Stuart endured the mistreatment with great forbearance. Partly he wanted to show willing –
I can be a team player, see?
– but also he was convinced Xibalba’s days were numbered, meaning nothing they did to him mattered. The longer the “gods” held off from attacking, the more certain he became that an attack was inevitable.
He could imagine Quetzalcoatl and friends debating the issue hotly amongst themselves in their underground lair. Xipe Totec and Mictantecuhtli would be the ones urging a pre-emptive strike the most vociferously. Quetzalcoatl himself would counsel caution, saying that Chel should be given every last chance to reconsider and withdraw. Coatlicue, for all her airs and graces, was a belligerent old witch and would be in favour of hostilities. Quetzalcoatl’s sister Quetzalpetlatl would side with her brother, thanks to their more-than-merely-sibling bond. Ometeotl, parent of all, would typically be unable to make up his/her mind either way.
In the end, though, the pro-aggression faction would win. The pantheon had a tendency to go for destructive solutions. The divine myths were a gory litany of bloodshed, vindictiveness and murder. There was no reason to think these would-be gods would behave any differently.
It was ludicrous, Stuart knew, to picture the people he’d met as though they really were what they claimed to be. But it was also unavoidable. They, by their own lights,
were
the gods. They behaved according to the character traits enshrined in holy lore. They had the gods’ known mannerisms down to a T. Though he had spent only a short time in their company, he could see that they had established an exact replica of the taut, contrary network of relationships which gave the pantheon its unique piquancy. Their common artifice had become a kind of reality, in as much as it was utterly real to them themselves, and he couldn’t help but treat it that way too, albeit with considerable irony.
By dawn of the third day, Stuart knew they were coming. The gods were coming. He sensed it the moment he woke up, could almost taste it. Danger like a scent in the air, a tang on the breeze. A dam ready to burst.
Quetzalcoatl’s words came back to him:
My advice to you would be get as far away from this place as you can before the trouble starts
.
Easier said than done. The guerrillas were keeping a weather eye on him all the time. They were also patrolling the clearing’s perimeter and the adjacent patch of rainforest more diligently than ever before. Skulking off without getting spotted and challenged would be next to impossible.
Instead he opted for making one final go of it with Chel. He clambered out of his tent and went to the cabin. A dishevelled, bleary-looking Chimalmat responded to his knock.
“Yes?”
“Is he up?”
Chimalmat grimaced. “Hear that?” Heavy snoring buzzsawed from within. “There’s your answer.”
“Give him a kick. Get him out of bed. He and I really need to talk.”
“He hates having his sleep interrupted.”
“He’ll hate it even more if what I think is about to happen happens and he’s not awake to face it.”
“And what is about to happen?”
“Nothing, if I can just get Chel to see reason.”
“You’re being very cryptic, Englishman,” said Chimalmat. “It would make everyone’s life simpler if you just –”
A scream from the forest cut her off.
A raw-edged, keening wail.
The sound of a man in pain and abject terror.
Stuart was too late.
It had begun.
F
IRST TO ENTER
the clearing was Mictlantecuhtli.
The Dark One sauntered out from the trees as calmly as though taking a summer stroll. His great black head was split by a fierce smile. With one hand he dragged a body behind him – Tohil, part of the pre-dawn sentry shift – pulling it along by the ankle as a child might pull along a toy wagon. The Mayan had been slashed open from pubic region to sternum. A knot of intestines trailed in his wake, gradually uncoiling into a single long ribbon as it bumped over the grass.
Stuart’s immediate assumption was that Tohil was dead. Then he realised, to his horror, that this was not the case. Tohil’s eyes were wide open and rolling. His jaw worked, shaping soundless cries. One hand kept pawing the slit in his belly, vainly trying to scoop his entrails back into place.
“Humans!” Mictlantecuhtli bellowed. “You were given due notice of our wishes. You failed to heed them. We have been more than patient and more than fair. You’ve brought this on yourselves.”
He upended Tohil, grasped his other ankle as well, then slowly, massive muscles bunching, tore him in two. He split him like some giant wishbone, longitudinally and downwards. First the crotch. Then the hips. The spine, which unfastened like a zip. Finally the ribcage. Tohil hung limp, a ghastly V of carcass, parts of him spilling out and spattering down around Mictlantecuhtli’s feet.
Chel emerged from the cabin just in time to catch the tail end of this horrendous spectacle. His expression flashed from disgust to fury. He shoved Chimalmat inside the cabin, telling her to barricade the door and not come out under any circumstances. Then he snatched up a rifle leaning beside the door and barked out an order at the top of his lungs.
“Xibalba! Enemy action! Move!”
No sooner had the words left his lips than he began firing at Mictlantecuhtli, who retreated at speed, using Tohil’s remains as a bullet shield, smiling all the way. Several of the guerrillas had already scrambled out of their tents, clutching blowpipes and guns. Now the rest emerged too. Under Chel’s supervision, they fanned out and divided into groups, adopting defensive positions all round the clearing. They knelt or crouched, fearful but alert, rifles cocked and loaded, ready.
“My stuff,” Stuart said to Chel. “Armour, sword, flechette gun. Where?”
“In there, where we’ve been keeping it for you.” Chel jerked a thumb at the cabin doorway. “So you’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with us after all?”
“We’re going to get massacred. Might as well die with my boots on.”
“Good man. Christ bless you.”
Chel jogged off to join his men while Stuart hurried indoors. Chimalmat was already opening the backpack that contained his Conquistador gear.
“Here.” She tugged out the cuirass and helped him strap it on. “They’re going to slaughter us, aren’t they? We’re all going to end up like poor Tohil.”
“If only Chel had listened.”
“Such a stubborn man. Once he fixes on something...”
“You should try to get away, Chimalmat. This isn’t your fight.”
“I disagree.”
“But you don’t have a weapon.”
“So chivalrous. Don’t worry about me. I’ll think of something.” Chimalmat handed Stuart his rapier and helmet. He put them on.
From outside came panicked shouts and a rippling fusillade of gunfire.
Chimalmat started pulling more pieces of armour from the backpack, but Stuart stopped her. “No time. I’m needed out there. I’ll have to make do with what I’ve got.”
She dug out his flechette gun. “At least take this.”
Stuart didn’t think it would be much use. He didn’t think anything would be much use against the opponents they were facing. Mictlantecuhtli had already as good as proved that. Still, he strapped the gun holster to his hip anyway.
It felt good to be the Conquistador again, even with an incomplete suit of armour on. At once, doubt was banished. There was only certainty. The cuirass and helm pressed coldly but comfortably on him. The weight of the armour was the weight of purpose, of vengeance. Stuart hefted the rapier, eyeing the blade’s keen edge. He had become, once again, a being who existed for a single reason: to fight and kill. Life was exhilaratingly simplified.
He stepped out of the cabin. Chimalmat followed, and they both took stock of the situation.
The guerrillas were blasting away with their rifles, their fire concentrated on a solitary figure striding towards them. Clad in night-black metallic armour, the person was unmistakably a woman. The armour hugged her contours, its segmented sections sheathing her snugly and completely. An ovoid helmet encased her head, sleek and featureless other than two dark hemispheres that bulged at the front like an insect’s eyes. The fingers of the gauntlets on each hand narrowed to ferocious long talons.
To judge by the ease with which the woman walked, the armour was made of some exceptionally light material. It was also impervious to bullets and somehow could disperse their kinetic force. Rounds whined and ricocheted off, leaving not a mark on the armour’s glossy surfaces, and its wearer didn’t so much as flinch at the impacts.
Within a stone’s throw of the frontmost Xibalba line, she halted. Domed casings on her back opened and a pair of wings unfurled. They were black too, and they spread out on either side of her. Flexible planes expanded and rigidified, until the wings settled into a shape that was more than a little like the wings of a butterfly.
“Itzpapalotl,” Stuart said under his breath. The goddess also known as the Obsidian Butterfly.
One downthrust of those stiff black wings, and she was in the air. Another beat, and she was hurtling towards the guerrillas. She grabbed one of them, digging her talons into the man’s armpits, and veered perpendicular. The wings propelled both of them into the sky at such speed that within seconds they were almost lost from view, just a tiny dark speck amid the blue. The guerrilla’s desperate screams faded to almost nothing. Then they grew louder again as he came plummeting down, alone now. Itzpapalotl had dropped him as casually as she had plucked him up. His arms were whirling and flailing as if he hoped somehow to counteract gravity and fly himself. He hit the ground head first with a tremendous meaty thump, his body bursting like a sack of jelly. Blood showered around him in all directions, along with gobbets of organs, partially liquefied by the impact.
Out of the corner of his eye Stuart saw Chimalmat dart off, heading purposefully towards the aerodisc. Meanwhile Chel and his men scanned trees and sky, fingers on triggers, searching for the next source of assault.
In the event, it came from right in their midst. A knot of three guerrillas found their number unexpectedly reduced to two; one of them had had his neck brutally broken. By whom and how, was unclear. One moment the man was kneeling beside them, rifle stock pressed to shoulder. The next, the rifle was gone and his head was canted at such an angle that his ear was resting on his shoulder. His tongue stuck out from his mouth like a lump of gristly veal he was trying to get rid of.
Something shimmered. It was like a silhouette in heat haze, a glassy wavering outline of a man. Before their astonished eyes, it gained solidity and colour. There stood Xipe Totec in his “flayed” form, a grotesque living anatomy of muscle and bone.
His death’s head grin glinted whitely as Xipe Totec took hold of another of the three guerrillas and snapped his neck too. He twisted the Mayan’s head through almost one hundred and eighty degrees. Vertebrae popped with a sound like pebbles crunching underfoot.
The third guerrilla was briefly frozen with shock, but managed to recover his wits. He raised his rifle. Xipe Totec yanked the gun out his hands and tossed it aside. The man lunged for the only other weapon within reach, his blowpipe. He clenched a dart between his teeth and put the pipe to his lips. Xipe Totec leaned back, his exposed facial muscles contorting into what could only be a sneer. The guerrilla puffed out his cheeks and blew. At this range he could scarcely miss, but somehow Xipe Totec was able to duck aside so that the dart whisked past him.
A faction of a second later Xipe Totec was grasping the tip of the blowpipe and ramming it into the guerrilla’s mouth before the man could do anything to prevent him. He thrust the wooden tube so hard that the other end smashed out through the back of the Mayan’s skull, carrying bone shards and bits of brain with it.
The other guerrillas trained their weapons on Xipe Totec. Zotz had the lightning gun and took careful aim. Xipe Totec, however, faded from view as soon as he had dealt with the last of his trio of victims. There was that shimmering heat-haze effect again, and he was gone. A few bullets zinged in his direction, but there was nothing to see to hit. Invisible or absent, either way he had evaded retaliation.
Xibalba was getting picked apart bit by bit. Stuart was appalled by the methodicality of it, the relentlessness of it. He had known that something like this might happen, but foreseeing an event was very different from actually watching it unfold in front of you. There seemed to be nothing any of them could do, except wait for the next attack, the next cold-blooded, merciless infliction of death.
A guerrilla came tottering out of the forest. He had been one of Tohil’s companions on the pre-dawn sentry shift, and he was lucky not to get shot as he stumbled into view. His nerve-rattled fellow guerrillas mistook him for an enemy, and would have planted bullets in him if Chel hadn’t shouted at them to hold their fire. He sent two of them forward to help the man, who looked dull-eyed and bewildered, as though unsure of where he was and why he was there.
The two approached him with caution, softly calling his name. “Mulac. Mulac. This way. Quick. Get to cover, Mulac.”
Mulac seemed barely to hear a word. He came to a standstill, his mouth slack, his gaze unfocused. Then he began feeling his chest and abdomen with his hands. The touching turned to scratching, some terrible itch needing attention. He ripped open his shirt and started clawing at his bare skin with his nails.
“In me...” he murmured. “He put them... in me...”
“Who do you mean, Mulac?” asked one of his confederates.
“Put what in you?” asked the other.
“Eggs. Made me swallow. And now they’re growing. Too fast. Hundreds of them. They want out.”
All of a sudden Mulac shuddered. A moan escaped his lips, rising in pitch and intensity as convulsions ran through his body. He was tearing at himself now, desperately trying to get at something under his skin. Stuart could see movement where his fingers were, small lumps pulsing and wriggling, dozens of them, like sentient cysts. The other two guerrillas exchanged looks of alarm. They didn’t know whether to go to Mulac’s aid or back away and leave him to whatever fate he was about to suffer.