Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (28 page)

The man shrugged and grinned. “Maybe I was looking for a hero.”

“Will you be my hero?”

The voice was low, husky, and feminine. Zamora wheeled to face its source. She was short, dark, and deeply curved. She had a curious sort of stone-bead tiara around her head and a large jade medallion around her neck. The cotton shirt she wore had fallen open far enough to show that was all she had on under it.

Her eyes met his. And held them like magnets.

She reached a slim hand up to trail her fingers down his chest. “I could use a big, strong man like you.”

Zamora's reason was screaming,
Get away! It's wrong! She's obviously not a whore. If she needs a big strong man so badly, why is she running all over the Mexican Plateau with her big old titties flopping out?

But it had been a long time—uncomfortably long—since he'd had a woman. And with his looks and age the prospect of another had been looking none too bright. His brain, in other words, had had its throne usurped by other parts.

And those eyes. They were pools. Black pools. Like gazing into an abyss . . .

“Watch her other hand,
coño
!” a voice screamed from the doorway.

Not the voice of reason, maybe. But the voice of Thought.

It was as if he'd dunked his head in a Sierra Madre snowmelt stream. He swung the bloody knife in his left hand hard up and around. He barely had a chance to notice what the hand she'd had hidden behind her hips was holding before the massive blade chopped through its delicate wrist.

The small rock rattlesnake struck futilely at air as the hand that held it bounced against the mud-stuccoed wall.

Hard as he could, Zamora smashed the pommel of his bowie into the side of the woman's face. He had no idea what other tricks she might have in store for him. He wasn't minded to find out the hard way.

The way Brodie did,
he realized. Before they tossed a bunch more rattlers on him to make good and sure.

The sound of her right cheekbone imploding was immediately drowned by the noise of her neck snapping. It put Zamora in mind of a handgun going off. A sound no human on Earth had heard for over twenty-five years, so far as he knew.

She fell straight down. The smells of various bowels emptying in death suddenly made the cantina feel very crowded.

The serpent squirmed free of the fingers of the severed hand, which were spasming open and closed, and tried to burrow into the sawdust. The trader's right foot stamped on it with a surprisingly solid sound, as if there was stone inside the simple moccasin, instead of flesh. It crushed its arrowhead-shaped skull against a floor of clay set with fresh blood and trampled hard by countless feet.

But the eyes of the woman whose neck Zamora had just broken were open and aware. They drew his as if by some even stronger version of the magic that had held them before. This time he was sure his pecker wasn't involved.

But where before the eyes had seemed like black pools they were really that now: all black, even where the whites should be. They glared at him with cold and infinite fury.

“I . . . See . . . you,”
the lips said, in a voice that no more belonged to the woman who had tried to seduce him into accepting venomous fangs than it did to him.

Then the eyes returned to what they had been before: brown irises around dilated pupils, in slightly yellow whites. They were unseeing as marbles. The woman was well and truly dead.

“Get the fuck out of my bar,
cabrones
!” the proprietor shrieked. Zamora looked over to see him half crouched behind the counter, brandishing a woodsman's ax. “I run a respectable place, here.”

“Yeah,” Zamora murmured. “Respectable enough for murder, but not self-defense.”

The trader had shouldered his well-stuffed pack. The trader had a shaved head, an eagle beak, and maybe a few years on Zamora. He wore an ancient T-shirt that read
I'M WITH STUPID
. He touched Zamora lightly on the arm as he brushed by.

“He's right,” he said in well-educated Mexico City Spanish.

It sounded quaint even to Zamora. You didn't hear it much these days.

“Best we find someplace else to be, pronto. Before more of them come along.”

Zamora was reaching down to recover his bowie from the first man's chest. He froze as he saw the heavily stylized eagle tattooed on the corpse's right biceps.

Then he grasped the hilt, braced his boot sole against the man's ribs, and pulled the big blade free.

“You said ‘them,'” he said, straightening. “You don't mean the white guy too?”

The trader grinned with yellow but surprisingly straight teeth. “Check him out,
chico
.”

A glance showed a second eagle tat on the pallid thigh-thick arm.

“¡Hijo de la chingada!”
he said fervently. “An Anglo Eagle Knight?”

“Huitzilopochtli has an equal-opportunity blood cult, these days.”

In passing—purely by accident—Zamora's glance strayed across the woman's upturned breasts, which were now entirely bare and lay sprawled off by gravity toward either armpit. They didn't count, anyway; they were dead-chick breasts.

But what did catch his glance was the equally stylized, and far more hideous, figure carved into the jade medallion lying on her sternum between them.

“What's one of Her priestesses doing hanging out with a pair of Eagle Knights?”

The trader just smiled at him and pushed out into the now visibly waning sunlight. He limped heavily, favoring his right foot—the one he'd used to crush the rattler. The crow that stood right beneath the swinging doors hopped peevishly to one side to let him pass, but did not take wing.

“Hey, mister!” One of the drinkers at last stirred himself to speak. “It was like that bird warned you. Does he talk to you?”

“Just random cawing,” Zamora said. “What do you expect? It's just a crow.”

*   *   *

“Well, that was a new twist,” said Memory—Recuerdo—fluttering down off the parapet of the flat cantina roof to light on Zamora's shoulder. “Killing off all your potential informants before they could give you any information. You think you learned enough mystic human bullshit to follow 'em into the afterlife?”

“They forced my hand.”

“They wouldn't have told you anything, anyway,” the trader said. “So, the crows do talk to you.”

Zamora shrugged. “They talk to anybody, man. I just listen.”

As a grad student in Psych, he'd been studying communication among birds—crows in particular, since they were clearly smart and also common as assholes in Albuquerque—when the Change hit. Funny, but it was only since then that he'd really begun to understand them.

He reckoned it was because he started paying more attention. He had incentive. Like survival.

“I say you should make them let us in,” said Pensamiento—Thought—fluttering up to Zamora's other shoulder. “Discrimination.”

“I hate being indoors,” Memory said. “No place to stretch your wings. Nothing in there for a crow, anyway.”

“¡Yo quiero
tequila
!”

“You can't handle that shit. You're even stupider drunk. And you fly into things.”

“TEQUILAAAAA!”

“Enough,” Zamora said. Then, to his human companion: “So how come you understood what he said?”

The trader just shrugged back and smiled. Again. He had dark Indian skin and dancing eyes. He limped south along the track that passed by the cantina. Zamora found he had naturally fallen into step beside him. Even though it was back the way he'd just come.

It wasn't as if he had any better direction to go, just now.

“I'm Zamora,” he said after a moment.

“The one they call the Seeker, right? Born in an onion field near Nuevo Casas Grandes, son of a Chicana law student from Albuquerque with a social conscience, and a Mexican-Apache day laborer without much evidence of a conscience at all.”

“My father was a good man,” Zamora mumbled. “In his own way. How do you know all this about me, anyway?”

The trader shrugged.

“You're quite the legend, in some circles. Also distinctive, with that hat and the two crows. Plus your proficiency with knives.”

“Eh. People gossip. Without TV, what else they got to do?”

“I don't have much memory of television.”

“I do. Plenty. And I had you sized up as maybe older than me.”

“Oh, I am, I am . . . but I forget my manners. Thank you for rescuing me, Señor Buscador. I am Nocheviento.”

Zamora grunted. It was something he was finding himself doing even more than usual. The name didn't really make sense. It was the Spanish words for “night” and “wind,” but crammed together into one. Which was more the English way of doing things than the
castellano
.

Then again, the Mexican and U.S. cultures had gotten pretty well crammed together themselves, before the Change. And the recent reversal of the military fortunes of Trans-Pecos' ally, Boise, had caused an upheaval in the Republic that had resulted in a fresh influx of refugees south. Most of whom were Anglo, which was ironic, since for the last few years Trans-Pecos had been trying to block immigration.

“So why were Eagle Warriors beating on you, anyway?”

“They thought I had something they wanted. Even cultists of Left-Hand Hummingbird and the Rattlesnake Mother have their reasons to stoop to highway robbery, I suppose. Why did you want to question them?”

Zamora frowned. But he couldn't think of any reason, paranoid though he was, not to tell Nightwind the truth.

“My buddy was murdered,” he said. “By rattlesnakes, looked like.”

“An ugly way to die.”

“Yeah. So I followed the tracks that led away from the scene. They matched the three I found jacking you up in that cantina. And the fact that strange woman tried the same trick on me tends to back up that they were the guilty ones.”

“Why would they want to kill your friend?”

“No clue. Brodie was a con man, sure. But totally nonviolent. He even disapproved of me being violent, even when I had to beat some ass to save his. Why would he get mixed up with a bunch of hard-core bloodletters like Eagle Knights—or that priestess with the crazy eyes?” He shook his head. “But I reckon that doesn't matter anymore. I've avenged him.”

“Maybe. And maybe not.”

Zamora gave his companion a narrow look.

“I believe he may have been caught up in a larger scheme,” Nightwind said. “Much larger.”

“How do you mean?”

“You asked why a priestess of Coatlicue would be keeping company with a pair of Eagle Knights—dedicated warriors of Huitzilopochtli, at least since his cult re-arose after the Change. Well, in the course of my travels, I have run across evidence that they're up to something together. My brother—”

He stopped.

“Your brother what?” Zamora prodded.

“He's . . . caught up with the Eagle Knights. And he won't listen to me. Even though the Rattlesnake Mother has always had an agenda of her own—and definitely doesn't have Huitzilopochtli's best interests at heart.”

“You talk about 'em as if they were real people.”

“Who's to say they aren't?”

I am,
the rationalist part of Zamora's mind wanted to say.

But he kept his peace. Arguing with people didn't do much good, he found. And until he found out the whys and the wherefores of the Change, he didn't feel as if he was standing on ground firm enough to go throwing many stones . . .

“Okay. I know a lot of people have gone back to believing in old ways. Even phony old ways, like that
Lord of the Rings
was an actual history book.”

“So you've encountered the self-proclaimed Dúnedain, have you? You've been northwest, to Montival?”

“I've been everywhere, man.”

“Like the Johnny Cash song?”

“Yeah. You know about Johnny Cash?”

“Know about him? I knew him. We were like that.”

“Huh.”

But you don't remember much about television,
Zamora thought.
Funny.

The two crows, getting bored, took off again and winged south.

“So they spy for you?”

“Good to have eyes in the sky.”

“Did they track your friend's killers, then?”

“I'm a better tracker than they are, actually,” Zamora said. “But they're good at spotting tracks in the open fast. Aerial reconnaissance and all.”

“A mysterious wanderer with a broad-brimmed hat and two corvid servants? So you're basically a Mexican Odin.”

Zamora laughed. “Not hardly. Still got two eyes, you'll notice. And no plans to go dropping either of 'em in any wells. So where we headed now?”

“You and I are parting company. Here, in fact. You will want to follow this road south.”

“Where does it lead?”

“To the reason your friend was murdered. That's the first part of my reward to you for saving my humble life. And it may be your eventual reward would become greater still, if you got to the bottom of what our cultist friends are planning. And survived, of course.”

“You'd pay me?” Zamora asked skeptically. “How would you get in touch with me? Not like we got telephones anymore.”

“I have my own ways of knowing. Some almost as cool as having a pair of crow spies. And now: farewell, my child. Good luck. Even you will need an abundance of it.”

And with that he set off toward the hills to the west, with a swinging gait that belied his years and gimpy foot.

Frowning, Zamora watched him go for a moment. Then he turned his head, put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled.

Another moment, and Pensamiento and Recuerdo were circling three meters over his head.

“What is it, boss?” Recuerdo asked.

“How about you keep an eye on that dude, find out where he's going.”