Age of Aztec (8 page)

They’re hunting us
, Mal thought.
Bringing us down like animals on the pampas plains
.

One of the skull-faced attackers ran at her, bolas spinning. Before he could launch it, she narrowed the distance between them and spiked her
macuahitl
at him. His momentum drove him straight onto the blade, impaling him up to the hilt.

As Mal heaved the sword out, another of the skull-faces sprang. This one wasn’t taking any chances. His blowpipe was already at his lips. The range was point blank. Mal swung her sword anyway, hoping against hope that she could get him before he sent the dart on its way.

His cheeks inflated, and at the very same instant Aaronson jumped at him with a frantic cry of “No!” There was a
phoooft!
and Aaronson yelped. He and the skull-face tumbled to the ground together in a heap.

Mal pounced on the two tangled bodies, thrusting the point of her
macuahitl
down into the skull-face’s eye and piercing him to the brain.

“Aaronson! Talk to me. Are you okay?”

She turned him over. He moaned. His eyes rolled in their sockets. His limbs were floppy, rubbery. Was he dying or simply lapsing into unconsciousness? Was the poison on the dart’s tip fatal or just a powerful paralytic?

Either way, there was nothing she could do for him right now. She rose, scanning around. The attackers had cleared a path through to the Conquistador. They were after
her
villain. Well, they weren’t bloody well having him.

She sprinted towards him, leaping over the bodies of downed comrades. The Conquistador looked stunned and exhausted. The skull-faces were helping him to his feet. He didn’t seem to know who they were, but was plainly relieved that they had intervened.

Mal was just yards from him when a rotund individual stepped into her way. His warpaint was the most detailed of all of them, savage and snarly. Yet his eyes were weirdly compassionate. He looked almost sorry as he loosed off his bolas at her.

She tried to duck, but wasn’t fast enough. The bolas cords twined around her head, tightening in an instant. There was a triple impact, a triple burst of lightning and thunder.

Then darkness.

FIVE

8 Flint Knife 1 Monkey 1 House

(Thursday 29th November 2012)

S
TUART WOKE UP
in his own bed, in his own bedroom. Not where he expected to be at all, but he was very glad he was there.

As he heaved himself to a sitting position, a tsunami of aches and pains crashed over him. His arms and legs felt stiff as cardboard. Examining himself, he found bruises almost everywhere, as though someone had planted a garden of purple and yellow orchids under his skin. His head rang like a gong.

He tottered to the bathroom in his underpants. There, amid the marble fixtures, he almost passed out. The world greyed, wavered, dimmed. A glass of cold water helped bring him back to his senses, and a second glass washed down a fistful of aspirin.

As he shuffled along the corridor to the kitchen, Stuart felt a sudden, instinctive certainty.

He wasn’t alone in the flat.

It was too early for the maid, Grace. Besides, in spite of her name, Grace moved with all the elegance of a rhino. You always knew which room she was cleaning, by the thudding footfalls and the clunk of ornaments not quite being broken.

Someone was here and doing their best to keep quiet.

Razor-alert, Stuart slid a carving knife out of the block on the kitchen counter. The intruder was in the living room. Stuart padded to the connecting door, which stood slightly ajar. He peeked through the crack. He had a view of half the room and there was nobody in sight, but the certainty remained. It was something in the air, in the sounds of the flat; something almost unconscious.

He eased the door open just enough to slip through sideways. He held the carving knife at his hip in a backhand grip, the blunt edge of the blade resting against his forearm. It wasn’t the most precise of weapons but, in experienced hands, it would serve.

There was a short, portly man standing in the far corner with his back to the doorway. He wore a neat tropical suit and appeared to be admiring Stuart’s bookshelves, which were laden with first editions of pre-Empire British fiction. His hands were laced together behind him as he keenly ran his gaze over the books’ spines, the cloth and leather bindings, the gold stencilled lettering.

Stuart crept towards him using all the stealthcraft at his disposal. His bare feet made not a sound on the floor tiles. His breathing was slow and measured, drifting silently in through the nostrils, out through the mouth. He skirted the sofa. He was almost within striking distance.

“H.G. Wells,” said the man abruptly, without turning round.

Stuart halted mid-step.

The man gestured at a blue-bound volume. “He foresaw the eventual fall of Britain to the Empire. What are the Martians in
The War Of The Worlds
if not a thinly disguised allegorical warning of an Aztec invasion?Whereas Kipling” – he pointed to a green book on the shelf above, a Collected Poetical Works adorned with beautiful blind-tooled patterns – “insisted your country would remain independent, an empire unto itself, for all time. Two authors, contemporaries, both equally brilliant, yet one got it so right and the other so wrong. Funny, that.”

Now, finally, he turned. He was round-faced, twinkly-eyed, with an impish cast to his features.

“Kindly put the knife down, Mr Reston. Were you to attack me, I would be forced to disarm you, possibly hurt you. Neither of us would want that.”

Stuart did not do as asked. Looking at the man, he doubted he could make good on the threat. Soft and chubby. Slow reflexes. Then again, he’d somehow been aware Stuart was sneaking up on him. There could be more to him than met the eye.

“Who are you?” Stuart demanded in English. The intruder had addressed him in Nahuatl, which Stuart refused to use if he didn’t have to.

“I’m sorry, my knowledge of your native tongue extends to basic reading, that’s all. What did you say?”

Stuart switched to the other language, reluctantly. “I asked who you are.”

“You don’t remember me from last night? No surprise, I suppose. Like you, I am in my civvies.” A grin doubled the number of plump folds in the man’s face. “My name is Ah Balam Chel, and I helped save your life at the theatre. Ringing any bells yet?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Stuart replied. He brandished the knife. “You have five seconds to get out of here, or else.”

Ah Balam Chel gently pushed the blade aside. “No need to keep waving that thing around. I mean you no harm. I am not your enemy. Believe me, if I wanted you dead, you would be. I had ample opportunity to kill you last night. That I did not must tell you something. The fact is, I want you alive. Very much so.”

“And why would that be?”

“Because you are the Conquistador.”

“Oh, come on!” Stuart scoffed.

Chel just smiled knowingly. “When I removed your mask and armour in the back of the getaway van last night, it surprised me to see such a well-known face beneath. I’d had the Conquistador pegged as a nobody, some disgruntled member of the lower orders – not an obsidian magnate whose fortune is based on a product so beloved of the Empire. Far from being an outsider or a social outcast, you’re part of the establishment. You’re the last person I’d ever think would go running around London playing the radical revolutionary.”

“Seriously, you’re mistaken,” Stuart insisted. “You’ve got the wrong man.”

“Who helped you back into this building, when you were so dazed you could barely walk? Who cleaned you up and put you to bed? Me. And all the while, I couldn’t quite get my head round the fact that this pillar of the community is also the man who would tear down the Empire. The final confirmation came when I inspected the premises while you slept, and found the stash of equipment and spare suits of armour at the back of your wardrobe.”

“All right,” Stuart said, relenting. There was no point trying to brazen it out any more. Chel knew what he knew. “I am the Conquistador. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing. Why would I? You think I’m going to turn you over to the Jaguar Warriors?”

“There’s a substantial reward on offer.”

“But I’m an outlaw too,” said Chel. “Remember at the theatre? When you were surrounded by those priests who weren’t priests?”

Stuart recalled the men with the death’s head faces. From the moment a Jaguar Warrior clobbered him on the head, events had taken on a hazy, surreal glow. The death’s heads had dragged him out of the theatre. There’d been a mad dash through the jungle of Regent’s Park, and then...? Chel had mentioned a getaway van, and Stuart had a dim recollection of a tumbling, swerving journey and the tang of diesel fumes. By that point he’d become half convinced the death’s heads were supernatural beings, the souls of the dead come to escort him to Mictlan. It seemed absurd now, especially as he didn’t believe in Mictlan, or Tamoanchan, or any form of afterlife. At the time, though, he’d felt it was a distinct possibility – at the very least, part of a dying man’s fever dream.

And yes, yes. Ah Balam Chel had been one of the death’s heads. Not just one of them, their leader. He’d been barking out orders from the passenger seat, even as he busily scrubbed his makeup off.

“Now, I imagine you’re hungry after your ordeal,” Chel said. “Why not put on some clothes, eat some breakfast? And then we shall talk, you and I. I have things I’d like to tell you, and a proposal to put.”

Stuart studied Chel’s face. He saw neither deceit nor fear there. Stuart trusted no one, but he didn’t sense any danger coming from this man.

Almost without meaning to, he lowered the knife. “All right.”

“H
OW LONG’S THIS
going to take?” Stuart had just wolfed down a bowl of porridge and two rounds of hot buttered toast. He’d also drunk a pot of proper tea, not coca infusion, which like most of the Empire’s cultural impositions he spurned. He was starting to feel himself again.

“Why, do you have somewhere you’d rather be?” replied Chel amiably. “A holding cell at Scotland Yard, perhaps?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Merely a joke. Perhaps not a funny one.”

“As it happens, I have a business meeting at nine o’clock sharp.”

“Ah yes, your other life. The man you are when you’re not in your Conquistador costume.”

“It’s not a costume,” Stuart said. “It’s a pretence, a necessary disguise. I wouldn’t have been getting away with doing what I’ve been doing for half as long as I have, if I did it as plain old me. Plus, it gives me protection.”

“The image the armour projects, though, that’s important.”

“I don’t deny there’s some theatrics involved. I want the Conquistador’s deeds to stick in people’s minds. I want to be memorable – unignorable. I want TV coverage and newspaper headlines. I’d get none of that if I was just some bloke running about in street clothes and a balaclava.” Stuart pointed an accusing finger at Chel. “All this is pretty rich coming from you. You and your friends with the death’s head faces, the ethnic weaponry. And that jewellery you were wearing. The jade frogs and carved circle pendants. Mayan, right?”

Chel nodded.

“Which explains why you speak Nahuatl without an accent, and you look Anahuac. So why are you over here?”

“To meet you, of course.”

“No, really.”

“Really. Well, it is a little more complicated than that. Have you got time?”

Stuart glanced at his wristwatch. “The meeting’s in half an hour, and it’s twenty minutes from here to Reston Rhyolitic if the traffic’s good.”

“Then we should perhaps do this on some other occasion, when you’re not so busy.” Chel stood up as if to leave. “Mustn’t interfere with the wheels of industry, must we?”

“Or,” said Stuart, “I could phone my PA and have her postpone the meeting. It’s not
urgent
urgent. Just going over the half-yearly figures with the accounts team.”

“That would be your decision. If you’re interested in listening to what I have to say...”

“I don’t know.” Stuart genuinely didn’t know. He was intrigued by Chel, that was for sure, and there was no getting around the fact that this man and his band of bolas-wielding paramilitaries had pulled the Conquistador’s fat out of the fire last night. Stuart owed him for his continued liberty – his life, indeed. Hearing him out seemed the least he could do.

“It shouldn’t take too long,” Chel said.

“I’ll make the call.”

“T
HERE IS, OF
course, no such thing as the Mayan nation,” Ah Balam Chel said. “Everyone knows that. The Maya are no more. We were the last of the Aztecs’ conquests in Anahuac, before the Empire’s expansion out into the rest of the world began. The Olmec, the Zapotec, the Inca and the Mixtec had been enslaved and become tributary states. The Aztecs then swarmed across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and up into the Yucatan Peninsula. Urged on by the Great Speaker, they slaughtered and pillaged, committing atrocities on a scale you wouldn’t believe. Mayan men were killed in their thousands, children too, and women raped in their tens of thousands. That, the mass rape, was a vital plank in the Aztecs’ plan. Their footsoldiers took a particular, vindictive pleasure in carrying out that particular duty. Within months, countless mixed-race infants were born. The bloodline of the Maya was thinned and sullied and would never be pure again.”