“Nahuatl,” Necalli growled. Reston had reverted to English. “If you please.”
Mal shook her head in an exaggerated show of pity. “Maybe you aren’t mad, Reston. Maybe for the first time in a long while you’re lucid and the consequences of your actions are hitting home. The guilt’s catching up. In which case, now is the time to ask if you’ve given any thought to what’s going to become of your company now that its CEO has been unmasked as an anti-Imperial seditionary? Did you even think that far ahead? All those people on your payroll — however many hundreds it is — suddenly their jobs are up in the air, their livelihoods on the line, thanks to you and your psychopathic dog-and-pony show. Do you have any idea how far Reston Rhyolitic stock has fallen since word got out who the Conquistador really is?”
“I imagine the shares hit rock bottom but bounced back. Some other company has launched a takeover bid and now owns a controlling stake. Am I right?”
“Well, yes actually, but — ”
“Who is it? CCMM in Italy? One of the Indian consortiums?”
“I have no idea, and I care even less. I only know that someone has.”
“No surprise. Reston Rhyolitic’s too good and too successful that anyone would ever let it fall by the wayside. I made provision, you see. If something untoward were to happen to me — and being arrested and having to flee the country definitely qualifies as that — I arranged things so that the company would immediately be put out to tender, lock, stock and barrel. That way it wouldn’t be broken down and sold off piecemeal but kept as a whole entity, a going concern. My people’s jobs are safe. There may be some restructuring, a handful of compulsory redundancies perhaps, the odd boardroom resignation, but the vast majority of the workforce will still be clocking on as usual, for the same salaries and pensions as before. I’m not a complete idiot, inspector. I’d always assumed the Conquistador would get his comeuppance sooner or later. His lifespan was finite. It was a good run while it lasted. Only now…” His eyes took on that faraway, despairing look again. “Now I really don’t know that it matters. That anything matters.”
“What happened to you out there?” Mal waved to indicate the world beyond the cell’s humidity-blotched walls — the land, the rainforest.
“I’m touched by the concern,” Reston said, coming back to himself. “I didn’t think I mattered to you so much.”
“I’m curious, that’s all. Necalli here says there’s this phenomenon called bewilderness, a delirium people can lapse into in the forest, a kind of fugue state. Is that it? Is that why you’ve come over all weird and spacey?”
“No. I couldn’t really explain it if I wanted to.”
“Why not try?”
Reston deliberated. “I think,” he said eventually, “that the world is a lot stranger and more complex than any of us suspects. I think there are truths we’ve forgotten or been forbidden from remembering. I think you and I, inspector, locked in our own little struggle, our own little battle of wits and wills, just have no conception of the bigger picture around us. We’re fleas. No, ants. We’re ants. Tiny, insignificant, anonymous, scurrying about on our missions and errands, oblivious to the fact that there are giants among us. They can control us, stamp on us, manipulate us, squash us without even trying. We’re nothing to them except objects of curiosity and sometimes distant affection. Am I making any sense?”
“None whatsoever,” said Mal.
“But keep going with the deep philosophical stuff,” said Aaronson archly. “It’s really enlightening. I can feel my brain expanding. Wow.”
“I’m wasting my breath,” Reston said. “You can’t know unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. Seen them in action.”
“Them?” said Mal. “Who’s them? Your Xibalba chums?”
“Oh no, not them.” Reston looked pained. “No, they learned the same lesson I’ve learned but, sadly, the hard way.”
There was only one inference Mal could draw. “They’re dead?”
“All of them. Wiped out, like crumbs off a tablecloth. It’s not even like they had a chance. They might as well have not been there.”
Necalli leapt in. “You’re saying a whole band of separatists has been eliminated? Well, that’s marvellous. I need details. Is there some kind of proof? Where are the bodies?”
“No bodies.” Reston gave a hollow laugh. “Only dust. Proof? I suppose you could go looking for a dirty great hole that’s been blasted somewhere in the forest. I couldn’t begin to tell you where, but get an aircraft up there, go scouting around, you’re sure to find it.”
“And what was responsible for this ‘dirty great hole’?”
“A disc. Blown to smithereens. I watched it go up. I was there, right in the middle of it. Right in the middle of the explosion, and I just stood, wasn’t touched, safe as houses.”
“Yeah, right,” said Aaronson.
“Hmm,” said Necalli, thinking. “Now that might account for it.”
“For what?” said Mal.
“We got multiple reports yesterday — some sort of loud bang to the north of here, early in the morning. Like a single clap of thunder, only there were no storms in the region yesterday. People heard it in locations as much as fifty miles apart. We just assumed it was coincidence. Hunters in the forest, perhaps. A distant gunshot here, another one there, each fired at approximately the same time. Separate instances giving the false impression of being the same one. But if Reston’s telling the truth, it seems it could have been a single major event after all. A disc, you say? Whose disc?”
“Theirs,” said Reston. “Xibalba’s.”
“And why were they in possession of an aerodisc? What were they proposing to do with it?”
Before Reston could reply, there was a commotion in the corridor outside. Marching feet tramped briskly. Leather creaked and weaponry clattered. Then a brusque voice rang out.
“I’m looking for Stuart Reston. Which cell is he in?”
Next moment, a Serpent Warrior appeared in the doorway. He glanced in officiously. Two more Serpents came to a halt behind him.
“That him?” said the first, nodding at Reston. “Certainly looks like an Englishman to me.”
“Who are you?” Necalli challenged.
“Who does it fucking look like I am?” came the sharp retort. “I’m a Serpent Warrior, I’m personally answerable to the Great Speaker, and whoever you are and whatever post you hold in this pissant little police station of yours, I outrank you by at least one thousand. So shut up and answer my question.”
Mal could see Aaronson bracing himself to ask how someone was supposed to shut up and answer a question. A swift kick to the shin silenced him before he could speak. Now was not the moment for smart-arsery. There were few people who genuinely looked as if they shouldn’t be messed with, and this Serpent was one.
“I meant,” said Necalli, with tremendous self-restraint, “please identify yourself.” He added, “Sir,” almost having to cough the word out.
The Serpent Warrior entered the cell, ducking his snake-head helmet under the door lintel. “Not that I’m under any obligation to tell you, but my name is Colonel Tlanextic. The salient part of that sentence is ‘Colonel.’ As in, ‘Fuck you, I’m a fucking colonel.’”
He thrust his face close to Necalli’s, who, to his credit, didn’t bat an eyelid and didn’t back away.
“You need to justify why you’ve come barging in like this, Colonel Tlanextic,” Necalli said. “What are you after?”
“Again, it’s not your place to ask.”
“It is. This is my station and I’m the duty officer.”
“No,” said Tlanextic, “what you are is a nobody in a nowhere town who’s talking to someone to whom you’re about as important as a smear of dog shit on the sole of his boot. Your lips are moving, but all I can hear coming out is a sound like a fart, and not even a loud one, just one of those hissy, squeaky ones that you sneak out between your arse cheeks on the bus and the passenger sitting beside you doesn’t even notice because it’s one of those farts that doesn’t even have the decency to stink, it’s not a manly fart, it’s an effeminate fart, a five-year-old girl’s fart. I can stand here and you can tell me whatever the hell you like about yourself and I won’t pay a blind bit of attention because, have I mentioned this already? I. Am. A. Fucking. Serpent. Warrior. Colonel.”