Age of Aztec (24 page)

“D
ID YOU REALLY
have to hit him so hard, Kay?”

“He shot Xolotl. What else was I supposed to do?”

“But he’s just a human.”

“Again – he shot Xolotl.”

“Shot
at
him. Not the same thing.”

“He had no idea I’d be able to catch the bullet. He meant to kill him.”

“Still, you didn’t have to razzle-dazzle the poor fool to quite the extent you did. Look at the state of him. You could have destroyed him inside and out. We’ll be lucky if you haven’t completely burned out his mind.”

“I’m sorry, Toci, all right? I overreacted.”

“Negating a threat is one thing. But this?”

“Work your magic. Bring him back to health.”

“Oh, I will. Just be more careful in future. He isn’t your enemy.”

“Yes, Toci.”

All this Stuart heard as though from a distance, from behind a thick screen of pain. He smelled a strange smell – neutral, antiseptic, like nothing he could name or knew. He felt remote, lost. Who was talking? He knew those names.

The blackness returned.

H
IS EYELIDS FLUTTERED
open. Light spiked his retinas. Everything hurt. He could just make out a figure bending over him. A woman. Long blonde hair.

Sofia?

Sofia.

He reached for her, even though every muscle in his body begged him not to. He wanted to touch her. He had so much to say. He wanted to forgive her, and rage at her, and hug her, and plead with her.

What it all came down to was a single question.

Why?

Why had she done it?

Couldn’t she have talked to him first? Discussed it with him? Given him the chance to put a counterargument, talk her out of it?

Why go off so selfishly like that? And why drag Jake along?

If only she’d given him some forewarning, even come right out and said that she was thinking about putting herself forward for sacrifice, then he would have been able to do something about it.

But she had hidden the truth from him, keeping it buried in her mad, secret heart.

For fuck’s sake, if she’d told him, he might even have gone with her.

That was how much he loved Sofia: he’d have been willing to die with her rather than live without her.

And Jake.

Just a kid. Barely out of nappies.

His world.

His future.

Stuart’s hand clamped around Sofia’s wrist. His vision swam into focus.

It wasn’t Sofia. Some other woman. As beautiful, if not more so.

She flashed him a businesslike, doctorly smile. In her hand was a device like a syringe and a pistol. In a clear capsule, a cloudy pink lymph-like liquid swilled.

“You need to rest,” she said. “This’ll make you better.”

She pressed the hypodermic gun to Stuart’s arm.

“Repairs. You’ll soon be good as new.”

A moment’s pain.

A numb warmth spreading outwards.

Blackness again.

J
AKE IN ALL
his chubby glory. Gurgling with delight as his father tossed him into the air and caught him. Tossed him and caught him. Tossed and caught.

Never doubting for one second that he was safe. Knowing Daddy’s strong hands would not drop him. Sublimely fearless.

This was all Stuart wanted. All he could have asked for.

To have Jake for the rest of his life, and always catch him, never drop him.

I
N THE FACES
of the priests the Conquistador killed there was often the same expression. As the sword went in, as life oozed out, a kind of outraged incomprehension. The look of someone who’d been made the victim of a practical joke, an undeserving stooge.
I don’t understand. Why me? What did I do?

With each death Stuart had been hoping to claw back some of himself. Murders as milestones on a road to recovery. A metaphysical transaction, the lives of those he hated helping him to regain his own life.

The emptiness inside him never seemed to fill up, though, and this was baffling. The Conquistador’s deeds were supposed to be some kind of cure, a medicine for grief. Why wasn’t it working? How come he never felt any better?

He kept at it, convinced a change would come, a corner would be turned, the longed-for satisfaction would finally arrive. He pushed himself to new heights of daring, wilder and more inflammatory feats of bravado. Putting on the armour became more than an act of provocation and transgression. He began to live for it. He missed it badly during the lulls between. To be Stuart Reston was to be ordinary, boring, a dweller in a world of routine and falsehood, where deals and smiles and handshakes were everything and meant nothing.

He found he was starting to play at being Stuart Reston. The Conquistador was his true self. Both were hollow vessels, but of the two, the Conquistador was by far the more pleasing.

T
HEN CAME THE
cop. Detective Inspector Malinalli Vaughn. The only Jaguar Warrior to take the jigsaw of the Conquistador case and fit the pieces together in exactly the right way. She was on to him so quickly. She figured out what nobody else had. In that first meeting between them, she saw past the mask of Stuart Reston, respectable citizen. Peered into his eyes and glimpsed the firebrand within. Nearly caught the Conquistador once.
Did
catch him, the second time.

He admired her for that. He’d almost welcomed it when she ensnared him on Tower Bridge. Cunning. If he were to be arrested – and he’d known he would be eventually, there had to be an end to it all – then at least he had been arrested cleverly, by someone with the wherewithal to outwit him. Mal Vaughn had proved to be his equal. It had been a short contest, but he knew almost from the start that he’d met his match. Maybe even – whisper it – his better.

And yes, Chel was right, he was ever so slightly infatuated with her, too. She was extraordinarily sexy. She didn’t seem to realise it, which helped. Made her even sexier, in fact. Many good-looking women swaggered through life all too aware of their attractiveness, expecting men to fall at their feet, disappointed if they did, offended if they didn’t. Mal Vaughn was not that banal. She didn’t put on airs, didn’t live by illusions. She was who she was, take it or leave it.

Stuart would have liked to take it. All of it.

T
HE ANTISEPTIC SMELL
wafted in on him again. Stuart came to, feeling weird, quite unlike himself. All the pain was gone, but that wasn’t the difference. He felt...
refreshed
. Yes, refreshed, although that didn’t quite cover the whole of it. As though his mind had been transplanted into a new-minted body.

He pulled himself off the narrow bed he was lying on. He got to his feet. He bounced springily on the balls of his toes.

Invigorated
. That sort of described it, too.

He stretched from head to toe. Nothing creaked or cracked. His tongue went to the molar Mal Vaughn had loosened with one of her punches. The tooth was firmly rooted in place again, not giving him gyp any more. The lumps and abrasions left by his scuffle with Zotz were gone. Even his many mosquito bites were no longer bothering him. All the little bumps of inflammation had subsided, and with them the aggravating itching.

The blonde woman’s words returned to him.
Repairs. Good as new
.

Yes. He hadn’t felt this spry in ages.

This hungry, either. He was famished.

He took stock of his surroundings. It was a small, plain room without windows. Almost everything was made of a dull platinum-grey metal. There were no ornaments of any type and no furniture other than the bed, not even a chair or a cupboard. It could have been a single-occupancy hospital ward. Or, equally, a prison cell.

The smell was strong now, and Stuart realised why he couldn’t place it. It was actually no smell at all. The room was entirely odourless, as though nothing that carried any kind of scent was permitted here. Even bacteria were forbidden. He bent and put his nose to the bed mattress, which was made of a grey, form-fitting foam. Nothing came up from it, not even a whiff of his own body, although he had been lying on it for several hours at least.

The room was beyond antiseptic; it was sanitised to the nth degree.

His stomach growled. The hunger was getting bad, but he could see nothing to eat.

He went to the door, only to find it lacked a handle. No opening device of any sort was evident, nor any keyhole.

A cell, then.

He thumped on the door. “Hey! Anyone out there? What’s going on?”

Nothing from the other side.

He thumped harder.

“Hey! Somebody must be able to hear me. I don’t know who the hell you are but you have no right to be keeping me here.”

If his captors were Serpent Warriors, they did in fact have every right. But Stuart wasn’t going to let a small detail like the rule of law bother him.

“Come on! Let me out. You’re making a big mistake. I’m really not the sort of person you want to be holding against his will.”

An impotent threat, but it was all he had.

Still no one came.

He stepped back, took a run-up and barged the door. It didn’t so much as shudder within its frame. He tried again, launching himself as hard as he could across the meagre breadth of the room, rebounding uselessly off the door. A couple more times, but he was left with nothing to show for his efforts except an aching shoulder. The door would not budge.

“Shit,” he hissed. “All right,” he called out. “At least bring me something to eat. I’m bloody starving. You can’t deny a captive a meal. You’re going to torture me later, fair enough, but in the meantime you could show a bit of common decen–”

At that instant, the door vanished. It was as if the metal had turned to thin air.

And standing the other side was a skinless man.

Stuart recoiled in revulsion.

The man was over six feet tall, and every fibre of sinew and muscle could be seen, clear as day, except at his nether regions which were swathed in a loincloth. Eyeballs stared from skull sockets. Flesh flexed wetly. Veins pulsed with blood. Here and there were pallid glimpses of bone.

Stuart wanted to believe this was some ghastly life-imitating statue, an anatomical effigy designed to give prisoners a heart-stopping fright.

Then it spoke.

“Who said anything about torture?”

Stuart may have said something in reply, he wasn’t sure. Right then, his thoughts were skittering in all directions, like panicked rats.

“Oh, wait a moment,” said the skinless man. His voice was a low, sibilant rasp. “I’ve done it again. I’m see-through, aren’t I? Everything on display. Let me opaque myself.”

In the space of a few seconds, skin formed all over his body. It appeared in patches, which spread and merged, until the man was fully covered in his proper sheath of epidermis. The skin hadn’t grown from scratch, Stuart thought. It was more a case of the invisible becoming visible.

“That’s better, eh?” Though the man looked markedly less horrifying now, there was still something disconcerting about his appearance. Possibly it was because he lacked hair of any kind. Right down to the eyebrows, he was baby-smooth and follicle-free. “Don’t know what was going through my head,” he continued. “I usually save that look for when I’m in combat. Scares the living daylights out of the opposition.”

He said it deadpan, but with a hint of disingenuousness. Stuart was in no doubt he had done it on purpose, this “glass skin” trick of his or whatever it was. He liked the effect it had on people. Relished the disgust and helpless horror it evoked.

“So, you could do with a bite to eat, could you? Always the way after one of Toci’s treatments. They take it out of you. You need to replenish the system. Why don’t you come with me to the refectory? I believe everyone’s having lunch.”

He made an ushering gesture. Stuart hesitated, then stepped out through the now doorless doorway. He gave the frame a quick inspection as he exited. The jamb was solid all round and he could see no slot that a door could have retracted into. There’d been a sheet of metal firmly in place, and then not. How was that possible?

He had a different question, however, for his escort. “You said Toci. As in the goddess, yes? The patroness of midwives?”

“None other.”

“But people aren’t named after the gods. It’s not allowed. It’s considered blasphemy.”

“Then it’s a good thing Toci isn’t named after Toci,” said the hairless man. “Just as it’s a good thing I’m not named after Xipe Totec. Mustn’t have blasphemy, must we?”

Stuart couldn’t fully fathom the meaning of the remark. He was, however, beginning to glimpse the shape of something here. Something he couldn’t quite wrap his head around yet, mainly because he was loath to. It was too huge, too extreme. Too insane.

A short corridor led to a terrace that ran round the rim of a vast open area. The terrace made four right-angle turns, describing a square, and there were more such terraces above and below, linked to one another by staircases. Stuart seemed to be inside an inverted ziggurat, its hollow interior forming an immense atrium. The whole was capped with a ceiling which glowed with light, enough to turn the interior into day. You could have stuffed the largest ziggurat on earth, upended, into this space and still had room to spare.

“Where are we?” he asked the hairless man.

“Halfway there.” Stuart’s query had been misconstrued deliberately. “Just a little further along.”

They arrived at a door larger than the one to the room Stuart had been in, but just as devoid of obvious unlocking system. The hairless man simply rested a palm on it and the door was gone in a blink.

“So that’s what you do,” Stuart said, bemused. “Touch it and it’s gone. Why didn’t that happen when I hit the other one?”

“It wasn’t keyed to your bio-data, that’s why. You’re not one of us.”

They entered a dining area complete with tables and chairs that were all wrought from the same dull metal as everything else. There was decoration here, at least. The walls carried designs that were similar to the carved murals on display in any temple or hieratic building: pictograms, hieroglyphs, symbols, all pertaining to the gods, or to sacred animals such as lizards or hummingbirds. The difference was that these were drawn in patterns of bright light, and weren’t static. Colours and imagery shifted constantly, a series of tableaux that flowed one to the next. It was mesmerising to watch and Stuart could have gazed at it for hours were it not for the fact that, seated at one of the tables, was the oddest assortment of human beings he had ever laid eyes on.