This, it seemed, was who he was meant to be: a man facing insuperable odds, beset by enemies, with nothing to fall back on but his wits and skills. He was a born desperado, a natural underdog. The Stuart Reston he had been for most of his life — rich kid, socialite, plutocrat, top of the heap — was a guise he’d worn so long that he’d ceased to realise it wasn’t really him. Only after he’d lost everything was he able to break free from the shell he’d built around himself and become something truer to himself.
It helped, too, that the indomitable Malinalli Vaughn was running with him now. It made a very pleasant change from having her running after him.
They crossed concourses and traversed raised walkways. Stuart kept the trend of their progress as southward as he could, but it wasn’t easy. Tenochtitlan was a maze. There hadn’t been any overarching design behind its layout. The ziggurats and towers had simply accumulated over time, one rising up in the space beside another until the entire island was covered. The train network made sense of the muddle and was obviously the most practical and straightforward way of getting around, but the monorail was no longer safe for him and Vaughn to use. On foot, sticking close to walls, skulking, steering clear of passersby, they could maintain a lower profile and, hopefully, evade detection.
He explained his choice of tactic to Vaughn.
“If you say so,” was her reply. “You’ve done more fleeing from the authorities than I have.”
“Yes, and I’m alive to tell the tale. So I must know a thing or two about it.”
“That or you’ve been phenomenally lucky.”
“Comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it? Who cares how I get there, as long as the end-result’s in my favour?”
“I liked you more when you weren’t so smug,” Vaughn said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“No, you’re right. I’ve never liked you.”
They came to a blind alley, and Stuart proposed a pause to rest and take stock. Vaughn, short of breath, agreed it was a good idea.
In the alley, they hunkered downwind from a set of bins. Tenochtitlan, for all its majesty, had its grubby areas, as any city did. You couldn’t have thousands of humans crammed together in a confined space, with their effluent and their detritus, and expect absolute cleanliness everywhere. Waste water trickled down the alley’s central gutter. A rat poked its head out from a downpipe, didn’t like the look of the two humans, and withdrew. The contents of the bins, as garbage was wont to in this climate, reeked.
“Aaronson,” murmured Vaughn. She was staring broodingly at her palms, which were badly grazed from when she’d leapt clear of the train. “That poor bastard. Why? It’s not fair. He didn’t have to die.”
“The Great Speaker thought he did. And Tlanextic.”
“But Aaronson never did anything wrong. He was a cheeky sod, and sometimes his tongue was a bit too sharp for his own good, but…” Her eyes were red-rimmed. “Those fuckers. Those pieces of dogshit.”
“These are the people you’ve been working for all this time, Vaughn.”
“Don’t you start.”
“I’m just saying, you shouldn’t be surprised how the powers-that-be have turned on you. They can do that. It doesn’t bother them. We’re all of us expendable, as far as they’re concerned.”
“I’m not in the mood for a lecture. Stop it or I’ll use this fucking sword on you.”
“Okay.” Stuart relented. Right now Vaughn was his only ally, and it wouldn’t do him any good to make her more upset than she already was.
A few moments later she said, “Were those really…?”
“The Four? Not so long ago I’d have said no, don’t be so daft. Now? I’m pretty sure they are. I don’t see what else they can be.”
“Fuck. And the Speaker is Tezcatlipoca. I never saw that coming. If there’d been a choice of which of the gods, out of all of them, had to be left in sole charge of earth, he’s the one I’d least want it to be. Even Xipe Totec would have been preferable. Even Mictlantecuhtli.”
“Mictlantecuhtli? I wouldn’t go that far. Xipe Totec, although he’s not a pretty sight when his skin’s transparent, you still sort of know where you are with. Mictlantecuhtli, on the other hand…” He mimed a shudder.
“How come you met them?” Vaughn asked. “Why did they reveal themselves to you, of all people?”
“Believe me, it wasn’t my doing. I’d give anything not to have been the one. They may be gods, but they’re far from benevolent. Even Quetzalcoatl’s got a mean streak. Azcatl’s pretty hardcore, too. You should see him in action.”
“Azcatl? The Red Ant?” Vaughn almost laughed.
“I know. The myths don’t make much of him. All I know is the one about Quetzalcoatl bullying him to reveal where his grain store is. In real life, though, Azcatl’s not someone you want to mess with. All of them are like that. You just feel so inferior when they’re around. Particularly when it’s someone like Tzitzimitl, who couldn’t disguise her scorn for me.”
“You don’t think that’s just you? Your sparkling personality?”
“Could be,” said Stuart. “And in answer to your earlier question, they revealed themselves to me because I happened to be there and it was convenient. No other reason. I wasn’t specially selected or anything like that. Quetzalcoatl injured me and had a fit of guilt about that, and then saw a way I could be useful to him. I’m not useful to him any more, apparently, judging by the way he almost completely blanked me when we were up on the Great Speaker’s palace.”
“He had other things on his mind.”
“Maybe. I think…” Stuart hesitated. “I think, to them, humans are playthings, not much more. ‘As flies to wanton boys,’ et cetera.”
“Don’t recognise the quotation, but then I didn’t have a posh education like you.”
“Shakespeare. And we didn’t study him at ‘posh’ school, either. Too Christian. I sought out his work for myself when I was older. Complete, unexpurgated editions of the plays are hard to track down. I found one of the last ever Victorian ones, got it from a black-market dealer in Hull. Set me back a pretty penny, I can tell you.”
“We’re the gods’ pets, then, is that what you’re saying?”
“At best. We intrigue them, the way a strange species of animal — I don’t know, the duck-billed platypus for instance — intrigues zoologists. All said and done, it turns out we’re nothing more than a worthy project to them, a charity case. That’s how this whole Empire nonsense got started. The gods saw us, thought we were cute, adopted us and tried to make us better, more like them. And then it all went belly up, and this is the mess we’re left with, the aftermath of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca’s big spat.”
“I don’t understand. So are the myths true or aren’t they?”
“I think they are, sort of, and also not. I think they’re versions of the truth which explain the gods’ behaviour, and the Great Speaker — Tezcatlipoca — has allowed them to become religious currency because it suits his ends. The creation story, for instance. It’s a way of telling us, reinforcing to us, that the gods made everything. They’re the ones responsible for the world and we owe them an unrepayable debt of gratitude for that. Of course, what they actually did was take a race at a pre-existing level of civilisation and develop it, mould it in their own image. They didn’t make the world, they remade it. And us with it.”
“It’s…” Vaughn moved her hands as though she were literally groping for words. “It’s hard to take in.”
“Tell me about it. Why do you think I was so spaced out when you first saw me in that cell? And I wasn’t even a believer in the first place, so I can’t begin to imagine the sort of effect this must be having on one of the faithful.”
“I’ve never completely been one of the faithful,” Vaughn protested. “I’ve had my doubts, now and then. The Empire just seemed… logical, and belief in the gods was an integral part of it. But now that I know what the gods are actually like, I’m not so sure about them.”
“Proof of faith has destroyed your faith.”