“Plans? What plans?”
“I–I don’t know. They didn’t say.”
Chel gave a scoffing laugh.
“But you’d be wise to do as they ask,” Stuart went on. “They have weaponry, skills… abilities. They outclass you in every department. Auilix’s ‘big black insect,’ that was one of them. And those mystery figures stalking us through the trees the other morning — them again. And the ants. Remember the ants?”
“Ants!” Chel boomed. “I’m supposed to be intimidated by a bunch of ants?”
“Someone controlled them, made them act as they did. You can deny it, but we all saw it, how they built a human figure. I’m not saying it’s ants themselves you should worry about. But someone who has the technological knowhow to get insects to obey commands — you’ve got to at least wonder what else they might be capable of.”
The dart hovered at Stuart’s cheek, a hairsbreadth from his skin. The point loomed as large as a javelin in his vision, the curare a thick dark smear. He felt a bead of sweat roll from his hairline, down his forehead, out along his eyebrow.
“Who are they, then, this unseen enemy of ours?” Chel wanted to know. “And why should what they want take precedence over what we want?”
“They’re your enemy only if you make them your enemy by not conceding to them. This isn’t about who’s got first dibs or who has more of a claim on the Great Speaker or any of that. It’s about who’s carrying the bigger stick, simple as that, and from what I’ve seen, the answer isn’t Xibalba. You’re up against a superior force, Chel, a bunch of very determined and well-equipped people. A couple of them could even be genuine psychopaths.”
“And our own fighting prowess can’t compare?” Chel sounded offended. “Now you’re belittling us?”
“I’m being as honest as anyone would be with a poison-tipped dart being waved at them.”
“Fear of death will make a man say anything to save his skin.”
“So what’s the point in threatening to kill me? Eh? If you’re not even going to believe what I tell you. Look at it this way. Would I have come up with a story as preposterous as this if it wasn’t true? I could just have given you some bollocks about wandering off and getting lost for a day. I didn’t. Fact is, I’m trying to help you. I’m delivering an ultimatum from some very serious people, and I urge you — beg you — to listen up and act accordingly. You may not survive if you don’t.”
Chel gave this some thought. Behind those warm eyes and that chubby, easygoing face lurked an iron resolve, a will that was like a torrential river, carving its own channel, meeting resistance with force.
The dart dipped away from Stuart’s cheek, just fractionally.
“You need to choose, my friend,” Chel said softly, grimly. “You need to commit yourself one way or the other. You did that as the Conquistador, but it seems you’ve lost your bearings since you last put on your armour. You’ve weakened. And I can’t have weakness on my team. It’s a liability. So decide, once and for all. Are you with us or against us? Look inside your heart and make that call. It doesn’t have to be right now, but it must be soon, because time is marching on, the b’ak’tun is drawing to an end, the hieratic synod is imminent, and our hour of reckoning is approaching. Are you going to carry through your mission as the Conquistador to its logical conclusion? Or are you going to be a coward?”
Well, when you put it like that, it’s no choice at all. “If you’re trying to win me over, Chel, you’ve got a damn funny way of going about it. But I will tell you that, threats notwithstanding, basically I’m still onside. In spite of everything” — Stuart lowered his eyes to the deadly dart — “you can count on me.”
“Can I?”
“Yes. Now, please put that bloody thing away and tell your men to let me go.”
Chel pondered, then with some finality jerked the dart back and passed it, flighted end first, to the man who had fetched it for him. A flick of Chel’s fingers, and Stuart was released.
“Be careful,” the Xibalba leader said to him. “Watch your step. Every move you make from now on is going to be scrutinised. More than ever you will have to prove you are worth the huge trouble we went to, the lives it cost us, to find you and bring you here. Don’t give us the slightest excuse to doubt you again. You will not live to regret it.”
“And about what I’ve been saying?” Stuart said. “These people I’ve told you about?”
Chel was striding away. He didn’t look back, just flapped a hand dismissively in the air. “If they’re coming, let them come. They won’t find us easy prey. Xibalba knows how to fight. We don’t give up on our goals, no matter what the obstacles. We’re dead already, remember? So we fear nothing.”
The guerrillas around Stuart echoed the sentiment with a low cheer.
“Well, I gave it my best shot,” Stuart said, mostly to himself, but also for the benefit of anybody who might be observing, eavesdropping by means of some sensitive listening device. “I really did.”
TWENTY-ONE
10 Reed — 12 Eagle 1 Lizard 1 House
(Thursday 14th — Saturday 16th December 2012)
Two days passed, and no move from Quetzalcoatl and his cohorts, no sign of an attack.
Preparations in the camp stepped up several notches. Chel began drilling the guerrillas, demonstrating what they would do in the moments immediately after the aerodisc touched down at Tenochtitlan. He ran through several possible permutations of the event: what if the Serpent Warriors insisted on coming aboard to perform a security check, what if one of them smelled a rat and they stormed the disc, what if the Great Speaker wouldn’t come quietly and had to be coerced…
According to Chel’s informant in China, the Speaker was due to arrive in Beijing at seven o’clock the evening before the conference. Extrapolating backwards from that, and allowing for changes of time zone, the aerodisc which would be transporting the Great Speaker across the Pacific would be departing at twelve noon on that same day, 1 Movement 1 Movement. The Xibalba disc should therefore turn up a few minutes in advance of that other disc.
The landing point for private flights in and out of Tenochtitlan was always the roof of the city’s main building, the Speaker’s palatial private residence. On the way in, the Xibalba disc would almost certainly receive a radio challenge asking its pilots for identification and clearance codes. Chel’s intention was to prevaricate and bluster until they were so close to the residence that it didn’t matter. If his assumptions were correct, and if providence was on their side, the Speaker would be waiting at the apex of the building, accompanied by a travelling retinue of personal servants and a bodyguard of no more than four Serpent Warriors.
It was the boldness of his scheme that was its strongest suit, he maintained. Nobody — nobody in the world — would expect enemies of the Empire to have the effrontery to swoop in on the capital itself and snatch the Speaker away in broad daylight, from under the very noses of his elite bodyguard. Xibalba would succeed through sheer balls alone.
Several times they rehearsed the kidnap, with Stuart dragooned into the role of stand-in Great Speaker. The guerrillas raced down the gangplank, dispatched imaginary Serpent Warriors, grabbed Stuart and hustled him aboard. They were as gentle with him as they would doubtless be with the Speaker himself, which is to say, not at all. They yanked him along like some recalcitrant donkey, oblivious if he tripped and fell, or barked a shin, or was accidentally winded by a flailing elbow.
Stuart endured the mistreatment with great forbearance. Partly he wanted to show willing — I can be a team player, see? — but also he was convinced Xibalba’s days were numbered, meaning nothing they did to him mattered. The longer the “gods” held off from attacking, the more certain he became that an attack was inevitable.
He could imagine Quetzalcoatl and friends debating the issue hotly amongst themselves in their underground lair. Xipe Totec and Mictantecuhtli would be the ones urging a pre-emptive strike the most vociferously. Quetzalcoatl himself would counsel caution, saying that Chel should be given every last chance to reconsider and withdraw. Coatlicue, for all her airs and graces, was a belligerent old witch and would be in favour of hostilities. Quetzalcoatl’s sister Quetzalpetlatl would side with her brother, thanks to their more-than-merely-sibling bond. Ometeotl, parent of all, would typically be unable to make up his/her mind either way.