Within a stone’s throw of the frontmost Xibalba line, she halted. Domed casings on her back opened and a pair of wings unfurled. They were black too, and they spread out on either side of her. Flexible planes expanded and rigidified, until the wings settled into a shape that was more than a little like the wings of a butterfly.
“Itzpapalotl,” Stuart said under his breath. The goddess also known as the Obsidian Butterfly.
One downthrust of those stiff black wings, and she was in the air. Another beat, and she was hurtling towards the guerrillas. She grabbed one of them, digging her talons into the man’s armpits, and veered perpendicular. The wings propelled both of them into the sky at such speed that within seconds they were almost lost from view, just a tiny dark speck amid the blue. The guerrilla’s desperate screams faded to almost nothing. Then they grew louder again as he came plummeting down, alone now. Itzpapalotl had dropped him as casually as she had plucked him up. His arms were whirling and flailing as if he hoped somehow to counteract gravity and fly himself. He hit the ground head first with a tremendous meaty thump, his body bursting like a sack of jelly. Blood showered around him in all directions, along with gobbets of organs, partially liquefied by the impact.
Out of the corner of his eye Stuart saw Chimalmat dart off, heading purposefully towards the aerodisc. Meanwhile Chel and his men scanned trees and sky, fingers on triggers, searching for the next source of assault.
In the event, it came from right in their midst. A knot of three guerrillas found their number unexpectedly reduced to two; one of them had had his neck brutally broken. By whom and how, was unclear. One moment the man was kneeling beside them, rifle stock pressed to shoulder. The next, the rifle was gone and his head was canted at such an angle that his ear was resting on his shoulder. His tongue stuck out from his mouth like a lump of gristly veal he was trying to get rid of.
Something shimmered. It was like a silhouette in heat haze, a glassy wavering outline of a man. Before their astonished eyes, it gained solidity and colour. There stood Xipe Totec in his “flayed” form, a grotesque living anatomy of muscle and bone.
His death’s head grin glinted whitely as Xipe Totec took hold of another of the three guerrillas and snapped his neck too. He twisted the Mayan’s head through almost one hundred and eighty degrees. Vertebrae popped with a sound like pebbles crunching underfoot.
The third guerrilla was briefly frozen with shock, but managed to recover his wits. He raised his rifle. Xipe Totec yanked the gun out his hands and tossed it aside. The man lunged for the only other weapon within reach, his blowpipe. He clenched a dart between his teeth and put the pipe to his lips. Xipe Totec leaned back, his exposed facial muscles contorting into what could only be a sneer. The guerrilla puffed out his cheeks and blew. At this range he could scarcely miss, but somehow Xipe Totec was able to duck aside so that the dart whisked past him.
A faction of a second later Xipe Totec was grasping the tip of the blowpipe and ramming it into the guerrilla’s mouth before the man could do anything to prevent him. He thrust the wooden tube so hard that the other end smashed out through the back of the Mayan’s skull, carrying bone shards and bits of brain with it.
The other guerrillas trained their weapons on Xipe Totec. Zotz had the lightning gun and took careful aim. Xipe Totec, however, faded from view as soon as he had dealt with the last of his trio of victims. There was that shimmering heat-haze effect again, and he was gone. A few bullets zinged in his direction, but there was nothing to see to hit. Invisible or absent, either way he had evaded retaliation.
Xibalba was getting picked apart bit by bit. Stuart was appalled by the methodicality of it, the relentlessness of it. He had known that something like this might happen, but foreseeing an event was very different from actually watching it unfold in front of you. There seemed to be nothing any of them could do, except wait for the next attack, the next cold-blooded, merciless infliction of death.
A guerrilla came tottering out of the forest. He had been one of Tohil’s companions on the pre-dawn sentry shift, and he was lucky not to get shot as he stumbled into view. His nerve-rattled fellow guerrillas mistook him for an enemy, and would have planted bullets in him if Chel hadn’t shouted at them to hold their fire. He sent two of them forward to help the man, who looked dull-eyed and bewildered, as though unsure of where he was and why he was there.
The two approached him with caution, softly calling his name. “Mulac. Mulac. This way. Quick. Get to cover, Mulac.”
Mulac seemed barely to hear a word. He came to a standstill, his mouth slack, his gaze unfocused. Then he began feeling his chest and abdomen with his hands. The touching turned to scratching, some terrible itch needing attention. He ripped open his shirt and started clawing at his bare skin with his nails.
“In me…” he murmured. “He put them… in me…”
“Who do you mean, Mulac?” asked one of his confederates.
“Put what in you?” asked the other.
“Eggs. Made me swallow. And now they’re growing. Too fast. Hundreds of them. They want out.”
All of a sudden Mulac shuddered. A moan escaped his lips, rising in pitch and intensity as convulsions ran through his body. He was tearing at himself now, desperately trying to get at something under his skin. Stuart could see movement where his fingers were, small lumps pulsing and wriggling, dozens of them, like sentient cysts. The other two guerrillas exchanged looks of alarm. They didn’t know whether to go to Mulac’s aid or back away and leave him to whatever fate he was about to suffer.
A scarlet dot appeared at the centre of one of the lumps, just above Mulac’s right nipple. There was a splitting sound like a blister bursting, and from the Mayan a sharp gasp that was almost a sigh of relief, as if the worst was over.
The worst was not over. Far from it.
The scarlet dot grew. A droplet of blood trickled down from it. Something was pushing its way out from Mulac’s pectoral muscle.
No, not pushing.
Gnawing.
A tiny black and yellow head forced itself through a gap it had created in Mulac’s skin. It chewed rapidly round in a circle, widening the hole. All over Mulac other similar apertures opened up and more tiny heads poked out. He looked down and watched as countless little creatures birthed themselves bloodily from his body. His expression was that of someone who had passed beyond pain and reason. His face showed nothing but a kind of sickly wonderment, a look that said, This is me. I’m doing this. This vileness is coming out of me.
The creatures were hornets, and the first thing they did after vacating their host was wipe his blood off their wings with their rear legs and take to the air. They hovered around Mulac in a darkening cloud, their communal buzz mounting in volume as more and yet more of them broke free from him. Mulac sank to his knees, his body a glistening moonscape of deep raw gouges.
Some of the hornets had burrowed upward rather than outward, through Mulac’s throat. They flew out of his mouth in ones and twos as nonchalantly as commuters filing out of a subway tunnel. Others exited the other end and crawled out from his trouser cuffs.
At some point during the whole terrible ordeal, while he was slumped in a kneeling position, Mulac died. It wasn’t easy to pinpoint the exact moment, as his body continued to twitch and spasm. The activity of the hornets still within him gave him a semblance of life long after his heart gave out.
Above Mulac’s drooping head, the hornets gathered into a swarm, forming a single rough sphere that started to split into two smaller spheres.
Loud as he could, Stuart yelled at the two guerrillas near Mulac, telling them to move, run, now. Chel added his voice to Stuart’s. He had no way of knowing that the hornets were under the control of Azcatl, but he’d seen the ants in the forest, as they all had. All he knew was that the swarms spelled obvious danger and his two men were closer to them than they ought to be.