Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (29 page)

They spiraled higher. Almost at once they swooped back down to orbit Zamora's hat once more.

“Funny,” Recuerdo said. “No sign of him. But there's a jaguar, loping down the far side of that hill he went up. Big one.”

“I hate those bastards,” Pensamiento said.

Zamora didn't care about any damn
tigres
. They didn't fuck with humans. Usually. And none had been known to fuck with him twice.

A lot like humans, come to think of it.

“How'd he vanish into thin air?”

“You're the naked monkey with the big brain,” Recuerdo said. “We're just birds.”

“Sarcastic asshole birds.”

“What do you expect? We're crows.”

*   *   *

“Have you seen this man?”

The old lady's face was wrinkled like a raisin. She had a blue-green bandanna wound around her head and was puffing on a fat joint as she hung steaming clothes on a line to dry. From inside the little adobe hut came the sound of an infant crying.

She paused in her work to study the object he held out in his hand. It was a hand-formed slab of red clay, into which he'd engraved a sketch of Brodie's face with his not-inconsiderable drawing skills. He had fired it overnight in the banked embers of his campfire, and then rubbed a slurry of charcoal and water into the engraving to add contrast.

She frowned and shook her head.

“No, I haven't. Kind of a fish-faced gringo,
¿qué no?
”

She offered her joint. He took a deep, grateful hit.

“He's a friend of mine who's dead, ma'am,” he said, exhaling. He handed back the joint.

She crossed herself. Then she frowned.

“If he's dead, why are you looking for him?”

*   *   *

The ground got higher as he followed the road south. He asked about his dead friend at every settlement, outpost, and random hut he came to.

People reacted with a certain amount of suspicion. They were poor, but not so poor that they might not attract the attention of bandits. Especially if those bandidos were the local baron's men. Nor was it unheard of for a lone hombre to scout for a gang of whatever sort.

But the mysterious—and improbably named—Nightwind was right. Zamora was the Seeker. Even if he had seen little evidence his fame had spread quite so far and wide as the trader made it out to have. And after all, he could be forgiven for laying it on a bit thick with a man who had rescued him and asked for no reward. Zamora had a well-practiced way of seeming harmless.

Which, unless you tried to do ill to him or his, was perfectly legitimate.

It was at least no particular disadvantage that his scarred, craggy features, which had never been mistaken for a movie star's even when he was young, now looked like a hundred hectares of malpaís: lava rock and heartbreak. North of the Rio Grande he was a scary Mexican, even to Latinos who were U.S. born and raised, like his mom, bless her memory. And with the Republic of Trans-Pecos trying to strengthen its hold by stirring up old racial feuds and divisions, he would've run shit out of luck in short order there.

Here, he was just another campesino scuffling to get by.

It was as such that he hailed a couple of farmers hoeing weeds out of an acequia: “
¡Escuchenme, hombres!
Give a brother a little help, here?”

He walked up to the irrigation ditch where they stood waiting with their hats pushed back on their heads. After all these years he still wasn't used to seeing Mexicans wearing conical constructions he thought of as “coolie hats.” But Asian influence was stronger in Mexico before the Change than most
norteamericanos
realized, and woven straw hats cost way less than a proper hat like his, with felting and such.

In their patch the bean plants were already beginning to twine their way up stalks of spring corn. Beyond them a huddle of adobe houses stood on the far side of a stream running down from the foothills. Let the gringos in the Northwest cling to their odd, parochial notions that native peoples around the world had mostly died out; they sure hadn't down here in Mexico. The people adapted to the fall of technology just as they had to its rise. A village like this looked little different than it would've a hundred years ago. When the lights went out, there were plenty of
abuelos
who remembered what things were like before electricity and running water.

Hell, there were plenty of people who never had 'em to miss.

As usual, people working in the hot sun weren't any too averse to taking a break. “What you got for us?” asked the gap-toothed older one. The pair were small, dark, and sturdy even by Mexican standards, suggesting they were mostly indio.

“Was wondering if you'd seen this dude,” he said, holding out his clay tablet. “He's my friend, man. I'm looking all over for him.”

“Your friend?” the older man asked. The grooves the sun had dug in his face got deeper. His eyes almost vanished into them as he squinted at the image.

“He's one of them!” the younger guy shouted. And he took a swipe at Zamora with his hoe so hard he overbalanced and splashed into the ditch.

The older dude jumped back. He crouched, menacing Zamora with his out-stretched hoe.

Over his shoulder he yelled to the other workers, “It's a child stealer!
¡Matenlo!
”

*   *   *

“I think you lost 'em now,” Recuerdo said, fluttering down to perch on a rock near Zamora's temporary hideout on top of a ridge. “They're stumbling all around with their hoes and machetes a good half kilometer off.”

“Good thing they weren't very good shots with those bows and arrows, huh?” Pensamiento said.

Zamora took a last swallow of water from his gourd, stoppered it, and let it hang from its sling across his shoulder. He wasn't too worried yet that it was nigh empty. Even if his father's people hadn't taught him the skill of finding water in the desert, he had the crows to scout for it. Though the rainy season was a month or two off, this close to the mountains it wasn't hard to find springs or even streams.

The rocks that hid him were black, part of an ancient lava flow. Which also meant they had fangs. They smelled, unsurprisingly, of sun-heated stone and the sage that sprouted plentifully from them. He had to be careful or they'd tear the soles of his keban, Apache-style moccasin-boots, to shreds.

He frowned. Something in his coat pocket felt hot. And was . . . buzzing.

He wasn't sure how a cold-blooded rattlesnake could make his pocket warm. But he wasn't taking any chances. Especially where crazy Magic Snake Priestesses were involved. He turned its contents out without even grasping the pocket directly. Much less sticking his hand inside.

What plopped out on the wind-drifted pale sand beside him wasn't an animal at all. At least not obviously. It was a rock. Its rounded back had sunk halfway into the dirt, exposing a face of glasslike black stone as flat as water in a jug.

Something like steam wisped from it. Something like condensation clouded the face of it.

“Shiny,” Pensamiento said, flaring his wings to land on a rock.

“Don't touch it,” said Recuerdo, landing beside him.

The pair had been kiting on updrafts from the lava ridge, to keep eyes on the outraged villagers.

Fog began to clear from the obsidian face. “I'm starting to have a bad feeling about this,” Zamora said.

“Don't be a wimp,” Pensamiento said. “Go for it.”

Zamora picked it up.

“Monkey curiosity,” sniffed Recuerdo.

“Hasn't killed me yet,” Zamora said.

“Yet.”

The obsidian lump was just bigger than his hand. It now felt only modestly warm, though it still vibrated. The rounded part he held it by was almost smooth, with a slight knobbly texture. After the fashion of the other obsidian chunks of Zamora's experience, that hadn't vibrated, got hot, or given off . . . smoke.

“You have got to be shitting me,” he said, staring at his own reflection in the black volcanic glass.

“I get that a lot,” said Nightwind's face, replacing his, as if the mirrored face was a tiny TV screen.

Zamora recoiled. “Cool beans!” squawked Pensamiento.

“Nocheviento,” Zamora said. “I thought that was a bogus-sounding name.”

“I admit that I was a bit surprised you didn't twig right away that was a kenning for Tezcatlipoca,” said the face in the smoking mirror. “But you'd had a tough day.”

“You mean I finally have direct interaction with an actual supernatural entity,” he said, “and I don't even find out about it until after? In a phone call?”

He surprised himself how cool he sounded. Tezcatlipoca—Smoking Mirror—had been one of the chief Aztec deities. And one of the bloodiest. A god of sorcery, as well as war. Although lots of the Aztec gods were war gods, most notably his brother and rival, Huitzilopochtli.

The trader laughed. “What kind of god would I be if I couldn't outsmart a mortal? And don't call it a phone, Seeker. Technology's over. It's magic.”

“I don't believe in magic.”

“While you're talking to a god? Okay. But how do you account for the fact that one day—one minute—technology stopped working? Poof—no more gunpowder, electricity, cars. Even steam engines. But the sun still burns, and lightning still strikes.”

“I don't account for it. Yet. I'm looking for the physics behind it.”

“You think physics still works? Even as a concept?”

“'Course it does. The rules have changed, that's all. And if there is ‘magic'—well, that's just a different kind of physics. One we don't know the rules of yet.”

“Circular arguments are the best arguments,” Tezcatlipoca said. “Because they're impossible to answer. Still, it may be that what you say isn't that far from the truth. Or maybe I'm trying to tantalize you, keep you in the game, draw you deeper?”

“I'm thinking”—Zamora drew a deep breath—“both. So what now?”

“You're on the right track,” Tezcatlipoca said. “You keep on the way you have been, you'll find the key to your friend's death.”

“That's it? You called to offer encouragement?”

“It's better than not getting any. You are getting close to your goals. You have the word of a god on that. Doesn't that make you feel better?”

“From the god of deception? No. But I do want to know what the fuck is going on.
Mi amigo
Brodie was a lot of things, and a ‘good' man in the way most people meant was seldom one of them. He was all kinds of fucked up, even when we were kids growing up in Albuquerque. He used his slick talk to cover my ass when I was small. Then when I started to get my growth, I used my size and strength to cover his.

“He was a con man, a
ladrón
. But never violent. And he'd never ever get mixed up with anything involving hurting children. He loved kids.”

He was eyeing the sky as he spoke, lying on his back in the little pool of sun-warmed sand between the rocks. The day was fleeing. Its departure should make it a bit easier for him to make clean his escape from the vengeful townsfolk.

He remembered that night was Tezcatlipoca's special domain. He doubted, somehow, that was actually going to turn out to be any use for him.

“And he was my bro. So what's your stake in this? And why me?”

“I told you. I need a hero.”

Zamora chuckled. “And I'm the best you could find at short notice.”

“Bingo.”

“But why? You're the god, man.”

“Well, don't gods traditionally act through heroes? Or proxies, anyway? And there are severe limits to what I can do in your plane. It stretches my resources just to talk to you, and as you might imagine, I have a special affinity for the object I'm using to communicate.”

With a racket of wings Pensamiento took off from the black rock he'd been perched interestedly on. “Uh-oh, boss. Trouble!”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Angry peasant trouble,” Recuerdo said.

“Fuck,” Zamora said. Then to the smoking mirror, “Gotta go.”

Before Tezcatlipoca—fucking Tezcatlipoca!—could say anything more he stuck the rock back in his pocket, rolled over, and wiggled through the sand so he could peep out and down the slope he'd come up.

“They got a dog to track you,” Pensamiento said before Zamora could start digging his binoculars out of his light pack. “Looks like he got a lot of Shar Pei in him. Got a face like an old
vago
's ass, all saggy and wrinkly.”

Zamora thought about asking how the hell a crow knew what a Shar Pei was. Or what a bum's ass looked like, for fuck's sake. He decided that, even as a Seeker after truth, he didn't really want to know.

He himself couldn't make out near that much detail through the gloom that had gathered at the base of the frozen flow. His eyes weren't what they'd been. But he could see the dog raising his big head and gazing up the slope vaguely in what he took for confusion.

“He can't follow us, anyway,” Zamora said in satisfaction. “Slope's too rocky for him to haul his big ass up.”

A couple of women trotted up to where the big black dog stood. They reached back for the baby carriers slung over their shoulders, then stooped down to release what they'd been carrying in them.

“Fuck! Chihuahuas!” Pensamiento yelped. “I hate those yappy little bastards!”

The little big-eared dogs came racing up the hill, weaving easily among the man-sized stones, or springing like little hyperkinetic cats to the top of them, barking furiously if shrilly the while.

Zamora sat up and clapped his hat on his head.
“¡Vámonos!”
he said. “Let's blow this joint.”

*   *   *

“Have you seen this man?”

The townsman squinted from the tablet up at Zamora's face. He had a stonemason's blocky build and big, callused hands. Though he stood a head shorter than the Seeker, he could do some serious hurt if he teed off on him, Zamora reckoned.