“And talking to you does that how?”
“The Code Duello,” I said. “The Red Court signed the Accords. For what Arianna has done, I have the right to challenge her. If I kill her, I get rid of the Red King’s problem for him.”
“Suppose he isn’t interested in chatting?” Thomas said. “Suppose they’re pulling back because he just convinced someone to drop a cruise missile on top of us?”
“Then we’ll get blown up,” I said. “Which is better than we’d get if we had to tangle with them here and now, I expect.”
“Okay,” Thomas said. “Just so we have that clear.”
“Pansy,” Murphy sneered.
Thomas leered at her. “You make my stamen tingle when you talk like that, Sergeant.”
“Quiet,” Sanya murmured. “Something is coming.”
A soft lamp carried by a slender figure in a white garment came toward us down the long row of columns.
It proved to be a woman dressed in an outfit almost exactly like Susan’s. She was tall, young, and lovely, with the dark red-brown skin of the native Maya, with their long features and dark eyes. Three others accompanied her—men, and obviously warriors all, wearing the skins of jaguars over their shoulders and otherwise clad only in loincloths and heavy tattoos. Two of them carried swords made of wood and sharpened chips of obsidian. The other carried a drum that rolled off a steady beat.
I thought there was something familiar about the features of the three men, but then I realized that they weren’t personally familiar to me. It was the subtle tension of their bodies, the hints of power that hung about them like a very faint perfume.
They reminded me quite strongly of Susan and Martin. Half vampires. Presumably just as dangerous as Susan and Martin, if not more so.
The jaguar warriors all came to a halt about twenty feet away, but the drum kept rolling and the girl kept walking, one step for each beat. When she reached me, she unfastened her feathered cloak and let it fall to the ground. Then, with the twist of a piece of leather at each shoulder, the shift slid down her body into a puddle of soft white around her feet. She was naked beneath, except for a band of leather around her hips, from which hung an obsidian-bladed knife. She knelt down in a slow, graceful motion, a portrait in supplication, then took up the knife and offered its handle to me.
“I am Priestess Alamaya, servant of the Great Lord Kukulcan,” she murmured, her voice honeyed, her expression serene. “He bids you and your retainers be welcome to this, his country seat, Wizard Dresden, and offers you the blood of my life as proof of his welcome and his compliance with the Accords.” She lowered her eyes and turned her head to the right to bare her throat, the carotid artery, while still holding forth the blade. “Do with me as you will. I am a gift to you from the Great Lord.”
“Oh, how thoughtful,” the Leanansidhe murmured. “You hardly ever meet anyone that polite, these days. May I?”
“No,” I said, and tried to keep the edge of irritation out of my voice. I took the knife from the girl’s hands and slid it into my sash, and let it rest next to the cloth sack I had made from a knotted inside-out Rolling Stones T-shirt. The shirt had been in my gym bag of contraband ever since it had been a gym bag of clean clothes for when I went to the gym. I had pressed the shirt (bah-dump-bump, ching) into service when I realized the one other thing I couldn’t do without during this confrontation. It was tied to my grey cloth sash.
Then I took the young woman’s arm and lifted her to her feet, sensing no particular aura of power around her. She was mortal, evidently a servant of the vampires.
She drew in a short breath as she felt my hand circle her wrist and rose swiftly, so that I didn’t have to expend any effort lifting her. “Should you wish to defile me in that way, lord, it is also well within your rights as guest.” Her dark eyes were very direct, very willing. “My body is yours, as is my blood.”
“More than a century,” Murphy muttered, “and we’ve gone from ‘like a fish needs a bicycle’ to this.”
I cleared my throat and gave Murphy a look. Then I turned to the girl and said, “I have no doubt about your lord’s integrity, Priestess Alamaya. Please convey us to his seat, that I may speak with him.”
At my words, the girl fell to her knees again and brushed her long, dark hair across my feet. “I thank you for my life, wizard, that I may continue to serve my lord,” she said. Then she rose again and made an imperious gesture to one of the jaguar warriors. The man immediately recovered her clothing and assisted her in dressing again. The feather cloak slid over her shoulders once more, and though I knew the thing had to be heavy, she bore it without strain. “This way, lord, if you please.”
“Love this job,” Sanya murmured. “Just love it.”
“I need to challenge more people to duels,” Thomas said in agreement.
“Men are pigs,” Murphy said.
“Amen,” said Molly.
Lea gave me a prim look and said, “I’ve not sacrificed a holy virgin in ages.”
“Completely unprofessional,” muttered Martin.
“Ixnay,” I said quietly, laying a hand on Mouse’s shoulders. “All of you. Follow me. And don’t look edible.”
And, following the priestess with her lamp, we entered the city of Chichén Itzá.
Chapter 43
Chichén Itzá smelled like blood.
You never mistake blood for anything else, not even if you’ve never smelled it before. We’ve all tasted it—if nowhere else, when we lose our baby teeth. We all know the taste, and as a corollary, we all know the smell.
The main pyramid is known as El Castillo by most of the folk who go there today—literally, “the castle.” As we walked up out of the gallery of pillars, it loomed above us, an enormous mound of cut stone, every bit as large and imposing as the European fortifications for which it was named. It was a ziggurat-style pyramid, made all of square blocks. Levels piled one on top of another as it rose up to the temple at its summit—and every level of the pyramid was lined with a different form of guard.
At the base of the pyramid, and therefore most numerous, were the jaguar warriors we had already seen. They were all men, all appealing, all layered with the lean, swift muscle of a panther. They all wore jaguar skins. Many of them bore traditional weapons. Many more wore swords, some of them of modern make, the best of which were superior in every physical sense to the weapons manufactured in the past. Most of them also carried a Kalashnikov—again, the most modern versions of the weapons, made of steel and polymer, the finest of which were also readily superior to the weapons of earlier manufacture.
The next level up were all women, garbed in ritual clothing as Alamaya had been, but covered in tattoos, much as the jaguar warriors were. They, too, had that same subtle edge to them that suggested greater-than-mortal capability.
Hell’s bells. If the numbers were the same on every side of the pyramid, and I had no reason to believe that they were not, then I was looking at nearly a thousand of the jaguar warriors and priestesses. I am a dangerous man—but no one man is that dangerous. I was abruptly glad that we hadn’t tried a rope-a-dope or a forward charge. We’d have been swamped by sheer numbers, almost regardless of the plan.
Numbers matter.
That fact sucks, but that makes it no less true. No matter how just your cause, if you’re outnumbered two to one by a comparable force, you’re gonna have to be real creative to pull out a victory. Ask the Germans who fought on either front of World War II. German tankers would often complain that they would take out ten Allied tanks for every tank they lost—but the Allies always seemed to have tank number eleven ready to go.