old but still strong and steady.

  “What did you do to him?” Scipio asks.

  The physician’s face crumples. “They made me,” he says. “El Cuervo, I swear. They put a gun to my head.”

  “You put something inside him,” Scipio says, as the fear in his gut transmutes into rage. “You cut him open and implanted him with something. Now take it out.”

  “I can’t,” the physician says dully. “It’s a miracle he survived the first operation. If I try to take it out, I’ll kill him.”

  “What is it?”

  The physician grimaces. “A weapon. Genelocked. You know genelocks, yes? It will only go off when it encounters a perfect match. So, only for one man. Biological components only. The scanners won’t find it.”

  Scipio looks over at the skittering bombardier beetle, the dissection blown up on the wall. He inhales the smell that is not quite gasoline.

  “It will at least be quick,” the physician says. “Better than what El Tirano has planned for him.”

  “Mateo will not be like El Tirano,” Scipio says. “He has no cruelty in him.”

  The physician croaks a laugh. “Mateo will be exactly like El Tirano. He will be El Tirano. That’s the secret.” He puts his hand at the back of his head and mimes the shape of El Tirano’s neural implant. “In five, six years, when El Tirano’s heart finally gives out, the implant will go onto Mateo’s skull instead. Like the wealthy men before the plague, El Tirano will be immortal. He will use Mateo’s young body as his own, like a puppeteer uses a puppet, and Mateo will be a prisoner in his own flesh.”

  “You’re lying.”

  But Scipio remembers the bone room, El Tirano’s agitated fingers touching the shining implant. I need my son back, Scipio, he said. I need him to live.