Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (32 page)

But other, burlier figures were converging on Zamora fast from all directions: male cultists, led by several Eagle Warriors armed with spears and macuahuitl.

Zamora decided his best bet was to take the offensive. He put his head down and charged straight at the nearest knot of attackers.

An Eagle Knight shorter than he but wider across chest and shoulders swung a club edged with razor-sharp rock at him.

He guided it by with the flat of his own stolen macuahuitl. A couple of decades' experience fighting with big knives had taught him that movie sword-fighting was a load of horseshit. At least where it came to parrying with your edge. You never, never did that, unless you wanted to wind up smart quick holding a dull club. Or an even more useless stub.

As he dashed past the Knight he hit him with a powerful backhand. And found out something surprising about the macuahuitl: while the volcanic-glass flakes set into it were indeed sharper than the finest steel, their square edges acted like saw teeth. His stroke didn't just send a dozen teeth flying, but ripped half the skin off the man's lower face.

Which gave him something to do other than press the attack on Zamora, such as falling down while trying to scream and not choke to death on teeth and blood.

Zamora kept running. He had no clear destination. Just away from the point on which several score angry enemies were converging. A cultist appeared in front of him, jabbing with a spear. Zamora jinked as far to the right as he could. The spear tip gashed his left hip just below the bone. He slashed the man across both forearms in passing.

Another Eagle Knight came in from the right. Zamora blocked his horizontal macuahuitl swipe with the bowie in his left hand. The tip of his own macuahuitl was flat and wide; its wooden “blade” narrowed straight to the grip on both edges. It still worked for poking his opponent hard in the Adam's apple and dropping him choking to his knees.

A Knight loomed in front of him. He blocked a cut from Zamora's sword-club with a clack of his wooden shield. Worse, he forced Zamora to slow down.

Strong arms gripped Zamora from behind. He thought for a heartbeat he was lucky it hadn't been a spear through his kidneys. Then he realized his enemies were still trying to capture him alive to sacrifice him. Just the way their ancestors—or anyway the people they were imitating—had.

The dude was going for a full nelson hold. But he wasn't good enough or quick enough—quite. Zamora jackknifed forward with all the power of his ample core. He flung the attacker right over his head. And literally into the surprised, painted face of the Eagle Knight with the shield.

But that well and truly fucked Zamora's forward momentum. His foes were all around him, a wall of sweaty, grunting, grimacing meat.

And then it was all wild twisting: hacking, stabbing, slashing, with steel and laboriously flaked black stone; elbows and knees and punches and head-butts. Blades gashed Zamora in a dozen places, so that his blood—and others'—covered him like a net, diffusing quickly into a slippery coat. No wounds large enough to be serious, yet. He would weaken in time. But time wasn't something he was worried about.

Even though the cultists had put themselves in the classic mob dilemma of getting in one anothers' way a lot more than they were stomping their would-be victim, it was only a matter of hammering heartbeats before they beat Zamora down. Even though he tagged at least a dozen of them, and dropped five or six more dead or hurt bad enough that it made no never mind, given the antibiotic-lacking standards of today's medicine.

Most mobs, it would've been more than enough to send them all packing off in search of easier prey. But this one had fanatic zeal driving them on. Backed by a head of plain old vengeful anger.

A blow from a club or macuahuitl-side on the temple sent sparks shooting through his skull. His vision got even darker than the sun's fall behind the mountains would have made it. His stomach sloshed like a stormy sea and his knees got weak. He continued to swing his arms feebly, tried to keep moving. Moving at all costs—to stop was to die—

Something big and dark flapped overhead. It came close enough to make the dark blurs of faces surrounding him turn upward. His vision began settling back into focus as he looked too.

In time to see the caracara fly by, low and fast. Whatever evil spirit had gotten into it was gone—Zamora could feel it. Now it winged in clear terror beyond the cultist summer camp and around the brush-dotted hip of the smoking mountain.

And behind him came Recuerdo, at the head of a vast flock of crows, a few burly Chihuahua ravens, and a mess of various kinds of jays, all squalling in joyous rage. Corvids hated birds of prey like poison. And a fraction of that number could fatally mob a much larger bird than the caracara.

“Get 'em, boys!” Recuerdo cried.

While a dozen or so of the crows and cousins kept pursuing the caracara, the others suddenly descended. Onto the upturned faces of the cultists and Eagle Knights. They clutched with cruel claws, jabbed with their beaks, and battered with their powerful wings.

They provided, needless to say, a powerful distraction.

Using which, Zamora dropped to hands and knees and, still clutching his weapons, still clad only in a coat of blood rapidly drying to stickiness and salty itching, crawled out of the midst of the yelling, flailing mob.

As soon as he was clear he stood up fast. Somebody blundered into his right side. He turned and lashed out by reflex, laying open the bare back of a male Coatlicue cultist who was trying to punch it out with a pair of punk-Mohawked Steller's jays. The man screamed and fell down. The birds flew off in search of more victims.

Most of the cultists seemed to be struggling with their feathered assailants. At first by blind impulse, Zamora headed toward the cage where the children were kept. Then by iron purpose.

A pair of the less-prepossessing cultists, one fat, one skinny,
el gordo y el flaco
, each a head shorter than he, tried to bar Zamora's way with spears. He knocked the weapons aside with his bowie and hacked them both down. With the macuahuitl, without remorse.

A trio of topless Coatlicue priestesses barred his way with machetes and a regular woodsman's ax. Fortunately for them, only the High Priestess got to wear the full snaky skirt. And apparently they hadn't been snake-handling when the subdual spell was broken.

“Scoot,” he told them. “Get outta here.”

But they stood their ground before the rush of the burly, angry man who'd been their impending sacrificial victim until moments before. He had to give them credit for their courage. Or their crazy.

The middle one, a tall, lean, light-skinned woman, uttered a piercing scream and began swinging at him in figure-eights with her machete. He only just managed to avoid getting gutted like a trout by stopping flat and sucking his big belly back away from the blade.

She still might've got him had she advanced. Instead she stood where she was, screeching and slashing air, until he timed her and decapitated her with a single backhand stroke.

As her head, elaborate headdress and fierce expression both firmly in place, fell away to be displaced by a pulsing jet of blood, her associates threw down their weapons and scattered into the twilight.

He ran to the pen. Small, frightened faces stared at him through the peeled-sapling bars. “Better stand back, kids,” he said gruffly.

Then he realized that was a pretty silly thing to say. They were all pressed as far back toward the granite outcrop that formed the enclosure's rear wall as they could fit, staying back away from the naked, bloody, crazy dude who had just hacked a lady to death in front of them. Even if it was a lady who was about to kill them.

The enclosure was fastened with an old-fashioned padlock. He hacked it partway free of the wood, breaking his macuahuitl in the process. Dropping the weapon, he started pulling on the door with both hands, even the one that still held his own knife.

A couple of small shapes appeared beside him, to help tug on the bars. He looked down to see two of the first four kids who'd been led out to sacrifice. The other two squatted nearby, too small to help and smart enough to notice.

In a moment they—okay, mostly he—got the pen open.

“Okay,” he declared. “We gotta get going. The birds won't keep those
cabrones
busy for long.”

They stared at him. He looked down at himself.

“Don't mind me,” he said. “I'm the good guy.”

*   *   *

He got them all out of the pen. The ones who'd survived to this point, anyway: twenty-odd kids from just barely walking to just-shy-of-marriageable. Which, granted, wasn't all that much older these days. It hit him hard to reflect that the reason they all were fit to flee was that only the near perfect had been kept alive for sacrifice to power Coatlicue's return. But he still thanked the Virgin that they were.

They hadn't made it more than a couple hundred meters from the camp before he heard the angry sounds of pursuit firing up behind them. And barely half a klick beyond that when he heard the crashing of enemy scouts in the brush off to their left.

They were caught. No way to hide that many fugitives, even small, well-motivated ones, from people who knew the area. Even though it was full dark now, with the light of a million stars offering little more illumination than they did heat.

He held a brief debate with himself. The outcome was never in much doubt. Between not being able to live, and not being able to live with yourself, was no real choice at all.

He shook his head.

“You kids keep going that way,” he rumbled, pointing southeast, at an angle to their course but basically away from the pursuer blundering around to the north of them, with one of his bowies.

He'd recovered the second from the corpse of the High Priestess. Who was in shape to make Brodie look ready for an open-casket funeral when he found him. He had also snagged a cultist's cotton shirt that wasn't too bloody, and bound up his loins. Because even with everything else on his mind he just didn't feel right, running around with his business swinging freely right next to a bunch of kids.

“Keep together, help each other, and keep quiet.”

“Mister,” said one of the bolder ones, an indio-looking boy of maybe nine or ten. “There's lights coming from the east.”

Zamora looked. He shook himself like a wet dog.

“All right,” he said, “change of plan. You all hide out in the scrub here and keep out of sight. And remember—you never saw me!”

They nodded solemnly.

“When can we come out?” a girl asked.

“You'll know.”

And just like that, they vanished as if they'd teleported out of there.

And right about then several dozen cultists, led by a handful of Eagle Knights, ran headlong into several hundred pissed-off peasants with pitchforks and torches, led by the young local priest. Who was waving an arming-sword, of all the gods-damned things.

*   *   *

“Careful!” squawked Pensamiento from the inner pocket of Zamora's coat, as the man squatted to reach for the Smoking Mirror, beside the horribly contorted and bloated High Priestess. “You'll squash me!”

“Yeah,” Zamora told him. “Sure. After I went to all the trouble of setting your broken wing after your
hermano
found you in that bush, I'm gonna forget and fucking sit on you.”

Off to the east of the now deserted camp it sounded as if some cultists were still busy dying. That sort of sound carried a long way, especially at night up here on the Chihuahua Plateau.

Zamora didn't hold with torture, even a little. But he figured what was going on was strictly between the local peasants and the fanatics who wanted to murder children to unleash untold horror into the world. None of his business.

“Neat trick with the locals,” Tezcatlipoca said, as soon as Zamora turned over the obsidian node. “Why'd you play it that way, though?”

“You mean, why'd I pretend to be the Devil, taunting farmers as they made their way to the local church?”

It was a stroke of luck today was a Sunday, with Mass celebrated twice.

“And why'd I tell 'em my worshippers had their missing
hijos
, and were fixing to feed them to me? Here I thought that was a nice, theatrical choice. With my best growly voice and everything.”

“But why not rally them and lead them yourself?” Tezcatlipoca asked. “And given what your normal voice is like, I'm not sure I want to hear your ‘growly' one.”

“Hey, man. That stings. Anyway, you're a Mexican deity, right? You know how things work around here. If I tried to gather me up an army and bring them back, we'd be setting out about noon Tuesday.”

He shrugged. “Guess that's better than it would've been back North in the old days. Anglos'd take twice that long, just to set up a committee to study the issue.

“Anyway, nothing gets these folks riled up like a threat to their children. Or any other folks. And belief in Luzbel is mighty powerful in these parts, which up until a few days ago I would've said was rank superstition. So I figured I'd scare 'em and piss 'em off to the max.”

“But why not try the direct approach? You still might have been able to frighten and anger them sufficiently to act at once, persuasive chap that you are.”

“And from a standing start, the cultists would eat their lunch. Those Eagle Knight assholes are pretty heavy dudes, and between them and fanaticism, the locals would lose. Also I worried about the bulk of the cultists holding off the rescuers until a few of their buddies could complete the sacrifices. Or just kill the kids out of pure meanness. So I decided to give the anthill an almighty kick, then sneak back in and see what kind of diversion I could cause here.”

“You weren't expecting divine assistance, then?”

“Not from you.”

“Point taken. So it all went according to plan?”