Another tremor rocked the gods’ lair. It felt less potent than previous ones, but Stuart assumed that that was because they were deeper underground.
“Hurry,” said Itzpapalotl. It was the first word Stuart had heard her utter, and he wasn’t sure if the remark was directed at him and Mal or not.
The two humans helped each other into the customised Serpent suits, fast as they could manage. When only the helmets remained to be put on, Mal said, “Here we go. Can’t say I’m not dreading this.”
“You’d be crazy if you weren’t.”
“So much at stake.”
“We’ll just do what we can, leave the heavy lifting to the big boys like Huitzilopochtli.”
“Stuart…”
He shook his head. “Last night was last night. I get that.”
“No, what it is, is, I don’t understand how I can have spent so many weeks wanting to see your heart cooking on a brazier, and now, suddenly, all that’s gone. Now I’m actually worried about you.”
“Maybe Ometeotl was right. We’re meant to be together but until now the circumstances were against us. I mean radically against us.”
“It’s almost like some kind of joke, isn’t it? Like the world was doing its very hardest to keep us apart.”
“If ‘apart’ is another way of saying ‘at each other’s throats,’ then yes, I’d agree.”
“If I don’t make it through this…” Mal began.
“In that case,” Stuart said, securing his helmet on, “it’s unlikely either of us will make it. The point is moot.”
Mal had her helmet on too, so they were now talking via the strange intimacy of the comms link. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”
“I do,” Stuart replied. “And I will. But afterwards, all right?”
Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli were leaving.
“Right now,” he went on, “we’ve business to attend to. The world’s not just going to save itself, you know. It’s time for the new, improved Conquistador to go out there and shine. Oh, and his sidekick Jaguar Girl too.”
“Call me your sidekick again, and I’ll kick you in the side,” Mal growled. “Fucker.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Fucker, fucker, fucker.”
“Eloquent as always. Let’s go.”
Taking flight, they followed in the wake of Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli, up through the centre of the ziggurat to the hatch. When they emerged onto the surface, it was like entering some fiery, howling maelstrom. There were Serpent Warriors everywhere, swooping, swarming, shooting. The rainforest around the hatch was ablaze. Flames crackled. Smoke churned. The air was thick with falling ash and embers. L-gun fire streaked between the burning tree trunks, and now and then huge, not-so-far-off explosions erupted, seeming to shake whole acres of landscape.
Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli wasted no time in engaging the enemy. Within seconds, Serpents were being blasted out of the air or sliced to ribbons.
It took Stuart and Mal slightly longer to gather their wits. A pair of Serpents came zooming at them on an attack run. Stuart targeted one, Mal the other. Plasma bolts zigzagged from their forearms and struck the Serpents with staggering force. One hurtled backwards into a cedar, crashing against the trunk and flopping down to its base, broken inside his armour. The other was sent sailing sideways and collided with a third airborne Serpent. They fell together in a tangle, and Mal was on them before they could extricate themselves from each other. She flicked her arm as Toci had instructed and the blade in her gauntlet snicked out to its full extension. One of the Serpents raised his l-gun and Mal slashed at it unthinkingly, slicing the barrel in two. The Serpent was almost as startled as she was, and his eyes widened further as she plunged the blade through his breastplate, deep into him.
The other Serpent made a bid to retrieve his own l-gun, which had been knocked from his grasp and landed a few yards away. He scrambled desperately on all fours, but was beaten to it by Stuart, who flew over him and alighted in his path, sword out. The next instant, a Serpent Warrior helmet went bouncing across the forest floor, with a Serpent Warrior’s severed head inside.
Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli had disappeared somewhere into the smoke haze, but more gods were emerging from below. Tzitzimitl and Azcatl took up positions on either side of the hatch, each accompanied by a retinue of monsters. Tzitzimitl had her leaping, yowling pack of Tzitzimime, while Azcatl was haloed by a dense, buzzing cloud of insects the likes of which neither Stuart nor Mal had ever seen. They were large, the size of a clenched fist, and appeared to be a hybrid of wasp, scorpion and stag beetle, with a stinger-tipped tail at the back, pincer-like horns at the front, and a yellow-striped abdomen.
Joining Tzitzimitl and Azcatl was a third god: the disfigured, hunchbacked entity whom Stuart remembered from his first ever visit to the refectory down below. Nanhuatzin, the Deformed One, limped up out from the hatch and stood, swaying somewhat. His arthritically clawed hands were outstretched, and a look of grim delight was discernible on his twisted face.
“Go!” Azcatl ordered Stuart and Mal. “Get out there. The main battle is that way” — he waved in a westward direction — “and that is where you can be the most help, if you can be any help at all.”
“We can defend this spot,” Tzitzimitl added. “No one will get past us.”
“Are you sure?” Stuart said.
The crone’s eyes flashed. “Watch.”
A squadron of Serpents came gliding in through the pall of smoke. Tzitzimitl, with a loud whistle, despatched her Tzitzimime at them. The dark demon dogs sprang up and brought down one of the Serpents in midair. They dragged him to the ground and set about him in a snarling, slavering pack, going for the joints, the vulnerable chinks between sections of his armour. His screams, relayed by the comms, were shrill in Stuart’s and Mal’s ears. As the Tzitzimime tore him apart and ate him alive, he was begging for his mother to save him.
Meanwhile Azcatl unleashed his scorpion-wasp monstrosities, which whizzed towards the Serpents like rocks from a catapult. They butted through faceplates and set about stinging straight away, clinging on with their pincer horns while their sinuous tails jabbed and jabbed repeatedly into cheek and nose and eyeball. The venom worked almost instantaneously; their Serpent victims went rigid with paralysis and became floating corpses, hovering stiff and lifeless in the air, supported only by their suits.
As for Nanahuatzin, he waited until one of the Serpents strayed close to the hatch, and then he simply reached out and brushed the man with his fingertips. Something glistened briefly between him and the Serpent. Something was transferred. The Serpent turned and trained his l-gun on Nanahuatzin, but all at once his limbs went weak and wouldn’t function properly. Over the comms link Stuart heard him say something about being unable to breathe. The man dropped the weapon and fumbled to get his helmet off. His face had gone a vivid, liverish puce. Sores were breaking out all over his skin, all manner of blisters, buboes and pustules. The whites of his eyes went scarlet. He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out, only a vomitous gush of blood. He fell, wracked with agony, as what seemed to be every communicable disease that had ever existed infested his body, proliferating at an obscene rate. By the time he stopped writhing and lay still, fluids were seeping out through all the seals in his armour and his face was so distended by swellings and lesions that it no longer resembled anything human.
“Fair enough,” Stuart said to the three gods. “Mal? This way.”
They flew through the burning forest. They drew their heading by the rising number of Serpent corpses that littered the ground, a trail of the dead left by the other gods. The comms chatter they were picking up over their helmet radios grew as they approached. It wasn’t long before they arrived at the epicentre of the battle.