“And now?”
“I still think you’re batshit crazy, but I sort of understand why. The Empire took everything from you.”
“It took something from you too.”
“My brother, you mean? Yeah, maybe, but the difference is, I gave Ix up. I’m the one who threw him to the wolves when I could have saved him. Because he compromised me. He was like a stain. Being related to a petty crim could have nobbled my career. So I scrubbed him off me, publicly, thoroughly.” She gave a bitter chuckle. “I told myself it was for his own good but really it was for mine. All said and done, he was still my big bro, wasn’t he? And I should have protected him.”
“You did what you felt was right at the time. You can’t condemn yourself for it.”
“Oh, yes I bloody can.”
“Well then, you mustn’t. Or else you’ll end up like me.”
“Perish the thought.”
“I mean it. There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t wish I could have helped Sofia, done more for her.”
“What, though? It wasn’t your fault at all, as I understand it.”
“Wasn’t it? I married her.”
“You didn’t make her how she was. You didn’t drive her to do what she did.”
“I knew, going in, that she was a bit flaky. But she seemed so right for me. For the man I used to be,” he amended. “Want to know why I first asked her out?”
“Because she was a catch, the trophy wife every bloke with a fat wallet was trying to bag?”
“No. Well, yes. But it was also because… I already knew about her, but when I actually laid eyes on her for the first time, at some drinks party or other, she was picking a piece of hors d’oeuvre out of her teeth.”
“Really?” Mal said. “That was it, the big attraction? She was picking her teeth?”
“She thought nobody was looking and she was digging at something stuck between two molars. Levering it out with one manicured, lacquered fingernail. This great swanlike society beauty. This ethereal, worshipped creature. Doing something so mundane and ordinary, her mouth wide open, hand rummaging away. That was when I knew I was in with a chance. That was also when I knew I could love her. She was human, after all.”
He looked wistfully out of the window.
“You like a bit of grit in the works, don’t you?” Mal said.
“If life’s too easy, what’s the point?”
“And yet the rest of us — the ‘other half’ — we’re all trying to fight our way up out of the muck, into the so-called good life, a life like you had.”
“Who’s content with their lot?” Reston said. “No one. Except maybe the Great Speaker.”
“Not even him, judging by how he whinged to Quetzalcoatl.”
“True. Then again, he seemed enthused by the prospect of this war. Like it was something he was looking forward to, after so long. Speaking of which…”
There was the distant sound of l-guns discharging on the outer walls.
“Looks like things are hotting up again.”
The Gods’ third strike was broad-based and comprehensive. They didn’t confine themselves solely to the air. Ground forces were also deployed.
The first sign was a terrific commotion originating from over in the direction of the main gate. There was shouting and a mass of concentrated gunfire. Shortly afterwards, non-armoured Serpent Warriors came hurrying into the concourse below the administrative ziggurat. They were on the run, pulling back, harried by an enemy.
“Xipe Totec,” said Reston. “And Mictlantecuhtli.”
The Flayed One was in full shock-mode, his skin transparent, all his viscera on display. Mal looked on with fascinated disgust as he cut a swath through the routed Serpents, wielding a pair of hook-shaped knives with finesse and almost surgical precision. He darted about, dodging his enemy’s shots; he seemed to have a sixth sense as to where the next plasma bolt was coming from. And his blades flickered and slashed, and here a Serpent fell with his torso opened wide from shoulder to waist, and here another Serpent staggered in circles with blood fountaining from a severed jugular, and here a third screamed and tried to stem the flow of life jetting from the stump of his arm.
“It’s like, he’s showing you his insides before he shows you your own,” Mal breathed.
Reston nodded. “Sort of a visual promise, isn’t it? ‘Look, here’s what’s coming your way.’”
Alarming as Xipe Totec was, however, he was nothing compared with Mictlantecuhtli. If the former was a scalpel, the latter was blunt force trauma. The Dark One strode like a juggernaut, implacably, as though nothing could daunt or deter him. His hands were encased in massive black gauntlets, and with these he did two things: deflected incoming l-gun shots and killed human beings. Often he would be performing the one action with one hand and the other with the other simultaneously. The gauntlets were large enough that a Serpent’s head could fit inside their grip, comfortably, at least until Mictlantecuhtli squeezed and the head was crushed, helmet and all, like a pistachio nut. A punch from one of those huge metal fists was capable of removing an entire arm at the shoulder. A swat easily disembowelled.
It was a hopelessly one-sided battle, right up until the moment armoured Serpents began buzzing out of the bunker like angry wasps and joined the fray. They pressed Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli hard, pinning them down with ferocious salvoes of gunfire, forcing them to spend all their effort defending.
One Serpent was at the forefront of the fightback: Colonel Tlanextic. Mal felt herself tense up at the sight of that gold-zigzagged armour. She willed Xipe Totec to get the better of him, or Mictlantecuhtli. Either of the gods was welcome to kill Aaronson’s murderer. If she was unable to do it herself, she would settle for that.
No such luck, however. Tlanextic and the other armoured Serpents succeeded in repulsing Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli and driving them off the concourse. The battle raged on down the streets of Tenochtitlan, out of view.
The few Serpents remaining at the bunker entrance had a brief respite. They reinforced their positions and tallied their living and their dead. By now the sun was setting. For a time, the air thickened and turned smoky gold. The sky was blood-red, then amethyst, then purple-grey. Stars winked. Streetlights came on automatically. Everything was still and quiet.
Then, amid the shadows on the concourse, shapes started to move.
At first Mal thought it must just be tired eyes, a trick of vision. That or wisps of dust being whisked up by breezes.
“Did you see that?” she murmured to Reston. “Down in that doorway just now. And over there by the monorail track. I could have sworn…”
“There’s something there, all right. Animals of some kind.”
“What?”
“Not sure.”
The Serpents themselves had noticed they weren’t alone on the concourse. They swung their l-guns in different directions, trying to train them on the creatures flitting and scurrying between pools of darkness. To Mal, from the fragmentary glimpses she was catching, the animals looked like large rats or perhaps small dogs. But they were furless, leathery-skinned, and their movements weren’t right. There was something of the reptile about them, not least the long tapering tails, and also something disturbingly humanoid, especially the paws, which bore a marked similarity to hands and feet.
All at once a Serpent screamed. One of the creatures had latched onto his back. He reached behind him, clawing desperately, and the animal squirmed out of his grasp and wrapped itself round his neck. It had a shovel-shaped muzzle, and twin rows of serrated teeth glittered like diamonds in the lamplight. It sank its jaws into the man’s throat and, with one wrenching twist of its head, tore out his trachea, Adam’s apple and a great deal of gristle and muscle. Blood gushed over it, and the creature became frenzied, burrowing deeper into the Serpent’s neck, hind feet scrabbling for purchase on his uniform, tail lashing the air.
This first drawing of blood was the cue for a concerted wave of attacks. More of the repugnant monsters sprang from the shadows onto the Serpents. Some threw themselves down off ledges and cornices and bit their faces, while others writhed up their legs and went for the soft parts at the crotch. Plasma bolts crisscrossed as the Serpents tried to fend off the creatures, but the vast majority of the shots were wild, fired by panicked or pain-wracked fingers. Martial discipline went to pieces in the face of an enemy that was so obscenely swift and that didn’t play by the standard rules of engagement.