Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

by S. M. Stirling

  The rocks that hid him were black, part of an ancient lava flow. Which also meant they had fangs. They smelled, unsurprisingly, of sun-heated stone and the sage that sprouted plentifully from them. He had to be careful or they’d tear the soles of his keban, Apache-style moccasin-boots, to shreds.

  He frowned. Something in his coat pocket felt hot. And was . . . buzzing.

  He wasn’t sure how a cold-blooded rattlesnake could make his pocket warm. But he wasn’t taking any chances. Especially where crazy Magic Snake Priestesses were involved. He turned its contents out without even grasping the pocket directly. Much less sticking his hand inside.

  What plopped out on the wind-drifted pale sand beside him wasn’t an animal at all. At least not obviously. It was a rock. Its rounded back had sunk halfway into the dirt, exposing a face of glasslike black stone as flat as water in a jug.

  Something like steam wisped from it. Something like condensation clouded the face of it.

  “Shiny,” Pensamiento said, flaring his wings to land on a rock.

  “Don’t touch it,” said Recuerdo, landing beside him.

  The pair had been kiting on updrafts from the lava ridge, to keep eyes on the outraged villagers.

  Fog began to clear from the obsidian face. “I’m starting to have a bad feeling about this,” Zamora said.

  “Don’t be a wimp,” Pensamiento said. “Go for it.”

  Zamora picked it up.

  “Monkey curiosity,” sniffed Recuerdo.

  “Hasn’t killed me yet,” Zamora said.

  “Yet.”

  The obsidian lump was just bigger than his hand. It now felt only modestly warm, though it still vibrated. The rounded part he held it by was almost smooth, with a slight knobbly texture. After the fashion of the other obsidian chunks of Zamora’s experience, that hadn’t vibrated, got hot, or given off . . . smoke.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” he said, staring at his own reflection in the black volcanic glass.

  “I get that a lot,” said Nightwind’s face, replacing his, as if the mirrored face was a tiny TV screen.

  Zamora recoiled. “Cool beans!” squawked Pensamiento.

  “Nocheviento,” Zamora said. “I thought that was a bogus-sounding name.”

  “I admit that I was a bit surprised you didn’t twig right away that was a kenning for Tezcatlipoca,” said the face in the smoking mirror. “But you’d had a tough day.”

  “You mean I finally have direct interaction with an actual supernatural entity,” he said, “and I don’t even find out about it until after? In a phone call?”

  He surprised himself how cool he sounded. Tezcatlipoca—Smoking Mirror—had been one of the chief Aztec deities. And one of the bloodiest. A god of sorcery, as well as war. Although lots of the Aztec gods were war gods, most notably his brother and rival, Huitzilopochtli.

  The trader laughed. “What kind of god would I be if I couldn’t outsmart a mortal? And don’t call it a phone, Seeker. Technology’s over. It’s magic.”

  “I don’t believe in magic.”

  “While you’re talking to a god? Okay. But how do you account for the fact that one day—one minute—technology stopped working? Poof—no more gunpowder, electricity, cars. Even steam engines. But the sun still burns, and lightning still strikes.”

  “I don’t account for it. Yet. I’m looking for the physics behind it.”

  “You think physics still works? Even as a concept?”

  “’Course it does. The rules have changed, that’s all. And if there is ‘magic’—well, that’s just a different kind of physics. One we don’t know the rules of yet.”

  “Circular arguments are the best arguments,” Tezcatlipoca said. “Because they’re impossible to answer. Still, it may be that what you say isn’t that far from the truth. Or maybe I’m trying to tantalize you, keep you in the game, draw you deeper?”

  “I’m thinking”—Zamora drew a deep breath—“both. So what now?”

  “You’re on the right track,” Tezcatlipoca said. “You keep on the way you have been, you’ll find the key to your friend’s death.”

  “That’s it? You called to offer encouragement?”

  “It’s better than not getting any. You are getting close to your goals. You have the word of a god on that. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”

  “From the god of deception? No. But I do want to know what the fuck is going on. Mi amigo Brodie was a lot of things, and a ‘good’ man in the way most people meant was seldom one of them. He was all kinds of fucked up, even when we were kids growing up in Albuquerque. He used his slick talk to cover my ass when I was small. Then when I started to get my growth, I used my size and strength to cover his.

  “He was a con man, a ladrón. But never violent. And he’d never ever get mixed up with anything involving hurting children. He loved kids.”

  He was eyeing the sky as he spoke, lying on his back in the little pool of sun-warmed sand between the rocks. The day was fleeing. Its departure should make it a bit easier for him to make clean his escape from the vengeful townsfolk.

  He remembered that night was Tezcatlipoca’s special domain. He doubted, somehow, that was actually going to turn out to be any use for him.

  “And he was my bro. So what’s your stake in this? And why me?”

  “I told you. I need a hero.”

  Zamora chuckled. “And I’m the best you could find at short notice.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But why? You’re the god, man.”

  “Well, don’t gods traditionally act through heroes? Or proxies, anyway? And there are severe limits to what I can do in your plane. It stretches my resources just to talk to you, and as you might imagine, I have a special affinity for the object I’m using to communicate.”

  With a racket of wings Pensamiento took off from the black rock he’d been perched interestedly on. “Uh-oh, boss. Trouble!”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Angry peasant trouble,” Recuerdo said.

  “Fuck,” Zamora said. Then to the smoking mirror, “Gotta go.”

  Before Tezcatlipoca—fucking Tezcatlipoca!—could say anything more he stuck the rock back in his pocket, rolled over, and wiggled through the sand so he could peep out and down the slope he’d come up.

  “They got a dog to track you,” Pensamiento said before Zamora could start digging his binoculars out of his light pack. “Looks like he got a lot of Shar Pei in him. Got a face like an old vago’s ass, all saggy and wrinkly.”

  Zamora thought about asking how the hell a crow knew what a Shar Pei was. Or what a bum’s ass looked like, for fuck’s sake. He decided that, even as a Seeker after truth, he didn’t really want to know.

  He himself couldn’t make out near that much detail through the gloom that had gathered at the base of the frozen flow. His eyes weren’t what they’d been. But he could see the dog raising his big head and gazing up the slope vaguely in what he took for confusion.

  “He can’t follow us, anyway,” Zamora said in satisfaction. “Slope’s too rocky for him to haul his big ass up.”

  A couple of women trotted up to where the big black dog stood. They reached back for the baby carriers slung over their shoulders, then stooped down to release what they’d been carrying in them.

  “Fuck! Chihuahuas!” Pensamiento yelped. “I hate those yappy little bastards!”

  The little big-eared dogs came racing up the hill, weaving easily among the man-sized stones, or springing like little hyperkinetic cats to the top of them, barking furiously if shrilly the while.

  Zamora sat up and clapped his hat on his head. “¡Vámonos!” he said. “Let’s blow this joint.”

  * * *

  “Have you seen this man?”

  The townsman squinted from the tablet up at Zamora’s face. He had a stonemason’s blo
cky build and big, callused hands. Though he stood a head shorter than the Seeker, he could do some serious hurt if he teed off on him, Zamora reckoned.

  Also this was a bigger, meaning more prosperous, settlement than the one he’d managed to turn into a lynch mob raving to see the color of his insides. The road here was broad and in good repair, as it wound its way among low, grassy hills and the houses scattered over them. Some of which were pre-Change cement or cinderblock. Like the one he’d braced the laborer by, obviously an old Pemex gas station, though what scavenging might have left of the pumps and any sort of signage, a couple of decades of weather eradicated. Now only memory remained to suggest what the structure with the formerly wide windows largely filled in by adobe blocks, and the mother outside teaching her preteen daughter to grind corn on a metate, had once been.

  “Why do you want to know?” the mason asked suspiciously.

  Judging from the white dust on the front of his leather apron, and that flew from his hands when he dusted them together, he worked in limestone.

  “I’m a bounty hunter,” Zamora said in his best guttural growl. Which given his breadth of chest and normal voice, was mighty good indeed. “He’s a child stealer. Got a good price on his head.”

  He had wised up some since his last debacle. Started thinking with the head that held up his hat, instead of the other one. Though that one hadn’t been getting much of a workout lately, either, if you lay aside the incident with the rattlesnake-priestess in the cantina. And Zamora was inclined to let Señor Feliz off the hook for that one, since magic had no-shit been involved.

  “Yeah, we know him. Took away two of Widow Susana’s niñas, and Old Lady Martinez’s grandson Rico, whom she took care of after Federales killed his parents. Not a one of ’em over nine years old.”

  Zamora’s gut clenched as if in preparation to take a blow. What was Brodie doing mixed up in scaly shit like this? he wondered for closer to the thousandth time than the hundredth. Why would he even be dealing with bloodthirsty freaks like Huitzilopochtli cultists and a Coatlicue priestess at all, much less for something like stealing kids? He wouldn’t even run a scam on somebody if it might make a child go hungry . . .

  The key to finding the truth, as Tezcatlipoca said, was to track down the kids Brodie had, apparently, helped snatch. If any of them were even still alive . . .

  “How do you know it was him?” he asked.

  It may not have been strictly in character for a bounty hunter—who, logically, wouldn’t care about such niceties, so long as he got paid for the head. But he really wanted to know.

  Maybe he was hoping it would all turn out to be a mistake after all.

  “He told us he was looking for a few orphan kids to take to an instituto where they’d be raised up right,” the workman said. “They’d get educated, even fed better. Even though Susana’s kids aren’t really orphans, she don’t have much family left to help her raise four of ’em, after Humberto got eaten by wild hogs and all. They liked the gringo’s line about how much better life would be at this fancy school. Got pretty excited. They were her youngest, Ramona and Isabel.”

  “Did he say what kind of escuela this was?”

  “Naw. Just that it was good. And run by priests.”

  Zamora grunted.

  I bet it was, he thought. Just maybe not the sort the people here thought. Catholicism had never been far from the main vein of Mexican life. But it had become a more powerful influence than ever, after the Change.

  “They vanished in the night. The gringo paid good steel washers for a bed at the inn, but come the morning, he and the kids were gone.”

  “Did you go after them?”

  The mason shook his head. “Not far,” he said. “They got a good head start. And we’re a poor village. We all got to work sunup to sundown to pay our taxes, or Barón Alonzo sends men with crossbows and armor to make an example or two. To encourage the survivors to work harder.”

  * * *

  “Looks like the gringo everybody’s talking about,” the trader said, nodding. “Weedy little bug-eyed motherfucker. Bad teeth.”

  The lead caravanner was a woman whose face had been sunburned into a mass of leathery wrinkles despite the straw hat she wore—Panama style, rather than the currently more-common Asian variety—over a gaudy red-orange-blue floral bandanna wrapped around her head. She had a stub of Cubano cigar sticking out a corner of her mouth as she looked up at Zamora.

  “Everybody says he’s one bad dude,” she said, and laughed. “Wouldn’t think it to look at him. Like a puff of wind would blow him away.”

  “Stealing children,” a black drover said. “Don’t need to be strong for that.”

  The half-dozen traders led three times that many burros, each with big, sloshing clay jugs hung on framework carriers strapped to their backs. The jugs, they told him, contained tequila from the blue earth country. Zamora wanted to ask about how they did business: did they mean to trade for the nails and needles norteños stamped and filed out of scrap metal? Fine swords from New Wazoo? Did they follow the common practice of buying carriage-beasts at the same place where they bought their goods, and then selling off the creatures as their loads were delivered and became surplus?

  Because that was what he did, ask questions. About anything and everything.

  But today he was Seeking other information.

  “Any idea where he’s taking them?” he asked.

  The traders seemed glad enough to break and chat, as folk usually did hereabouts. Even in the old days Mexico had moved to its own pace. Zamora had been raised enough of a norteamericano still to feel pangs of impatience with their deeply ingrained cultural lack of urgency, sometimes.

  The exception was a silent indio—Zamora sized him up for a Rarámuri, or Tarahumara—who never stopped scanning the surrounding hills, and especially their back trail.

  Traders carried lever-action repeating crossbows, with relatively light springs, and wore crossed bandoleers of quarrels.

  The Rarámuri, though, carried a full-on sniper model, with a heavy bow cut from car springs and a pre-Change four-power scope. All sported a variety of cutlery, most prominently machetes and steel-headed hatchets.

  They were bandit-wary he reckoned, naturally enough. But they were also probably watchful for predatory local barons, whether or not nominally associated with the Federated Kingdom. The fact was, Cuauhtémoc II couldn’t even claim to control more than a day’s travel from his own capital. But that didn’t stop him and his vassals from sending patrols far and wide to loot in the name of tariff and taxation.

  Zamora expected scorn in reply to his question, though he had to ask. The easy answer was, If anybody knew, they’d go get their kids back. And burro-drivers had a reputation for especially caustic speech and manners at the best of times.

  But to his surprise the woman nodded.

  “People say they go off toward there,” she said, taking the stogie from her mouth to hold it between the first two fingers of the hand she pointed southwest with. He saw a plume of gray smoke rising into the cloudless afternoon sky.

  “Why don’t people go after them?” he asked in surprise.

  “Locals are afraid to go there,” said another trader, with long, drooping moustaches, a none-too-sanitary looking eye patch, and a nasal Veracruzano accent.

  “Because they think the smoking mountain is an evil spirit?” Zamora asked.

  The traders all laughed. Even the indio grunted amusement.

  “No, ¡norteño estúpido!” the lead trader said. “That’s just a volcano, like a hundred others in Mexico. They fear the evil spirit who lives there. They say it kills men and eats children.”

  Zamora nodded. Inside him exultation warred with a deep sense of, Oh, fuck me.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “You’re not going there,” the black guy said.

  Zamora
shrugged. “Dude’s got a good price on his head.”

  The traders looked impressed at his balls. Or something.

  “Lucky for you,” the chief trader said, “you’re too ugly even for a demonio to eat.”

  Zamora rubbed his chin. “We’ll see about that,” he said.

  * * *

  “Yeah,” Zamora grunted softly. “Fuck me was right.”

  The good news was he’d found the place where Brodie—or, more likely, Brodie’s customers—had brought the stolen children.

  The bad news was—well, that.

  “So this thing does work both ways,” he said to the face that resolved out of the mist on the obsidian mirror.

  “It wouldn’t be much use to me, otherwise,” Tezcatlipoca said. “Though like any god, I reserve the right to ignore prayers and other calls upon my divine attention if I damned well feel like it.”

  “But you picked up this time.”

  “Of course. What have you got for me, Buscador?”

  “Found the camp. It’s near an active volcano—vent, anyway. Sends up clouds of ash and makes a nasty sulfur stink. Haven’t seen sign it’s been doing much else lately, but all the rocks are old lava and igneous shit.”

  “And the camp?”

  He lifted his head over the jagged boulder he’d found shelter behind, on a handy lava-flow ridge, and peered through his binoculars. At least the laws of optics hadn’t gone chingado with everything else.

  “They got the kids, two dozen or so, in a wooden pen built against a big old rock. It just has a crappy ramada, with latillas and brush for shade, a few water jugs, and that’s pretty much it.”

  “And the cultists?”

  “That’s the problem, now. They got a bunch of adobe-hut barracks. Some of ’em look to’ve been here a while; dunno if they took them over, or have just been here that long themselves. I see maybe a dozen hefty dudes with those obsidian-edged sword-club things, and various Eagle Society regalia.”

  Whether formally trained or just combat-seasoned, the way the Eagle Knights carried themselves told Zamora they were pretty serious badasses. As a largely self-taught pretty serious badass himself, Zamora knew the signs.