Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  I stepped out of my building with all my senses on full alert. The way was thronged. There were overdressed merchants with retinues like nobles, too-well-dressed individuals whose professions weren’t immediately apparent but obviously unsavoury. There were slaves staggering under burdens, house servants whose tunics clashed with each other and the brightly tiled walls of the houses. On the corner a vendor was hawking fruit juices from a cart. All perfectly normal and all guaranteed to put my nerves on edge this day.

  I moved along at a leisurely amble with my stomach going tight every time someone moved past me or I passed the mouth of an alley. I had gone two blocks like this when someone called my name.

  “Hsst. Sir Lucky.” Beside me was a boy perhaps ten years old wearing a dirty yellow tunic that marked him as someone’s not-too-important house servant.

  “I know someone who’s got something for you,” he hissed without moving his lips. His eyes were darting around and his head swivelled from side to side as if looking for eavesdroppers. Obviously he was enjoying this.

  I wasn’t, so I gave him my best supercilious stare. “Who might that be?”

  “Oh, a beautiful lady who misses your company.” The line was the standard panderer’s come-on but he flashed a sign with the hand hidden between our bodies. The sign of the jaguar.

  “Not in the market,” I said gruffly. “Go away.” I raised my hand as if to strike him and he grinned and vanished into crowd. I resumed my leisurely pace and at the next corner I turned right and headed for the market.

  The gates were closed by the time I got there, but Mother Jaguar wasn’t hard to find. There is a dive called the Vulture’s Rest on the street of third-rate wine shops and fourth-rate brothels that runs along the market wall near where Mother Jaguar has her divining business. As usual, Mother was in a tiny nook in the back, well hidden from the doorway and doubtless close to one of her many bolt holes.

  “I found something that might interest you,” she said without looking as I slid in across from her.

  “Any words of the wise woman are as spring rain on my ears.” She cackled and pressed her hand into mine beneath the table. I felt her make the sign for gold.

  Without comment I withdrew my hand, and slid out my other hand bearing three gold pieces beneath the table.

  Mother’s head sank upon her withered breasts and she seemed to drop into sleep, or a trance. I waited as she rocked back and forth and her breathing steadied.

  “One of those has been found,” she mumbled in her reedy trance voice.

  My lips barely moved. “Ransomed?”

  “Dead, quite dead,” she keened softly. “In the street of warehouses behind the English Docks. A man of most excellent family, of the Watermonster Clan, and most excellent prospects.”

  Meaning he was well-born, but otherwise unremarkable, and had reached at least middle age without accomplishing anything of note.

  “How was he found?” I asked thinking of the huetlacoatl.

  “By the smell,” Mother Jaguar intoned. “The smell of those who die slowly. His belly had been slit, and days ago.”

  “Sacrificed?”

  “Who knows? Who knows?” Mother Jaguar wailed softly. Then she dropped her voice even lower. “Others came and took him even before the Death Master arrived. Shadows fell and the poor man vanished forever.”

  “Forever,” she repeated even more faintly and pitched forward onto the table, seemingly unconscious.

  “Thank you for your wisdom, Mother,” I said loudly enough to be overheard. And, rising from the table, I placed three more gold coins upon it.

  I was even more nervous when I left the Vulture’s Rest than I had been when I went in. I didn’t have to ask who the shadows were, or who had taken the body, or why the Emperor’s Shadow was interested in the death of a very minor noble. The slit belly implied he had been sacrificed.

  I thought briefly of Lady Threeflower and what had likely become of her friend. Then I thought in more detail about the effect this was likely to have on my career and longevity. Being interested in anything that involved the Emperor’s Shadow was not a positive career move, to say nothing of its possible effect on your lifespan. I suspected the only reason Mother Jaguar had the courage to tell me about it was that the story was all over English Town. I just hoped my interest in the matter wasn’t.

  I considered my options and the more I thought about them, the more convinced I became that this was a time to spend a quiet evening at home. That wouldn’t help me if the Emperor’s Shadow came after me, but it was the last place my other enemies would expect to find me at this time of night. Besides, if I decided a sudden retirement to the country was in my best interest, I’d need items that were at home, such as gold and a certain casket that sat near my bed.

  Lady Threeflower was waiting for me in my chambers. She kept her mantle over her face but I knew her by her carriage.

  “Is there news of Fourflower?” she asked without preamble.

  “None, my lady.”

  “I had heard—” She stopped and gathered herself, “I had heard that someone was found today. Someone who had been taken.”

  “It was not her, Lady. It was a man.” I debated telling her how he had been found — or what the implications were for Fourflower.

  She sighed deeply, as if a weight had been lifted from her. “There is one other matter,” she said. “My lord husband found out about my visit to you. He is extremely angry, and he may seek vengeance on you.”

  So that was it! “He already has, lady.” My smile was one part irony and one part relief.

  She cocked an eyebrow. “I take it he was not successful?”

  “Let’s say he caused me a certain amount of uncertainty, cost me the price of a new cloak, and probably the out-of-pocket cost of a couple of back-alley thugs, but overall it was little enough.”

  “Nevertheless, I shall repay you,” she said, reaching beneath her mantle.

  There was something in the way she moved that made me reach out and jerk the mantle from her face. One eye was purple black and nearly swollen shut. There were livid spots on her neck where someone’s fingers had dug into her pale flesh.

  “I think,” I said slowly, “I would rather be recompensed of your lord husband.”

  Her chin came up and her dark eyes flashed. “You would see me shamed, then. Does it please you? Does it excite you?” With a jerk she loosened the pin at her shoulder and her mantle and dress cascaded to the floor. “Here. Would you like to see all of what my lord husband did to me?”

  I averted my eyes but I still had a glimpse of matronly hips and full breasts, the brown nipples crisscrossed with lash marks. There were other lash marks on her flat stomach and down the sides of her thighs. “I’m sorry.”

  “What is between a man and wife is no business of anyone else, especially not a clanless brigand,” she said, stooping to gather her garments. There was a rustle as she replaced them. “You have served me and I have paid you. Now it is at an end between us.”

  Even if I had my full clan rank Threeflower would have been too proud to accept help.

  Besides, I recognized bitterly, she was right. She knew the risk she ran in coming to me in the first place and so did I. She had been caught and paid the price. It was not my affair.

  The tequila pot was empty, so I slept badly that night.

  “Ah, Lucky my boy,” Uncle Tlaloc rumbled when I showed up at the Hummingbird’s Palace the next afternoon. “We have a request for the pleasure of your company.” My stomach clinched at the words.

  “A high-born lady, I hope.” At least he hadn’t used the nephew routine, so how bad could it be?

  Uncle sighed gustily. “Nothing so romantic, I am afraid. This is from a priest—of sorts.” He caught my look. “Oh, not one of your relatives, I can assure you,” he said, holding up a flipperlike hand. “At least not one close enough to claim the relationship, but with the way you nobles intermarry, who can say?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at
my mentor and employer.

  “I do not know why,” Uncle said. “He simply asked, very politely, to see you.” Then he reached out and took a sip from his skull mug. “Life is so charmingly full of surprises, is it not?”

  Personally my life had been way too full of surprises recently, and none of them pleasant. But I smiled and took my leave as if Uncle had done me the greatest of favours. The first rule in this game is never let them see you sweat. The second rule is never let them see you bleed.

  The Cloud Villas were on the other side of the city, so I took a water taxi for the first part of the trip, and then a cable car up into the hills. Once, a long time ago, the area had been a suburb, a pleasant retreat beyond the city walls for nobles seeking refuge from the heat and insects of summer. Then, as the Empire tightened its grip and clan warfare was sublimated into other channels, the wealthy and noble began to live here year around. Now those seeking a summer refuge used the distant mountains, only a few hours away by steam train. Proximity to the Great Plaza and the invention of air-conditioning had drawn the nobles back to their compounds and the wealthy had found it more convenient to live closer to their businesses. So the neighbourhood had filled up with smaller houses and less important residents and the big houses had been divided into apartments or put to other uses.

  The temple had started life as a nobleman’s mansion, or more likely two or three adjacent mansions. It had been knitted together with a glazed brick exterior, brilliant blood red around the bottom and sunburst yellow on top. There was an elaborate frieze about two-thirds of the way up the side and the wall was subtly shaded to represent a stepped pyramid rather than a flat surface. A set of four broad stone steps led up to the recessed space in front of the door, flanked by two life-size carvings. The two muscular servants in feathered cloaks who stood by the oversized carved doors bore no weapons, but they were guards nonetheless.

  The place looked like a child’s picture of a temple. Awesome and splendid, but overdone. I’d seen worse, such as the Whore’s Temple to Tlazolteotl, down in English Town, but this place spoke of dark old gods put to bright new uses in a way I found unsettling.

  A temple virgin guided me from the door, down a maze of halls and up a flight of inside stairs to a rooftop pavilion where my host awaited.

  Toltectecuhtli was large, paunchy, middle-aged and as much of a mixture as the temple he presided over. His head was flattened, Frog-fashion, until he looked like a painting on a Frog temple wall rather than a human being. His lip and ears had been pierced for the heavy jade spools the Frogs favoured, but the holes were empty. He wore a green-feathered short cloak that covered his shoulders and came within a finger’s breadth of being blasphemy against the priests of Quetzalcoatl. His tunic was snowy white set off with gold bangles and a stomacher of lizard skin, and a beaten gold pectoral depicting Lord Quetzalcoatl hung from his neck. His eyes were permanently crossed but that didn’t add to his beauty. The whole effect combined the barbaric, foreign and modern in a way that was not in the least laughable. He sat rigid as a statue on a carved stool, staring out over he rooftops at the city and the bay beyond.

  Wordlessly he gestured me to a seat on the step below him, and wordlessly I took it. He kept his gaze on the horizon as I kept mine on him. Although he never turned his face towards me I got the feeling he was sizing me up just as carefully as I was sizing up him.

  “Tworabbit,” he said at last, in a voice as distant as his gaze. The name startled me. It was my natal name and should have been my everyday name, save that it was notoriously unlucky.

  “I am called Lucky,” I said quietly.

  He turned and suddenly focused hard and sharp as a hunting hawk on me. That unblinking crossed stare gave me the feeling he could see all the way inside me to the black nodules of my inmost soul. A nice trick, that stare.

  “Do not discard what you are,” he said sharply. “For it is what you are in the beginning that determines what you will become in the end.”

  “If the fates allow.”

  “Ah yes, fate.” He was silent for an instant. “You represent a noble branch of a fine clan,” he continued. “Brought low by unfortunate circumstances.”

  I said nothing. If this one was trying to unsettle me… well, I had been played upon by masters.

  “I owe you thanks,” he said at last. “You helped someone two days ago.”

  I shrugged. “The attendant was clumsy. He tripped over his own feet.”

  “Still, thanks are in order. And a seeker of wisdom you have become.”

  I shrugged. “Anything that turns a profit.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” he snapped. “Profit is not what drives you.”

  “Not entirely,” I said as I thought of the small casket beside my bed.

  He smiled in a particularly unsettling manner. “Nor revenge either, much as you would like that believed. No, you seek wisdom, albeit you do not do so wisely.”

  I licked my lips and wondered where this one got his information. “What would be the wise way to seek wisdom?”

  “There is no wise way,” he said. “Wise ways are for cowards, fools and those who do not seek to know. Wisdom is found by treading unwise paths.”

  I wondered if the extreme skull binding had affected his brain somehow. This “priest” appeared more than half mad, but if it was madness it was combined with an unusual force of character.

  “The cycle closes, Tworabbit,” he said. “Venus will not cross the sun thrice before the Monkey Baktun draws to a close.”

  “The cycle dies as all things must.” It was the first thing that came into my mind.

  He made a dismissive gesture. “That it dies is unimportant. How it is reborn is all that matters. For that is in our hands. Each time the cycle turns we have it in our power to recreate the world entire. To bring together the elements that are tearing our world apart and to form them together as a potter forms clay. To temper them in the fires of the end times until the new world emerges whole and unbroken.”

  “I had thought that was in the hands of the Gods,” I said carefully.

  “The Gods do not play dice with the world,” the priest said sharply. “They show man the path and each cycle they offer him the chance anew to take it. That we do not is our own doing.”

  This conversation had started off peculiar and it had got weirder and weirder. “You wished to see me,” I said, hoping to force the talk back to a path that made sense.

  Again that stare like a cross-eyed hawk. “And I have seen you. The cycle turns, Tworabbit, and neither you nor I can escape our place upon the calendar stone of fate. Now is the time to weld together all the elements so they may be mixed as potter’s clay.”

  This part vaguely reminded me of some of the street-corner priests of the English Quarter. “You mean nobles and commoners?”

  “Oh, more than that, Tworabbit. Far more than that. Nobles, commoners, Reeds and Frogs, Englishmen and others, yes, even the huetlacoatl. To create a thing transcending anything the world has ever seen. A new being for a new cycle.”

  “That would be a thing to be seen,” I said as neutrally as I could.

  “And it will be seen, Tworabbit, if we all play the parts we are destined to play.”

  This wasn’t just weird any more. It had started to remind me of those conversations one had with one’s age mates at noble parties. Conversations where nothing was stated, no matter how bright the surface, and much was implied: threats, offers, information swapping, all wrapped up in inconsequential talk. Only here I didn’t know the language or understand symbolism. Was I being offered something? Was I being threatened? Was I being pumped for information? It was like one of those dreams where Smoke came to talk to me about his skin. Just as bizarre and just as menacing.

  “If we are destined to, then we shall play those parts.” Not much in the way of snappy repartee, but it was the best I could do without knowing what the hell was going on here.

  This time the stare held me even longer, as if Toltecte
cuhtli tried to pin me to my cushion by the force of his eyes. “See that you play your part well, Tworabbit. Play it well indeed.”

  “Forgive me, uncle, but I do not know what my part is.”

  “That is because your part is ignorance, Tworabbit. Cling to that ignorance. Cherish it. Profess it to all who ask. That is your part.”

  Then he looked back out over the sea and I waited for him to speak again until the temple virgin touched my shoulder to tell me the interview was at an end.

  As I left the temple, I paused at the bottom of the stairs. The frieze showed a polyglot of symbols. There was Quetzalcoatl in both his Reed and Frog aspects. There were human forms representing all ranks and stations. There were signs of the zodiac and the glyph for the end of the cycle. And mixed in with it all were stylized huetlacoatls, running, walking, commanding and lying in repose. Here and there were the conventional symbols for the burden of time, but instead of burdens or the traditional monsters, these glazed brick figures of humans were locked in the embrace of huetlacoatls. There was something vaguely erotic about their posture, and much more that bordered on the obscene.

  As I made my way down the street to the cable car stop, I pondered Toltectecuhtli and his religion. New religions weren’t anything out of the ordinary, especially here in the south where the Mexica Reeds mixed with the native Frogs and the regime of the priests was not as strict as it was back in the Valley of Anahuac by the shores of the Lakes of Mexico. I had heard vaguely of the Toltec and his followers, but I had classed them as another huetlacoatl-worshipping cult. Wrong. Even though Toltec was definitely concerned with the huetlacoatls, he was not a huetlacoatl worshipper. It was a lot more complex than that and tied in with the coming end of the cycle.